skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I lived in Ecuador for 5 months and was a little surprised that at one time they had the highest rate of cell phone ownership per capita of any country in the world [1]. Like the countries mentioned in Africa, it's because they skipped the land line stage and went straight to cell phones.

What was truly shocking was the amount of money people were paying relative to their income. There were local Ecuadorians working with me - earning a good income by Ecuadorian standards, though they were living in dirt-floor houses and didn't have hot running water.

These people were spending an entire months salary on a flip phone. Because that's what they wanted and was cool.

It blew me a way to think of the average person from a Developed country spending an entire months salary on a cell phone - it's essentially not even possible.

It's as if they have access to all the same technology the Developed world does, but the cost of entry is exponentially higher.

[1] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2?order=wba...
If you think $99 is expensive just wait until you have to buy your first copy of MSDN.
It's completely insane to have multi-hour downtime every week the way Blizzard does. Between that and their regionally segregated Battle.net (there's no good excuse that you can't play Hearthstone with anyone anywhere), they're basically stuck on server architectures from the 90s.
What was the problem in [4]? I'll agree that there are a couple nice things about the core matlab syntax, but things tend to get very terrible very quickly once you start to actually do anything with it.
Now I'm curious: what was this problem? I can't imagine any program in Matlab that one can't simply transcribe into Python almost mechanically.
Only C# is actualy used ;).
Tech Companies Line Up Behind Surveillance Reform Bill
'I've never seen anything like it': Airbnb renters leave Calgary home trashed
The software development experience is not only about subjective opinions ("I like static typing better!") but also about reliability and bug-catching.

Forget Haskell. I'm sure you know this is flamewar material, but the purported advantages of statically typed languages over dynamically typed languages are that it's easier (less bug prone) to refactor code written in statically typed languages, and also that there are fewer tests you have to manually write, since the compiler "writes" those tests for you, so to speak, helping write correct software with less effort. In general, the argument goes "all else being equal [1], it's easier to write correct software using a statically typed language". As an end-user, the software development experience affects you even if you are not a programmer!

I'm sure you won't agree with this. You could as well ask Paul Graham "what benefits would WhatsApp see if they had used Lisp?", and his answer would likely be as unconvincing to you as mine in this post.

----

[1] availability of libs, performance, and not competing with a custom language designed specifically for the problem at hand.
A lot of this article is absurd... I've been playing for 15+ years in the US and I've never had someone think that what I did was checkers.
Real Spooky Rich. Real Spooky.
That was certainly a really bad move—Obviously people were very pissed off.
They haven't had time to accumulate patches that were useful five years ago but now just make things pointlessly slightly different. Similarly, you can generally assume that if someone has clang then it will be a relatively recent version of clang, because of how fast clang moved from not being practically usable to being very good.

In a few years I assume that all of the various annoyances around targeting GCC on Linux will also apply to clang.
Overpopulation is really not the origin of much negative bias, and where researchers publish on that topic it is to note that it isn't an issue. E.g.:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/

However: researchers don't want to be seen as being just another part of the "anti-aging" marketplace of pills and potions and lies, as it has a negative affect on their credibility and ability to raise funds for research. That is the dominant issue, and it has taken a lot of work over the past few decades to get even more adventurous and strong-willed researchers to the point of being willing to talk in public about extending healthy human life spans.
To be fair to Google, if you click through to the second page, they do indeed collapse the rest of the results with the notice about result similarity.

On the other hand, it makes me wonder what kind of ad money these sites pull in. At least I got to add a whole bunch of sites to my personal block list...
Does evolution matter for a species where every sick offspring is saved at birth?
Yep. They probably had to buy several cases of coconut water, made some very expensive visits to the Apple store, and the founders maybe bought a Mercedes or two.
CSS DemoS › a CSS Font (First?) (2004)
I remember the threads on Vic Gundotra on Secret. And yes I agree that the decision to use real names or be anonymous in general should be left to the poster.
Smartphone Obsession: This Is What Einstein Had Feared
package management is going to suck on windows as long as permissions sucks on windows.

multiple times, i've been unable to delete my own damn files as administrator on windows machines, leaving me angry and frustrated. i've also been stuck in a catch-22 in the extended acl/permissions dialogs, unable to exit. all the googling in the world couldn't help me - it was just fuckin' broke.

sane package management can't exist on such a system. an assertion impossible to prove, but i'm right so far.
Yet the only thing any real programmer wants is C11 support.
Have We Seen the End of the 8-Hour Day?
We have used Wagtail on a recent project of ours. We were looking for something lean which would allow us to define our pages easily and offer a clean interface to upload content to those pages. Wagtail fit this requirement perfectly. We faced some issues when upgrading to newer versions but they were expected on 0.x releases.
Urbit? No wait, that's what kind of language alien trolls would have.
Box bought box.com roughly 6 years after they launched, they were already wildly successful (as box.net).
A common problem I've had is:

Prospective client: "We would like X, BigCompany did that last year."

Me: "Cool! We've been doing that since 2010, let me show you some videos, with timestamps."

Prospective client: "What! How come I haven't heard of you until now then!"
Where and when do chess cheerleaders cheer?
> Then, at least in SF, it started being almost entirely about gay sexual fantasies. Friends in my circle started using it less, so it got less interesting to me. Eventually I stopped using it when nobody I knew was posting.

This happened in Boston as well. It was really odd how rapidly it changed from a mix of different types of posts to nearly all gay sex posts.

I wonder if that won't flow over to Yik Yak now that Secret has shut down?
First Hours with Visual Studio Code on Mac and Windows
The very last link in their "are you serious?" section is the sentence "Or maybe you have some clue about how the internet actually works, and you don’t need a manifesto to tell you what you already know" with a link to an article titled "TCP doesn't suck, and all the proposed bufferbloat fixes are identical." I read the whole thing as a joke, and I don't see anything that suggests otherwise anywhere in it.

Seriously, how can you read "just as the Reactive Manifesto reminded us that new branding can give a youthful glow to decades-old ideas" as anything but funny?
For iOS and Android apps you must have implemented some POSIX APIs that Windows hasn't supported historically, such as pthreads. Will it now be possible to write a Win32 app using pthreads?
Pretty much our experience too. Haven't run into any upgrade issues but so far only have done a couple of minor release upgrades so might have lucked out and missed the pain points you had.
Climate Time Machine
Also interesting is their F* language: http://fstar-lang.org/

"F* is a new higher order, effectful programming language (like ML) designed with program verification in mind. Its type system is based on a core that resembles System Fω (hence the name), but is extended with dependent types, refined monadic effects, refinement types, and higher kinds. Together, these features allow expressing precise and compact specifications for programs, including functional correctness properties. The F* type-checker aims to prove that programs meet their specifications using an automated theorem prover (usually Z3) behind the scenes to discharge proof obligations. Programs written in F* can be translated to OCaml, F#, or JavaScript for execution. "

It's open source too: https://github.com/FStarLang/FStar
Why only patent?

Sell everything to Google and live on its mercy…. that is what Google wants.
This may be off topic, but why are min and max macros by default ? It is the problem we face most often when we compile our library on windows.
Dang, was hoping this would make plugins for VS easier. I have to write a plugin for every release of Visual Studio currently.
Gmail for Desktop (unofficial) built using Electron
It's very easy to abuse ratings/downloads when there's no paywall.
Making MySQL 5,888.6x faster Yep, you read that right
Pretty sure that "breaking with DOS" has already been the case since NT.
Hi guys,

Started playing around with Electron this weekend and threw together this Gmail desktop app. Would love feedback and pull requests to make it better!

-Drew
PL's as tools is a half-accurate analogy. If you're going to stretch it that far, shouldn't you use something more accurate? Or better, not use an analogy for something that detailed?

Say, PL's are materials. They are something that useful things "tools" are fashioned out of. The properties of a material affect the entire thing built out of it, in modest but pervasive ways. Some programs are built in more than one language, this could be seen as an object built with different materials for different parts. Now, whether mainstream languages are analogous to different iron alloys, wood, concrete or plastic is a different discussion. (And maybe another exercise in taking an analogy too far...)

Not sure where I saw this analogy first, since I can't find it on LtU...
Apple warns of ‘material’ financial damage from Irish tax probe
That is amazing. Sad that your initial crowd funding was unsuccessful.

Have you tried to tell about your product on reddit? There are many subreddits interested in tech like this and in indie music production.
That's the part I don't understand.

Why do people spend $600 for a phone that they use to do stuff a $80 phone does, except the $80 phone has an effectively better battery and often gets better signal?
They should just rename it "Code", visual studio inevitably brings memories of "bad M$". This is going to be a good trojan horse to lure developers into the microsoft platforms now with windows 10 and all, esp. as OSX developers are getting tired working with 80s technologies.
My guess would be that they are wrapping native threading under pthread api. So there is no advantage of using pthread api for win32 apps.
It went extremely viral in Israel about a year ago.

At first with the start-up community that's very connected to SF used it for internal gossip and anonymous whining and dissing.

Then it expanded naturally to young creative types (developers, designers, bloggers, journalists, etc) who are connected to the start-up scene, and became big in the gay community in Tel-Aviv, that highly overlaps both groups.

And then the mainstream media started raving about it, and it exploded with the masses and especially teens. At this point it just became a cesspool of online bullying for teens, and I lost interest in following its path. There was even a proposed law banning it in Israel or something (http://pando.com/2014/08/28/israel-becomes-latest-country-to...). But seeing this expansion graph over a period of 2-3 weeks last summer was fascinating.
We thought the exact same thing, so we're creating Matrix [1]! It supports all sorts of things, but especially public/private group chats with multiple device support. We're basically a team of people who use IRC all day, so we really do feel your pain :)

[1] http://matrix.org
Frustration and enlightenment: how I learn a new development technology
Are the tickets entry-only? Then presumably you pay for your meal as well?

Perhaps you could just pay for drinks, I guess, and have the meal on the ticket. I assume their price covers all your typical upcharges anyway.
I honestly can't make out if the author is trying to be serious or sarcastic. For instance:

"We follow in their Chukka-booted footsteps by challenging the comforts of the ubiquitous Transmission Control Protocol and recognizing the well-deserved renaissance of artisanal protocols built on UDP. We didn’t start this fire, we’re just calling it what it is: the NoTCP movement"

I'd admit to being too dumb to parse the exact sentiment behind that paragraph. Though it does sound somewhat like sarcasm to me.

Then in the rest of the paragraphs, he actually goes on to make a pretty good case of why one might want to get rid of TCP (especially from under the complex beast that HTTP/2.0 is with it's own flow-control, multiplexing etc.)

For what it's worth, I wrote my own manifesto against using TCP in all cases a few weeks ago. But this one is geared very specifically towards the needs of mobile native apps.

https://packetzoom.com/blog/
You can blame me for those wasted four bytes (or, perhaps, that wasted terabyte in the aggregate).

The original idea was that on big-endian machines, the resulting .odex would be endian-swapped compared to the original .dex, and this field would provide a reasonably-blatant indication. This would probably help with debugging more than anything else (maybe help with security, but not much), because there's no reason anyone would drop a little-endian .odex file on a big-endian machine (or a big-endian one on a little-endian machine).

We wrote (most of?) the code to get the vm working on big-endian systems, but within Google we never shipped any big-endian hardware AFAIK. I have my doubts that anyone ever did.
As somebody who varies between managing cashflow well and not-that-well ... it all depends on how much you make and the steadiness of your income.

For instance, last year I had a string of events where clients were a few months late in paying me. This created a snowball effect that took over a year to fully get rid of. During this time I was always running out of money by the end of the month, and it was always a race of whether my credit card payment[1] would get triggered before the wire transfer for my payment arrived.

Now I have enough saved up for just two months of living.

Suddenly cashflow management isn't a problem at all. If something happens, it happens, I can buffer it all out and money just isn't as big a problem. At least not for the big stuff.

It's a bit like clothes. I can manage my laundry perfectly fine. But if for some reason I don't do laundry on Saturday, I will be out of clean clothes by Tuesday.

[1] it's set up so it gets blocked if I don't pay it off in full every month
> There's not even a notice on the original

No license on the original means you don't have the right to use it.
I suspect it doesn't work as well when you're a marginal player (as they are in mobile today) as when you're the 800-lb gorilla.

Edit: I suppose this is a case of them trying to pull the conversation back to the place where they ARE an 800-lb gorilla. I just don't see them as being as dominant even on the desktop as they once were.
If you replace every piece of a B52 with a new piece, is it still the same plane?

Especially if the new pieces are no the same as the old piece?
Your question was already answered: "regularly catching bugs that would have taken hours to deal with". That is the benefit nbouscal believes WhatsApp or pretty much anybody else would see. You can argue whether sophisticated static type systems accomplish such a thing, but it seems inarguable that it would be widely beneficial if they do.

I'll add my own (related) real-world benefit that I feel when I'm using a good static type system: I find it easier to write good unit tests when the types of data being passed across units has been statically limited.
3200x1800 here and it is unreadable as well. Could be that I am using Firefox, but so are... a lot of people.
I think it may be a cultural difference thing. In many parts of the world, including Eastern Europe it is common to provide your age and a photo on a resume.
Compatibility for old code?
Just "#define NOMINMAX" before including windows.h
>users have become accustomed to periodic cycles of updating and upgrading to avoid obsolescence—if at some cost in terms of frustration.

That fear of obsolescence is what drives those upgrade/subscription revenues. Finding replacement revenues thus is the real task here.

Anyway, TCP is 40 years old and will be with us for the other 60 years (with some fine-tuning for the big latency roundtrips to Mars) - so this is your 100 year system for example. Others mentioned COBOL already and one can also look at Fortran libraries like in astronomy, etc...
Yes the "how cute" comment is still displayed to me as "[flagged]", as well as being completely grayed out.
Virtual machines, yo.
If F# is of interest to you then check out http://www.fsharpworkshop.com/ + https://github.com/ghuntley/fsharp-workshop and finally http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com
The advantage is portability. For example, if you're developing a library that needs to be usable on Win32, Linux, and Darwin.
See also: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4609
Interesting, from the history section in [1]:

---
At Los Alamos, Monte Carlo computer codes developed along with computers. The first Monte
Carlo code was the simple 19-step computing sheet in John von Neumann's letter to Richtmyer.
But as computers became more sophisticated, so did the codes. At first the codes were written in
machine language and each code would solve a specific problem. In the early 1960s, better
computers and the standardization of programming languages such as Fortran made possible more
general codes.

[..]

MCNP5, released in 2003, is rewritten in ANSI standard Fortran 90. It includes the addition of
photonuclear collision physics, superimposed mesh tallies, time splitting, and plotter upgrades.
MCNP5 also includes parallel computing enhancements with the addition of support for OpenMP
and MPI.
Large production codes such as MCNP have revolutionized science − not only in the way it is done, but also by becoming the repositories for physics knowledge. MCNP represents over 500 person-years of sustained effort. The knowledge and expertise contained in MCNP is formidable.
---

So it seems that Fortran is already the 50-year programming language.

[1]: https://laws.lanl.gov/vhosts/mcnp.lanl.gov/pdf_files/la-ur-0...
You can now fall under a curse, while cursing your head off at the damn man page, while playing a curses-based game.
>> The reason the "web developer community suffered overall by 'supporting' IE6" is because people wont and dont update their "broken sites". That's a pipe dream.

I meant that we wasted a lot of effort building IE6-proof sites in recent years. My analogy itself had nothing to do with updating sites. I was trying to give an example of a 'crazy web workaround' that screwed us over in the long-term.

But if we forget analogies and I address your actual claim that:

> [...] people wont and dont update their "broken sites".

We're talking about major sites here (like Reddit) where this is clearly not true as most have updated already. Reddit is something of an exception, though they are clearly working on it as the commenter that linked to the beta `m.reddit.com` has shown.
I would say it is the same plane in exactly the same sense that DARPA is interested in having the same computing system running for 100+ years; i.e., they want something that can be in use, maintained, adapted to current needs by incremental updates, without every being tossed out all at once and replaced with a from-scratch new system.
How about taking a month of an interns time and adding C99 support to your compiler?
I find it hard to take seriously an article praising "telomerase-activating herbs and supplements". Sounds like a marketing piece for alternative medicine.
Animation Performance in the Browser
> Is application dependency management in windows normally a problem?

It has its own name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_Hell
This isn't from The New York Times Company.

whois nytimes.cat
Steffi Paepcke on Robots, women and design: Opportunities abound
And that it's often hard to tell that a great idea has been poorly executed until it's too late.
Exactly. For those of us who like to play around with protocols over the real Internet, availability of UDP as basically a proxy IP protocol is a godsend. Well what really matters is that a few uses of UDP over the internet are well established (DNS, VOIP etc.) and that makes it hard for ISP's and middle-boxes to block arbitrary UDP ports. And that makes UDP the perfect conduit to invent custom protocols.
This doesn't solve the reflow problem, but you can double tap to zoom, too.

I always forget Android supports pinch. I never use it, myself (don't like needing my other hand except when typing).
if preventing doxxing is your idea of social justice i have some news that will confuse you
This is why you don't anger Bitcoiners
3D Scan of the Oldest Mask in the World (9000 Years Old)
> It really does feel like another planet when people earning "minimum wage" are doing just fine

There's a big difference between getting minimum wage every 5th of the month on the dot, or getting $2k one month, $10k next month, $1k third month and so on.
Summarizing all big data projects
Fair point. I wanted to clarify the difference since "built on Atom" has a different meaning to me than "using the GitHub Electron shell". The first sounds like an extension to Atom and the second sounds like a whole new app.
I'm upset this wasn't called Joe Camel. And marketed towards children.
Moving averages and the iPad
For OpenGL ES: https://code.google.com/p/angleproject/
Like IE11, Edge is evergreen.
Does this mean we are going to see a .NET based desktop environment in Linux anytime soon?
Depends of the definition of breaking with DOS.
UDP is quickly becoming the base protocol for "I don't want TCP but I do need something that gets through firewalls".

Exactly right. No need to invent a new protocol number in the IP headers. UDP is the perfect vehicle for custom protocols. And once you start experimenting with a somewhat intelligent custom protocol, it's amazing how easy it is to beat even well tuned TCP stacks on average over a large number of users. This is especially true, by large large margins, over mobile networks.
In C++ you can use std::thread for this purpose. In C, in theory C11 thrd_* would be better to implement than pthreads, since it's been standardized... too bad none of the major platforms support it in their default libcs, so Windows implementing it wouldn't actually improve portability. If Windows implements pthreads, maybe there'll be a C1y that removes thrd_* from the standard and just standardizes pthreads. That'd be funny.