skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I saw that they're opening new offices and was interested in applying there, do you think db won't exist in, let's say, 5-10 years?
Forgive me but why go after LaunchRock? It seems like the point of LaunchRock is to serve people who wouldn't have the tech skills (or desire) to deploy a Ruby app, or possibly even a static HTML app by themselves?
> but doesn't ask countries like Germany and France to do the same isn't really unity, it's exploitation.

Yes, if it ever happens that Germany and France need their economy bailed out in the future they should also have to give up some autonomy.
We use dh-virtualenv and it's working out pretty well for us so far.
very interesting article. It is a pity that his column has no rss feed.
I'm like 2 paragraphs in and already publishing this is a total win:

Thistle was origionally an intern project to produce a source-to-source translator that translated ASP into PHP by adding dollar signs to variable names and implementing LBound and UBound in PHP

Thank you so much for ruining my productivity for a couple hours. :)
Came here to say the same thing. Why is the government collecting secrets of its workers' sex lives? Why is it being stored? All data is subject to theft. The bigger question is why it was collected and stored in the first place. The government is responsible here.
he ran the company into the ground but we all had a great time while he did so.

that was the best place i ever worked. the problem was that dave really didnt want to be in the software industry anymore.

nowadays, jimmy carter reads his political blog.
What problem does the extra 176MB present to you when you likely have 256+GB of disk storage?
A lot of people don't know this but that's pretty much how Windows actually works underneath everything (DCOM, RPC, pipes etc)
There are no other languages that could replace Rust for Mozilla due to their combination of performance and safety requirements. It is also the product of Mozilla's research arm, which is not directly focused on immediate productization and employs several people with PLT backgrounds full-time. Finally, Rust has always been an open-source projects and has developed a robust non-Mozilla community that contributes heavily to the compiler. None of these is true of Wasabi.

In any case, Spolsky still firmly believes that Netscape would have been better off today if they had continued work on the (completely unsalvagable) Netscape 4.x. Having extensively reviewed the history, Joel was dead wrong about this. There's no reason to assume his advice is more trustworthy than that of any other "thought leader," or that it is consistently followed within his own company.
I'd rather not say, but: they were not laid off. They were in a position to know, at my 5K person workplace.

I don't want to seem like a conspiracy theorist. There was probably no one over-riding reason for ditching the written report. But I think the above was a big factor.
Well, your user might have python in /some/path/to/python. My user my have in /usr/bin/python or maybe /usr/local/bin/python.
How Mayvenn Built Its Community Using SMS
You could if your line had a syntactical construct that presented an interface, like say, a name and a parameter list.
No intention to go after anyone. Yes, LR and this project serve completely different audiences. It was just the least-wordy way I could think of to describe it.
"The cycle of bloat doesn't always take hold"

Don't recall claiming everything is under the "cycle of bloat". The fact that I gave specific examples was a pretty big clue that it's not all equal.... and jQuery isn't in any of them, either.

Edit: Sorry, is there something wrong with my pointing out that I didn't ever claim the things being imputed to me?
Patrick Naughton – co-creator of Java and sex offender
> Asked specifically what information the hackers had obtained, Seymour told lawmakers that she preferred to answer later in a “classified session.”

Does anyone get the sense that often times "classified" is just a cover for "embarrassing?" Essentially information they know their political opponents have, but really wish to conceal from the American public?

The whole American intelligence machine is (and related, like secret courts) is very creepy. Definitely starting to wonder if the whole thing can be kept under any kind of control with the levels of indirection.

Congressional oversight is a nice theory, but when the people who do the overseeing are either former spooks or in the pockets of monied corporate interests who sell kit to the spooks, you really have to question how powerful oversight is in this case (and if negative reports will too be "classified").
How I became a temporary Google+ celebrity
Is there any basis for thinking this is 100 years away when we have working prototypes now? Compare other technologies which had working prototypes; did any take 100 years to get to operation? (The longest/closest I can think of is 'flying cars', which first ran in '47 and don't have a clear road to success today. There are many counter-examples.)
Sorry, twelve. Not sure where twenty came from.
Woahhh! That is awesome. Looks like you've put a lot of work into it.
For every one of you, there are several that don't mind. That's not to denigrate your opinion, just a consequence of priorities in people's lives.
Why stop there? The Hammer and Sickle represent the slaughter and enslavement of tens of millions. The Chinese flag at one point represented normal people being forced to run small metal smelters in their backyards exposing them to the joys of heavy metal poisoning and rank air pollution (when they weren't being starved for political reasons).

We have a lot of flags left to ban!!!
> because the first thing you are thinking when you join what seems to be a nice company is leaving.

Of course it's a risk, but there are two things to consider in counterpoint:

1). If the employee gets adequate training and the chance to contribute to his/her work with said training, that may improve their happiness and desire to stay. Both parties win. They win, you lose.

2). Suppose the exact scenario above plays out, you spend money on training, and they leave sometime thereafter.

3). What if you don't train the employee, but that employee stays? Everyone loses.

Obviously, scenario 2 is the one you're most worried about, but imo if the environment is structured in such a way that that employee is looking for ways to leave at some unspecified point, there are probably bigger problems with the environment that need to be addressed.
'supplements' in general are snake-oil, so I wouldn't worry about it too much...
Both things you mention have to do with Google, who happens to own Chrome. Why do you think it is a ridiculous proposition? After all, you gave in and switched to Chrome...

I've actually done the opposite, switched back to Firefox after many years of using Chrome. Was a bit wary, but no issues at all, runs fine in both PC and Mac. Although I don't use hangouts on it.
This. This needs to be a musical number along the lines of the Lion King's "circle of life"
Thrilled this is finally out. I've always wanted to be able to turn all my posts from adventures into stories. Now I finally can!
So they'd have blackmail material to use against potential leakers or defectors. They certainly did in the Edward Snowden case (remember the whole "girl is a stripper" thing that was meant to damage him but backfired?).
I wouldn't even classify CoffeeScript as another language. It's really just javascript with some syntactical sugar. It took me about 20 mins to get comfortable with it.
US government logins, passwords leaked Online
I feel the same. I've been using emacs everday for over a decade but I am keeping an eye on Atom and LightTable. With the amount of community involvement one of them could well eclipse it soon.
With RxJS, you can compose with existing Promise-based libraries, solve asynchronous programming (and error handling) in an elegant fashion with code that looks like simple linear chains (or DAGs) of Observables, and you don't need to give up non-blocking JS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRYN2xt11Ek
if it have org-mode and a mail reader...
> FogCreek should have bit the bullet and re-wrote their application in an open, standardized cross-platform system.

Ah, so you happen to know better than Joel how much resources they had available at the time, how long the rewrite would have taken, how much it would have affected their ability to ship new features?

Fog Creek was a much smaller company back when they wrote Wasabi. Postponing the rewrite until they had more resources to spare was probably a good decision.
Sounds like an instance of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
It's not at all clear to me how they're namespacing the invocation names.

Do they need to be unique across all skills?

Will there be a land-rush on all the good two and three work invocation names?

Do I manually select which skills will be enabled for my Echo, and only those invocation names will be accepted? What about conflicts?
How exactly it is easier to extend than emacs?
You have zero idea what you are talking about.

I support free speech, but that doesn't mean I am going to allow the KKK to do their demonstrations on my front lawn because "free speech." Disallowing that is not "stamp[ing] out free speech." Not even in the slightest.

Its a two way street - they are free to do their cross burning elsewhere and I'm also free to put signs on my lawn that support racial harmony.

Walmart (or whoever) is free to decide they don't want to sell the Confederate flag. The Daughters of the Confederacy (or whoever) are free to decide they want to sell the Confederate flag. Neither is stamping out free speech. BOTH are practicing free speech.

Free speech (as a value) doesn't mean "I need to facilitate everyone else all the time, always and so does everyone else." Free speech (as a value) means "you let me say what I want and I let you say what you want." The KKK can do their own thing and American Atheists can do theirs.

I can choose to hold an atheist convention and disallow priests to speak. Priests can choose to hold Mass and not allow atheist to speech. Its each party's choice.

If some types of items are unpopular with the public (or unpopular with the people who choose what to sell) it is a business decision to not sell them in order to appeal to their chosen demographic. It is not "stamp[ing] out free speech." There are niche markets everywhere for items that don't appeal to the general public. Most companies you are hearing about (Walmart, Sears, Apple) are trying to appeal to the masses.

Being forced to support everything is the exact opposite of free speech.

Let's also distinguish "the law" from "the Constitution." They are different.
Beats logo? http://beatsbydre.com/
Show HN: Passport – responsive email WYSIWYG editor
Whilst a nice idea, I suspect you might have a hard time growing the community when people can just use Quora for the same thing.

That said, a service (perhaps this exists) where I can give you an idea and pay you a bit of money and in return receive a full market analysis, information on competitors, investments made, upcoming startups working in the area, etc - I feel that would be useful.
It's also a camera: http://www.arri.com/camera/alexa/
Java the language is more like Simula than Smalltalk. But yes, the JVM/runtime is vaguely Smalltalkish, and this is no accident given that many of the key contributors came from Self and Smalltalk lineages.
https://cloud.google.com/tools/cloud-repositories/

A number of features are listed, 'Source Code Editor' seems to be the other big one, the rest might fall into the other cloud offerings.
I think you'll love it. I'll send you a code when I get back home in a few hours.
Slack doubles in size in four months to 1.1M daily active users
"Do people believe that having access to packages and add-ons makes an editor (or whatever else) "bloated and slow"?"

... no? Hate to dismiss your entire message that way (I mean that seriously), but...

People appear to be assuming a great deal more universality than I could possibly have implied, since I don't believe it's a universal problem anyhow, and never addressed scope. It's just a cycle that definitely exists in some domains.

It's gotten to when I see something described as "minimal" I tend to just roll my eyes and move on. Especially when combined with accusations, veiled or otherwise, that something else is "bloated", which at this point I tend to just assume is a meaningless feeling word with no real technical content. Yes, that includes when used in the context of "cycle of bloat"; this is a cycle endlessly recurring, yet has very little technical content. Mature text editors are, to a first approximation, all the same. (Yeah, there's some differences, but, meh.)
As a paying user of Sublime Text 3, I finally jumped on the Atom bandwagon a few months ago and have overall been pretty happy.

It's certainly a slower editor - I have found that opening it, creating a new window, and quitting all take more time than I would like. However, I have stuck it out primarily for two reasons:

1. It's far more extensible. Sublime Text has a thriving package ecosystem, but the limitations of the extension API show up in lots of little places. Atom being browser-based comes with its downsides, but it also allows flexibility that Sublime could only dream of.

2. It's open source. Sublime Text is a great editor, but it's closed source, maintained by a single guy, and updates have slowed to a crawl. It's not something I ever felt 100% comfortable with relying on as part of my day-in-day-out workflow.
Heroku Data Links
That's why you shouldn't let javascript developers produce desktop apps... The whole Chromium is bundled with Atom.
Norwegian with Sámi has a lot of collisions. With the regular Norwegian layout, the only collision should be µ (M + AltGr).
Can an Algorithm Hire Better Than a Human?
Needs to be renamed to AlexaSkillsKit.NET, but here's C# support:

https://github.com/AreYouFreeBusy/AlexaAppKit.NET
Translation is an overcrowded and not very generously paying field, especially in media. It's cool these guys can do it for a living but I gave up on it, personally.
Probably more like 100 who don't care for every one that does. Or 1000. Not here on HN, of course, but in the potential customer base.
I see where you're going, but the constraints don't work out that way.

In an at-will state like California, you can be laid off for any business reason, such as "the work in this area is closing up."
So, justifying a layoff (to the satisfaction of a court) is not a major constraint.

But if there is documentation stating that the employee's work is great, that future opportunities abound, etc., then that justification begins to look suspect.

On the other hand, in the absence of documentation, the at-will rules give great freedom to the employer.
And today from the How-To-Stealthily-Sell-A-Book department ...
Is it censorship in the name of profits when they make less money by taking apps off the App Store?
The future of healthcare is powered by AI
I agree with you, but in general the fansubbers' audience demands the style that's being used and will go nuts if they don't see one of the handful of Japanese words they know somehow reflected in the subs directly.
Ondt i ryggen aarhus osteopati
Gentrification of Innovation (SF and Silicon Valley)
Interesting, can you send me the details of the output? pastebin?

EDIT: or even better github issues and I'll fix it asap :)
Had to turn down an offer for $350k for frontend development?! There are worse problems to have...
Looks like it's not working just now:

Searching packages failed: atom.io is temporarily unavailable, please try again later.

Also, install Mercurial before the go-plus package. See "Missing Tools" near the bottom of the page.
In Korea Town in Los Angeles, you can call a double taxi. One driver comes and drives you and your car home, while the other car follows to take the 1st driver home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snoop_Dogg#Legal_incidents

What a fucking joke.
Not sure how you got that from my comment.
MtlWiFi – free public Internet starting rollout in Montréal
env -i ifconfig -a | ... solves a lot (like locale or other special env vars), but yeah...
I wonder how much, if any, this can be improved by prefetching the indexes you might access next step?

I haven't tested it directly on binary search, but I've done some synthetic tests of the same approach. The answer seems to be: the results can be really good!

There are several issues, though.

First, your gains will usually be in increased throughput rather than reduced latency. And this is usually a tradeoff that requires greater consumption of memory bandwidth, as you're loading data you don't need. If you are running on a single-core, this is usually a good tradeoff. If you are already parallel on all cores, it may not be.

The second is that you need to be able to "batch" your requests. That is, you need to be prefetching for the next request while you are handling the next level for the current request. The shorter the final processing time once you have the answer, the larger your batches need to be.

The last is that each CPU has a limit on the number of outstanding requests for cachelines from RAM: usually 10. This limits the size of your batches in accordance with Little's Law. The question then becomes whether that batch size is possible, and how much benefit it provides.

But there is a sweet spot where you can get large gains (2-3x single processor throughput) if you have enough requests available, if you can tolerate a slightly slower response time, and if the processing required once you have a result is significant (comparable to memory latency).

Oh, and you also need to be willing to write the critical sections in assembly. Even if you figure out the combination of fragile syntax and compiler optionss that produces the branch-free logic that you need, convincing an optimizing compiler to make your apparently unnecessary prefetches at exactly the point in time you need them to be is next to impossible.

This paper isn't quite on this exact topic, but leans heavily in the same direction:

Rethinking SIMD Vectorization for In-Memory Databases
Orestis Polychroniou, Arun Raghavan, Kenneth A Ross
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~orestis/sigmod15.pdf
They are over-charging us for Internet. Comcast's margins on Internet alone are 90%[1].

[1] My brother-in-law works there. He also confirmed that they actually have the capacity to deliver several hundred megabit to most households. They just don't because they can get away with delivering 50 megabit for $70/month since their competitors are the telco's which have significantly more regulation than Comcast.
eventstreams are handy for handling a stream of events (user actions in UI, streaming API client), but when a request gets a single event as a response (ajax/http), async/await looks like a much simpler option (functions return the output, instead of taking a handler to process it). Thoughts?

PS: enjoyed your talk 'user is a function', looking forward to how cycle evolves.
Physics from the Farm
The author has graciously posted _Wasabi, The ??? Parts_, the internal book about Wasabi mentioned in the blog, on their website:

http://jacob.jkrall.net/wasabi-the-parts/index.html

Having now read it, I've come to the conclusion that the blog gives the wrong impression about the implications of having a custom language. Readers of the blog post come away with the idea that Wasabi was so full of "o.O" that someone was moved to write a book about that. In reality, the book is simply documentation of the language features, with callouts for weird interactions between VB-isms, ASP.NET-isms, and their language.

You should definitely read the "Brief And Highly Inaccurate History Of Wasabi" that leads the document off. It's actually very easy now to see how they ended up with Wasabi:

1. The ASP->PHP conversion was extremely low-hanging fruit (the conversion involved almost no logic).

2. Postprocessing ASP meant PHP always lagged, so they started generating ASP from the same processor.

3. Now that all their FogBugz code hits the preprocessor, it makes sense to add convenience functions to it.

4. Microsoft deprecates ASP. FogBugz needs to target ASP.NET. They can manually port, or upgrade the preprocessor to do that for them. They choose the latter option: now they have their own language.

It's step (3) where they irrevocably commit themselves to a new language. They want things like type inference and nicer loops and some of the kinds of things every Lisp programmer automatically reaches for macros to get. They have this preprocessor. So it's easy to add those things. Now they're not an ASP application anymore.

Quick rant: if this had been a Lisp project, and they'd accomplished this stuff by writing macros, we'd be talking this up as a case study for why Lisp is awesome. But instead because they started from unequivocally terrible languages and added the features with parsers and syntax trees and codegen, the whole project is heresy. Respectfully, I call bullshit.
Yes. Any proprietary system will require you to document/educate the users, and you will not have the benefit of an online community to get help from, or bug fixes, or security analyses. There are very few problems where rolling your own solution is the right solution. Maybe if you are Google and your database isn't big enough or something.

If you have great people building the software, or at least competent ones, and you have competent users, you might succeed, maybe. But that's assuming you have a maintenance plan and a roadmap, which most software companies do not. Maintain software? YOLO! What happens when you have a bunch of morons using and maintaining the software?

In short, computer science in industry is largely practiced as shamanism by people who cannot engineer their way out of a crackerjack box.
Yup, that one was certainly big for a while! KHTML and its whole menagerie of browsers competing to be more "minimal" than the last.

I think the web has stabbed that one dead, though... ship a proper HTML5-compliant browser engine, and, well, you're already looking at a whackload of startup time and tons of functionality. The size of the chrome is hardly an afterthought nowadays. A really "minimal" browser can hardly browse the top-ten sites anymore.

(Wikipedia's still looking pretty good in Lynx, though... just checked.)
Being Honest with Yourself – The Launch
Self-Assembling Robotic Gun Will Shoot Through Tissue Inside Your Body
Let them speak English! This'll bring the world closer together.
This looks nice. I sure wish there was a jvisualvm/jconsole version of this.
Isn't this question better suited for a FireFox dev/complaint forum?
Humanity will never achieve artificial intelligence, and this is why
I think his point can be summarized as "it's better to have to maintain your software than to have to maintain your software and the compiler for it", which is hard to argue against.

Then again, given that they had the codebase already, writing their own transpiler sounds like it was the best option at the time.
Who are you making that argument to? If your company is making absurd profits, you should be tap into it as an employee. Comparing your earning to people elsewhere isn't going to mean anything unless the money is there as well. And saying "Oh, but other people don't make any money" doesn't mean that they shouldn't make money. Or that people in the tech sector developing the social tools and economic methods to make for fairer compensation wouldn't also apply elsewhere.

You're not going to convince people that they should except peanuts from a multi-billion dollar industry because "there are starving children in Africa(TM)." That's not a progressive argument.
Scaling customer support at Smartly.io
The First Integrated WMS and OMS OmniChannel Solution: Shipedge
Thats still a long time for a text editor though. Sublime, Vim, gedit, etc are all instantaneous.
Before then Java was dynamicly typed language pretending it's staticly typed :)

List doSth(Object a, Object b) { ... }