skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems to be a failure to understand when exceptions and when error codes are to be used. I'm just starting a big infrastructure project that needs to be high uptime and distributed across a large number of machines, and I'm doing it in C++ because I know I'd never get it working in anything else.

Let's take one specific example -- connecting to a remote host. The loop that goes through the DNS returned IP numbers uses local error codes to try each in turn until one is accepted. If none are accepted it throws an exception so that the higher level application code can decide what to do about the connect failure. The exception ensures that all resources are properly cleaned on the way through.

The exception is used to guarantee that resources are properly de-allocated on the way back up to where the error needs to handled as it cannot be handled locally, probably not in the function that kicked off the connect attempt either, but there's no local exceptions to handle the case where the error is handled locally.

The use of the exception is more like a ROLLBACK on a database transaction together with error reporting -- it helps ensure correctness by backing out properly changes in state that were kicked off by the connect attempt. When the exception is caught the program state is exactly as it was when the connect attempt was first tried so we know we have good clean state to make another attempt or to move on and do something else. Backing out all of these other state changes is really hard when an error code needs to be handled non-locally -- and it's this non-local handling of errors that's so hard and error prone without exceptions.

So if you're only ever using error codes you'll far too easily make mistakes when the error needs to be handled non-locally, and if you're only ever using exceptions then it's going to be real ugly when the error is handled locally.

You need to use both if you want clean code that is going to work reliably (or you need massive engineering resources to fix all of the bugs you'll end up with).
Help us build a better LDAP browser
WhatsApp: businesses could pay to be allowed to send you messages, Facebook says
Hm paypal. I used my account last month. I used paypal regularly to make online payments (never in order to receive money). I had no major problem, only strange thing is that... In order to un-subscribe from services (e.g. like the NBA league pass, which I wanted for a month, not lifetime) I need to follow a step-by-step tutorial because the subscriptions listing is literally hidden.
The Missing Alias Manager
A while back, I was looking for a guide to meditation and found this to be really helpful: http://www.meditationmojo.com/
In general, the more you can package up into single abstractions, the more someone will have to learn to thoroughly understand your code base. If those abstractions fit the problem domain well, hopefully they will ease the overall cognitive load of working in the system, even somewhat early on, but there will always be some ramp-up time. I'm not at all sure it's a big problem, just something you need to be aware of.
The technique is not about the initial validation of a self-signed certificate, its about a pinned self-sign certificate that you trust but want to be able to revoke in the future.
Right. Also, say,
Kolmogorov and Fomin.
And Dunford and Schwartz.

No doubt the full literature
is enormous -- I don't know all
of it!

But Rudin is a good author, and
as a writer got better, less
severe in style and, thus,
easier to read,
over time
in his career.
As usual, this guy doesn't understand how to use C++. Nobody with any significant C++ experience puts error generating code in constructors. Once I saw that I stopped reading.
It might be a word in English[dictionary], but it's not a word in English[used].

On that subject, what does the word "wyrm" mean?
from the flipboard article:

"The final use case that we thought of was saving bandwidth. A smaller image could be sent to the client which would run a client side version of this model to gain a larger image."

Can be applied to gifs and videos, but this really depends on the usage case and if the client would tolerate such a thing.
Dollar for dollar food, water and education in the 3rd world has to have the greatest impact on human suffering, but they are likely a different color than you so it seems some would rather save some drug company R and D money.
I thought plain threads are the goto of the 21st century?
Huh interesting- never heard of May First/People Link. Anyone have any comments on it? Concept seems appealing.
Nope. The author was just clueless.
Monster's Den: Godfall Kickstarter – this game dev really deserves some love
Hi folks, last year, I made this ruby script with thor to manage my terminal shortcuts.

The script makes it easier to grow my aliases and improve my terminal workflow. I'm posting this here to see how I can improve it further.

Any feedback will be appreciated!
Amir Younis Najam- a Professional Photojournalist
Four Kinds of Opinion Pieces I Will Not Read
I see a lot of interest in saving the repo/forks as archive, perhaps to revive it to some extent in the future. Wouldn't it be more constructive to build an open client that can compete with WhatsApp instead? Granted that it's hard, but definitely more fun than fighting legal notices and guessing hidden features that break the code occasionally.
Let's Encrypt: ACME Protocol for Automatic Browser-Trusted Certificate
I think you and Lawtonfogle are in agreement. For example, anonymity on the internet is illegal (or very close to it) in China, and Tor is meant to circumvent that law. Thus, it was designed for an illegal purpose as far as the Chinese government sees it.
Is it just me, or did it not actually explain why:

> Bus bunching happens because, if a bus gets delayed, then there will be more people waiting at the next stop than anticipated. The extra passengers' boarding time makes the bus even later, and so on in a vicious cycle.

OK, so I get that buses get delayed. And even more delayed. But why buses "bunch" up and arrive at the same time doesn't seem to be explained anywhere.
Discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9572478
So you looking for an online service to do your job of filtering who you hire ? Don't be surprised if you don't get what you think you want.

If you're a dev company in any sense, it should be pretty straight forward to setup some kind of mock project that potentials can checkout and do something with.
Investigate the results.

If you want to know what they are to work with and what skills they have, then work them...and test some skills you know are needed for the job.
^ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4633971

I've been watching for updates for almost 3 years :( Gave me so much hope. There are a few local startups that have tried to replicate Stripe, but their customer service is absolutely atrocious.
There's been a flurry of 'machine learning in plain English' posts recently. I think this post does by far the best job of explaining usecases for each algo.
Wow, this was the CS101 4th week assignment I had to do (without the graphics).
I think there are free ruby addons you can add to make SketchUp models more printer friendly(adjusting wall thickness etc).

I don't have a link I looked at it a while back now.
Sounds/Looks like the name of a tech startup. :)
The clock is ticking for Dropbox
It wasn't clear to me which is why I asked. I agree for that case the headline is a bit misleading though.

In the EU it's nearly always free to transfer funds between the same currency, even between different countries. Banks still get people with the exchange rates or high fees to make transfers between currencies. TransferWise is a UK company, so that being their primary market, they took off from European workers in the UK wanting to send money home.

Just for comparisons sake, my use case is transferring money between Ireland (EUR) and the UK (GBP) and vice versa. Compared to my bank they have both better exchange rates, lower fees, and are quicker.
Just got back from a meditation gathering from meetup.com and all I have to say is WOW. Powerful, and highly recommended.

Start with 3 min a day right when you wake up (before food, cigarette, anything at all) and then go from there.
It's great to cut out humans from the loop where we can, but we cannot do so here. As you say, upscaling is lossy (de)compression, and no amount of math is going to reveal information that fundamentally does not exist in a source image. Furthermore, neural networks are trivially fooled: http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/03/images-fool-computer... . I'd actually trust a trained neural network far less than a human, just like I'd trust the upscaling technique in this article far less than a human artist. Speed and automation are their advantages compared to trained humans, not quality.
This is fine, but for anyone to be able to actually trust that this person's signed distribution of some piece software is actually safe then you would have to assume that the person has some way of obtaining the source code from a place that they themselves trust. If they don't write the code and have no access to any other signed version this may be difficult.
This doesn't even seem like an accurate simulation, if bus 1 is unloading/loading at a bus stop and bus 2 catches it, bus 2 waits for bus 1. This makes sense in the context of the website because buses always drop off/pick up passengers when they get to a bus stop. But that isn't how it works in real life, if bus 2 doesn't have to drop off someone while bus 1 is at the stop it will just leapfrog past it.

The fact that busses don't overtake each other seems to be the reason the bunching happens, as soon as the front bus starts slowing down a little it's inevitable bus 2 will catch it and then the situation can't be fixed.
Regardless, if you now try to convert more of your touchdowns, and you have Eli throwing the ball, that's going to result in more 2 point conversions for the other team.
There's a thing built-in to WordPress called "Pages" which are not sequential and don't have an implicit date. Maybe the author could look into those.

I'm being facetious but I've created entire WordPress sites with no Posts, only Pages. They are easy to use for the clients and a few tweaks of a starter template (I use Bones) and you are done.

Also, using a starter template (or even creating your own) so you provide for many common options (full-width pages or other stock layouts) is an invaluable tool. And one you can reuse for any project.

Granted, there are many situations where WordPress isn't the right fit but to discount it outright, and for the reasons the author sites is a bit of a cop out.

A little long-term planning and reusable code solves a lot of those issues.
> Eating whole, unprocessed, natural foods is great, but the science behind the paleo diet being “the one and only diet that ideally fits our genetic makeup” - I mean if that literally doesn't sound like dogma, I don't know what does.

The paleo straw manning needs to stop. Most people I know that use paleo as a standard to live by don't think it's the be all, end all. That if you eat anything you couldn't get 60,000+ years it's automatically bad, that isn't how people that actually follow paleo go about it.

> There is no "one and only" stone age diet - you ate what was around you! The Inuit aren't eating oranges and spinach, that stuff doesn't grow in the tundra. Similarly, you won't be eating deer and bison in Greece, but you will be eating fish and olives.

The fact that you put this out as an argument against further proves what im saying, I really don't see how this applies to anyone but the hardcore strict paleo which doens't really exist outside of the ones who write and sell books.

> There are societies across many geographic regions with long life expectancies, and their diets vary wildly.

Yes, these kind of conversations are the ones I find myself having with paleo-minded people more often. About trying to work out what food our bodies work better with, I really am stumped as to why you are seeing this is a knock on paleo.

> The Grecians eat lots of fruits, veggies, olive oil, fish, goat milk and wine. The Japanese eat soybeans, sweet potatoes, white rice, seaweed, and fish. Sardinians eat lots of game, goat cheese/milk, beans, and barley. Each is home to peoples with the longest life expectancy on earth today, and each has at least one staple that is not considered paleo friendly.

If you read the book outliers you would also know that food isn't the only contributing factor to life expectancy by a long shot. The example in the book about the greek town who by any dietary standards was eating incredibly faty and unhealthy foods had extraordinary high life expectancy, believed to be due to their extremely high happiness due to their tight-knit social structure.

> Alan Aragon did a great talk critiquing the paleo diet, which you can read more about here

I don't see why I should even bother when you start off your comment talking about the dogma needs to stop and you throw out a bunch of half assed arguments which don't address paleo directly.

This dogma needs to stop.
I'd say there are a lot of local streets with speed limits to high, designed for speeds MUCH to high.

http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2010/11/22/confessions-of...
Yes, I'm in favor of installing and maintaing "elastic search".

It's not rocket science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch#Users
Buses bunch as they move further along the route as a consequence of having a dwell time (the time spent at the stop) that increases as a result of the number of passengers boarding at each stop increases AND having passengers arrive at each stop randomly. You can reduce bunching effects by:

* loading passengers who have already paid through multiple doors like Curitiba which every transport engineer includes on their honeymoon :)

* having passengers use smart cards rather than cash which is slower

* running infrequent services so passengers read the timetable and do not arrive at the bus stop randomly as their is an incentive to be their at the timetabled time.

The last method is obviously not acceptable in running a service but it highlights the curse of running frequent services. As frequency increases, people's behaviour moves to "turn up and go" rather than read a timetable and the buses bunch. So you in effect trade waiting time, waiting for a timetabled service for bunch delay time. Hence one good reason to go for smart cards or bus platforms where you pay prior to boarding the platform like a train station to speed up loading.
It lost me when I saw those infinite number of bubbles for tutorial!
If there’s a tech talent crunch, why are Silicon Valley jobs filled so quickly?
Here in Portland I've often seen pairs of bunched busses leapfrogging each other at every stop so that at least they both move faster.
Reddit is Down Again
C++ not only fails to hide the above-mentioned C pitfalls but adds entire classes of pitfalls of its own. Just a few examples:

* undecidable grammar: http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html#defect-2

* const inside containers: http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/const.html#fqa-18.1

* template error messages
http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/templates.html#fqa-35.17

C is often nicer than C++ because it's simpler: it only has the C pitfalls not the combination of C & C++ pitfalls that plague C++.
Not so easy to do. As usual, there is a risk that such legislation will be abused to let people who are trying to break in to a system for malicious reasons, claim later it was research. A decent law would require researchers to register with police/whatever before they start researching. Which then excludes researching government/police systems (because they would know up front). etc. Not so easy!
One thing the DoT could do to assuage our negative feelings is put the methodology out in the public after it's implemented.

It likely is public - there may be an environmental assessment (EA), Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) or Environmental Impact Report (EIR) that will have an appendix containing the detailed traffic engineering study behind the metering. It's probably based on MUTCD guidelines [0].

Assuming you are referring to I-5 through CA, a Google search for "california ramp metering study" brings up a lot of studies and documentations sponsored by Caltrans.

[0] http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/htm/2009/part4/part4i.htm
> The hackers with the skills to break into software and networks, who choose to come forward with their knowledge and share their findings, should be legally exempt from criminal prosecution under laws designed to punish crime.

I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but I personally think that you shouldn't mess with people's shit unless they invite you to (e.g. by having a bounty, research partnership program, etc.). Yes, some organizations will be less secure because of it. Similarly, some houses are less secure because the locks are low quality. It isn't up to you to decide how thoroughly said locks should be checked.
Impact of Shared Code on Vulnerability Patching
"He argues that the study's authors examined only microbial composition, not function — and microbes can change function rapidly, making it hard to predict how they perform solely on the basis of the genera of bacteria present. A 2011 study found evidence that Clostridium bacteria in panda guts contained genes that resembled those known to produce enzymes that break cellulose down into simpler sugars."

It sounds the authors identified the bacteria flora in the panda gut via feces, but not the bacterias' specific gene expressions which may vary even if they are known suited more for carnivore digestion (e.g., but may be specialized to digest plants cellulose in panda gut environment).

For those involved in genomics, I'm curious as to how one can obtain the RNA expression (RNASeq) of multiple bacteria present in panda gut; and how do they go from the raw sequence data sequenced from the multiple bacteria composition to match the specific gene and then also its host bacteria?
Stripe doesn't accept every credit/debit card out there and can often cause charges to be declined for ambiguous reasons. In my experience, PayPal doesn't have this issue. PayPal is also a preferred payment option by a lot of customers and visitors, believe it or not. We still have a lot of customers who refuse to use any payment option other than PayPal, which is honestly really disappointing. Removing support for PayPal would mean losing a lot of customers.
That's what I've been doing lately, as soon as I wake I focus on my breathing for a few minutes.
If you're on the latest Firefox (38), then it has been insanely crashy. Even with the 38.0.1 update that supposedly fixed a crash bug, the browser still crashes on a lot of websites. I'm not sure why Mozilla felt the need to push a suboptimal version out, but it is making me think of leaving Firefox again (been very unstable for me the past few versions).
Transparency can only lead to a freer market, which is something many capitalists truly fear.
It exists now, you just need to run it on an OS X machine running OS X + Fusion to be legal.

I have vagrant vm's for OS X back to 10.7. You might be able to run esx on a mac then use vm's that way but I have no idea. In either case what you want has existed for some time.
Of course a long time ago people decided that 'blasting off' was inappropriate for a rocket, it 'lifts off' since rocket + blasting usually means spontaneous unplanned rapid disassembly :-)

It is too bad this first one has to stay in the upper atmosphere to be dragged back down to earth. I get that a tiny cubesat is still really nasty orbital junk when it is dead but the chance to show a solar sail actually working would be nice.
Summary: No generics. No versioning. The author said they wanted to bring more to the conversation, but it seems that they really didn't after all.
Read all that and I still have no clue what the author is making now.
The Daring Genesis of J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens
I completely agree; the entire time I'm reading this I couldn't help but feel this was misunderstanding the use of exceptions.

The stated design goal is that the project "never fail and never exhibit undefined behaviour" yet exceptions are exactly for undefined behavior. If you can't allocate memory, if your function is called with arguments that it cannot possibly interpret, or that a fully expected network connection has failed and cannot recover. Those are exceptions. For all your defined behaviors, you can control just as described in the article without exceptions.

There is clearly too many exceptions (and handlers) in the first case and way too few in the second case.
I read recently that Messenger saved fuel on its trip by using its photovoltaic panel as a sail. So there has been a demonstrated use of solar sails as propulsion, contrary to what the article says.
ctrl+backspace to go back a word on windows and linux usually. alt+backspace on mac.

plus, lots of linux apps and the command line you have ctrl+w to go back a word. just fyi. :) quicker than hitting backspace a bunch.
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9572426
Not a mathematician either, but Tao's view does make sense for me.

What Lurie seems to be missing is you don't necessarily go "down to the metal" when using an ideal proof assistant. Ideally you should be able to specify almost the same arguments for formalization.

The only fundamental impediment I can think of relates to the following: is there some clear step that (for example) shows a proposition, which might be laborious and hence omitted normally, and is not amenable to being automatically filled in? I'm not sure of the commonality of this case, since as far as I know mathematicians tend to want to minimize intuitive leaps that are not completely obvious.

Even then, it might be useful for all other instances. So how close are we really to getting this piece of software? Seems quite revolutionary for writing mathematics; and equally interesting are the advances required to get there.
I believe that the Telegram (telegram.org) server is open source. There is also a publicly documented API.

Correction: the clients are open source.
To Stop Killing Earth, NYC’s Food Carts Get Solar Panels
> people's shit

Is the key term here. What counts as people's shit? If I, as a customer of a company, find out my shit (lets say personal information) is insecure because a security researcher investigated a security flaw in a company's API: Is that ok?

This gets even more blurred when lets say my shit (house) is in imminent threat of destruction because the chemical plant 1 mile away can easily be explosively sabotaged remotely, releasing toxic chemicals, due to shoddy SCADA security. Don't I and my shit deserve to be protected?

We are getting into the whole "Greater good / public interest" here where such a simple definition as you specified is no longer applicable I think.
I tried meditation for a month, all it did was bore me and make me fall asleep.
Houses also don't contain the private information of countless other people. Any company with users will be constantly under attack by the bad guys so it's in everyone's best interest that those companies have strong locks in place.
I should have been more specific. I was hoping for an OS X VM that runs on host OSes other than OS X.
Learning NIOS ASM was great for learning how to code functional languages too. When you see how much overhead is involved in languages like C for recursive functions that have a simple algorithm, then you start to appreciate the power of functional languages!
Companies that don't employ people as talented as you probably are. There are lots of them, and they have plenty of dollars to spend on services that fulfill their needs. Often, technology is not the core strength of these companies.
"When you learn dvorak on a qwerty keyboard, there is less temptation to look at your fingers because all the keys are labeled wrong."

A property plenty easy to achieve on any keyboard layout, with a little ingenuity (and possibly a butter knife).