skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, but there are a bunch of tradeoffs. do you try to lex the floating point format, or push that back to the parser? Do in introduce an extra pass for constant folding or do you try to shoehorn it into AST generation in the parser?

The nice thing about compilers, it requires a ton of code.

It's the kind of thing that any programmer can do (well good ones), and there are organizational tradeoffs to be made. There is no "right" answer, it's an opportunity to talk about organization. There are blind alleys that seem like a good idea, but turn out not to be. There are opportunities to merge and split passes. Some layers might want information from other layers, some layers might look very similar to other layers.
I read this story and had a bit of a chuckle. And then I read your username and had a real laugh. Thanks for that!
Kevin Spacey's persona controls CGI face
Yeah, that's the rub. Their normal payout is a percentage of revenue, so if there is no revenue...
There are a lot of things about working in an office that are unhealthy, but you have to do what you have to do.
You're disappointed because Apple will pay artists to broadcast their music. Care to explain why?
Do you have any evidence to prove this? I've read a few papers that disagree with your opinions...
> You don't have to actually drown out the ambient noise; you just have to put enough sound that you control into it such that your brain is lulled into ignoring the totality of sound around you.

That depends on who is using the headphones. I can't not pay attention to any sound I hear. My brain is very good at filtering discrete signals out of backgrounds.
Why's that? I've been thinking about starting my own side company. It is a lot of work!
But we do have similar restrictions on a house--you need licensed electricians, etc., as well as approved building permits to do many tasks.
> and you wouldn't use it in your code

Speak for yourself. I don't see any value in not using a tool when it's available and seems to do the job:

http://science.raphael.poss.name/haskell-for-ocaml-programme...

Personally I don't believe in 100% pure FP, it's both a pain in the ass and doesn't really give you more than 85% FP already would. Actually, most of the FP world seems to agree: out of many Lisps, Scala, OCaml, SML, F#, Erlang/Elixir etc. only Haskell is that hell-bent on purity. Even things like PureScript are more pragmatic than Haskell in this regard.

Here's a great talk on getting what's best from FP without also taking all the problems: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/functional-pros-cons
Java Weekly 26/15: Jigsaw, Java EE 8, Microservices
Did you even read the article? His point was that introducing some functional features to imperative languages do not confer them the safety benefits found in type systems such as Haskell's. It has absolutely nothing to do with pragmatism or any such thing.
I used to work on the Delphi compiler, for 6 years or so. That compiler was not a simple function of file input to file output. It lived in an IDE. It had to do incremental compilation, throwing away the compiled version of an in-memory file and recompiling it, but avoid recompiling the whole world of downstream dependencies if not necessary. It had to provide code completion, which meant parsing and type analysis of a file, but skipping codegen, with reasonably sophisticated error recovery. It had to provide the debug expression evaluator, which lived intermixed with the constant evaluator, and needed to know how to set up calls to symbols in the program being debugged. And it had to do all of these things in a long-lived process, with no memory leaks and high reliability.

The degree of asynchronicity is low, I agree. The most significant was just interrupting compilation on user request. But the complexity was not trivial.

These days I work at a startup on a full stack SaaS; C++, Java, Rails, and Coffeescript with as few blocking browser actions as possible. It is far less complex than compiler work, but it pays better. I've never had to debug OS code to diagnose runtime library issues in this job; nor write manual structured exception handling. I haven't had to try and build stack frames dynamically to implement reflection calls, nor unpick stack frames dynamically to implement virtual method interception. The relative complexity of potential races with SQL read-committed, or writing UI such that it can't become inconsistent, really doesn't compare.
Yeah, might as well compare it to a Roomba too.
I'm trying to say that they would have preferred to not get caught.
Just like most things on HN, once you have submitted it (either comment or article) it becomes the record.
You have a limited time to edit things, but after some time you could go back and "rewrite" the conversation, this type of thing prevents that.
We're very excited to see CERN contributing SAML this release and hope that the .gitlab-ci.yml file will make using CI more powerful and easier.
Sure, but in the traditional taxi system, it did happen, over and over again, therefore it must be possible. I really don't see how the same would happen under Uber without them weighing in to either claim the share of that additional middleman or to protect their "drivers are not really doing business, so regulations for professionals do not apply to them/us" illusion.
I completely agree, especially about the feeling of vulnerability. It's apparently something that not everyone experiences, but there's no way I'm going to wear something that removes my ability to hear someone walking up behind me.
Deleting content disrupts conversation, see eg [deleted] on Reddit where people can delete their posts anytime.
What are you doing that you frequently starts / shuts down an application to the order where 70ms is a problem?
A slightly unrelated question: Are there any plans to make the compiler "aware" of the type annotations, so we could have performance improvements? Basically Typed Clojure going a similiar route as asm.js
There's a lot of grade inflation, especially at the top level. I took 9 APs in high school, and they were, generally speaking, the easiest classes. Part of that is that, when you create a nationally-standardized curriculum, you have to water some of the content down. Part of that is a culture of not doing anything to jeopardize the student's admission prospects. The school's reputation is dependent on AP placement rate so they also had an incentive to keep kids in APs, and giving a B to a high-achieving student could provoke an angry response from the student or the parents.

Not to mention, there is no standardized grading system in the US. GPAs are nominally out of 4.0, but some schools pump those numbers by tacking .5 onto honors classes and 1.0 onto AP. At other schools its 1.0 and 2.0. Other schools don't have APs at all, or don't offer a bump for high-level courses. Who is the "better student?" The one who has a 4.43 at a school where there are no APs and honors is a .5 bump, or the student with a 5.28 at a school that offers 19 APs and gives a 2.0 bump? It's ludicrous.

The subjective measures colleges use actually started as a veil to enable racism in the 1920s. It gave them cover to deny anyone they wanted on the basis of intangible factors. This ended up hurting Jews the most. It has stuck around because it benefits the rich. Families with money to throw around can make their student look more desirable. Family connections can get you a prestigious internship with a senator. A few thousand dollars can get the student a spot on a "research trip" to Costa Rica. Another few thousand and you can get a book of your photography listed on Amazon. I go to what many would consider an "elite" school and all these examples come from people I know.

College admissions in the US is incredibly strange and arduous, and I'm dreading the day they my kids have to endure it. I would almost prefer they became plumbers or something...
But design patterns are horrible at organizing code. They have a much higher chance of introducing unneeded complexity.

It should be no surprise that almost every single design pattern can be replaced with a simple lambda in languages supporting them.
Holographic pyramid creates a world on your table
Those sneaky bastards, no way I believe this whole thing wasn't prearranged with Taylor Swift. Apple has been subject to public outcries over their greedy business models lots of times, but never did they give in so soon and easily. Either T.Swift is some kind of head honcho of the music industry, and Apple genuinely has to respect her statement, or this whole thing was prearranged for PR.
Dare to Dabble
How am I able to see what flagged comments had said?
Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
​Phishing e-mail delays OPM hack remediation efforts
There already are Facebook pages with locations on them so I don't see the need for beacons to already be able to do this. And Facebook also already likely uses users locations to pinpoint where they are. As it stands right now you already can get notifications if you have location services on that you're near a business and will ask if you want to "check in".

So I don't see how this changes anything. They already have this data, the beacon doesn't change that.
Who cares who invented it, especially if they were incapable of bringing the technology to the mass market themselves?

This would pretty much disqualify a large chunk of computing research (research in general, really) from being notable according to your criteria, as it wasn't brought to the "mass market".

The real heroes are those who make it useful for the mass market, not those who keep it on the 8th shelf in their "R&D Lab" or even those who manage to sell 10,000 units a year globally.

They're all important. The ones who keep it on "the 8th shelf in their R&D lab" are who laid the groundwork for the mass marketeers to prevail in the first place. The small-time sellers frequently come from hobbyist backgrounds who are attempting to distribute a more specialized (or more capable for complex use cases) product as opposed to tailoring for maximum units sold.

Those who bring it to the masses deserve praise in as much as the product has utility and how it improves over previous designs. All too often the result will necessarily have to be watered down so it can pass in widespread consumer circles.

Is Bill Gates a hero, but Gary Kildall a zero? Nonsense. Though that's what your logic ultimately concludes.
>> Yet nearly every job I apply for these days wants a 90 minute online test. (I just had to implement a sorting algorithm in psuedo code - I have never in 12 years had to implement a sorting algorithm as I choose an appropriate library to do that for me).

True, but if you can't implement a simple sorting algorithm how are you going to implement _____ ?
I would be careful about this. They are building a product with simple messaging and you are adding 2 very large feature sets.
Beats Headset Maker Says He Was Illegally Cut Out of $3B Apple Deal
Cars are similarly locked down, as are many (most?) consumer electronics devices. Buildings have an even more complex system of restrictions placed on them, called fire/building/electrical codes, albeit the enforcement is more nuanced.

If you want to advocate for a more open system of published regulations and a licensing/insurance system for professionals that's fine, but don't try to pretend that other facets of life aren't equally regulated.
It's not quite the same as Apple deciding that all apps in the app store, regardless of what you'd like to sell them for, are free during a 3 month introductory period.
I think the author means to say that it's kind of an all or nothing thing. You either go purely functional and get all the benefits, or you don't and barely get any benefits at all.

You could say that "almost functional" does not really exist, just like "almost secure" does not exist.

And yes, you can still program with a non-functional language just fine he does not refute that.
Whenever I feel regret such, as you're expressing, I am reminded by the proverb: "The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, the second best time is now. Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree." Sometimes that helps me get back to what I had wanted to do.
Yes, this a ridiculous PR puff-piece. JD saw something coming and got into the business along with a bunch of other companies. There are a lot of competing GPS technology companies that make products just as good if not better and sell well in the absence of the advantages that JD had from the start.

Hemisphere GNSS, whose (Outback) products I use, has a superior product in my opinion and started a few years before Deere got interested in the business at all.
I can rember a local agricultural college in the UK (silsoe now part of cranfield) experimenting with self driving tractors back in the late 70's
This is a really excellent point, doubly so when three of the bullet points in the article about what they did to sell Sunset had zero to do with improving the game itself (namely, hire a PR firm, take out a pricy internet ad, hire an image consultant).

Advertising your game is great and all (although I seriously question if their PR/ad markets were well researched before their money was spent, because their ROR on those dollars was essentially nil) but you HAVE TO have a good game in the first place or else no one is going to want to play it. After reading the article it seems like they were more interested in going around saying "hey we made this game and we really really want you to pay us money and play it!" instead of making a kick-ass game in the first place.
Compilers aren't real-time, distributed, multi-user, ... basically anything that is hard from a software engineering perspective which includes deployment and testing. Compilers have reproducible test cases (if they don't, that is a bug in itself). You can catch regressions in a compiler with an automated test suite, and bisect their version history to see where it was introduced. Bug reports from the field tend to be easy to confirm. A compiler isn't going to work well when it has 10,000 users, but mysteriously spiral to a crash when there are 10,100.

Compilers have been developed by lone developers in isolation. Some compilers are only a few thousand lines of code.

Someone who can demonstrate knowledge of making a compiler could well be completely behind in their knowledge about language design. He or she shows how calculations are turned into a tree and then into code on a register machine (i.e. "for-mula tran-slation"). But no idea how to compile exception handling, closures, and doing advanced things with type (beyond just checks) and such.

That is to say, the bar for what can be legitimately called a compiler is quite low.

On the topic of languages, I'd rather interview someone who knows about a lot of modern language features and how they can contribute to the improvement of program organization, yet is foggy about the details of how some of them are might be compiled to machine code.

There is still "compiler worship". On a previous job, I fixed a code generation bug in gcc affecting MIPS targets. Everyone was talking about that: "like wow, he fixed gcc".
Was Noel Lee Betrayed and Pushed Out of Beats?
Yup, exactly this. Which is why when we hire, we try to at least get hold of code written by the interviewee and preferrably make him/her come over for a day or so and have him/her do some programming. Much more valueable than 90 minutes of putting someone under some stres-test which doesn't resemble an actual job at all. I read similar things on other comments here so hopefully there's a shift going on. Especially because I would fail terribly at standard interviews as well :]
Eddie Cue is the public point person at Apple for Apple Music; he's the person most likely to respond to a concern about the service.
I agree. I like to remember that I'm passing code into the future where I might not be working on it anymore. Clear, well named code helps the next developer far more than an obtuse algorithm that smashes all logic into a single line.
Which one do you think is more likely:

a) "Oh gosh, apparently having the artists/labels taking the monetary risk for us for trying to acquire a strategic stranglehold on the music industry was bad, we should do the right thing!"

b) "Argh! the backlash is bigger than we anticipated and Taylor Swift is causing too much negative PR. Quickly, change our minds before our service and future music profits are doomed. We'll make it back some other way somewhere down the line"

Doing the right thing because you have to is better than not doing it I guess, but I tend to measure a company on whether they'd try the same thing again if they could get away with it... and Apple definitively would.
I would give the edge to this being a PR ploy, but then again, I'm sure that Apple had different financial models on the table when they were building this product.

They might have been going with the "shared risk" model of free up front play, but bigger payouts to the artists on the subscriptions - but still had their "Apple takes the risk" on the front end, then payouts are smaller on the back end.

Then when artists grumbled about the shared risk model, they kicked in with the alternative model.
Isn't that missing the point?

The entire argument was that they were demanding rights to use the photographer's work in the future for free. There was a non-commercial clause but its wording was a bit strange (is publicity for a brand like Taylor Swift ever non-commerical?)
What about the cognitive load of chasing down things like null reference errors, which in some strongly typed languages don't even exist? And no, they're not always fairly obvious to find, especially when you're fixing somebody else's code.
> You say penny-pinching, but not all companies can afford the office space for all their employees from the get-go.

With the caveats that is is one situation and we are in Dallas, my company could afford to give everyone a private office in the building we currently occupy for less than the cost of my salary alone. IMO, if you have enough money to pay developers market salaries you have enough to give them their own office if you wanted to. In fact, I would take a pay cut to get one.

Obviously some markets like SF proper and Manhattan are stupid expensive and this likely isn't true there. I'd wager that most of the world i closer to Dallas than SF, though.
Traders, Lawyers Rush to Tom Brady's Defense with Damning Charts
Nice comparisons site, but when I quickly mouse over thorugh list items, because of the animation it seems like a small earthquake is going on :)
None of that comment seemed unreasonable to me - I've had large over-ear sets of headphones that require me to turn the volume up pretty high. It takes more to drive them, that's why some people own headphone amps.

Compare that to IEM's like the Sennheiser cx 300 - 5% of max volume at my computer might be too loud.

And it would surprise me if headphone usage at reasonable volumes is worse than going to loud concerts, even if you use headphones for long periods of time. If I'm at a concert or a loud bar for an hour or two, my ears feel really fatigued afterwards, everything seems quieter. I've never turned up headphones loud enough to experience that.
AMD is better at providing documentation needed to write open-source drivers, nVidia is better at providing a high-quality closed-source driver. From what I understand nVidia's closed-source driver is still the best for gaming and other intensive 3D applications followed by AMD's closed-source driver.

The open-source drivers are not on the same performance level as the closed-source drivers, though the AMD open-source driver can be classified as "usable" (or better) in most contexts whereas the nVidia open-source driver has many issues since it depends far more on reverse-engineering the GPU's programming interface. Intel has the best open source driver of all of the desktop vendors (since the open source driver is their official driver) but its use for anything 3D is constrained by the relatively weak performance of their GPUs.
>I think the author means to say that it's kind of an all or nothing thing. You either go purely functional and get all the benefits, or you don't and barely get any benefits at all.

Yes. And what I say is that "I get enough benefits from going halfway functional, thank you very much".

>You could say that "almost functional" does not really exist, just like "almost secure" does not exist.

You could say that but you would be wrong. Most Lisp coders for example have also used imperative code where they need it, with side effects and all. Nobody cared much about such total "functionalness" and purity as you get today from Haskell programmers (most of them non professional of course since there are far more Haskell programmers than Haskell jobs) and the like...
In many cases where the executives don't have their own office, there's a conference room that serves as their de facto office.
It's wrong to deny women a means to safely practice a trade and participate in the greater economy. When you make it illegal, you force them underground and remove any protections they could have had.
If it were that easy, you could write a compiler compiler that knows all the “design patterns” and generates perfect solutions for all problems.

Remember the 239th Rule of Acquisition, “Never be afraid to mislabel a product.” That goes for methodologies, too. If they could get away with it, they would probably say it cures baldness, too.
Alright, I meant it in a 'scientist trying to have illustrations' and found it weird his mindset would fit with hand made twisting of PowerPoint.
So it seems to me that if you need multiple constructors then it's worth being able to give them names, in order to identify their purpose.

I have never looked at how Scala handles constructors, beyond being dimly aware that Scala has them, so I don't see why I should be expected to mention Scala, when it had no influence at all on the design of this functionality. To be clear, I find it highly unlikely that Scala constructors are very similar to what I describe in this post, except perhaps on the most superficial level. I will take a look at Scala later today to confirm that, just in case I'm wrong.

I'm not sure what argument is being made in the rest of your comment. Perhaps you could elaborate on what are your concerns?
For me it makes interacting with people even more inconvenient. Now instead of having a conversation with one person, I'm effectively having one with a dozen or more. So everyone's booking entire conference rooms just to talk 1:1—even if the topic is fairly benign or banal, nobody likes eavesdroppers.
I write HTML using a text editor.
The 1x1 gifs help count pages, because bots tend not to fetch them. Though I don't monitor traffic that closely.
This is why I love Haskell. Haskell seems to increase my ability to manage complexity by one level.

Disclaimer: Haskell is not a silver bullet, not a panacea and I'm only claiming a modest increase, not miracles, but it helps me deal with complexity better than any other language I know.
Don't app developers get a much bigger cut of revenues than musicians do? That being the case, I don't understand your comment.
Did you accept?
It would be too hard to do, add too much complexity.
The DARPA grand challenge was certainly a pivotal event, but I wouldn't say it jump-started the industry. The two biggest teams in the second race, from CMU and Stanford, were both spinoffs of the Field Robotics Center at CMU, which had been doing this for a long time:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tjochem/nhaa/Journal.html
http://www.pbs.org/saf/transcripts/transcript705.htm

Disclosure: I was a grad student at CMU at the time, in the building, and saw a lot of this up close.