skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A very good point, we should have a metric that establishes how much carbon is released extra into the environment from cpu cycle wasting crap like atom and even more bloated versions of word.
Clippy could pop up: "I can see you would like to release an extra ton of carbon into the atmos, why not upgrade word now!"
> If more people complained about a lack of real browser choice on iOS, including developers and users, Apple would eventually have to cave.

Nope. Don't you remember just a few years ago, when everyone was screaming at Apple for years to put Flash on its mobile devices? Apple never caved. Apple doubled down, because Apple was smart enough to figure out that Flash was a battery-sucking, security-ruining disaster.

Gee, kinda like allowing third parties to control the web browser on a mobile device would be. Fancy that!
I think so too. It's not about ASM snippets; it's about people not knowing what their software actually does. Software bloat isn't magic, nor is it static; your CPU is doing something. If with time application gets bigger and slower, and yet no extra features appear to explain it, it means your CPU is running code that shouldn't be run, wasting its cycles on pointless and irrelevant computations. That's laziness and/or stupidity.
Depends. Sometimes ownership of data is bound by law - by ToS you can give away some usage rights such as to use/modify/sell/whatnot.
it's about wanting what you know.

And this in part is what has kept MS on the desktop, as they used to bend over backwards to make sure old binaries ran on new OS releases.

Supposedly the DOS version of SimCity had a bug/oversight where it accessed a ram segments after freeing it. This because while DOS was supposed to enforce access restrictions, it has failed to do so in early versions.

But rather than let said game crash on newer versions, MS put in a conditional that disabled the enforcement if it was the SimCity binary that was running.

You also find this in the "do not break userspace" that Torvalds enforce within Linux kernel development. Once code is in the kernel, its APIs are to behave the same for perpetuity. Thus it can be damn hard to get new code in the door if it adds a bunch of new APIs.

Sadly userspace devs are less conservative about API breakage...
"Sorry, this page doesn't work with IE6. Click here to download Mozilla Firefox"
It's a funny idea of sucking less where any user configuration involves editing config.h and recompiling.
Talking Machines: Solving Intelligence, with DeepMind’s Nando de Freitas
It's not that they have poor algorithms or whatever, it's that they're part native, to handle the desktop interaction and the rest is a bunch off html/css/JavaScript running in an embedded browser. At least that's how Spotify works.

The problem is that our tools for making multiplatform native GUI's suck so bad we'd rather just embed an entire Web browser into everything.
A couple examples: Playing video without opening a full screen popup window. Preserving `position: fixed` elements in the right place while you type in a form. Properly emitting scroll events. Not throttling timers. Adding webcam/microphone API support. Allowing canvas contexts to access video content. Not downsampling images. Not immediately killing a page once it exceeds the JS heap limit. Not automatically deleting local storage and application cache. Implementing pointer events API. Adding an actual file picker (not only a photos picker). Exposing an API to control the virtual keyboard. Adding the full screen API. Allowing CSS transforms and filters to be applied to playing videos. Allow users to download files to iCloud Drive.
Like others have said, I'd ditch Apache/Varnish for Nginx/PHP-FPM with the ngx_cache_purge module. That's what I've done, and it's far easier to maintain. The VCL language has always struck me as overly complicated, but that's just me. Any reason you chose MongoDB over Redis? (I work with MongoDB and Redis on a daily basis, so I was just curious as to why you chose one over the other for session storage).
Except Apple very overtly neglects to fix huge bugs on Mobile Safari, so developers are locked into endless hacks to have anything substantial work correctly on iOS, which is a vital market segment. It may have been incompetence rather than willful neglect on Microsoft's part, but the end result for developers is the same. This is the right tree :)
I didn't forget about KDE. Last time I checked, it fails on accessibility.
Unicode characters don't have colour in them, much as they do not have a shape either. The Unicode standard does not specify the exact visual representation of any codepoint.

No, fonts can have colour in them. This isn't a new thing, colour fonts have been around for decades. However, they're particularly useful for emoji.
Or have children somewhere else.
And this is why perhaps the old microcomputers were perhaps more user friendly than the modern PC.

This because they were for the most part single task, and usually had a full reboot done before a new task was initiated.
How so? If you're white, perhaps you see no problem with making everyone's skin white.

But the billions of people who aren't white might have a problem with it.
Frustratingly, we can't actually look at the React code he used, because it is Google proprietary code(?). But there are definitely slow and fast ways to take an array of elements and render it. Ideally, each element would be wrapped in a component with a "key" property to speed up diffing.

Also, the standard way to do infinite scrolling when you care about performance, especially on mobile, is to reuse a small number of elements, just enough to cover the screen and then some. You don't actually create 1500 elements.
I've been using this service for a while already, mostly for demoing answers on StackOverflow and/or testing out new languages without having to install anything locally. Although the site is very handy, I find some of its design choices a bit peculiar.

1. Saving after editing someone elses snippet (effectively creating a fork/clone)

> I can run the code after I change it, but I can't save it? This is what I miss most from other "pastebins".

2. Save indicator

> I don't see any indicator of whether or not the snippet has been edited/saved.

3. Secret snippets

> Why can only logged in users store "secret" snippets? Secret snippets are still accessible by anyone with the URL, so why shouldn't an anonymous user be able to save them? I'd imagine a concept of "private" snippets would make more sense to restrict for logged in users.

4. Code language versioning

> Currently, there is only one version, "latest" of each language available (except Python, JavaScript and PHP). I assume the version support lists will improve eventually, but it would be nice to know what this "latest" refers to, and a bit more accurate versioning in general.

5. No URL immediately visible after saving a snippet

> OK, I need to grab it from the address bar, but this may not be immediately obvious for everyone.

6. Username

> What is it used for? I can't log in using my username, and in the "Snippets" table, I'm listed with my name instead of my username.

7. E-mail address

> I can't change it?

Other than that, props on creating, providing and maintaining a great service!
I guess you're used to it :] I'm mainly comparing to Belgium, and most people I know here actually think the same; might be because we look at it from a more tourist POV and tend to ignore uglier things but still:

- not a lot of ribbon development. That alone makes a huge difference.

- cities of comparable size seem to have more green overall (trees, plants in front of houses, more parks etc). Typical example is something like Ravenstein. Seems to have more park than actual housing area.

- nicer architecture (again, eye of the beholder, but hey we have a 'ugly belgian houses' book :]) for instance streets whith all pretty much the same houses, but every third house has a door in a different pastel color etc. Not sure that even existst here. Or apartment buildings with some color to it.

Of course there also are more ugly things (e.g. there are beautiful pieces of the Waal with nice tiny isles and such, then you look more to the left and there's a rather ugly concrete factory or so; some cities have more 'ghetto-style' places but still not as bad as some parts of Brussles I think). But in general I like it more.
And yet there are still issues on my Sandy Bridge system with display corruption even with the latest Intel drivers.

Also has anyone else noticed that Firefox is no longer keeping the page state when navigating back? For example on Reddit go to the comments section, minimize a few comments then navigate to a link then go back and none of the minimized comments remain minimized, in Firefox prior to 38 things worked correctly.
I created a profile in freelancer dot com about 3 years ago and one in nubelo dot com, never had a single job, the sites recommended me to make tests to increase my reputation, but the tests where not free, I paid like 30USD to be able to show some useless badges.

Waste of time, the best freelance projects and customers where by recommendation. Instead of these 28 sites, I suggest to focus in connecting people.
How often do you need to edit a doc using a word processor that's running on a floppy? I'm guessing that it's not very often.

If you really need a lightweight word processor, there's plenty out there. They just probably won't have a lot of the features that the big hitters have now. And if you really want a lightweight OS, there's a fair few Linux distros aimed at that market.

What do you want your code to optimised for? Fast startup times? Functionality? Extensibility? Stability? Compatibility? Security?

None of those things come magically for free, and every day that a developer spends on one is a day that they aren't spending on another. And if they are waiting until any, or all, of those are optimised for any possible scenario, you'll be waiting a long time for any software at all.

As Blaise Pascal (or possibly one of many other possible candidates) once said - "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." The challenge of optimisation v delivery is not a new one.
Tim Draper Doubles Down on Europe
I don't care if an app is 20% bigger in file size as long as the user interface makes sense and the product actually works, especially if the bloat is due to a programming language or architecture that makes it easier to add new features or fix bugs.
I'm starting to feel like a grey neckbeard. In my day, when I wanted to hang out with my friends, I called them, from a landline, known simply as "the phone". These days, I'm at or near a desktop/laptop computer almost 24/7 so don't see much need for a smartphone. I dread the day when a smartphone is required to be a part of society. It's shifting in that direction rapidly. If being on Facebook/LinkedIn also becomes a necessity, hopefully I'm already retired and have a beautiful lawn.
Those are good points. adamwong246, iteration is certainly faster on hybrid web, and potential migration to native once the dust settles is a clever approach. And as kinj28 mentioned, using a common platform between the mobile app and internal-facing web app is a compelling way to save costs through shared business logic and staffing efficiencies.

Speaking of enterprise, the ability to integrate with disparate data sources in some cases trumps mobile, and the mobile framework choice becomes part of an overall full stack solution (think Appcelerator Cloud Services).

Lots of considerations to weigh in picking a platform.
One thing that strikes me is the explosion in dependencies in most software. I'm guilty of this, too. I've seen plenty of examples where an entire library or framework is added to a project just for a couple of features. Add a few libraries like that and suddenly you have a few megabytes of additional libraries, where maybe 90% or 95% of the features will never be used. A good article a while back looked at common unix utilities, comparing the size of commands like cp from the 1980's to the present. Most of the bloat had to do with features that almost nobody ever uses. It wouldn't be so bad if everyone used the same set of libraries. For example, almost all applications have a dependency on certain core libraries like libc.

But we often use different libraries that do essentially the same thing or different versions of the same library, so instead of 1 copy of libfoo.jar, I have 2 copies of libbar.jar and 4 copies of libfoo.jar that may all do essentially the same thing. Then I have essentially the same functionality in C++ (some libraries that wrap collections), Python (where maybe one of they python versions wraps one of the C++ libraries, but a different version). And of course I have a version installed in each ruby environment. Add to that their dependencies, and the dependency's dependencies, and you have a perfect storm of craptastic. So libfoo.jar version 1.2.3 depends on libbaz.jar 2.3.4 which depends on libqux 1.5.7. Let's say each one is 250k, and all I ever used was some list sorting utility in libfoo.

But I don't know what we could really do about it. You can't force everyone to program in C++ or limit them to a set of blessed libraries. I think maybe developers could be more judicious about when they could add a few lines of code and when they actually need to bring in a hard dependency an an external library. And it happens with commercial software as well. Maybe this is just the way the world will be.
dealing with rescheduling all future AMAs can suck up a lot of volunteer moderator time. Time that would otherwise have to be spent moderating the sub.

So yes, to do things effectively without half assing everything, i can see a reason to shut down the sub temporarily
Writing Microservices in Go – Nordic APIs |
The battle to reform 300-year-old copyright law for the digital age
Le Tote (YC S13) Is Hiring Full Stack Engineers – Change Fashion with Us
I believe they're talking about Desktop Safari, there's yet no Firefox for iOS to test.
Why Lego Is Spending Millions to Ditch Oil-Based Plastic
Stop texting right now and learn from Chinese: there’s a better way to message
Maybe that's because OS X makes the scroll wheel consider acceleration (move the scroll wheel quickly, you scroll more, move it slowly, you scroll less), unlike Windows/Linux?
The don't want to make money safe. making money safe makes money slow. Pay wave / pay pass and mastercard/visa chargebacks are all about getting money moving around more.
Yes.

https://youtu.be/TCbFEgFajGU
The color was not specified before, so it was up to the font creator. I think yellow was the most common choice. The test page shows all the icons as blue in my browser. I'm not against the new changes, but I think the old version was more popular in Asian countries than anywhere else, and wasn't really pro-white.
Not without voiding the warranty. Incidentally, the exact same thing is true of the iPhone.
Merkel Bugged While Pondering Greece Crisis
I think it's being downvoted because a lot of geeks hate that they love Apple products.

It's a bizarre situation that results in some odd things, such as Macs and iPads being prevalent at OSS user group meetings.
don't forget all the ongoing advances in the "here's a bunch of pictures, come up with a 3d model of the person" problem, making the spoofing even easier
The one feature that I would really like in personal file encryption tools like this is to be able to read/write the files on the fly. For example - with encfs you have 2 folders:

/encrypted

/decrypted

Whenever you write something to /decrypted it is automatically encrypted and copied to /encrypted. And /decrypted contains all the files from /encrypted but decrypted. The use case is using cloud storage such as dropbox.
Does Atlassian really care about not “F8%k the customer”?
Isn't Apple paying the fines? Did I miss that the publishers have to poney up too?
I've heard people say that TeX typesetting is so nice that people will do scientific research just so that they can publish papers using it.
As demand for software grows, a lot more code made by immature (as in beginner, junior, green) developers finds its way to production.

Part of it is not code reviewed by senior developers. Another part is but too late in the cycle and goes in anyway because features.

The bloat is technical debt accrued in favor of shipping.

It probably happens to both types you described, but shipping is a business decision.
Which is easier? Re-running make, or having to write and induce another library to read configuration files?

Configuration files introduce a new point of failure (file not present, file corrupted, file not readable), a point of slowdown (how long does it take to read the file from disk, how long does it take to parse and load the file), and a point of complexity (parsing even ini files is pretty complicated, if you want to support the myriad of ways we write them).

All of this for values which change once every... how long? Once a year? Once an install? Or for most configuration values, never?

I still use configuration files, because I'm OK with including third party libraries... but I can certainly understand why some people may not be.
This. As always, there's a relevant xkcd[1]. Features that I might decry as bloat are probably someone else's "necessary, to be preserved at all costs" features. If you want to cover a large number of use cases, you have to include all of them. And with that comes bloat. There's a reason why even a minimalist CLI-only Linux installation requires more than 24MB of RAM when Windows 3.1 runs on 3MB - the Linux kernel is capable of a hell of a lot more.

[1]https://xkcd.com/1172/
Happiness in slavery? It is easier to develop for a single target, as always, but in this case the single target is starved for both features and bugfixes. I'm not sure what you developed, but in the last few months alone, we've run into bugs that have apparently existed and been known about for years. There really is no excuse.
This sounds like it will a pretty legendary event!

Btw, great design and choice of location.
> That's why it's worth investigating.

I don't think it's not worth investigating, but certainly more resources should be directed towards the more promising theory. Let's just say that what we do know seems to very strongly suggest no more than a small genetic contribution. Physicists, biologists and psychologists can't completely disprove ESP, either, yet what we know now suggests that we shouldn't put too much effort into studying it.

Surely you would agree that the dominant effect should be studied and understood before we try to understand secondary contributing factors.

Finally, if you don't understand how a piece of software behaves, you're likely to first study it using software tools before reaching out for your oscilloscope. The universal computation of the mind and all that.

> You previously claimed that a straw man of the form power = alpha x genetics (for a specific value of alpha) must be wrong. You later backed up and admitted power has no cardinal scale. This means that your refutation of the straw man was flawed.

I don't think so. I didn't reject that straw man you're now presenting. I said that if minuscule genetic differences result in huge variance of power, there needs to be some super-linear correlation, or, if that is too cardinal, some amplification mechanism. I then said that whatever that amplification mechanism is, because intra-group genetic variance is much larger, that amplification would create a rather chaotic power structure, which is far from what we see. The power structure does not look at all like an amplification of some random noise. That means that there must be a much stronger organizing principle, and from what we know about the change in frequency of adaptive traits in populations, evolutionary genetics seems like an even less plausible explanation to serve as that organizing mechanism.

> Sorry about that, but to predict reality we do need to be literal.

Sure, but not when arguing on HN. If I need to qualify every word I write here to convey my meaning even to the most literal-minded HN reader -- and God knows there's no limit to the literality of the geek mind -- I will go crazy.

And there's little wankery in sociology or poetry. It's perfectly fine to hack the software. You don't need to drop down to the electron level to study how the computer program behaves; in fact, and doing so won't help you much or at all. The universal computation of the mind (though restricted) makes reduction hard and often misguided, and it can simulate laws that are very far removed from those of the universe where the hardware exists.
While the science geek in me is super thrilled, I'm concered about the possibility of radical groups using this knowledge to their advantage. They now know where to go and how to access certain parts of the collider, thus far only known to a selected few. I'd love to hear the thoughts of others on HN.
Flux: Getting Past the Learning Curve
> I'd ask him one question: how is the idea of regulated, political and centralized money working out for you?

That's kind of a straw man, because the Euro is all of the burdens of a centralized fiat currency while lacking almost all of the benefits (or at least the ones most relevant to Greece's current situation).

Having a unified monetary policy among countries with incredibly fragmented and disparate fiscal policies is a recipe for disaster. Even in the US, fiscal policies are relatively unified at the federal level and states are prohibited from backing their own debt the way nation-states (like the US federal government and Eurozone countries) can.

And on that note, look at the USD. It's the strongest fiat currency in the world and the preferred medium of exchange worldwide, even despite all of the outstanding issues with the US economy and the state of the US national debt. Clearly a centralized, fiat currency can be powerful if you don't set it up for failure from day one (as the Euro was).
They still have a noticeable 109% debt-to-GDP ratio, which means quite a bit of debt to service. At crisis peak, their public spending was 66% of GDP (now 40%). At the first hint of recession, they will be in trouble.

You would be forgiven for thinking there are more troubled countries that could be targeted by speculation. Italy has a 130% debt-to-GDP ratio, is still basically in recession, and has 50% public spending to GDP. Spain is approaching 100% debt, 44% public spending, and it looks like it's getting worse. Then there is Portugal, Cyprus and so on. However, if Greece goes in full default, the Euro will likely get battered and all these positions will potentially unravel, including the Irish one.
https://hex.pm/packages?search=json&sort=downloads may contain something for your needs
Could a setup help with this unfortunate incentive situation, wherein independent frontend providers would get a small, fixed fee from the state for each case handled through their systems? They would invariably compete for users on the usability front. And if those fees (oh no, fixed! Where is that sacred free market?) turn out too big it would not be as catastrophic as one may think, because they would not just get filthy rich/reinvest in shady lobbying (like traditional government contractors, e.g. military technology), but would put much of the excess money into advertisement, keeping the bullshit-job flywheel spinning that our postindustrial societies are relying on to keep an acceptable number of people employed.

I see a few potential pitfalls, but it should be doable and cheap. The meta-system would have to be balanced between two failure modes. One would be to allow frontend providers to optimize their revenue by case-inflation, like making their users run to that virtual tax office more often than strictly necessary, e.g. by shoddy implementation of corner cases. The other would be discount providers specializing only on the easy cases, making it unnecessarily hard for more complete providers to make their living.