skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of the GMO fetishists are completely ignorant of the Green Revolution and how the economics of modern industrial food have contributed to hunger. Industrial agriculture for cash crops brings in global money, topples governments, and arms the police to run traditional agriculture off the lands that once fed the people. Third world shantytowns are filled with people who were once farmers, before "modern" agriculture was introduced to the land they once farmed.

GMO is just an extension of Green Revolution capitalism-centric agriculture. That model has done miracles for supporting the growing population and making food cheaper, but it's not a free lunch.
To answer your browser compatibility question: https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/
It's only a problem if you choose a language that requires a large build environment.

I have a very effective programming fundamentals class. y students perform very well, and every project we do is done from scratch. But I teach it in JavaScript simply because that is the absolute quickest way to introduce programming.

JavaScript can be an unforgiving, punishing language. But an absolute beginner who's learning to code can be steered away from the nasty bits. Because if you've never taught an absolute beginner, who doesn't even know how to open Notepad or unzip a file, you'd be shocked how slow and deliberate you have to be when you teach. :)
Search Google books for "green revolution ethiopia", lots of hits.
There has been a consistent pace of advancement in understanding gene regulation, microbiological evolutionary processes, and the systems of cellular machinery and regulation. There haven't been individual huge breakthroughs that are easy to point to and say "ahah! that's the lynchpin of everything, gimme a nobel!" but it's been a steady progression of improved knowledge. It'll be interesting to see if that trend continues and what that new understanding will translate into. In large part it's this stuff which is really fulfilling the promises of things like the human genome project.
Why do you put "ing" at the end of "finding" when it is obvious what you mean from just "find"? English is so silly.
Peak conventional oil was reached in 2005. World production of liquid oil is already steadily falling and will never again reach its peak. Synthetic and deep water and rock and tar to oil conversion processes have kept total world production steady since then and refinery efficiencies have been stepped up to produce more motor fuel, but increasingly expensive and heroic extraction is necessary to keep all that up. Prices have been rising and will continue to rise. The lower prices this year are unsustainable as they are now below marginal cost of production.

And peak helium is linked tightly to peak natural gas, because that's how helium is obtained. It's a byproduct of natural gas. When natural gas production falls in the next few decades, He will do the same.

Of course, we can always extract He from the atmosphere. Unlike oil, it renews itself -- contrary to op's implication -- from underground radiation and solar wind. it won't ever get much more expensive than neon.
The Web has enough commercial heft that maybe we could see things like ARM's Jazelle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle DBX Java support.
Yeah, the creator of TypeScript was complaining about this in a presentation. I think the existing syntax "import X from Y" reads more naturally than "from Y import X" but obviously the latter is better for tooling and autocomplete/intellisense. Oh well!
So how did Nintendo intend you to program this? I believe their official sdk ran on DOS, so was there a ISA card that let you program this?
from the poster's profile:

> VP Engineering @ CakeMail

I'm guessing someone from CakeMail is in for a rough Friday:)

On a serious note, I'd expect this thread to be flagged to death pretty quickly as this a pretty poorly worded question.
More information would be helpful. In terms of having a data store that you can easily query text I would recommend Elasticsearch. Kibana is a dashboard built on Elasticsearch for performing analytics and visualization on your texts. Elasticsearch also has a RESTful api which would play nicely with your Python scripts or any scripting language for that matter. I would also recommend the Python package gensim for your NLP.
Dropbox launches 'Request a File', a way to collect files from anyone
If this sticks, it just means that Uber drivers will get paid less in cash, more in benefits, and lose the ability to take business tax deductions.

Is that really better for the drivers? Sounds worse to me.

I ask because many people have been claiming Uber is a bad actor for making drivers contractors, but it's not clear to me that it's a big win for the drivers to be classified as employees. Actually it seems worse in many ways.
Hi Richard,
Thanks for your question. It is just a feedback form to send your thoughts about the definition. Based on the feedback, we can improve upon. Thanks!
Update from Stripe on problems with support requests / ticketing:

"There are, however, a couple situations that might cause issues. For example:

-- If you write in multiple times, multiple tickets will be created
-- If the subject is changed in the middle of a conversation, a new thread will be created"
Samsung Phone Issue Exposes Millions to Hackers
From the Wikipedia:

> The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referer URL to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Sites that publish their access logs, including referer statistics, will then inadvertently link back to the spammer's site.

So, don't publish your access logs and referrer statistics!!! Doh?

Who in their right mind would pull a stupid stunt like that?

Linking back to the spammer's site isn't the only problem. The URLs could be malicious.

You don't ever want to blindly re-publish any piece of data that was handed to you by a random client.

The proposed Apache mod_rewrite rules are completely wrongheaded, and just add to your administrative load (since the blacklist changes over time).

Okay, suppose you really, really want to publish these stats. What can you do?

Firstly, filter the data rigorously, to ensure that it is syntactically correct URLs and nothing else. Nothing that will inject HTML into a page if it is blindly inserted and whatnot. Secondly, mangle URL's such that they are still recognizeable, but don't actually resolve. For instance "http://spamming-jerks.com" can be published as "http: //spamming-jerks dot com", or some other modification that can be easily reversed by a human.
Interesting...

The Lua community has found that bytecode is actually slower to load than it is to generate from source:
The extra latency of loading the (larger) bytecode from disk/ssd/flash, exceeds the cpu time to lex/parse.
I have no idea if that statement is serious or ironic.
Glad you clarified and said Minix 3; I remember the 90s version had its own userland, and its own C compiler (also written AST), I know this because I hacked on them extensively. Probably the first time I have seen extensive source code, more than a snippet or a *.c file.
1. Stop.

2. Switch to TypeScript

3. ???

4. Profit!!!
Yes my thoughts too. Unless you are a contractor who is not getting renewed or the boss already knows you are leaving for some unchangeable reason (change of location for example).
I thought it was already clear that we come from some cells, a storm and some luck, and that we're going nowhere.

We're on our own, and I bet no science or discoveries will change this.
Read up, you've missed a memo :-P. Plan for Harmony-era weak refs is to notify in next event loop turn.

Note turn-based notification. No way will exact GC schedule be leaked via callbacks from the GC. Ditto anything like Java's post-mortem finalization.

But your "e.g." is unclear, though. Why do you need to manually deallocate a callback function passed to setTimeout?
He lost me when he said "start a new window" as the work around to not having job control.

Neat idea but seems nowhere near done.

And as others have said, this was nicely handled by QNX way more than 15 years ago, I was running multiple users on a 80286 around 1986 or so. Really neat system.
It depends if you want to argue if it's the economics behind distribution that is the problem or not. Because the problem with everything can usually be turned into an issue with economics, I tend to draw the line where economics gets involved. In this case: distribution. I can understand how you might see that as a simplification - and in some ways it is. Even non-existing technology can boil down into being an economic problem. [0]

Since everything is an economic problem, blaming economics doesn't help people envision where the problem is. Blaming distribution shows where the problem is - which is both in our methods and the economics of doing so.

An issue with improving those methods is also an issue behind economics.

[0] non-existing technology --> which requires R&D to be developed --> R&D requires $$$ --> economic problem; especially if technology is difficult/impossible to actually create
But that's true for Chrome/Google too.. if anything, since Chome is more popular than IE, Google probably sees more of these types of searches than Bing does.
This looks interesting, but I don't totally understand how it works. How is the key changed every time on the server? It looks like it requires server side support.
Hence cperciva's "Playing chicken with cat.jpg": http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-01-19-playing-chicken-w...

When we're talking about protection against government data requests, only companies that make sure they have access to the absolute minimum client information they possible can do truly have our backs. Everyone else just has good intentions.
And the URL :/
QnX achieved Minix's stated goals of OS reliability 20 years ago.

And Minix isn't a micro kernel in the same way that QnX is.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1894374 from @nix.
Great article.

I am a instructor for Software Carpentry[1] , the goal of these workshops from my experience is to try and help mostly scientists get started on the journey to becoming early programmers.

In biological sciences with more and more data becoming available, the Expert blindness Zed speaks of is a major problem. We need to invent better systems and actually take heed of research based teaching methods as SW does if we wish to improve this situation.

https://software-carpentry.org/
On the other hand, Lua syntax is much simpler

(slightly out of date: http://programmingisterrible.com/post/42432568185/how-to-par...)
Key for you, maybe. Key for their ability to make money is their "innovation" in avoiding regulation and reducing labor costs.
You can estimate how much this will cost Uber in CA as follows: $0.56 multiplied by total miles driven by UberX drivers over all time.

It’s almost as simple as that, since damages were given out almost entirely on those grounds.

I'll leave it to HN to figure out a guess on mileage =)

Some other interesting notes:

Plaintiff was engaged with Uber from July 23 to Sept 18, less than 2 months (p 2)

She worked for 470 hours in that time, so quite a bit (p. 6)

Damages broken down as follows: $0.56/mile reimbursement, for a total of $3,622, tolls for $256, interest of $274, for a total of $4,152 (p10)

Claims for wages, liquidated damages and penalties for violations were all dismissed (p11)
They just bundled some stuff into the language's CLI. This doesn't mean it somehow doesn't exist or that the language is any simpler.
Airbnb reportedly raising $1B at $24B valuation
Why not Swift for the Web? Better yet, Rust.
With the Acer displays, it takes one DP port per monitor. So I got a multi-headed graphics card... 3xDP, 1xDVI, 1xHDMI2 ... expecting to use the DP ports for 4K displays, and the HDMI for a TV... all without daisy chaining.
I hope this spells the end of labor exploitation as an "innovation" strategy by "technology" companies. It's getting sickening.
You can get off the ride right now.
iirc they implement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAC-based_One-time_Password_A... (or a variant of it)

Each side has a seed value which then allows the calculation of what the current value should be.
I'm happy to hear this. This is the display I've actually been considering if I don't stay with Acer. The coating on the screen and general sense of quality is attractive. Any drawbacks you've seen?
Right, because wasm is for AOT (ahead of time) languages first. To support dynamic languages that don't map to JS well, the future extensions including JITting wasm will be needed.
Instruction alignment is very important for performance. I remember a similar slow down when working on a VM for Itanium. The architecture manuals for processors usually describe this in detail.
Three of the stars last year -- "requires a warrant", "publishes transparency reports", and "publishes law enforcement guidelines" -- were merged into a single star "follows industry best practices". According to the report, a company has to do all three of those things to qualify.

It's perfectly reasonable for the EFF to evolve how they're rating companies as the years go on. After all, the privacy landscape changes and they're trying to push companies to making some changes. That explains the drop in stars. According to the EFF, Google is doing things that are now considered standard, and they're no longer on the forefront of defending privacy.

Your accusations of bias because Google isn't funding the EFF are, frankly, ridiculous.
You could try grabbing a digital electronics textbook such as this one (link below). I haven't read this one specifically.

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Electronics-Practical-Approach...

I took some EE courses as part of a CS degree. Years later, I found that reading a textbook was a good way to re-learn it.
I loved QNX.
And last but not least, the benefits that using a compiler provides.
We probably could delay it until the setting is enabled. I wasn't on the team when that decision was made, but I would imagine it's because a) latency (we want the feature to be enabled right away when you turn it on), and b) just the way it happened and nobody really thought much about it at the time.

The fact is that an end user should not care if software downloads a "binary blob" without running it. This is functionally equivalent to downloading anything from the Internet, a JPG file for example. Chromium downloads a bunch of things on startup, and nobody seems to mind. Just because hotword.nexe happens to be an executable blob doesn't really make a difference.
Thanks for your thoughts...

Right now I have an Acer 4K TN as my primary screen and it's extremely difficult to work with. And keeping the three HD displays I have around it is also problematic... the resolution difference always destroys the illusion of working on one seamless desktop... and the viewing angle has me need to turn the HD displays around and rotate their output so I'm "viewing them from above" ..

What's a "good TN" in your experience?
> I blow some people's minds when I tell them about tab groups (ctrl+shift+e) in Firefox.

What do they think that icon to the right of the tabs is? Just some bit of abstract art? :)
Libel can be resolved through the courts. If you can demonstrate that you have been harmed by someone's untrue speech, then you can be granted restitution.
Say Hello to the University of Microsoft
> Read up, you've missed a memo :-P. Plan for Harmony-era weak refs is to notify in next event loop turn.

Got a link to the memo? I haven't heard about this one.

> Why do you need to manually deallocate a callback function passed to setTimeout?

One of my use cases is running lua in the browser. see lua.vm.js: https://kripken.github.io/lua.vm.js/repl.html

When you pass a lua function to a javascript function, I create a 'proxy' object that holds a reference to the function in the lua VM. Only if javascript tells me it's "done" with it can I drop the ref inside the lua VM.
Side note: the $0.56 is an IRS number, and therefore federal, so could even be used as a proxy for all US =)
There is a lot of activity along these lines - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science and especially follow the "see also" links.
In South Africa, that seems to be exactly the case, at least for most of the rides I've taken on Uber. The vehicle owners are not the same as the drivers (most of the Uber drivers here wouldn't be able to afford their own vehicles). Uber invoices are issued on behalf of third parties that employ the drivers and own the cars (drivers are still rated directly as individuals on the Uber app).

This seems an extension of the existing South African minibus taxi industry model, where drivers make a daily quota for taxi owners, then keep the rest. (It has also led to at least one early-afternoon Uber ride with a very sleepy driver who was up from before dawn making his quota for his owner).

In any case, in South Africa, at least, Uber is clearly acting as a facilitator, rather than a direct employer.

I think it would be a pity if rulings like the one in OP lead to the worldwide emergence of capital-rich fleet owners taking on the role of employers, because Uber became hesitant to deal with individual driver/owners for fear of being designated as their employer.
Given Uber's recent $50bn valuation I'd say "the market" believes they'll keep their market power and resulting profits for some time into the future. (46% definitely means monopoly power but it doesn't mean monopoly.)

I am being snarky, but the libertarian poster-child is shielding 46% of the national market from competition (drivers can't compete with eachother) and that's pretty ironic.
AI learns Mario level in just 34 tries
I worked for an NLP research think tank for a while and we always created text files as intermediate steps to each part of our system. It was basically a cache of each step, and you could restart the system at whatever step did work.

Hard drive space is cheap. Use as much as you want.
Or, you know, an actual platform that does connect freelance drivers to passengers and allows them to set the conditions for the fare in a legal manner?
> slightly out of date: http://programmingisterrible.com/post/42432568185/how-to-par...

Ouch....
Perhaps a lesson in making your language's grammar too complex: if you do, you'll eventually have to pre-compile.
Wouldn't the company perform best if they didn't pay attention to the larger social context and rather simply hired solely on merit? Like I don't see how in the end hiring on anything but merit mathematically comes out better.
Cool as hell, as usual! You consistently seem to find just the right mixture of inspiration and perspiration. I love how you just turned the knob and hit a button every few minutes, while I'd have spent six weeks trying to automate the stop-motion process.

It's obviously too late now, but you can actually get piezoelectric cartridges with no coils or magnets, made for (very) low-end phonographs.
You can extract argon from air to do most of what helium is used for. It's completely inert and liquefies at 87K. Pure argon gas costs $5 a kilo. Liquid nitrogen and carbon dioxide will cover most of the rest of the applications and are much cheaper.

Neon from air is much more expensive at $300 a kilo. That's because Neon is at a low concentration similar to helium. Helium can be extracted for about the same price as neon, so we're not in danger of ever running out. Helium is a renewable resource that leaks out of the Earth's crust and regenerates from solar wind constantly, contrary to op.

It's only extremely cheap helium that will run out, and most of the supplies in the world are still underground in natural gas reserves. There are generations of cheap helium left.
Be better today than yesterday
Love those TC Cribs segments with Colleen! Does this mean more video content for the Youtube channel? Though it may prove a tough beat to cover when every founder is like "we're in stealth mode, get that camera away from here..." ;)
Hah. .pyc files are one of the worst part of Python for developers.

export PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE=true is the first thing anyone should be doing.

I guess it figures that we copy each others' mistakes.
Increase FB likes with exchange service quickly
Why is it crazy? We extract our iron, copper, gold, and silver from sand and rocks. Is that crazy too?
Being Bitcoin entusiast, IMO blockchains provide no benefits for banks. Blockchain is actually very ineffective protocol/data structure, and the reason Bitcoin uses it is because it provides pseudo-anonymous network that removes need for trust. Also Blockchain can be trusted only combined with underlying unit of motivation and currency: Bitcoin (or other coins). Banks don't need pseudo-anonymity and can provide some level of trust. Protocols like Stellar / Ripple / Open Transactions and other non-blockchain digital accounting technologies are much better suited for banks.
I have a few of their basic model keys. They have implemented OATH-HOTP as well as their own OTP scheme and HMAC-SHA1 challenge-response. You can also embed a static password. The keys have two slots and both of them can be used for any of the supported schemes.

They have some fancier keys that support a 'universal 2 factor' standard which I think they may have had a hand in creating.

I've used mine in OATH-HOTP and HMAC-SHA1 along with KeePass to do two-factor on my password db. You do need a server-side or peer component to initially sync with to do OTP or challenge-response.
Questions like this ignore the economics of minification. If you're a website and you have the option to ship a megabyte of unminified JavaScript or 150 KB of minified JavaScript, the minified JavaScript makes a ton of sense. Sure, gzip helps, but not all the way.

Same thing with WebAssembly: wishing WebAssembly didn't exist isn't going to make it go away. It exists because there is a real need for it: the need to securely and efficiently run high-performance C++ codebases in a web browser. Not everyone has this need, and not everyone will use it, but WebAssembly (and asm.js and Emscripten) solve a real problem for some people, and they simply cannot realistically target the web without this technology.
Hi Brendan, just hopping on the end of this thread to tell you that I think it was just disgusting the way that you were boycotted for your donation. It seemed really hypocritical for them to mistreat you for your opinions.
It's taking place in the brain of the mathematician.
> Yes, the search results aren't that good, but they're good enough

It took me a while of using DDG and looking at results side-by-side before I could reliably distinguish between "results aren't as good" and "results don't feel like Google results".

For example, I kept track for a little while of how many times I had to use !g. I changed my DDG theme for a while to use colors similar to Google, and found myself using !g less often. That has disturbing implications for just how conditioned I was towards Google search results. (These days I use the default DDG theme.)

Apart from that, I reported various minor cases where DDG's rankings needed fixing (many of which got fixed, with actual email from a human about the issue).

These days, though, I almost never use !g. In the rare cases where I get annoyed with a set of search results not showing me anything useful, I tend to find that Google's results aren't any better.

One area I do wish DDG would fix: showing calculations directly without having to use !wa. For instance, just today I searched for "2^64 picoseconds in years" on DDG, and that didn't instantly give me the answer; I had to repeat the search with !wa. Google gives the answer at the top of the search results.
With transpilers like Babel you can fantastic browser support today.
> If QNX, the company, weren't such a pain...

Well, regardless of how late, Minix is bringing it fuss-free to the rest of us now.
The supply of taxis is regulated in the cities, amongst other things, so that the pricing reflects society's ideas of the minimum fair compensation for that class of work.