skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not wanting to flame here, just curious (I have asked a number of times on HN and trying to learn); I'm not from the US and 'some kind of creepy mancrush' would definitely not be considered in any way 'hostile' around here; I wouldn't know of anyone in my circle in any context who would take that personal either. It does there? Seems people have way longer toes and are very prudish in silicon valley; yes I know that's a generalisation but it interests me because I have seen this so often on HN while I rarely see it in other places which are more diverse in their audience.
Sure - what's interesting is that they use this power to eat the first-mover cost for changes that actually are beneficial to everyone to adopt. For example, they got a critical mass of HTTP2 deployed, and that has made it an immediate win for everyone else to implement it (non-Google web servers because Chrome, and non-Google browsers because Google Everything). This is similar to the effect Apple is having in making the USB-C connector happen.

The difference with Office XML is that a) there's not a clear benefit to the community as a whole to adopting the new standard, and b) they don't seem to have made any great effort to encourage their competitors to implement it.
"Recognize pure functions (where x=y => f(x) = f(y) and there are no side effects) and routinely optimize. This is essential in code with lots of calls to trig functions."

It sounds simple when written, but it's less than trivial. For you as the user, the trig function is something "pure." For the compiler author, the trig function is most probably "some huge library function with a huge amounts of the alternative paths, and in any of those the "exception" can potentially happen."

If the modern compiler actually receives the info about the "purity" it will actually do the common subexpression elimination. It certainly knows how to do such stuff.
I'd probably call it an operating environment (like e.g. DESQview).
Yes, because lots of people end up using software with default values. Can you blame them? Perhaps... in a way that you can blame a user who accidentally clicks a "delete account" button that doesn't have a confirmation step.

Good defaults are expected in quality software, and are just as important as any other part of software interface, CLI or GUI.
Success without Testosterone
You have to thank Erik Meijer for that, at least partially.

"Confessions of a used programming language salesman (getting the masses hooked on haskell"

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.118....
It's kind of the basis of the article. The European Commission is focusing on shopping as the core of the case right now, so that's what the article is about.

It's arguing that if you want to improve competitiveness of European shopping sites, there's much that could be done to make sure they aren't hobbled in the first place.
... except that the choice isn't between Java or type-unsafe code handling people's money.

That's a silly (and false) dichotomy.
Modula-2 and Modula-3 don't have the same authors, even if the name implies otherwise.

Also Oberon had a different purpose than Modula-2.
The Best Day to Launch Your Mobile App
It would be so incredibly nice to have a compiler that told you about such things

gcc can output such information for autovectorization (-ftree-vectorizer-verbose=[n])
How was the gentleman 'assigned' to help you?

Did the assigner spend enough time with the remote worker to understand the skill level?

In your organisation, is it OK to report a skill mismatch like this up the chain?

Summary: this is a management issue I think
Old silicon valley map
The problem is that the Statement of Objections is private and will apparently remain that way for some time (this article says "many months"), so no one really knows what the arguments are (except the European Commission, Google, and presumably folks like "Fair Search").
How much memory is saved by shared libraries?
Prompted by the recent discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9379088) I set out to make a program to compute how much memory is saved by avoiding code duplication through using shared libraries. The code is here: https://gist.github.com/zvrba/33893e14b4536a8d55d1

If you run it as root with no arguments, it will iterate through /proc/*/maps, pick out rx-p (readable & executable) mappings with a non-zero inode (corresponding to an exe, or an so) and for each address in the range count how many times each physical pages is mapped. Finally, it outputs how many pages were saved through sharing (i.e., w/o sharing that many extra pages of physical memory would have been consumed).

I ran it inside a stock Centos 7 VM with 1GB system memory, and firefox (no tabs), emacs and a terminal running. It outputted a saving of ca 16500 pages, corresponding to about 62MB of saved memory.

It'd be interesting to run it under KDE with a number of widgets and other fancy stuff running, just for comparison.
Discovering a New FizzBuzz – The Cheryl Birthday Problem
Google Cloud Nearline storage explained in 30secs
With TeeSpring, the only way to win as a seller is to go for scale

I know some internet marketers who will go out and create hundreds of campaigns targeting different interest groups (right from broad categories like 'truckers' to narrow interest groups like Pokemon fans who play Skyrim). Then they'll test them all out on Facebook, throwing in thousands of dollars into the process.
Do you have a link for that? Wikipedia has Spiegel listed as a developer (but that's unreferenced too).
I always found this Python 2 vs Python 3 discussion very interesting.

One does not see such amount of discussions regarding other languages that suffer even bigger transitions problems.

Java is now version 8, still there are lots of places having to deal with versions 4 and 5.

.NET is getting 4.6/5 version in the upcoming months, still many enterprises still have version 3.5 code bases.

Everyone is discussing the benefits of C++14, while many corporations still use pre-C++98 like code.

Yet in the Python community it is such a big deal.
Brazil is probably my favorite movie of all times.
>> poll the heart rate monitor every millisecond

Every millisecond? Isn't that a bit overkill?
Because these are all artificial boundaries you have created. Many of the operations within the domains you mention here are going to be the same. It all comes down to effects, data structures, and algorithms.
Well, Windows also keeps compatibility layers whose only job it is to run legacy code. If a handful of enthusiasts can do a better job on a completely different underlying operating system, they have obvious improvement possibilities.

The curse of Linux is that every moving part is its own project. Libc and the gcc C++ API is notoriously problematic with backwards compatibility, so the backwards compatbility of Linux as a whole is also restricted.

I just want to question the often-repeated picture of Microsoft as obsessed with backwards compatiblity. Where does that idea come from? I'm just not seeing it at all. A new Windows box will not even authenticate with a too old AD server. If you want examples of backwards compatibility, look at S/360, AS/400, VAXen, pretty much any other operating system with an enterprise prescence.
+1

What I want, and will probably never get round to implementing, is Markov chain playlist generation. Collect play order from (high-quality, human-generated) playlists, then use them to build Markov chains of tracks that tend to be played after one another.
Indeed, plus you need multiple hand-optimized versions. Not only per architecture, but also e.g. pre-AVX and AVX. An optimizing compiler will give you optimizations for all current and future platforms for free.

Another problem is that the number of people who can write good general hand-optimized assembly is small. E.g. I used a numeric Go library (which I will not name, because I should've submitted an issue) that used assembly-'optimized' routines. Replacing those with simple C loops and turning on auto-vectorization beat those hand-written routines handsomely.
Not to advocate for word or anything, but technically it's a zip of xml and other stuff (images, etc) that get's pulled in through ... OLE(??). VC + markdown/latex excellent for collaboration or branching drafts.
Since

a. this is functionally equivalent to coroutines implemented via library support through generators

b. Python will never ever get rid of the GIL, i.e. won't have real parallelism (given that the JVM/CLR Python implementations are basically dead and PyPy is chasing the pype dream of STM, we're left with CPython the only actual implementation)

Is there any reason to add new syntax? Other than wishful thinking that one day someone will write a Python runtime with proper JIT and parallelism support?
> Lacklustre cross border commerce is among the reasons why successful companies in one European country have trouble scaling up and competing with American giants who by default start in a market with over 300M people.

While it would be nice to get the VAT problems sorted out, this is second to the problem of there being a couple dozen different languages being used in the EU. People shop domestically because they can use websites in their native language and when they have problems, can talk to customer service representatives in a language they understand.

It is really, really hard to get your service localized in couple dozen different languages (let alone provide actual customer service in all of them).

Even Amazon handles only a part of Europe, and if Amazon can't do that, what companies can? There are a few, but not all that many, and for many it isn't worth it, because your economies of scale quickly disappear when you have to build and maintain a separate presence in up to 28 different countries that mostly speak different languages. (That includes American companies, too, by the way, many of which simply choose to ignore Estonia or even Sweden and Portugal.)
With the speed we are wrecking the planet they won't have enough time :(
Also my feeling. You've been a great inspiration about how to write great and useful code, but I still feel like the many great features of R (as you said some time ago, NA handling, data frames, etc.) are sometimes outweighed by the cons.

Quick question: what would you tell the Julia guys as a recommendation? Even though they are "competition", you probably have strong feelings about what features of R must be in any language that aims to replace.
The Seeds of [Apple's] Success (1982)
Perhaps he is a proper canuck by now ;)
"Rust essentially never wastes cycles on bounds checking thanks to the design of its iterators. The Servo team tells me that bounds checking has never shown up in any performance profiles."

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9392131
Code for older Java versions still compiles in Java 8. Code written for python 2.x will not run on python 3.x.
I should start writing the script of "skynet vs the planet of the apes" with the last day's news.

On a serious note - a recent theory that in a heat sink ocean and energy source life evolving is inevitable, and we have multiple species able to get to intelligence ... the fermi paradox becomes more urgent to be solved.
Tidal Fires 25 Including the CEO
I think its about time everyone seriously considered learning this lesson from Germany and improved their work ethic. It's amazing that a culture could be so generally efficient. Compare that with typical work culture elsewhere - grossly inefficient. We all know this to be true. I worked in a few places and witnessed how half-assed things could get. It's frustrating and pathetic to see coworkers stream tv shows for hours, read books, take naps, go out for coffee 5 times a day, and ultimately accomplish nothing while making 70k+. This is most prevalent in large organizations with big bureaucratic structures. I would welcome this change. Focusing on task, eliminating distractions, having greater accountability, being straight-up, and getting to the point are all wonderful ideas which should be emphasized and practiced. A lot of workplaces are great, but a lot still are poor.
I have OOXML on my poorly written wishlist among with a proposal to withdraw it from standardization without breaking compatibility.
One of the things that I take from this article is that it appears to support the use of hellbanning as an anti troll measure. Not that hellbanning is a perfect solution - like everything else it depends on how it is implemented and managed.
There is no good way to implement hellbans, the only people affected by them are the ones not expecting to get banned.
I looked into the changes between Python 2 and 3 a few years back (like, 2011, 2012). There lots of minor changes that were all nice, but no single big change that was a compelling reason to switch. If, e.g. they had ditched the GIL and allowed pure Python code to exploit multicore systems, that would have been compelling to me.

Instead, at the time, Wikipedia claimed that Python 3 ran somewhat slower on CPython than Python 2. :(

Maybe all of those minor changes taken together constitute a big improvement, once I give it a try. The Unicode handling is said to be much better, and Unicode handling does suck really, really hard on Python 2. So there's that.
With Perl 6 we saw even bigger fuss and ultimately failure.

Ruby 2.0 had similar levels of incompatibility; I think people simply didn't have those large enterprise codebases in Ruby to make a fuss about.

Java, .net and C++ go to extreme efforts for backwards compatibility, compromising their current/future versions as a result.
Didn't say I was hopeful. But it is in line with "innovate first, then offer for standardization".
I wish installation was easy and having it as a default language on an OS. Scientific Python distributions are generally with 2. Trying to get all scientific packages with 3 is still tough.
There's already a "wtf" program, available in Macports and probably some other package managers. It has a database of internet acronyms, and otherwise it seems similar to commands like "apropos" and "whatis".

~> wtf is imnsho
IMNSHO: in my not so humble opinion
~> wtf is cat
SVK::Command::Cat(3pm) - Output the file from depot
cat(1) - concatenate and print files
fc-cat(1) - read font information cache files
git-cat-file(1) - Provide content or type and size information for repository objects
~> wtf is fuck
fuck: nothing appropriate

http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/games/wtf/
async/await is useful for more than just 'real parallelism': its main use is coordinating concurrency. The GIL isn't a problem when dealing with async IO or async calls into C libraries.
You may know already, but that syntax already does that in Scala (with for/yield), and I believe also in Haskell (with do).
By that reasoning, most open source software is "proprietary". If you submit code to sqlite then the author can accept or reject the code at his sole discretion.
This looks similar to mongoDB
How is work on Telehash coming? I'm still waiting for an XMPP equivalent for the mobile age that will free us from the medieval [1] state of communication we are experiencing.

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.ht...
Starting up in Cuba, but not connected
Unmaintained packages will never be ported, and that's fine. Most of the popular packages have been ported though: http://py3readiness.org/
When I started using Python, it was pretty far behind R. No dataframes, barely any stats, etc. It caught up fast. Julia will do the same.
It depends on the company. As a remote worker at a 90% remote tech company of ~1000 employees, I have experienced much better communication here than at any other 90% in-office tech company of similar size.

The key here is "good" communication. A 90% in-office company will have lots more communication than a 90% remote company. But hardly any of that communication is getting written down, recorded, or shared among potential stakeholders (on a an internal mailing list, IRC channel, or video meeting for example). A 90% remote company communicates in ways that are more inclusive, robust, and efficient.
> It's frustrating and pathetic to see coworkers stream tv shows for hours, read books, take naps

Just curious, where do you live? And in what sort of companies is such behaviour common?
Sample size. Also particles are "the same" and much simpler.

Put a particle in a magnetic field and it will behave the same every time (and you can usually do this 1e3, 1e4, 1e5 times as needed). Give 100 people the same drug (ok, 50 of them get the drug, 50 get the placebo) and see each one have a different reaction.
Business 101: NEVER turn away a paying customer.
A broad brush[1] is acceptable if you're unable to use the Internet without being harassed by "contrarians".

I am someone who is not often harassed online, but I am involved with people who frequently experience harassment. I've been using Twitter block lists[2] and have noticed a great absence of hateful responses. This is not a long-term solution, but it lowers the number of times a day that my heart sinks. I accept any incidental losses.

The article suggests a finer brush using something like crowdsourcing. Perhaps harassment targets could pay to submit their profiles for monitoring, and the resultant block list could be made public for subscription by anyone on Block Together[2].

It would be nice to see networks take a stand against repeat harassers, but clearly people are tired of waiting around for that.

[1] https://github.com/freebsdgirl/ggautoblocker

[2] https://blocktogether.org/

EDIT: Without responses, I'm coming to some disappointing conclusions.
The strange assertions aside, calling someone creepy (and meaning it) is hostile. The individual used this to mean the relationship between the two men was disgusting. Saying you think someone is disgusting, with as much intent and conviction as was applied here isn't like a joke, it's a serious opinion. I don't know how to express this. It wasn't a joke, what this user posted. If someone posted a long description of how they inanely perceived your life and your association with your colleagues and made true-looking allegations of 'creepy' non-sexual sexual relations I wonder if you wouldn't be offended and would want to clear up the misunderstanding.
Double-clicking on the Web
> I don't feel the real human element is an issue.

I've been remote since 2009, and sometimes the team dynamics can get a bit rocky. Having a regular (2-4x a year) meeting where all the remotes on a team come face to face does wonders to address this. It's worked best for me when the team rents out a whole house and spends a week together working out of it and cooking for each other. Lots of fun, and you get a much better feeling for each others' sense of humor, etc.
Why would you need this in the language? It seems to me that these things can be provided by a library without any loss.
I think "ORGANIZATIONS CREATING APPLICATIONS NEVER BEFORE POSSIBLE" about sums it up on their "who uses" page... There's nothing in particular that mongo does better than it's competitors.
Why do you think people expecting to get banned wouldn't be affected by them? Those that are aware of the existence of hellbanning probably won't be impeded very much, but I'm not convinced that hellbanning is widely known of. I'm sure lots of HN participants are aware of the existence of hellbans, but I think your average troll may not be. They may eventually figure it out, but if it slows them down, it has already done something good.
Learn to Create 10 Amazing Text Effects in Photoshop
It's pretty clear with support until 2020, that python3 isn't happening...

Shame on the community for not learning the lessons of Perl. Fragmentation is far worse than an imperfect language.
See Digg for a case study on how bad execution post launch during iterative stages can crush a business.
Listened to the FLOSS weekly podcast where they had him on (it's a bit older) recently during my commute. Recommended:
http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly/306
I don't see the advantage over pressing up, C-a and typing sudo
The homotopy type theory book was managed over github :

https://github.com/HoTT/book/commit/cb5b01618ac3cf2774430b50...
The article says they think female chimps invented first ever spear. So these scientists think chimps have been doing this a long time.
> With my method we'd pick the magical constant 16777216.0f and we'd also get 0, 1, 2, ... 16777216.0f is bigger than 8388608f, therefore it's better.

The constants I've mentioned (23 bits of input and 8388608.0f) aren't "magic" but are the essence of floats when generating the uniform distribution for floats in the range 0..1.

That's what I want you to actually try in your code: to write it with the inputs of 24 bit integers 0..16777215 and to demonstrate that when you produce the float values and multiply these with the 16777216.0f you get every number from the 0..16777215.0f exactly once. Unless you show me that result (repeatable by anybody) I'll claim that your code doesn't work what it claims to have had achieved.

So once again, to be really clear: don't input any "random" bits. Input the integer numbers 0..16777215 (always only the lower 24 bits of them!) and demonstrate that your code works for floats (as explained above, every resulting float multiplied by the 16777216.0f must then be in the set of 0..16777215.0f and happen only once!). Only then I can believe you the equivalent solution works for doubles too. Before that, I don't believe you really understand what you want to do and what you're actually producing.
Really quite nice - very elegant interface, and super quick!
From my perspective (mostly scientific computing), Python has been killed after 2.7 by its creators. Python 3 might as well be Perl 6.

I know this is just the situation in my corner, and that it looks rosier for other users - e.g. for web development, system administration, etc..

The thing is, we have decades worth of legacy code - large libraries and small config scripts - that no one is going to rewrite. All python versions up till 2.7 were mostly backwards-compatible, and we came to depend on that. That the changes towards 3.x were breaking seems totally unneccessary (except for the string/unicode thing), which also gives it a psychological component in my opinion. Give us back the stupid print statement, and I bet this alone will massively increase adoption.

And if someone makes a patch to Python to import a Python 2 module in Python 3 (old syntax, old str/unicode, and a copy of the old stdlib - and it doesn't matter if it is 10% slower or never gets merged upstream), I'd be willing to pay $$ for it.
Compiler optimization is obviously a sleeping field currently. There's nothing that's made it into practical compilers to address the bottlenecks shifting from ALU work to data storage and layout considerations.

Consider all the gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands that goes on in C++ circles about inefficient data layout & representation by inferior programmers, and the stories of victorious manual data layout refactorings by performance heroes.

DJB's slides don't address the data side because he only does crypto, and that's one of the fields where the ALU twiddling is still relevant. But crypto is also rarely a bottleneck.
In the Sony case, it seems to be an employee inviting the executives to make a donation.
So they claim. My experience says that somebody will not make the deadline and will have to keep maintaining it.
I discovered a weird interaction between f.lux and fullscreen gaming. They seemed to fight about which gamma etc to use.

It was nothing you could see, and other than a jerky in-game mouse you did not notice it. And after an hour of playing, dying cmd+tabbing out to Safari to surf while waiting for respawn, WindowServer core dumped, logging out all users in an instant.

This is fixed in 10.10.3. The jerky mouse pointer problem still remains. I don't use f.lux anymore.
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