skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Checkout Intentional Software. It's a startup of about 70 people funded and led by billionaire CTO Charles Simonyi. They built a platform for developing domain-specific languages (on top of the CLR), and are now developing some pretty incredible collaborative productivity apps on top of that platform. Their recruiting slogan is "this is why you chose computer science," and after interning there for 6 months I can say that's 100% accurate.

Pay and benefits are equivalent to what you'd get at Microsoft or Amazon, without the corporate BS.

http://www.intentsoft.com/careers/
I used Delphi for more tan 10 years, so this is what I believe it went wrong:

* They lost Anders Hejlsberg
* Free compilers got aceptable.
* Lack of back compatibility, new VCL components from one version weren't compatible with older ones, every new versión require to biy the new components.
* To expensive.
* No new books to learn Delphi, they are to old.

I'm still using Delphi 7 for some projects.
Oh that's where he got the number. I read it on mobile, so I didn't notice that.
Answers to two (closed) Stack Exchange questions are relevant:

What happened to Borland Delphi?
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/83009/what-ha...

Why has C prevailed over Pascal?
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/114846/why-ha...
And that is why the city of Detroit is going down the drain.
> Farming in the desert is folly because that water could be put to much better uses (e.g. allowing more growth in the cities).

Do we really want more growth in the cities where water is scarce?
The contrast is a little low for me, but I can still read it fine. I think a lot of the problem might be the amount of ambient light in the reader's room. My room is somewhat dimly lit.
I think "How the Irish Became White" by Noel Ignatiev is a good place to start with respect to engaging on this topic.
So university Hackathons you have to fork over IP?
Didn't know about this one, looks interesting indeed. Thanks for sharing!
So technically, changing the time settings, you could continue signing code forever?
Microsoft poached some people.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/borland-sues-ms-over-staff-poac...
Paging is not used. All tasks can access all memory from all cores at all times.

Virtual address are identical to physical.

Niggers cannot understand.
The same developers who would be willing to try Go would also gladly use new Java libraries, and they will be able to preserve much of their hard-earned expertise.

You're implying that the mere switch -- all things being equal -- has an inherent advantage, while I say the opposite: all things being equal, switching languages is always a net loss, other than a possible advantage in recruiting in some regions where HN is popular. Of course, all things are never equal, so there are many other considerations.
Why do exceptions interact badly with RAII?
What would mean "be contained?"

Can US prevents China's influence to grow and keep bombing and destabilizing governments all around the world while the chinese invest so much in Latin America, Africa and Asia? I don't think so.
I recognize that my intent was... obtuse. But look me up. These buttcoiners are fun to toy with. I didn't mean a word I said, I mostly wanted testingonprod to look stupid. Because he is.
Ask HN: PhD Machine Learning vs. MBA
I am a 25 year old software engineer with a Masters degree in Computer Science from University of Cambridge along with a few years of Software development experience.

I have identified that my passion lies in startups - especially in the intersection of product, people and technology - hence I think an MBA in the future would be a good career option for me.

I currently have a PhD offer from the University of Cambridge in Speech Processing and Machine Learning and considering whether it would be a wise career move given that I'll be 28-29 when I finish.

Any advice from someone who has gone through a similar situation would be invaluable. Thanks!
this:

> Go won’t let you abstract yourself in the foot.

aside from being amusing -- I like this, but can anyone confirm its true in practice with Go?
We are using different definitions of the words "intelligence community". To me, if you have a clearance then that makes you part of the "intelligence community" regardless of whether your salary is paid by NSA, NASA, a defense contractor, a national lab, the Army, a university, or whatever.
The FSF's goal in essence is copyleft. Copyleft requires copyright law in order to work. As such, the FSF certainly does not intend to eradicate copyright, very much the opposite is true.
If someone says "excuse me" in an angry voice, it's sarcastic. If someone says "excuse me" in a soft voice, it's genuine.

Or something like that, anyhow. It's certainly possible to make it ambiguous, in which case it will simply be interpreted according to the mood of whoever hears it.
Money is a religion. Bitcoin offends some people's gods.
Man, you wouldn't have believed what maintaining sendmail was like. You're new to the Internet. :) Though I agree that Bitcoin isn't money. If it were money, Michel Espinoza would have to go to jail. It's more like beaver pelts - a commodity
First of all, Israel is a special case. It has been founded artificially on a land that was predominantly inhabited by muslims, surrounded by countries predominantly inhabited by muslims.

I won't dive into any discussion if that was a good idea, or if they were right to do that, I am just stating that a lot of non-muslims streamed into a place where there were lots of muslims. The idea that this jewish state, would manage to keep out the majority population in the region without some major "ethnic cleansing" is ridiculous.

In Europe it's the other way around. The large majority here is not muslim, and there is a small (yes, it's tiny compared to the whole population) influx of muslims.

There is no reason to fear a islamification of Europe. The numbers just don't allow it.
Yes, the issues are substantially bigger. South Africa can't even provide reliable electricity in the cities, never mind elsewhere. People living there tell me it's not a problem. If they're not bothered by that, I doubt they give a damn about google searches. If memory serves me correctly that's been going on for about 10 years now.
Contributor (Flattr by Google)
The number of actual facts in this article is distressingly small. Paragraphs like this:

Even the U.S. business community, once Beijing’s staunchest advocate in Washington, has lost some of its enthusiasm for engagement. James McGregor, a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China and now the China chairman of APCO Worldwide, a business consultancy, recalls helping to persuade U.S. trade associations to lobby for China’s admission to the World Trade Organization, which happened in 2001.

make me wince because at any given time you can probably get someone to say business has lost enthusiasm for "engagement" and someone else to say business is as engaged as ever.

More importantly, Andrew Browne misses an extremely obvious point: the USSR had an ideology totally opposed to capitalism, a murderous state machine that killed tens of millions of its own citizens, and an expansionist mindset demonstrated by Russia's control of Eastern Europe. China has none of those things. It is "communist" in name only; to the extent it has an ideology at its heart it might be called crony capitalism, or something like "material goods for all!" It would like to invade Taiwan, which is bad, and it is attempting to claim the South China Sea, which is also bad, but it isn't in the same order of magnitude as taking over half of Europe and flaming proxy wars around the world.

That an article like this even makes it into the WSJ is depressing.
People in London don't talk to strangers. So if a stranger does say anything to you, even just "Hi", it's deeply concerning, bordering on alarm.
TANSTAAFL is only true in the broadest sense about opportunity cost, as in I can only live once. Any stronger interpretation doesn't hold true.

Anyway, philosophy philosophy philosophy. It is interesting, may or may not be valid, does inform real life… but it's not the same as discussing the actual details of practical life. GPL lives in real-world social context, less abstract than all this other stuff.
Meanwhile, in China, a headline reads "Can the U.S. be Contained?". On its face this rings of ethnocentrism.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism
It's very clear what Go is for. Go is for the kind of stuff Google runs on their servers. C++ is too complex, too unsafe, and too hard to maintain, and Python is too slow. (Remember that "slow" at that scale means "we have to add another acre of servers.")

Go is an OK language for server-side stuff. It's not perfect. The concurrency isn't as airtight as its proponents originally claimed. Reflection and type "interface{}" tend to be needed too often. Other than that, there are few killer problems with the language when doing server-side stuff.

The libraries for doing web server type stuff are available and well debugged. When you use a Go library that came from Google, you're probably using code that's executing a few million times a second on Google servers. (As I mentioned on here a few months back, I recently ported a medium-sized production Python program from Python 2 to Python 3. I found library bugs which would have been found long ago were the code heavily used.)

So yes, Go is doomed to succeed. That's not a bad thing.

As for Rust, while I like Rust personally, it may be too complex. The borrow checker concept is brilliant, and a huge advance in understanding how to avoid a big class of bugs. We'll see that again in future languages. The type and generic system, though, pick up where C++ left off, and seem to lead library developers to develop very complex interfaces.

Rust is for people who debate language semantics on Lambda the Ultimate and program in Haskell for fun. Go is for people who have a job to do.
How about teaching them about saving? It'd be nice if this was interest-bearing.
Kamcord is looking for iOS Engineers
Not a single mention of all the dirty tricks by Microsoft?!

What a shallow memory. I remember how Microsoft cornered Borland and others to use some undocumented features of their OS, then make them incompatible. Remember, back in the 90s updating software on mass scale was a PITA, end users were expected to never update.

Also abusing their dominance to aggressively target key developers and contractors, copying any good application in the ecosystem and bundling it.

But SV didn't learn the lesson and we are now in more abusive walled gardens for or mobile phones. And some young people parroting how wonderful Microsoft and Bill Gates are today.
Bitcoin mostly makes where the inefficiency of incumbent solutions is high. This is typically the case when routing value around regulatory encumberences and/or censorship. I'm sure you don't use tor 99% of the time either.
Religious flamewars are not allowed on HN. There are other places on the internet to conduct generic polemics against religion. Please don't do it here.
Looks to be a great book.

I'm curious what the motivation is for some authors lately to make the whole book available free while making it available for sale?

Does it help with publicity or anything or is this mostly a gesture of generosity?
Great stuff! Now if I someone can create a site with curated content from these sites so that I only need to visit only one site.
This is the Tipu Sultan who had this fantastic device built for him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipu%27s_Tiger

It's on display in the V&A in London.
You are misinformed, the GPL does not prevent you from selling your software. The GPL only requires that whoever you sell it to can do with it whatever they want, more or less. That might limit some business models, but neither does it make GPL software useless for entrepreneurs nor does it prevent you from making money by selling software based on it.
Keep on the lookout! Working on it!
Why do you think generics are more relevant for concurrent data structures?
Turns out, Islam tends to have virtually no influence on European culture. All this talk about "dilution" is ridiculous. If at all, Muslim immigrants feel diluted.

And I am not denying that European societies have disproportionately many problems with Muslim immigrants. But we can't do anything about it without violating what we believe is a just society: No human should be punished for crimes another human committed. That holds even when both are muslim.
It will require a much different strategy than with the Soviets. We don't have a fundamental political difference in belief with the Chinese. The Chinese are ultra-capitalists with a technocracy leadership (although the u.s. is more lead by lawyers than engineers, so maybe there's a conflict there). It's not even clear if a conflict is necessary.

The Chinese mostly care about resources and economics in China - they are determined to have a minimum percentage of economic growth in order to continue pulling their population out of poverty. They have brought something like 500,000,000 Chinese into the middle class and want to continue doing so, and this requires economic growth. Their military is mostly run by officers that are running factories - not even on the side, it's just normal.

Granted, there's friction in places like in the South China Sea. But the real conflict will be in Africa - there are entire Chinese cities in Africa as they move engineers and resources to take on large engineering projects and exploit the vast resources of the area. But the u.s. has seemingly abandoned Africa (and South America) and instead is putting all of their money into the middle east and Afghanistan/Iraq/Iran.

I wonder if the u.s. will just concede Africa to the Chinese or if there will be conflict in the future.

(If you do a google search you'll come across articles about chinese ghost cities in Africa, but keep in mind that all of these ghost cities, even in china and mongolia, are eventually filled with chinese)
I think the point of the GPL is to make a political statement about changing the state of affairs, and it's done remarkably well in that regard.

When you choose GPL you're saying "I believe software should be free"[1]. When you choose BSD you're saying, "here's something I've made; use it as you like". Those are two very different kinds of statements, operating at entirely different levels.

[1]: Of course, not everyone chooses GPL for that reason.
I've seen plenty of poorly written Java applications that have background threads terminate due to poor exception handling with that exact end result.

However, is there a mechanism other than catching OutOfMemoryError/Throwable and swallowing the exception that can cause that behavior?
My issue with free software is the ideology. I tend to have mixed feelings about movements that claim to absolutely know what's good for humanity, no matter how noble the cause. I believe that if given the power to reach their goals we'd notice that a fraction of that same humanity will still end up suffering some consequences. Unless you can acknowledge that I cannot be a firm supporter.

In the context of software, I'm more comfortable with open source because it has shown that it is aware of the "it depends" nature of the field today, and is capable to adapt to get to 60% of the goals _right now_ by reaching some compromises, rather than going nowhere because of principles.

This is the definiton of Open Source, a really short read http://opensource.org/docs/osd

To me it's good enough.

Some open source licenses can indeed be too restrictive, but as Stallman says himself Fortunately, few programs use such licenses. However, depending on your point of view free software as an ideology can also be too restrictive.

Change is gradual and happens over time, but you need to give a chance to different parties to warm up to unfamiliar ideas. Open source accomplishes this. Free software as an ideology does too, albeit at a much slower pace.

I think it's Max Planck who observed that (I'm paraphrasing) the world doesn't change because old smart people tend to warm up to new ideas, it does because as they die out, growing generations are familiarized with these same new ideas from the start. As I see more startups (and new executives from old companies) embracing open source, I have to concur.

I understand Stallman's advocacy here and am even glad that it has perdured the way it has. It is a reminder of an ideal world towards which I feel open source actually strives to get. I'm still personally convinced that open source will be able to more successfully reach these goals with its flexibility than free software would with its rigidness.
Actually that's true, I should have said most GPL software where I actually care about the license is GPL because of their business model - ie. I don't care about kernel or linux userland being GPL because I don't plan on building any commercial extensions to those - even if I make some changes (which I doubt I ever will but still) I don't mind pushing them upstream no matter what's their license. But most programmer facing stuff that's actually intended for commercial use is GPL as sort of a "trial mode" - you see exactly what you get and then if you want to actually use it you need to re-licence.
I don't know how much truth there is to this, but from the point of view of the several hundred Chinese netizens I know, a lot of China's current international policy decisions are arising out of desperation. For the past couple of decades, China has experience about 10% growth to its economy per year which has led to a wealth gap that makes ours look small. While the tide was rising, I suppose the average Chinese citizen had hope that perhaps he too can make it big... but with Xi's crack down on corruption (which, for good or evil, was just how business had worked in China), the economy slowed down considerably.

With that slow-down, the feeling of hope that the young unmarried men of China depended on to buoy up their spirits (it needed buoying up because there is tremendous societal pressure for them to find a good wife, but they outnumber girls their age by as many as 17 to 1 in certain cities) just vanished, leaving in its place restlessness and frustration. And if you get a bunch of young, restless, and frustrated men together, you have the historically tried and true recipe for destruction. I guess China's leadership, fearing for government stability, is looking to turn that sentiment outward via war, rather than take it inward via civil disobedience / revolution.
As a former Borland employee (not for very long, 2006-2009, and actually working in their Austrian offices, which originally became part of the company through the Segue acquisition), I certainly didn't have the complete picture, but our managers, even going as far as those located in Cupertino, and later Austin, were quite open about what Borland's issue was: even with the rise of Java, they thought they could continue in the IDE business like they did before. Apparently, JBuiler used to be their #1 cash cow. Well, until Eclipse came along: within 18 months, JBuilder license sales dropped to essentially zero. They eventually realized that the whole IDE market was dead, so that was spun off into CodeGear, JBuilder was relaunched as an Eclipse distribution with "premium" extensions, and CodeGear was ultimately sold to Embarcadero, while the rest of the company was trying to refocus on producing software for other parts of the development lifecycle, from requirements management to automated testing and test management (hence Segue) to SCM. Company performance was atrocious, and that really screwed over people that took part in the employee share program, but they somehow managed to make it over to get acquired by Micro Focus.
ring-0-only
What's your point? Let them piss all the water down the drain until there's no more? There is land in the U.S that is more hospitable to growing crops. Get your head out of your behind and see that. Otherwise, let them suck all of the water out and then look at each other like idiots when its all gone. More and more this country seems like it needs to get a smack in the face and a swift kick in the arse to wake up. I never wonder how past civilizations went extinct when I read comment trains like this. Everybody wants to talk w/ their nose up in the air instead of addressing problems... Because that's too hard and problems have been around forever. Oh no, change that makes sense. Why do that?

Reply to post below me : So, there is no issue. Best of luck.
That just fixes one of javascript's weirdnesses. There are many many others.
It has garbage collection through shared_ptr.
The choice of "excuse me" or "pardon me" is largely regional. I grew up with "excuse me," but switched to just "pardon" because it works in French and Spanish too.

If it is meant rudely or not is entirely based on the person's mood who said it and the vast majority of the time, the reason it is said with contempt in their voice is because the other person is ignoring social norms and being rude themselves.

Your example of standing in a crowded shop is quite apt here. The socially acceptable thing to do when you notice someone who wants to get by is to move back slightly and try to let them through. When you just stand there blocking the path without even trying even in a crowded shop, you have broken social norms which annoys people.

It can also of course be also be used rudely when someone is in a rush and is frustrated that people aren't obeying social norms fast enough, but I find that to be far more rare.
You have to think carefully about how to clean up your object if something throws during its constructor, and throwing an exception in a destructor can lead to your program aborting if that destructor was called as a result of another exception being thrown.

Note that I don't think banning exceptions is really the answer; in particular, the destructor issue is just a specific case of "handling errors during finalization is really hard", and you can't get away from finalization in general. Exceptions really put those issues front and center, though.
Where are the lectures?
Looking forward to it eagerly!
The elephant in the room is that most of SV companies don't do anything technologically sophisticated, so for them it's simpler to take the latest technologies and hire young people who will work without counting their time. Were they working on more complicated problem, they would require more experience.
It's less ethnocentrism and more realism (the IR theory) and realist scholars proposing a different tack with how the US deals with China going forward.
And even the GPL was too short sighted. The "ASP/PHP" loophole exploited by Google and others had a dismal impact in the free software community. They used the code, extended but never shared it. Some sociopathic corporations made BILLIONS on top of it buy contributed back almost nothing. Yes, the glorious Google being the prime example, but there are many others.

And let's not forget the patent trick Oracle pulled on Apache and Google.

I used to be a BSD fan, but from my own experience and some close firends's experience I learned the lesson. I would only release via Affero-GPL from now on. I hope the FSF will eventually bring out a revised version with a more aggressive stance against software patents (e.g. not valid to use if you ever sued anybody with a software patent or something like that).
Show HN: Fast integer compression library in C
"Don't be in a hurry to leave."

走 zou can mean "walk", but it's the normal way to say "leave". 慢走 is just the opposite of 快走 "get out!"
>The real problem here is runaway population growth.

Agreed. The recent arrival of one-fifth of Mexico's populace has put a severe strain on California's resources.
Ah, that's very interesting, and much simpler! That seems better for both parties. I'll update the post to reflect this.

Thanks for your affirmation, I was feeling like a dummy being the only one that decided not to sign.
> pure pandering to the fat majority

Please don't.