skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We have no plans to support any coins other than Bitcoin, though our platform is being built in a way that it could if any gain similar adoption and acceptance as Bitcoin. We'll leave that to the market. And our platform writes only the multisig transaction to the blockchain, the irl data and everything else is offchain, client and mempool only.

Decentralized, p2p ledgers are thus far good at a subset of contracts in which no off-ledger is enforcement is required. Aka, they're good at cash-settled (bitcoin-settled) contracts, in which all parts of the contract creation, joining, settlement, and clearing can be cryptographically enforced, and a real-world legal system is not required to guarantee ownership transfer.

For example, if you want to sell the title to your house or car, if there are problems or disputes the real world isn't going to recognize some title transfer deal done on the blockchain and you'll have to resort to the irl legal system anyway. But any kind of pure financial contract is potentially game.
Every time I look at it, I have a very hard time taking Rust seriously. I really don't get whoever decided to use the shortest keyword names possible. It looks like a nice alternative to C, but wrapped in a horrible syntax. fn, f64, i32, u8, mut, mod, pub, ...
Cornell University is Laughing in the Face of Moore's Law
It's not realistic in my opinion. Your web server and operating system for example will be built on a huge amount of C source code written by a huge amount of people; it's just not realistic to expect everyone to be careful enough that there's no buffer overflows in there.
> I would rather prefer seeing the thing I am interested in at the very top

You've hit on the exact point. If you've ever watched a heavy pinterest user browse pinterest or other pinterest-styled shopping sites -- they look at EVERYTHING. Just infinitely scrolling for hours after hours, skimming every single item until they hit the end of a collection. Occasionally opening items in a new background tab.

Probably that's where this UI works best, for apps where the person is going to look at many thousands of items, and no ranking exists that can do a decent job, for the particular user's needs other than at a rough level. Women's fashion shopping (e.g. pinterest and shopping clones of pinterest) seem to be an ideal example of that.

By the way, fashion is an interesting example of being anti-ranking. If something gets too popular, it suddenly becomes unfasionable again by the rules of fashion.
Fort Huachuca bids farewell to Morse code training
Rust people, please don't screw up. We desperately need a replacement for C. Rust could be it. But it's not too late for the Rust crowd to blow it. Rust may have too much cruft at version 1.0 for C programmers.

Things that worry me about Rust:

* Too much mandatory metaprogramming. Basic things such as I/O require generics, and even lambdas. Rust's cruft level in this area picks up where C++ with Boost left off.

* Error handling is too verbose. Wrapping things in "Result<>" and "Some<>", then unwrapping them with "match" is wordy. Wrapping that in generics makes it shorter but hides what's happening.

* The type system and type inference are very complex, and type errors induced from another module can be hard to diagnose.

* Too much language churn. Supposedly "stable" modules still keep changing. I'm surprised when I recompile a program after a few weeks and it still works. This needs to settle down very soon.

* Resource Allocation is Initialization. Initialization isn't that bad, but what do you do about an error discovered in a destructor? Destructors are always troublesome, and Rust doesn't seem to have that area under control. A "with" clause approach would have been cleaner. The recent discovery of a soundness problem in Rust destructors is being handled in a way that bears watching. First, the actual issue reporting the problem was closed without a fix.[1] The discussion was "moved to an RFC" so as not to block the release of Rust 1.0.[2] Related issues are now being discussed to death. A good discussion of the issue is at [3].

While Rust avoids complex run-time abstractions, it has very complex compile-time abstractions. Rust has all the cool abstraction ideas - closures, generics, templates, type inference, RAII, functional programming, etc. This may be too much for the C crowd. The basic libraries use all these features, so you can't restrict their use on a project.

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/24456
[2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/1066
[3] http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2015/04/29/on-r...
The doc. is published by a staffing agency, so they are on the sell side rather than the buy side, which means the numbers are higher, which is one of the reasons I like it as a reference!
I think RTW (reinventing the wheel) is a favorite pastime in avionics, right up there with DRY (do repeat yourself) and TED (test eventually design).
The Second Circuit is not an expert on software. It is an expert in law and modified open source code becomes proprietary code in eyes of the law for the purposes of GS employment agreement. They're not parsing how GPL or some other license might have applied.

I encourage you to look at Michael Lewis's article[1]. This passage is relevant: "As Goldman hadn’t permitted him to release his debugged or improved code back to the public—possibly in violation of the original free licenses, which often stated that improvements must be publicly shared—the only way to get his hands on these was to take the Goldman code. That he had taken, in the bargain, some code that wasn’t open source, which happened to be contained in the same files as the open-source code, surprised no one. Grabbing a bunch of files that contained both open-source and non-open-source code was an efficient, quick, and dirty way to collect the open-source code, even if the open-source code was the only part that interested him."

[1] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...
Wait, so your github repo just has binaries in it? It doesn't seem like you're doing it right.
"these may be attributable to Anderson instead of Snowden"

The blog post is a write-up of a conversation between "a group of cryptographers from industry and academia" and Snowden, one of whom was Ross Anderson.

There are things that were said during this conversation that you disagree with. Why do you assume that they were all said by Snowden (or Anderson). There were several others present ("As well as over a dozen cryptographers there was at least one lawyer and at least one journalist familiar with the leaked documents"), who could have been the source for these particular remarks.
Method #3 (increasing enemy spawn rate) sounds iffy. It's a subtle change that just makes the game worse, and the player isn't going to know it was because of piracy. They'll just think the game was designed poorly and be less inclined to support the developer.
Thanks for the pointer. How much does a comprehensive test cost in India and are the test records given to the patient? I've wondered whether traditional Ayurveda and modern medicine are complementary.
All very true, I just think its still a little early to recommend Rust, personally.
And what if the user wants to find something in this almost endless list, by pressing ctrl+F?
Lex/Yacc are great for parsing things like your own internal files that the end-user never directly touches. But if you really care about your users, there are certain times when you've just gotta bite the bullet and hand-roll a parser. Because when the user mis-places a punctuation mark, it's much better to give them a humanly-thought-out human-readable error message rather than a generic blob of unreadable gibberish.
Do you have something valid to contribute? I'm all ears.
Damn, it really has been that long. 4.6 years of posting irrelevant comments and generally loving this community. I should do something for my 5th anniversary.
Elon Musk and Iceland's Role in Changing the World
I come from an incredibly conservative family (literally had pictures of Reagan and Cheney on the wall) and they had no problems with my engagement to an Hispanic woman.
Thousands Linux and FreeBSD servers infected with Mumblehard spamming malware
That's a really great video. I can understand why he was so highly regarded. So sorry that this is what brought it to my attention.
You are probably experiencing a syntactic illusion where it looks like C++ but then it looks all wrong. I've used Rust and it didn't take long to get acclimated.
Foresight Exchange
I've never heard of anyone getting Linux running under hard real time constraints. You can get it pretty good (excellent for real time audio, for example), but can never be 100% sure you're going to meet the deadline. The people I've talked to who tried said by the time you strip out enough of the kernel to approach hard real time, you've lost enough of the advantage of using Linux that you may as well switch to an RTOS.
I agree with your point that you don't read about the "silent majority" on Hacker News and TechCrunch. Consumer internet touches more people's lives so you hear about it more, especially when said founders are 22 and straight out of school. It's a story the media likes to tell.

Google, Cisco, Kiva, HP, Sun Microsystems, Theranos, Yahoo, Trulia, StubHub, Lytro, Coursera, Bonobos, Snapchat, and Instagram came out of Stanford in one way or another. These companies showcase a diverse range of tech that IS useful.

It's unfair too to say that social media doesn't do anything useful. Facebook reports 1.4 billion MAUs and works to bring the internet to more and more corners of the world. Snapchat's social component has given it the platform on which to innovate.

True, many Stanford students are already wealthy. True, there's a recent trend toward social media companies. But, Stanford continues to be a place where students work incredibly hard and remain motivated to do impactful work. Stanford has a storied history of entrepreneurship that begins before Snapchat and will continue after it.
Did you consider using dtrace for tracing?

Edit: Oops, misread the comment.
MBAs with technical background usually have a BS in STEM and go work to a bank/corporation in finance/management positions.

Hence, they are not actual engineers actively building a product.

Please do build a company, but not a money-making scheme treating developers like dispensable tools.
+1 Fantastic. Its hard to receive these reviews as a young engineer, and as a slightly more experienced engineer, it is also hard to give them. But its an important part of the job. Its fine, in my opinion, to give the hard review, as long as you walk over to your coworkers desk, and helpfully guide them through this as a learning experience. Having this stuff written down is also helpful for them to reason.

That being said, I dont think I'd ever say, "This code sucks." I might say something like "I think there is significant room for improvement here if you were to <xyz>"
It doesn't seem like copy protection that makes the game un-fun to play is really a good idea. It seems more likely to backfire as it might generate bad word of mouth for your game.

"Damn, that game sucks. Glad I didn't buy it. Better warn my friends"

IIRC when we made Gunship for the Commodore 64 it had something long these lines in that if the loader was tampered with the helicopter wouldn't get enough power to take off. Whether or not that was a win for anti-piracy I have no idea. I do know the game was completely pirated within 2 weeks of shipping though even though we had gotten some fancy copy protection. At least the copy protection added a fast loader so it was a plus for the user :p
inflammatory post. but it's techcrutch so what was i expecting?

this is the same as saying "armed concrete buildings fail more often then buildings made of paper and bamboo" while completely ignoring that all the world around them not even being possible without talented people building the armed concrete structures around the ego of whoever wrote this.
Not an RTOS, but seL4 is a correctness-proven open-source ARM microkernel: https://sel4.systems. Looks like a mixture of public and private funding. It's part of the L4 family, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family#Univers... which includes OKL4 (deployed on 1B+ ARM-based mobile phones) and http://genode.org (x86/ARM) from Dresden.
? It does seem to contain everything. Note that it really is just a software package and wraps other software that of course doesn't live in that repo. (Conemu, git)
That hypothetical language wouldn't be more abstract so much as vague and context-dependent which isn't the same thing.

When a language better handles abstraction, that means it's better at expressing common elements across a variety of domains without having to refer to particulars. For example, being able to talk about a relation between some X and Y without having to keep inflecting based on whether X means animals or houses.

One abstraction-helping construction in English is being able to go from "that thing is red" to the concept of redness.

I don't know if English is better or worse at this than other languages except that I remember anecdotes about it being harder to express sentences with unusual referents in Japanese eg "am I wearing the jacket?" vs "are you wearing the jacket.
C! Made in AMERICA! (F--K YEAH!)

We can't be using any of those sissy languages made in Switzerland!

The real tragedy is that [Turbo] Pascal / Modula / Oberon / Eiffel never got any traction. We could have been ahead of where we are now for low / medium low level languages DECADES ago.

E.g. - Turbo Pascal:

* Checks array boundaries, but you can cobble up pointer arithmetic if you really need to squeeze something (it looks funny, as it should, but it converts into the same assembly code as ptr += size ; ptr)

references ("var" params) used safely as non-optional values in most cases, using pointers for parameters that are truly optional.

* much stricter type checking and type range restriction allowed - most of which is only paid for at compile time, rather than run time.

* faster compiles, allowing quicker test cycles.

I suppose Ada fits in this group as well, but it was expensive in the late 80s.

Modern GC languages do well for long running application server programs, but they don't make good "transient" utility programs. We still need lower level languages for some types of programs.

Mobile could benefit from smaller memory footprints as well. I'm "gaming the game", but here are some tests on a 32 bit quad core setup, sorting by memory used for something that grinds through a number of connected objects as a surrogate for bulk data twiddling:

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32q/performance.php...

Alas, the Pascal version used 3 times the CPU seconds that the (fastest, but 2x more memory) GCC version did. However, a lot of work has been thrown into tuning GCC. Also, there were 6 C/GCC solutions submitted for this problem, of which 3 were not even correct. Of the other 2 C attempts, one was about the same size and speed as the Pascal version, and the other was twice as big and three times as slow.
"Do you find it to be something with the vocabulary, the grammar? What about the writing system?"

All the above. In everything. There are no tenses in Mandarin for example. The writing system is hell. Most Chinese have different levels of analphabetism because it has so many words.

"I've always wondered how the Chinese language writes loan words"

They have different transcription methods for that. They standardized in Pinyin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

It is not for loan words, but THEIR OWN ones. They need this in order to know how something sounds!!. Most of them use memory, but you study pinyin if you are educated.

In fact, the same Chinese character sounds different in different Chinese languages, and even in the same language in different parts of the country!.
Conversely when a few of my friends family found out I was an atheist they were no longer allowed to associate with me. A select few tried to convert me, others acted outright vitriolic towards me. This was in a major metro in CA.
Romantic relationships have also ended in the past when family members couldn't get over my lack of faith.
Biologists discover the key mechanism that triggers human ageing
Doesn't make sense to speculate, could be a million things like heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, aneurysm, complications with undiagnosed diabetes etc etc
I wasn't implying that meaning in the slightest. Just establishing that I am not a trained programmer nor a computer scientist. Poorly composed turn of phrase, I guess.
That's super cool, thank you for that link.
Part of your comment may be partially true, but the truth is likely much deeper and subtler. I'd say much of it is a bit Western bias. Abstractions come in different flavors and are tied to worldview. Most people in the West (except learners of Asian traditions) also have problems understanding concepts like Tao, Buddhism's Nirvana, Confucius' filial piety even when they know the words for them. A similar thing may happen in China which compelled the comment of yours.

(My native language is Thai, which is somewhat related to Chinese, and both share many characteristics. I also know a bit of Chinese and Japanese. I think a lot about languages in my job, NLU research)

English might have an advantage representing Western-style abstraction, not because of its inherent linguistic nature, but the culture surrounding its uses. China, Thailand, and many other countries in Asia just started its industrialization recently and one can argue that they have not gone through a European-style Enlightenment. Many of the Western abstract concepts in Chinese and Thai are imported, rather than invented, and thus have shallower roots and limited penetration in societies. Less educated and traditionally educated people might not wholly understand them even if they have heard them mentioned in passing in a documentary or foreign news. Neologisms are invented to represent these concepts, often fairly easily since compound words are in common use in both; but for most people to deeply understand them is a different issue.

So my question is what groups of monolingual population in China do you interact with and draw conclusions from? If they are not the new elites who had much education in Western tradition and worldview, their issues with Western abstract concepts may not really be of linguistic nature, but related to worldview.

Note on representing emotions:
Thai and Chinese use tones for meaning, but they have particle words for emotions and social cues. These are more expressive in writing compared to English. Spoken voice usually comes with emotional tones (pitch and loudness vary in these languages too) so people can almost always tell the emotions if the speaker does not hide them. So I disagree with your point about emotional expressiveness.
And it's working? All my experience with multiple threads on different contexts is crash, crash, bug bug bug. I'm surprised it's stable at all on any platform.
In my experience, the major problem with standards like MISRA is that people read the rules, but rarely the rationale behind them, which makes every coding standard end up encouraging cargo cult bug avoidance.

Case in point: MISRA C forbids goto statements primarily because it can mess up static analysis. Yet this rule is gratuitously followed even when no static analysis tools are used, thus yielding none of the gains that you trade off for occasionally writing ugly code.
Problem is: C, while very powerful, ends up being a burden in today's complex software.

It won by being less verbose and "more powerful" (for some uses) than Pascal (amongst other things), however, the way software evolved it starts to pull down.

There's a lot of unmanaged complexity in C (and in C++ it just ballooned); things like Go, Python (and even Java) taught us that managing complexity is important

It's very easy to shoot itself in the foot in C, C++ gives you a laser scope on top.

Some software gets away with C (like the Linux Kernel) by being very careful with it.

https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/329210881898606593

Can C be salvaged? Maybe D is the answer?

What I would do: built-in strings into the language (C's strings are pretty much a syntax shortcut to a char array), safe strings, bounds checking, if you want an array of bytes you get an array of bytes, not a string. Type aware allocations (no more sizeof all around), maybe exceptions.
> GR doesn't require global conservation of momentum or energy

That's not what the pages you linked to are saying. They are saying that there are solutions in GR where there is not any well-defined notion of total energy, as in "total energy of the universe". But GR certainly does require local energy and momentum conservation, which is what EmDrive would violate if it worked.
That is actually not a drive, since it is not (and, given the known laws of physics, cannot be) mounted on the ship it propels.
So lotsofmangos's idea is not quite the same, as it can be on-ship (although trying to use it as a FTL drive would either require infinite energy or rip the ship apart due to tidal forces (or, more likely, both).
How do you change the background?
Obama’s Social Media Hits and Misses
Just drag the complexity of bignum arithmetic into a hard-realtime embedded system... What could possibly go wrong?
Btrfs is by now used as a default file system in some distros. As far as I understand, only some features are still considered experimental.
I wouldn't say it's stupid so much as variable in its value. Some people are naturally attracted to a wide variety of people, ideas, experiences, and so on. For them, following this advice is likely to turn out well. For others, with narrower horizons, results will be a bit more mixed.
How do you define the term "philosophy"?
White House digital strategy director to step down Friday
Experiments aren't usually written in FORTRAN.

The programmer is by far the slowest part of HPC. It often makes sense to use the language you're fastest at instead of the language that will run the fastest.

It's very common for experiments to be written in languages not know for their performance (Java, Matlab, Perl, and Python for instance).

For reference, here are some of the packages commonly used in experiments[1]:

BLAS Fortran http://www.netlib.org/blas/#_software
NCBI BLAST C++ ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/executables/blast+/LATEST/ncbi-blast-2.2.30+-src.zip
BFAST C http://sourceforge.net/projects/bfast/
BioPerl Perl https://github.com/bioperl/bioperl-live
Bowtie C++, C http://sourceforge.net/projects/bowtie-bio/files/bowtie/
Clustal C, C++ http://www.clustal.org/omega/#Download
cp2k Fortran https://github.com/cp2k/cp2k
Gromacs C https://github.com/gromacs/gromacs
HTSeq Python https://pypi.python.org/pypi/HTSeq
MUSCLE C++ http://www.drive5.com/muscle/downloads.htm
MrBayes C http://sourceforge.net/p/mrbayes/code/HEAD/tree/
OpenFOAM C++ https://github.com/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-2.3.x
SAMtools C https://github.com/samtools/samtools
SNAP C http://korflab.ucdavis.edu/software.html
fftw3 C https://github.com/FFTW/fftw3

[1]: I went down this list and picked some of the ones I remember using (been out of the HPC world for a couple years): https://portal.tacc.utexas.edu/software It'll be a bit skewed towards genomics.