skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was talking about revisionist interpretations of the events leading to and surrounding WW2, up to and including questioning the number of victims, the methods of killing, and the systematic nature of the killing. This is so scary it even got brave skeptic Michael Shermer in some hot water and he is a trained arguer in this very topic.

Another frightening thing, since we're on the topic, is a bit more complex for me to explain, but if you search for "Perth Group" you will find there is a group of people who seriously question the viral model in Biology and to what extent it explains AIDS and HIV.
That term actually makes the subject much more understandable.
Great comment, thanks. I agree on the difference between a Computer Science degree and a Software engineering degree. I have the former (Comp Sci), and that's the premise for my article. Many folks were never taught the strict definition of "engineering", and believe that's what they do as software devs. I know that's not what I do.
A week of fundamental critique on trade negotiations
chemists, sales persons, security, pilots... ;)
It was submitted as a link a few times 2–4 years ago but got no traction: few votes and no comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3350754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9463006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6352216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5324400

I want to write some examples (as long blog posts or similar) in a few concrete science fields showing how to use these tools in practice and submit those. I feel like the chebfun guys haven’t really figured out some good introductory hooks yet, or done much marketing/outreach: most of their output is papers about approximation theory which takes some amount of effort to figure out and only get seen by academics working in the same subfield, and the practical examples on their site are pretty small pieces (and don’t have comparisons vs. alternative approaches) so it’s hard to see the big picture. Those lecture videos are pretty good, but an hour long lecture is a somewhat big commitment and hard to skim.

BTW, I’m serious about the email thing: shoot me a note (address in my profile) and I’d love to hear about your attempts to implement Geometric Algebra in code. One of my goals for the next few years is to at some point sit down and write a nice web-based introduction to GA filled with interactive diagrams.
Furthermore, assert is specifically intended to catch internal logic bugs which would still be present even after user input validation. i.e. logic bugs which are invariant upon user input
Wow... this hit Hacker News a second time!
I agree, perhaps we should be pushing more in the direction of engineering... at least for certain kinds of project / product. At startups, there's definitely a push in the opposite direction; towards Agile, less formality, etc. I suspect the two approaches to continue diverging.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh409293.aspx

2013 has a lot, and it looks like 2015 almost closes the gap. I'm content with the 2013 additions, but I simply do not understand why c99 wasn't fully supported 10 years ago, much less in the latest VS edition. C++ is better in many ways but when you need to compile C specific code, it is incredibly frustrating.
The article it's self is very useful, and I think the advice the guy gives is totally on the money. But to be fair, the article does not cover how to go from $100 to the first million. That's the really tough part. Going from 1 million to 10, and then to 100, and so forth isn't a walk in the park, but that first step is always the toughest.
Choose a project that you personally use, then fix or improve something that impacts your use case, where the accuracy of the fix can be verified by a test that you can run. Caring about the project is the most important aspect of unpaid open-source contributions, as it will lead to quality work.
Thank you for your thoughts. I think pico-iterations would be wonderful, and that is the big problem -- we meet twice a week (he has dedicated 4hrs a week and sometimes not even that.) Way too much time goes by before we test whether the build-out matches the vision. This makes it more disheartening because there is often so much wasted work.

However, I'm glad this worked out well for you -- I am going to try to split the 4hours more evenly, perhaps into at-least a daily review. Part of the problem is he seems to think we are all wrong in requiring all these reviews, rather we should simply implement the vision rather than just talking about it over and over.
It's a little more than syntax to me, even though it's part of it. Maybe a ~rapprochement between syntax semantics evaluation of recursive domains/categories. The fact that the construction of data through sexps belongs to that same philosophy as valuation between any domains. That the same recursive idea permeates through the whole system.
Thank you! And thanks for the correction, but it looks like I can't correct it anymore (no more editing allowed).
If only we had the perfect voting system, and if only the deck chairs on the Titanic were aligned just so...
This is basically what TOR does. You can certainly do it, but as anyone who has browsed the web through TOR could tell you, the experience is significantly degraded. It's a lot slower, and many larger sites will ban you because you trigger their scraper/DDOS protections.
Is that still the case? Is there no real 'stl team' at MS and everything is written by Dinkumware? Or is there a more entwined collaboration between them?
There simply are no valid arguments for voting machines.

Speed is irrelevant, there's no reason why tallying the votes desperately needs to take a few hours less.

There are only two motives for voting machines: commercial interests and the desire to obscure the voting process. Neither of these should be trusted with foundations of the democratic vote.

On the latter subject: because the transparency of the voting process is so fundamental to democracy, most countries had laws in place that first needed to be scrapped or mutilated to allow voting machines in the first place. The people who wrote these laws were neither stupid nor Luddites.

Ironically, we've always send observers to third world countries and former dictatorships to judge whether their elections are truly free and democratic, using criteria that would never allow for voting machines to obfuscate the process. For starter, it would make such neutral observation pointless.

I'm lucky I live in country (Netherlands) that has abolished voting machines years ago. (After a campaign against them led by by old school hackers.)

(There's one movement in the Netherlands that openly advocates a return to voting machines. This movement is lead by Dutch mayors. The Netherlands is rather unique in the fact that mayors are not elected but appointed by political manoeuvring, which has been subject of debate for a long time. I do not believe these things to be a coincidence.)
uh sure okay.

People will continue to obey copyright laws as closely as ever. right.
Interesting article that conveyed something new, so it was a worthwhile read. But did anyone else feel that they had to filter out the gushing / "crankish" bits in there? Particularly the gripes about the impossibility of inversion.
From the linked text.

> The government's choices are now to remove the private copying exception—making personal copying illegal again, or to supply additional evidence that copyright owners suffer no or minimal “harm” from personal copying, or else to begin imposing a new tax on users to compensate the indust

This is exactly the situation we have in Spain, a tax was created to compensate private copy.

Sure it would fly in Spain
Except for maybe the kernel, libc, the browser, drivers, widely used server software, emulator suites, the window system, the office suite you have to use, the runtime libraries for the high level languages you use, and so on. 


(Hmm, perhaps I'm making your point for you? ...)

One thing I have noticed though is that replacing manual with automatic memory management often doesn't help as much as one might think. The bugs just tend to shift to other areas (e.g. memory corruption -> command execution, XSS or XXE etc).

I think this is because with a more forgiving language, developers tend to naturally create more complex systems. Like how car drivers go faster when they feel safer in their car.
The compilers back then were horrible (gcc2 something?). Our next project was the other way around - porting IHRA Drag Racing from PC to Playstation... now that was a bitch, and showed how inexperienced we were :) (it's much easier to port to something where you have better hardware and software all along).

The IHRA Drag Racing game (PC) version had a full simulation of the engine (valves, torque) - e.g. for any configuration it'll calculate right away the torque/gear ratio tables (okay, I was never a car buff, and my memory is very short here), but essentially there was an algorithm, which I later understood certain car-tuning services were using to adjust real cars! - I mean there were DOUBLES and lots of fortran-looking code written in "C".

Where we failed was trying to reuse this code on the PSX. First there was no hardware floating point, and what took 10 seconds of calcuation on PC took 45 minutes on PS1 - unacceptable.

Again our boss made a crazy idea - why we don't precalculate some values and store them on the CD - way more limited than the PC, but still something. Not sure how the values were chosen, but overall the game was not a success - one magizine rated it, as one of the worst PSX games ever... I left the project early on, as I felt it wasn't doing good (and was feeling really bad since then about it, as I felt like deserting the person that took care of me, and brought me to US) - http://www.mobygames.com/game/playstation/ihra-motorsports-d...
> Just goes to show you can't count on the US, like when Russia, the US and UK all agreed to guarantee Ukraine's sovereignty in exchange for it giving up its nuclear weapons to Russia when the Soviet Union dissolved.

Not just US, UK was also part of that agreement, and they also have done nothing to help Ukraine. This is really disheartening because it just shows how much you can trust in these multinational agreements. Why should any other country ever trust US or UK ever again?
Is there any opportunity (or practice) of other conditions bypassing the ER? If that's the bottleneck, I hope it doesn't have to be life-or-death for someone to thing "We should re-engineer this process".

E.g. uncomplicated fractures getting brought to the fracture clinic?
I've lead design & PM at several startups & I can basically tell straight-out, that building without a design, wireframe, or at the very least a written spec is completely inefficient & it's likely that you will have to rebuild this all later. Basically every company I've worked had a similar process in place (often lead by the CEO) - this process does not scale & it will cause technical debt to your engineering team.

For all I know, this guy may actually be some product visionary, but why isn't he telling this vision to designers to create the mocks so the intricacies are worked out before it gets to build? Is it because he doesn't believe this process would move quick enough?

Also, one huge flag for me is that not once in your post did you mention that his "vision" was based off feedback of users. This is the most important task of a product manager (collecting user feedback & filtering it back to engineering). In the past, I've also had hunches about how things should work & I've proven myself completely wrong either after asking users or in usability tests on the build I designed.

Remember, Steve Jobs was designing products for the average person - not a lot of startups target such a blanket market & most are targeting some subset niche. You really need to be a voice for the users you're targeting.
EBay/Craigslist: Pierre Omidyar’s corporate spying scandal
Ralph Roberts, Cable TV Pioneer Who Built Comcast, Has Died
My guess is paypal is going to apple and ebay to alibaba.
I think for places like Aus, NZ - with small populations and a handful of population centers, what you are saying makes a lot of sense.

For a place like India, the problems pretty much require electronic voting. I am old enough to still remember paper ballots in India. Imagine having to count of the order of 600 million(!) votes. Each with potential challenge from a partisan, validation, security. The costs and logistics were a nightmare. After polling, it used to take days just to get all the ballot boxes to centralized counting arenas. The machinery for the counting alone endedup involving about a million people!

India has very strict election codes - how many voters to a booth (few hundreds), how far a voter can be required from his place of residence to polling station (3 miles max), etc. We also do not require "registration" before polling like in the US for example. Once you are 18 and have obtained a voter ID, you can simply walk into a polling booth on the day and vote.

Indian Election Commission took a pioneering lead in using technology for polling - We have had near-universal electronic polling for 25+ years now. The trouble with the "moderm" voting machines is that they are way to complex and try to do too much. Indian design went the other way. Security of paper ballots was already an understood and mostly solved problem. The machines are simple - more in the league of a 8-bit microcontroller with 16 push buttons and 4x7 segment LED display. very old school. The machines rely on physical security. They cannot be opened without breakage, physical seals can be applied to their "reset" and "count" buttons, and access to them is controlled the same way as access to paper ballots and boxes would have been controlled. This allows even a poor country to deploy the order of half a million voting machines!

There are of course issues - there is no paper trail for example, which as a concept has never even arisen in Indian electoral design debates. I am not sure I am myself sold on the need for them - I do see the importance, but its not an absolute.

EVMs built on top for high end PCs, with Windows and millions of lines of custom code, manufactured by people who also build Slot machines (in the US atleast) is at least to my mind - simply another case of overdesign and overspending - typical of defence and government contracts. When security, reliability, are concerned, simplicity and even non-technical solutions combined with technology work better than compicated technology.
For what it's worth - the authors know each other from before and knowing both parties Mark did not intend to mean any offense.
Show HN: 入(rù-lang) – Clojurized JavaScript
You Draw It: Family Income vs. College Attendence
Reading and research is something wealthy people try to guilt you into doing! We want you to spell it out here so we don't have to spend any of our own effort discrediting our preconceived notions.
"We can embed snippets of JavaScript within the debugging data to locate a binding's value." - I see this as a security risk, but then again so much code is executed by the browser so it probably is okay.
In other news: not single person who rips their own CDs in all of Europe will give a crap.

Also, the only people still buying CDs don't rip them, and the rest of us have ripped their last CD over a decade ago.

The actual impact of this decision is close to zero, and therefor not a strong argument for copyright reform. Many countries still have outdated laws on the books nobody bothers with, making noise about this just gives the impression copyright reform isn't urgent.
Scopes are tree-shaped, what more flexibility do you need? Do you have a reason to believe that DWARF, which has stood the test of time, is somehow lacking in this regard? Don't forget that unnecessary flexibility is really just needless complexity. As the article says, the final mapping from a debugger entry to a value can be performed using JavaScript in order to have flexibility where it is actually needed.

Any API which inspects the stack is (obviously) going to have to run in a separate thread/stack which then means you won't be able to use plain JavaScript to retrieve in-scope object values, as in the article. Instead you'll have to introduce an API which provides a means to reflect over the other thread/stack's scope tree - so the "less flexible" scope tree will simply be baked in to your (by this point very complex) API.
As a fellow Australian, the only voting machine I'd like to see would be one that prepared a more easily machine-readable paper vote.

I'm also a Spanish national, where the voting system is admittedly much simpler (closed party lists with provincial constituencies), but you can take the paper system from my democracy's cold, dead hands. Meaning the temptation for fraud would be too high for a country used to shortcuts.
Context https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744059
This is how Elon Musk and other highly successful people spend their weekends
One functional feature that is missing is that of having blocks in different order. Jeremy Ashkenas argues that because of functions, we do not need that reordering.

I disagree with that. I do think a large part of what makes literate programming powerful is that one can easily sculpt the order of the presentation. It elevates the code and comment to telling a story for humans.

I think the code is not incidental, but is part of the aspect of the story, much like in a fictional story one has descriptive passages and dialog passages. If one updates the story, both may change or perhaps just one of them.

My take on literate programming, using markdown:
* minimal client at https://www.npmjs.com/package/litpro
* core library and docs at https://github.com/jostylr/literate-programming-lib
Here's some sources unrelated to the new leak:

http://www.examiner.com/article/did-cia-and-state-department...

Remember Christopher Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya who got murdered in Benghazi? When he was killed, he was working to secure the stockpiles of weapons in Libya after the US helped al-Qaeda oust Gaddafi. The article, which was written in 2012 identifies Abdulhakim Belhadj as the guy who was telling the Americans which groups they could trust and give arms to.

According to this article from March of this year, he's now the head of ISIL/ISIS in Libya:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/mar/3/frank-gaffney...

Back in 2004, the CIA and MI6 captured him and his wife and secretly flew them to Libya so that Gadaffi could torture him for information. He was "chained to a window, deprived of sleep, beaten, hung from the walls and kept in solitary confinement" with British intelligence providing the questions for the interrogation.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/30/abdel-hakim-bel...

I don't know what would be worse: that the Obama administration deliberately armed ISIS/ISIL or that it was stupid enough to give weapons to a guy the CIA had tortured. I guess the leaks will tell us which.
Honestly, it's embarrassing that people who pretend to be professionals would do something like this. I agree that there needs to be structural changes to how we address this issue. I'm not read up enough on the structure of the problem to propose solutions, but I do know that some people who need the help might get some help, but eventually run into a wall.
I will think about it :) I am a bit unhappy with gog after buying Spelunky there and seeing that some features (such as the daily challenge) are available only in the Steam version, but I guess this can be done better.
I'm fairly new to the web-development, and on my new job I've been tasked to use java (new to me) with gwt (just knew the name) which is translated to javascript (yes, not enough experience there).

Now SourceMaps and Chrome/Firefox debugging tools are great savers. I wish Eclipse had better debugging (actually it seems it has, since it's also new to me, the curve for learning it is much steeper - I'm an ex - Visual Studio Debugger guy :)).

But even with SourceMaps gwt translated (from java->javascript) names do not always match - often _g or _0 _$ are added, and object properties are intermixed with original java defined ones, and some internal - I'm used to it now, but was wondering whether it would've been better if it work ideally (e.g. show real Java "view" of the things even from the "Javascript" land). While this might've been the right choice, what I have now gives me more usable information.

What doesn't work always, is that sometimes the debugger would display the javascript, not java code (maybe gwt's fault, or something I do incorrectly with gwt's SuperDevMode )

I wish there is an option (for gwt, and other languages) to somehow show the transition, and allows intermixing when displaying. To give you an example - When debugging "C/C++" code most of the debuggers can intermix the assembly generated code in there... I'm not sure whether this would be as good as intermixing java and javascript (or say another language with javascript) because they look very similar, but at least to allow me to sometimes see the javascript, rather than always show me the java code (it's possible that this is already available, and I haven't found it yet).
I've been using this for a while in Firefox.

These kinds of floating scroll bars really should be the default for all OSes. Presence of scroll bars changing the width of the window contents and causing repaints/reflows is really poor UX in my humble opinion.
What programming language should I use?
I plan to develop a web/mobile app and I'm trying to figure out what language to use. Any thoughts? What languages are generally good for this purpose? What about if I ignore availability of programmers and things like that? What languages then?
Well, that is kind of to be expected, the paper is nearly thirty years old. It is still an interesting read, though, if one uses C a lot.

Some of the advice does seem odd to me, such as the warning regarding bitwise vs. logical operators.
There's selection bias at play here - how often have you heard someone gossipping about a reasonable legal demand politely offered, which they complied with? Makes for a dull read.
Ask HN: Why do you want to start a startup?
I'm interning in a series-B San Francisco startup this summer, and probably more than half of the people I know - from multiple-exit CEOs to high school dropouts - are entrepreneurial in some way.

I'm vaguely interested myself in starting a startup, but I'm really wondering if I'm interested in it for the right reasons. Sure, for most people they usually fall into a very small set - getting rich, being famous, solving a niche problem, building the next big thing, making the world a better place - but I'm interested in everyone's story.

So... why do you want to start a startup?
Lets be realistic here.

So I'm going to go and delete 90% of my mp3s and go and purchase a CD player this afternoon.

Actually nope, I'm going to continue to steal all my music out of a combination of apathy and disdain for the system.

Oh and continue to go to the odd gig.
And there are people who have good backup systems.
>How much more might we advance the state of the art in every field if the experts in those fields are still around..

That will also keep bad guys around indefinitely. I think we can agree that things can be better. (I mean things like, environmental issues, corruption and foreign policies). But one cannot really hope to change the viewpoints/values/priorities of people already in power. Our only hope is the new generations, which we can hope to bring up with better values, which will eventually replace them.

Imagine if Hitler could live indefinitely or created an army of clones. Imagine every corrupt/powerful person in the world right, has the capability for doing this.

The point I am trying to make, is good cannot do good, when evil forces are in power. And the only thing that prevents evil forces in power indefinitely, is natural death. (We can all agree that things like democracy are not really doing a good job at that, right?)