skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Does imperative programming have a (mainstream) future?
After this question getting down voted and put on hold on programmers.stackexchange.com, I decided to take it here, as HN seems to be better suited for discussion about such a topic.
Copy of the question:

I have written a few small programs in Python and C++ and am currently learning F# (I am already quite familiar with FP concepts, as a result of reading the Learn you some Haskell tutorial until the monad part ;) ). And while I appreciate the elegance of functional programming in some situations, in other situations I just feel that it would be more natural to write a particular algorithm imperatively with mutation and I certainly can't imagine programming my Arduino board in a functional way for example.

It often seems that today imperative programming is considered outdated and inferior to functional programming. So my question basically is: does imperative programming have a future outside of some niches? What do people with practical experience with both functional and imperative programming think? Will the programming world slowly shift to functional programming languages or will functional programming languages merely continue to influence imperative programming languages, leading to tacked on FP features (like in the latest versions of Java and C# and Ruby, Python etc.) or is functional programming in mainstream languages just a hype all together?
Typo in first paragraph: '...30 pratical tips'. Undermines the buy my book pitch slightly
See links at the bottom of http://www.eisionline.org/index.php/sk/projekty-m-2/ochrana-...
SwiftKey Launches Clarity Keyboard Beta
Did you copy the other comment, or is there a bot writing pro-Uber comments in here?
How the fuck? I go to ridiculous lengths to avoid using JS for anything critical (ya know, like SITE STRUCTURE!), and then these people waltz in....
Not a fan of this argument. It applies the small economic negatives w/o counting the value of the positives.

Pro: Democracy is more stable and more guaranteed
Pro: Lower level criminals are thwarted and the cost of attacks prohibit profitability of small attacks.
Pro: Increasing value of transactions are becoming possible online. No one in their right (or educated) mind would sign into a $10k+ account if their password/traffic wasnt protected.
The funnest game I've ever played.
> "Lawful intercept": sure, you have the right, good luck with that. We're not going to make the Internet less secure for the benefit of government interception; if anything, we're making it more secure because of the possibility of government interception.

Government censorship is happening if you want it or not. The main difference is now that there is a lot more collateral damage with SSL deployed.

> If you don't understand TLS, learn, or count on other people to have learned. That's no excuse for not using it.

I agree in the sense that anyone who runs a security critical website should deploy SSL and there is no excuse for not doing it. However what triggered the whole article was that more and more websites become completely impossible to use in the absence of SSL even for anonymous data access.
Knowing who you want to contact is usually a requirement to be able to contact them.
> There is no technical reason for this unless you want to hide from someone that you are downloading a specific Python package which seems pointless.

"Oh, I see you're downloading this package in a slightly old version that is still vulnerable. I guess you're going to install it, which means you'll be vulnerable in the next 10 mins"

This is one of the main obstacles of things like apt-p2p or debtorrent (i.e downloading your system packages in a p2p fashion): you don't wan't to tell the whole world what are the packages on your machine.
Not to mention weather...
What You Don’t Understand About Growth Hacking
A lot of people do little more than web browsing, youtube, facebook, some other instant messaging (though that is more commonly done on phones instead), and maybe a bit of email. For that a tablet does rather well and can be more convenient to carry around than a laptop. That seems to be the most common use for ~10 inch tablets in my experience, I know many people who use them quite a lot that way.

If you have relatively large pockets a 7 inch tablet is quite carryable and does noticeably better for video and text reading IMO due to the larger screen unless you have a huge phone (though huge phones are getting more and more common - I use a tablet a less now I have a 5" phone screen).

You sound like you need at least one step more than that though, at which point yes you will probably find a tablet frustrating as it nearly does what you want but is far enough away to not be practical. Something like a transformer might work, but they tend to be pretty expensive. I have a "poor man's" version of that: an 8 inch tablet (both my winter and summer coats have large inner pockets!) with a bluetooth keyboard & mouse and a simple stand for when I need/want to use it more like a laptop. The tablet was less than 100ukp so the who kit cost a chunk less than a laptop or a transformer-style hybrid. It runs full Windows too which is a bonus for me (it means I can run anything I do at home rather than being limited to tablet apps) though the Windows desktop interface can be a bit fiddly at that size unless you drop the DPI a bit. There are similar 10 inch devices too if you want something with a bigger screen.

Of course a tablet may just not cover your use cases at all. Different strokes for different folks!

There is a lot of one-up-man-ship in tablet owning of course especially in the case of iDevices in my experience - in some circles having the latest of those is a style statement, and some people just get bought them as presents, though I'll stick to talking about more practical reasons for ownership!
This and "disrupt", please.
Making automatic loans sound very similar to sms loans, which is a common cause for people falling into incurable debt. It mean less insight and less responsibility, targeted to those who lack financial skills. That could make things better in theory, or things much much worse if the incentives are to get people to take unnecessary and expensive loans.
(Alt+8 gets you an assembly language view in VS. Right click to get the context menu, then select "show source". Similarly, press Alt+5 for a registers window, and right click to select register set(s). (This particular bit of UI isn't exactly amazing, but it does basically work.) Or, for getting an assembly language listing from a build, go to the project properties and select listing file format "Assembly, machine code and source". The format is quite readable.)

Things I quite like about it:

- no grammar to the command set, just keypresses, and no need to press Return. gdb drives me nuts with its command line... feels like trying to count while somebody shouts random numbers in my ear. I'd probably get on better with a command-line driven version of Photoshop than I do with command-line controlled debuggers

- passable support for mixed assembly language/source code debugging (same step commands in all cases)

- dockable UI that's satisfactorily configurable and updates as you work, so you can see a lot of stuff at once. I find the gdb text-based UI like trying to look through a telescope the wrong way, and it's even worse if you go for the line-by-line TTY mode

- it displays code using the normal VS editor, so you can use the code browsing functionality to look around the code as you work

There's plenty of scope for improvement, so while it does a reasonable job, I'm maybe not sure about "best". But... I don't appear to be unique in preferring it to gdb. So if we're going for some kind of democratic vote, then maybe an argument could be made ;)

But overall, the main thing I like about the VS debugger is that it's integrated quite well into the VS workflow. When you run your project in VS, you run it under the debugger. You have other options, it's true - but running under the debugger is the most obvious one, so that's what you do. There are times where you need rather complicated stuff doing, and VS is sadly lacking in that regard. But most of the time, when your code fucks up, the VS debugger provides enough to let you figure the problem out, and your code is already running under it, so there you go.

(I never found a way to get gdb working quite so well - it starts out with your process stopped, for example, so you have to type "run" to get it going. And I never figured out any way to stop your process without being dumped back to the gdb prompt, like Shift+F5 in Visual Studio. If I actually liked working in gdb, I'd probably just get over this, and/or put the time in to figure out how to fix it. But... I don't.)
The article author obviously is astro-turfing for the company and if people want to link infomercials passing for journalism I can have an opinion on that. (I agree that I did not phrase my first comment well and it makes it sound like I implied ColinWright's involvement specifically, I've fixed that).

That doesn't change the fact that it's a duplicate from within 12* hours and should get removed.
It often seems that today imperative programming is considered outdated and inferior to functional programming.

Only among the kind of people who bother to consider that question at all, which 99% of programmers don't.
I believe they have margin atop the Bitcoin price.
Angular 2 Moves from Alpha to Developer Preview
Ikea is entering production with their temporary refugee shelters:

http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/26/8287509/ikea-refugee-shelt...
I've been a fan of Aqua Data Studio for years and it doesn't seem to get mentioned often. Cross platform and supports a myriad of dbs. http://www.aquafold.com/aquadatastudio.html
I disagree. What I do with the iPad is different than what I do with a laptop, and I would guess most of the people who opt for an iPad instead of a notebook uses it like that too. After starting with the iPad reading anything on the computer sees intolerable, and this reading web pages/pdfs/etc use case by itself for me validates the iPad.
Now, I understand other people may prefer to carry a notebook all the times, but if Apple replaced the iPad with an iOS laptop I would have absolutely no reason to buy it. Everything I like in the iPad is related to its form - size, weight, no keyboard, can be rotated etc.
PG now has materialized views, but they appear mostly useless. Their the equivalent of creating a table from a query. They don't update on every change to the source data. 9.4 I think added a way to force an update, but it just re-reads the entire source. To do it right you still have to use triggers.
Works okay for these guys, and they attach the parachute to the customer!

http://www.uspa.org/BecomeaSkydiver/ChooseaSchool/tabid/437/...

If BO can demonstrate that the risks of a flight into space are comparable to other hazards we encounter in life (car driving, bungee jumping, heli-skiing, surgery), they're going to have plenty of people (myself included) who want to go.
I printed 4x1.2m night sky panorama for my living room. I worked on Skyview fork (astronomical image stitching library), after some processing I got 5GB JPEG with 60K to 20K resolution. 6 hours of work and 80 euro printing fee.
How could you do better than that?

It's a real-time game; it needs that much input data (but nothing else).
> We need encryption. Why? Because communication has changed.

I never said that we don't need encryption, far form it. I said we do not need to encrypt everything and I firmly stand by that. If we do want to encrypt the entirety of the internet traffic then I believe we need to consider all the consequences this causes. That was my point, not more, not less.
Reading papers on it was the killer app for me. Nothing else had a decent screen size/aspect ratio. If there was a huge e-reader that could handle pdfs properly I'd have gotten that, but there wasn't so I shelled out way too much money on an ipad. Very happy with it.
Encryption bundles orthogonal concerns, authenticity and confidentiality. Since there are situations confidentiality is not desired (see OP), I think we should work on making cleartext+signature easier.
> CSV support - if you do that much CSV extract/transform/load (or indeed, any kind of ETL work), use an ETL tool.

Why? CSVs are portable and much easier to deal with (when exported correctly, which PostgreSQL does and MS SQL does NOT).
That's encouraging. Thanks for the reference.
It has a feature named materialized views, but it isn't close to being the real feature that MSSQL calls it.
Anything that takes away from MatLab is good in my eyes. I have never had a good experience with it.

Granted, I've only ever used it for school, but it is always incredibly painful to work with. I like Octave much better.
Ask HN: How do you deal with email spam?
Say you had subscribed for some xyz.com and now they have started selling your email and you receive mail from some wxy.com?

I caught many such spam using google's easter egg. (myname+xyz@gmail.com)

Catching such people is a bit easy. But how to report them? And how to take control over them?

Plus how to send someone email with from myname+xyz@gmail.com? So that we can catch if someone whom we sent mail is spamming us.
> Well bitcoin transactions are almost free (miners fee is what nowadays 1-2 cents regardless of amount?) as is. It is hard to compete with that

You're talking sending Bitcoin from one address to another, not Bitcoin/fiat exchange. Apples to oranges.
>It's white hypocrisy alone that lets us pretend that if the situation were reversed and whites were the victims of this kind of pervasive government brutality

Blacks lined up to protect the Police in Baltimore because they realize, unlike SJWs, that most violence against blacks is done by black criminals, like the rioters.
There is inherent risk in home ownership too, which is why we have homeowners' insurance. Nobody is denying the inherent risk.

I agree that we should take the bad with the good. However, I believe that assuming the mantle of intellectual superiority after something bad happens is doing basically the opposite. These transactions work out just fine for most people. Seizing upon the rare bad outcome as a chance to sound smart is ignoring that most AirBnB guests really do treat other people's homes well.
Oh this is nice. Simple points of order concerning HN operation are downvoted now? (Hint for drive-by downvoters: if you don't know what we're talking about, you probably have "showdead" set to "no".)
As as you mentioned RCS thrusters I thought, "but reaction wheels are cheaper and don't require fuel, for all but the largest vehicles they are not needed", then I realized this was real life and not Kerbal Space Program.
Gall-Peters is definitely not conformal. It preserves area, but greatly distorts angles, apart from at the two standard parallels of 45 degrees north and south. This results in the shapes of land masses getting very squished towards the poles (and to a lesser extent, the equator). For an example, look at the shape of Greenland, which appears twice as wide (east-west) as it is tall (north-south), when in reality it's the other way around.

I'm also not aware of any of the main online maps changing projection as you zoom. It seems like that would be more pain than it's worth.
I use both Navicat and pgAdmin3 these days.

One thing I like about pgAdmin3 is the ability to only execute the query you have highlighted and also the scratchpad. It's nice for exploratory querying. In Navicat, I like switching between various tabs where pgAdmin3 makes me switch between windows.

Both have some hilarious idiosyncrasies. When one locks up for no reason, I generally just alt-tab to the other.

Recently I was using pgAdmin3 and set my production database color to red. I happened to notice that the color didn't repaint back to green when I switched to my dev database. And Navicat seems to consistently hang whenever the network dies or burps mid-action, requiring a command-line kill.

Idiosyncrasies. :)
As I understand it, your argument on a technical level is basically that SSL and the CA system as-is sucks, and I think most people would agree with that. That's something that can be fixed (at least according to djb).

On a social level, I don't find any of the arguments convincing. The positives of ensuring private communication far outweigh the negatives.
Drop in Discover Traffic Poses Questions for Snapchat
Most Americans take our assets and advantages for granted, as we've not known anything else.

There are a number of good places to live in the world, and the United States is one of them.
This article takes the position the government has the right to shut down communication it dislikes and spy on communication as it sees fit, as this is legal in some places and the author does not want to get into whether or not it should be legal.

This is a fundamental disconnect with how many people on the pro-encryption side think - the government has no right to do this, regardless of the law, and therefore we will do all we can to get in the way.

>> Cryptography is black magic.

It's maths.

>> As of recently the Python package installer downloads every package via SSL. Why? There is no technical reason for this unless you want to hide

There are multiple reasons.

One might be to ensure integrity of the file, and authenticity of the source. TLS gives you this, plaintext not so much.

Another is that the more uninteresting stuff there is getting encrypted, the better, as it means it's less noteworthy.
WINDOWS 10 PLANS TO HIT 1 BILLION DEVICES IN 3 YEARS
I agree with this sentiment.

4chan's /b/ is seen as "the cesspool" and nobody tries to make it better because nobody wants it to be better. It just needs to be that place where the EMT that spent his day dealing with life and death can relieve his stress and let go of what's plaguing his mind with "lol, tits or gtfo"[1].

Because in the end, it's all a big joke.

1: Can't find back the exact screenshot were a /b/ user was saying this, sorry.
Zero’s New Email App Can Help You Reach “Inbox Zero”
This is so brilliantly reminiscent of Borges' famous fiction:

On Exactitude in Science
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.
...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
—Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
Yes you can manually re-order a table, with locking, but that's really not the same thing as enforcing in on INSERT/UPDATE.
CREATE PROCEDURE puts a schema lock on the procedure. Didn't realise it doesn't release it! SQL Server only allows one Sch-M lock on an object at a time.
I understand. I maybe should have been more specific in my point that I think encrypting everything is the only reasonable defence against such pervasive invasion of privacy.

The long term solution is to get to the point where lawmakers talk about encryption, authentication and integrity as things they actually understand. Rather than having people with ulterior motives explain these things to them with snail mail analogies.

However, that is many decades off. For now we have encryption and the means to ensure MITM attacks are ineffective.
Set your ciphersuite to RSA_NONE_SHA256...
Running Services Using Docker and Amazon EC2 Container Service
Feature requests: choose the server (to play with friends), see map borders, super fast mode (twice the speed for everyone)

Great game!
Sure, then we'll lock up developers who write insecure software. I think we'll need some bigger jails.
You certainly can have authenticity without encryption - just think of how Debian package downloads are authenticated with gpg. In fact this option is built into TLS - RSA/SHA with the null cipher suite.

It doesn't solve the CA problem or the cost problem (you still have the whole cost of setting up a TLS session, actually encrypting the payload is the cheap part). But it's possible.
>However what triggered the whole article was that more and more websites become completely impossible to use in the absence of SSL even for anonymous data access.

How would you bootstrap a secure encrypted login for a user who was browsing the site without SSL? I agree with you that anonymous data access is often encrypted unnecessarily, but in practice deploying HTTPS is an all-or-nothing deal.
I wanted to really hate this, but it sounds like a really interesting idea.

It seems like it would either be very capital intensive, or it's going to need to operate like a bank. Also, folks in these situations tend to be very transient and have fluctuating income. How do you establish an adequate virtual salary when the terms of the person's employment change?

Forget about massage people -- they are a bad example because two or three customers may make for a windfall-like experience. How about a person who works at the Gap or BestBuy? You might get 35 hours one week, 20 the next, then 18 for a month.
> The greatest impact on user's safety would have been the development of per user encryption for public Wifi access points. Instead what happened is that now every larger website has to implement SSL

Assuming that, once it's off the wifi, it's utterly unrealistic that an attacker could be anywhere else in the packet path? That -- even outside of ecommerce -- there's no way any icky ISP could be doing deep packet inspection to sell your data out for ads, or any virus on a cheap consumer-grade router interested in hijacking your profile to turn into a spambot? And assuming, moreover, that this New Technological Capability would be deployed in a consistent and timely fashion? Sure, I agree it'd be an excellent deterrent to many attacks on its own, but end-to-end encryption easily wins. (And if you're really an interesting "larger website" then you have the resources to make SSL happen.)
Or you can just buy this big ass one from Ikea for 129 bucks:

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/70119430/
How much effect does weather have on radio telescopes?

We don't have many very strong winds (at least, I don't think so) and the rest has (I think) little impact. Am Iissing something?
When you want a piece of information be authentic, chances are high that the information is also of private nature.

It would be trivial to add something like <rel signatory="https://this.same.domain/verify" algorithm="sha2"/> to any web page, or an HTTP header of the same nature, and run an HTTPS endpoint to check the url/signature pair. Probably international news agencies could run this, so that the proverbial China government would be able to see that a web page has nothing subversive on it, but anyone could see that the page has not been tampered with, by running a checksum against the page source. A browser extension could be used for that.

But it seems that nobody cares enough.
Does this use an L1 norm?
Since it was stitched using a number of smaller images printed from Google maps, wouldn't you end up with a bunch of "google-maps" watermarks all over the map?
I think that if we, as a community, innovate on our rhetoric we can really disrupt the overuse of "innovate" and "disrupt".
There appears to be near-unanimous consensus: the consequences of encrypting everything are less than the consequences of not encrypting everything.
What Can We Do with a Quantum Computer? (2014)