skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My 'Bait & Switch' light turned on half way through:

The author tries to move between mech-eng analysis (under controlled experimental conditions) - "what happens to this piece of metal in a 25 mph crash? how about 30?"
vs. social-science analysis - "what happens to crashes when the state changes the excise tax on alcohol?"

It's not like there could be any confounding variables between states Oregon vs. Kentucky, the 1970's vs. the 1990's etc. It's all just data and engineers, right?
Stephen Hawking’s dire warning: Humanity won’t last another 1,000 years on Earth
My ideal programming language would be a language where the IDE stores the tokenized result of the code entered as an s-expression instead of the text itself, so that I could then change my syntax settings and compiler settings to allow it to syntactically work like (almost) any other language, and the displayed code would be updated to match those settings.

That way everyone working on a codebase could have it appear to them with their favorite language syntax style and formatting.
Just under two hours to the next SpaceX launch
Mobile app that knows what you want
Whistleblowers Back “Surveillance State Repeal Act”
Mobilegeddon is here
No, you are not.

seq 100 -7 0
ruby -e '100.step(0,-7) {|n| puts n}'
python -c 'print [x for x in xrange(100,0,-7)]'

Humans should think; machines should work.
I woke up one day (after clicking update) to find my default search engine set to Yahoo and ads in my new tab page. You can mention it all you want in the release notes, but users don't expect nor want those kinds of things to change.

The only thing more behind-the-back than that is Chrome yanking Java (well, NPAPI) with no warning in Update 42
For those on OS X, check out JSON Query: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/json-query/id953006734?mt=12

It's not nearly as powerful as jq, but for simple querying and downloading JSON (with POST body and HTTP headers), I find it quite useful.

Disclaimer: I built it.
It's possible they'll license http://www.google.ca/technology/pigeonrank.html
John Backus: Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? (1977) [pdf]
Thanks for the touching post - it's always good to hear these human stories about the people who write the software we use every day.

I have a question though - the post does not mention Mihai having passed away but has a mournful tone. A commenter on the blog post said 'rest in peace'. Is Mihai retiring from development due to illness, or has he indeed passed away?
The thing that strikes me is how small the sample sizes are - most students really can't be bothered to fill out evaluations, and those who do are probably not an unbiased sample. There's often maybe a handful of evaluations per year for anything but massive lecture classes. It's hard to even make meaningful or realistic estimates of the quality of a teacher from that data.
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Wow. We were mentioned in 6 bytes, steego.

At Platzi, we just launched in English. We've been doing this for the Spanish-speaking world for two years (switch from EN to ES in the header to check it out), with more than "7 classes".

I understand why you might think what you do, but you seemed to infer A LOT from a single link the author gave to us.

Without that link, would you think differently about the article?
Locksmith Who Picked Two “Unbeatable” Locks and Ended Era of “Perfect Security”
As far as giving to the homeless, etc... I generally give a dollar to anyone who asks. I figure they can't get into too much trouble with one dollar, and it's still giving something to help another person in need. I still go by my gut feeling sometimes, and don't give to everyone, though. Also, I put a "daily max limit" on my giving, too. I can only give so much in a day. Mostly I try to use it as a chance to talk to the person, and find out a little bit about them.

I think most of the people begging have mental health issues, and it can be very hard to tell at a glance who is sick or not, so I try to give without worrying about who the money goes to too much.

Also, I try to see it as a chance for me to be grateful for what I have and to share a little bit.
For those of you watching hockey recently, that's the same disease that Jonathon Pitre has, the kid who has become an honorary scout for the Ottawa Senators.
For me, that "some reason" is normally the overlap between children and parameters:

<foo bar="123" baz="456"><qux>789</qux></foo>

There's not a great round-trip mapping of that to JSON, like:

{"foo": {"bar": 123, "baz": "456", "children": {"qux": 789}}}

(which also illustrates why I dislike XML being untyped unless you have a schema file to interpret it with).
Could this be considered to be a breach of contract?
Thanks! Now, it looks more interesting...
Check if your site is Mobile Friendly here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Hacker News? Not mobile-friendly (Surprise)
Internet Explorer 8 used to do this on first run - that is, prompting you to confirm your default search provider and whatnot. [1]

It sucked, because most people would open IE, expect the browser, instead get this dialog instead of the browser, and just click the "ask me later" button each time, thereby loading the browser with defaults. And then of course, it comes up again the next time you start the browser.

Back in my technician days, I dealt with a lot of tickets about this. Even a cursory glance at the window explains what it is and what it does, and it only takes like three clicks to finish the process and then never deal with it again. Most people didn't care, they just wanted the damn window out of their way so they could open the browser and do their job, so they select the option that leads to the lest friction - go away and ask me later.

The point being, what you suggest is not an improvement of the user experience. The number of people so invested in the default search engine that they make value judgments about what comes set by default is much lower than the people who would be annoyed by a prompt to set it.

Average users don't freaking read their screens. If they did, frontline tech support people would be nearly out of a job.

[1]:http://www.sevenforums.com/attachments/tutorials/100217d1285...
I'm actually shocked at this article's underlying message, which seems to be implying that since engineering perfection is unobtainable, good enough within the given time and material constraints is acceptable and these recall issues were more of a PR problem.

Ford and Toyota are companies that generates billions of dollars in profit. Think about that. It in no way realistically ran into any constraints that were not arbitrary. You can hire more engineers. You can hire better engineers. This is not a question of a scrappy start up needing to release something or go bust.

I'm not anti-capitalism. I understand companies run into actual, real constraints that prevent perfection. But do we care that the defects and safety issues are dwarfed by poor driving? How are these self imposed 'constraints' on engineering anything but maximizing shareholder value at the expense of public safety?
Written on my phone, hence typos. I'll correct one: the tutors name is Jonathan, no h. Oops.
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It was on the globalpost.com site - ie the article.
I think that you're right that employers don't care about the specific courses that you took. I think you're wrong to assume that that doesn't mean that those who do take the more challenging courses do get ahead. The best networking I've done was in my challenging courses, where I met smart people who were also interested in learning and bettering themselves. My admittedly skewed and anecdotal evidence is that those people I knew who challenged themselves are now working at better jobs or going to better grad schools than those who decided to coast by.

I did not have a single situation where I did not know the difficulty of a course going in. While professors may not adequately let you know, any one of your friends or a number of websites make this information easy to obtain.

I feel like I might be alone in this, but I feel like if anything, a professor should warn you if they know that they do not challenge and push. You're in a university course -- it should be challenging. Courses should not be designed for an average student to excel.
I agree with this. When you you give to an organization there is some overhead, but you know its money going to be distributed and spent appropriately.

Give to charity instead.
The GHCi command to enable multiline mode is `:set +m`, not `:set +s`. `set +s` enables profiling.
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A BLUNT BUSINESS: the hottest space in tech – marijuana startups
I know it's not "realistic". But it is a viewpoint as from a student. I just distilled it down to the absolute minimum I could.

I work in a staff role at an university. I see things from the students and the faculty role. I see many students who skate by, doing little and collecting the degree. I also see professors who I'm surprised still figure out how to breathe.

I also see that the university props up a great deal of failing architectures (both buildings and power structures) that would fail readily except for the 'wonderfulness' of student loans. What money they bring in now will be paid in 10 fold twenty or so years from now.

I also know that my own job is artificially propped up because of students' debt. I also reduce cost for the university, knowing that the huge monument or statue or building was funded, because the uni has easy money.
An interview with rapper G-Eazy about his career and his new deal with Uber
I see an article and HN post full of obsolete old people thinking. You can't outsource responsibility for your life to someone else and then complain about it. The prof is not responsible for what a student learns or enjoys any more than the prof is responsible for the students sex life or religious belief. The student is responsible for learning the material. If the prof refuses to answer questions or refuses to eval the students the prof is guilty. If the students are lazy thats too bad for the student, sucks to be them. If the students don't like their prof, who cares, they're just ignorant kids till they learn something useful...

Old people thinking is you learn for 4 years then work at the same company doing the same thing for 43 years and retire with the corporate gold watch. Young people thinking is you learn full time for 4 years and then work while learning part time for 45+ years. For 4 years you have profs who you think you can outsource your responsibility for learning to... and your plan for the following 45+ professor-less years, still have to learn with no one to outsource your responsibility for learning to? Good luck with that.

There is also the missed effect of warped samples because the population is not constant over time. Lazy students either sink or swim and possibly learn to avoid hard profs in the future. Given that selection pressure its hard to imagine hard profs not resulting in better grades later because the sample is self selecting itself away from hard profs or dropping out. Even if there is no difference in educational attainment between hard and soft profs.
"BUT EMOTE ABOUT THE CHILDREN!"

FTFY. =)
Wow. Mihai's story is at once humbling and inspiring.

As a web developer who has used the fruits of his hard work in Firefox, I will remember him when I think that my job or life is difficult. I really have nothing to complain about.
Just compared to dynamic languages. Cross compiling and such. I went with docker (see the repo) and it works. Deploys via docker push are a little slower than I'd like but nothing I can't improve later.
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It's a little more nuanced than that. Phobos is moving towards a more pipeline style, of which http://dlang.org/phobos/std_algorithm.html is a standout example.

Algorithms, by and large, do not need to dynamically allocate memory. By converting more of Phobos to being algorithms, they become agnostic to whatever allocation method is used. Allocation strategy becomes a high level decision, rather than a low level one.
"brew install jq"
From nabraham's post [0], it seems that this is actually the result of completely transparent salary information. The firms are all in lockstep because they can all see what each other are paying and adjust to the same number. I'm not sure collusion really applies to that type of scenario, especially when the net result seems to be that employees get paid more, not less. (A raise in salaries at one firm will cause an equivalent raise in others, because they're afraid of missing out on talent.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9448562
A very compressed cultural history of Silicon Valley
I would have loved it if my "required" courses were more engaging or interesting. One semester I got three As and a B. The As were in 3000 or 4000 level engineering courses. The B was in a 1000 level "required" course.

If I had questions on why I got homework or exam problems wrong (thus demonstrating that I didn't understand the material) my engineering professors or TAs would generally explain the mistake I made. It was really helpful to me and even though I couldn't retake the exam and get the points back to get a better grade, at least I (usually) actually learned it the second time. This also helped me figure out where I wasn't learning effectively and to improve my ability to study, thus improving not only the value of my education in school but my ability to learn throughout the rest of my life.

After my first exam in my "required" class that one semester, I got a decent but not great grade. On one of the questions I looked the answer up in the book. It corresponded to what I put down on the test. I took this to the professor and asked, given this information, how I got the wrong answer. The professor replied "you're supposed to pick the BEST answer" a bit smugly and would say nothing more.

I get that a college professor doesn't necessarily have the time to explain everything to everyone all the time (which is why lectures exist, they're more efficient), but it's not as though there was a line of 50 students behind me in the hallway outside their office. I was the only one there. Probably a bad teacher rather than a bad program, but it stuck with me nonetheless.

Anecdotes, data, etc.
Great interactive visualization of musical artist similarity!
The T. Rex comparison does a good job of illustrating the point.
> [...] I wonder if this is what Chinese Democracy looks like.

No, tautologically because it's not a democracy.

Balance of power issues pretty much mean that a democracy can't stalk its citizens and still claim that they have an independent right to vote. And that's ignoring all the other stuff we know China does to maintain order like kidnap and murder dissident bloggers.

Also, this concept that maybe asian people are actually happier (presumably than other 'races') when tightly controlled is offensively racist. China has traditionally been a brutal authoritarian state but that doesn't mean the people are happier when dictated to any more than anyone's fingers naturally pluck cotton better despite centuries worth of evidence...
The blog post was written in February; according to a post on the Mozilla developer-tools mailing list, he died a few days ago.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.develope...
Sun-powered desalination for villages in India[2014]
> We needed phone numbers for our upcoming features.

> The newer version which won't need phone number to login is on its way.

So which is it? new features need the phone number but the new version won't require it? Are you gonna ask users for permission to use their phone number to access the new features? Will users who prefer their anonymity be able to interact with users who surrender their identification?

Isn't the unique token good enough?
Judging by his site it looks like he may have passed, if not left because of the possibly of passing. :( http://mihai.sucan.ro/mihai/blog
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Talking of alternative-world: I think anything by Chuck Moore falls in its own world (http://www.colorforth.com).

He even wrote an (unpublished) book about programming with as third basic principle "Do It Yourself!" (Aka "Invent The Wheel!"; http://www.colorforth.com/POL.htm). That alone moves it into its own universe. If you don't think so, read on to "Make variables as GLOBAL as possible. Why not? You can save some space and clarify your requirements"
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Ability in physics could be considered a proxy measure of student ability to understand abstract mathematical models. Or perhaps it's just another "are you smart?" filter.
WB5WGA here. I got my license when I was 13; I'm 52 now.
According to my boss, the ideal programming language would allow him to scribble things onto a piece of paper, rub that piece of paper really hard on his screen, and presto; programming!

Coincidentally, the idea of there being a consensus on an ideal programming language is just as likely to occur.
It would take an expert in both languages to do it. My knowledge of Rust is fairly limited. In particular, every language has its own idiomatic way of doing things (the D Way, the Rust Way), and to compare one has to be cognizant of those idioms.
How much for international shipping? I'm in Canada.
New http status code: 451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons
Scheduling conflicts? Requiring others to flop their lives by 180 degrees so you can play a round of golf is a scheduling conflict?

And the joke here is being used to illustrate a point (that the engineer thought of a solution when no one else did), I'm using it to point out that the engineer offered no solution while keeping to the general disregard for others in their simple work-arounds.

Just hold it differently.
Indeed. Never send a human to do a machines job. It may just be a cheap quote from a scify movie, but it is also one of the design principles I use at work.
Profit per car for car manufacturers is often under $1000 per car. That's not even close to enough money for perfection.
While this looks promising, why not make Disque part of Redis by introducing the "message queue" data structure? This would allow to build more powerful, application-specific messaging abstractions, for instance a compare-and-swap-key-with-reliable-broadcast (CASKWREB in Redis terminology).
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Perhaps a corrected definition would be physical and/or mental exertion. That would fit with with chess.
Why would you need to add them all at once?
There probably exists lots of differing experience on this, but I've found it easier to get permission to contribute paid work on a tit-for-tat basis, because it alleviates the "why should we let our competitors use our work for free" question.

I don't think that it is a coincidence that GPL led to Red Hat, a billion dollar support and services company, while BSD let to a multitude of hardware companies. The former is direct and the latter indirect profits of their respective software. The difference in worldview leads to different business ideas.
There are a number of reasons that I can tell - but no one 'killer' reason. The first is that sequestration has been cutting the defense budget so that the normal methods of technology development and acquisition are more limited in what they can fund. The second is that the pace of investment in the public sector, while very good, isn't always able to complete with the private sector - especially when the size of the private sector is so much larger than public innovation. There's also that the direction of technological change right now in SV is toward personal consumer products. Another reason is that more broadly the internet and cybersecurity has been a much larger problem for the US than it had anticipated. While the US has state of the art surveillance capabilities, built with its Five Eyes allies, it does not have the best cyberattack and defense teams (Russia is a notable leader). Obama characterized cyberwarfare as being more like basketball - everyone is scoring all the time and the one who scores the most wins. This is exacerbated by asymmetries. The US has the most to lose from cyberwarfare in terms of IP, wealth, and political secrets.

There is a new term being traded for what warfare is like today. Modern warfare exists simultaneously on multiple fronts, including the cyber domain and propaganda and information warfare. This term is hybrid warfare.

Finally, DARPA has new programming models it would like the private industry to adopt but no way to compel them to do so (Probabalistic Programming). This is a nice way for them to encourage the private industry to adopt and play with some of these new publicly developed technologies.

The last link I posted elsewhere in this conversation tree is the overview for the 2015 DoD cyberdefense planning. They are making investments on ALL fronts. Cybermilitary training, international partnerships, technology acquisition and investment, cyberwarfare simulation and modeling, diplomatic approaches, information sharing, etc. In other words, this is just one way that the DoD is 'getting serious' about cyberwarfare.
It in no way realistically ran into any constraints that were not arbitrary.

You seem to think that every constraint in the world can be removed by more money.
Which is exactly why the first rule of good problem solving is to re-state the problem. :)
> Who know, maybe an object-oriented shell that mixes well with the Unix tradition will emerge.

This doesn't make any sense though. Unix has a tradition of language diversity where Windows has a tradition of using whatever Microsoft says to use.

Unix has language-specific shells but like Powershell they haven't really caught on.
Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuYxGtuBSgk
Huge fan of the game, but now I think my rockets will be even more unstable and will burn up poor kerbals during re-entry...
Just to be clear, it's Language Log that's Omar in this silly little metaphor. I was making an appeal to authority, but of a different sort than "yet another famous author using singular they". :)
Thanks for the interest! It's $5.
Without information on the project the choice is meaningless. Is the project is solving a generic enough problem where any Turing complete language would be fine to use? Does the project need to meet certain requirements? Is there a well-fleshed library for your specific problem you wish to solve available in the language you want to choose?

Are you programming simply to learn more about programming? Are you already comfortable in these three languages? Are you learning it as a new language? As a first language?

All that said - use Haskell. I picked it out of a hat.
That was it, thanks!
Good question. I actually just shared a blog post the other day on this topic/my recent experience: http://www.thebradlazarus.com/a-good-friday-for-giving/
Probably completely impractical, but this conversation gave me a picture of people raising fast-growing plants in their homes/yards that they continually 'harvest'. This harvested matter than gets taken to a dump site and buried, capturing the carbon underground.

I suppose the whole operation would have to either use solar power or be extremely efficient to avoid burning as much or more carbon based fuel than it buries.