skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>But sometimes the connection between "beautiful art project" and "practical tools" is totally unexpected. We often invest time in projects that seem simply like "beautiful art", and then much later stumble upon something practical.

That's like saying that we should randomly start drilling holes in the ground because sometimes we will strike oil.

people arguing for it usually ignore the silent evidence of research that lead nowhere and also, more importantly, the potential research accomplishments those people could have acheived if guided to work on different problems.
I didn't mean to stretch it, you get the message, do not write an OS in SQL nor a DB in bash, but don't tie yourself to a technology too much either.
I love it when companies make software that I use on my mobile phone and it syncs with a desktop application as well. As a web developer I appreciate web applications but the experience is almost always better in a native application (at least I've found very few exceptions).

So I'm happy companies like this still provide desktop applications. It would be great if it were more of a trend but I'm not sure that it is yet. If there were better frameworks to use that would allow code reuse across all platforms it would certainly make this easier.
Styling Visited Links with SVG
I think the normal summary would be "the new version of our tool has streamlined numerous features, allowing you to spend less time using our app; testing already reports people spend 30% less time"; the implication, though, left out of the summary, is "and accomplish the same things" (which is why it is only summarized as the exact opposite, but the metric, I agree, is not the exact opposite).
> Considering that a Quad-core + GPU Core i7 Haswell has 1.4e9 transistors inside, even given a really small probability of one of them failing, wouldn't this be catastrophic?

Yes, generally speaking it would be. Depending on where it is inside the chip.

> Wouldn't a single transistor failing mean the whole chip stops working? Or are there protections built-in so only performance is lost over time?

Not necessarily. It might be somewhere that never or rarely gets used, in which case the failure won't make the chip stop working. It might mean that you start seeing wrong values on a particular cache line, or that your branch prediction gets worse (if it's in the branch predictor) or that your floating point math doesn't work quite right anymore.

But most of the failures are either manufacturing errors meaning that the chip NEVER works right, or they're "infant mortality" meaning that the chip dies very soon after it's packaged up and tested. So if you test long enough, you can prevent this kind of problem from making it to customers.

Once the chip is verified to work at all, and it makes it through the infant mortality period, the lifetime is actually quite good. There are a few reasons:

1. there are no moving parts so traditional fatigue doesn't play a role

2. all "parts" (transisotrs) are encased in multiple layers of silicon dioxide so that you can lay the metal layers down

3. the whole silicon die is encased yet again in another package which protects the die from the atmosphere

4. even if it was exposed to the atmosphere, and the raw silicon oxidized, it would make silicon dioxide, which is a protective insulator

5. there is a degradation curve for the transistors, but the manufacturers generally don't push up against the limits too hard because it's fairly easy and cheap to underclock and the customer doesn't really know what they're missing

6. since most people don't stress their computers too egregiously this merely slows down the slide down the degradation curve as it's largely governed by temperature, and temperature is generated by a) higher voltage required for higher clock speed and b) more utilization of the CPU

Once you add all these up you're left with a system that's very, very robust. The failure rates are serious but only measured over decades. If you tried to keep a thousand modern CPUs running very hot for decades you'd be sorely disappointed in the failure rate. But for the few years that people use a computer and the relative low load that they place on them (as personal computers) they never have a big enough sample space to see failures. Hard drives and RAM fail far sooner, at least until SSDs start to mature.
I used to struggle to answer this when talking to Angular folks about React. Then I came across a situation where I needed to recursively build a DOM tree based on complicated calculations on a per-node basis and also calculated values at the top level. If I'd been doing it with ng-repeat, the logic would be split confusingly (and unnecessarily) between the template and the controller, and I'd need to pass down any information from the top-level ancestor manually.

In React, I just create a renderNode method that's called by render at the top level, and renderNode on non-terminal nodes returns <div>{children}</div> where children is a map whose mapping function returns this.renderNode. The entire algorithm is grokkable at a single glance, and there's no need to create Directives to add any fancy features or special cases in the future. No need to read pages of documentation about ng-repeat and its intricacies; it's all just Javascript.

Yes, Angular "just works." But React "just works" the first time you try it.
Related: I need to confirm the trend held, but as of a year or two ago, US FAA RITA data showed peak aviation fuel in 2000. Total departures and passenger miles have been higher since, but due to smaller and more fully loaded aircraft.

By 2010- 2012 or so, actual fuel use was ~50% of year 2000 forecast estimates.
As with all speculations about the roman empire, it's complicated and the money really just moved east, while the west just turned into the catholic church and really struggled maintaining order for a few centuries.

Was it the volcanoes? Or maybe the barbarians? Maybe the communist-like christians? Maybe the corporation-like regions?

Talking about the fall of the roman empire is like talking about the rise of the PC: inevitable, and a mind-boggling number of variables were involved with the particulars.
Australian Government agencies negotiating with “notorious” surveillance company
Well, "But, ISIS!" is not a real argument, that should be clear.

Backdoors make the situation worse, not better. We'll still have ISIS, we'll be even less secure, and we'll have lost whatever is left of our right to privacy.

Pretty much a lose-lose for everyone involved (except maybe ISIS).

The answer to "But, ISIS!" is not backdoors, it's foreign policy.
the F-35 could use its low-observable phased array radar to detect the Su-35 from twice the distance of the latter without triggering the enemy's RWR, fire off an AIM-120 and turn around before the Su-35 detected it

Right, when people complain about the F-35, for all its shortcomings, they look at it as though it should be a "faster horse" (it's an apocryphal anecdote but makes a good point) rather than a whole new weapons platform.

The USAF clearly wants something that doesn't engage in close combat, so it's about superior sensors and long range/precision air-to-air and air-to-ground weaponry. I think the biggest shortfall of the F-35 though is its close air support capabilities. The USAF just want to have the target marked by ground forces and for the F-35 to drop small precision munitions on the area, but a big part of CAS is psychological - when you hear that 30mm cannon burp and the A-10's engines loitering in the background, you feel safe while your enemy is terrified. Plus a loitering A-10 is more useful than an F-35 with an ephemeral presence.

Solution: give the Army the ability to provide CAS so they can purchase the A-10's from the USAF. The USAF can play with their fancy spaceships while the Army can have its flying gun.
PlayStation TV downgraded?
Sleeping is considered harmful. I've stopped sleeping.
Looks great vlad. It is true, this was the first known visual swagger editor and was a very helpful project (also open sourced). The Apigee folks went on to build the current version, a separate effort from the swagger-ui.
Ha, I guess they can join the team of the tech companies and other government agencies around the world doing the same. All of which is going to be increasingly available to the public.

The naked babies uploaded by their parents and parents friends today will be very familiar with the way the world will be, for it will all they would have known on some personal level beyond the grandparents of that time ranting on how good things used to be and wanting to allocate resources for destruction of others for such banal causes, despite the hypocrisies as their robot aids wipe the slobber from their mouths…
vulcan is not for api management and beside that quality > quantity

What do you mean ? With vulcand you can implement your own middleware similar to kong. Also, it is written in go and you can use all existing go libraries.

Also, how can you gracefully reload kong if you need to add/remove/change a plugin ? With vulcand you just replace the binary, and send an USR2 signal to the running process. It will fork, wait for all connections to drain, and remove the old process

For deployment, again, you need to sync all lua files, with vulcand you just ship a compiled binary.

Kong doesn't have a notion of servers for each API, you need to forward requests to a haproxy or another load balancer for this. Also, I can see that backends are added by their DNS hostname. In order to achieve HA (backend redundancy) is there any way you can do it, assuming that nginx is caching the upstream dns values ?

About performance, I can see you are advertising about 1000 r/s using kong, and you need 3 machines for this (kong, cassandra, haproxy). I benchmarked vulcand and obtained about 12000 r/s on a more modest hardware.
Interesting to note that Jeff Bezos is an investor in Mashape: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mashape
Conversion Optimization – The Vulcan Way
That looks good. Might work exceptionally well for my needs. I want to have a PyPI mirror in an environment that doesn't have public internet access.

Running devpi in another environment and syncing the resulting repository should allow me to achieve what I want.
Then I wouldn't put much hope in the world of gaming coming up with a GUI solution, then. From what I understand, Scaleform is considered best in breed for cross-platform GUIs in the gaming world.
One anecdote from a power user is rather uncompelling.
Do I understand this correctly? It only mirrors the packages that are requested from it? So I won't need to download 100GB+ of packages that I am not interested in?
Ubuntu – I Am Because We Are
Show HN: Bubblin – Next-generation books
I read the entire source of angular and enjoyed doing so. If I work with a react-based stack I'll probably do the same and enjoy that too.

But: My attempts to figure out a complete react stack resulted in me discovering that the react tutorial example is awful, then realising that's because the way I think demands a fluxish thing, then finding redux made sense but assumed I already knew flux, then discovering the billion other fluxish things and developing a headache.

So I clearly don't know what I'm talking about with react yet. If you have any suggestions for how to resolve the above headache I still want to try - hence my request for details, I wanted to understand why you liked React.
Education Technology – How to choose the best devices for your school classroom
Our energy metabolism isn't that mysterious. Like, we know how various macro nutrients are broken down into constituents and the pathways that are then used to convert them into energy that is available to cells.

The problem with the food energy hypothesis as a path to weight loss is that it is a lot of work to accurately count and limit calories, and that it is difficult to accurately estimate calorie consumption (a good way is to count calories for a long time and calculate consumption based on the corresponding change in weight). Once there is an accurate estimate of consumption, sustaining intake below that level will result in weight loss.
Forget about old mechanical hard drives. I installed one of these in an Amiga 2000 a couple of weeks ago: http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=SCSI2SD. It lets me use an SD card as a HD. It's not the fastest but works perfectly even with my really ancient SCSI controller. It's also cheaper than finding an IDE controller for these machines or a SCSI to IDE adapter.
I installed some 3.1 ROMS a few days ago, now I just need a 68030 or 040 card for it :]
FPM is written as an in-house solution only. It's not intended to be used for making packages for official distro repositories for third-party users to pick up, and they suggest you use the distro-specified methods for those.
I was extremely frustrated with my machine learning class because of this. The notation used was hazy. Also if you ask me, probability theory should just be squashed and the ideas reformulated with new more consistent syntax / symbols, because the entire thing is so damn inconsistent and disorganized at present.
> If there were better frameworks to use that would allow code reuse across all platforms it would certainly make this easier.

I feel that this is exactly what web applications try to solve in the first place.
...No need to be insulting and condescending. I understand that you were making a joke. But the fact is, your joke example was poorly chosen.
Yes, hard to say. That's why I said, "I believe"...gut feeling, no evidence either way.
> But my god the cognitive load involved in swimming through all of the "this library literally saves THE WORLD" marketing fluff is intense.

As far as I can tell, this isn't a JavaScript problem -- it's a general problem, and it comes from the fact that creating specific & modest solutions to day-to-day problems often seems to be a worse way to advance your career than creating a tool or library that becomes part of How We Do Things Now™.
Ivan said something in the aforementioned video to the effect of "Last year, Intel's dividend was as much as ARM Holding's entire revenue."
spain yusss
My understanding was that forgoing JSX would make the situation worse by falling back to imperatively manipulating the (virtual) DOM within your component. If there is a way to have an external, declarative HTML document using React I would be very interested.
Have the secret backdoor keys for Dual EC DRBG leaked yet? Nuclear launch codes and authenticators?

Analogies are useful but don't get carried away, especially when talking about something as broad as "the government" (as if it were one singular thing). The fact that a BLM federal officer lost his firearm doesn't instantly mean that all of our Tomahawk cruise missiles are next to be stolen.
So, you're saying you've become the guy with the hat. :-)
Can you get the weird go asm / ir rep of go from it?
It makes sense as short buzzwordy marketing text. If you scroll down further there is a link to the whitepaper which describes it in great detail.

"A peer-to-peer network, enabling different parties to jointly store and run computations
on data while keeping the data completely private. Enigma’s computational
model is based on a highly optimized version of secure multi-party computation,
guaranteed by a verifiable secret-sharing scheme. For storage, we use a modified distributed hashtable for holding secret-shared data. An external blockchain
is utilized as the controller of the network, manages access control, identities and
serves as a tamper-proof log of events. Security deposits and fees incentivize operation,
correctness and fairness of the system. Similar to Bitcoin, Enigma removes
the need for a trusted third party, enabling autonomous control of personal data."

http://enigma.media.mit.edu/enigma_full.pdf
Ok, here goes. You are going to be asked to close your eyes and think again, but this time it will be pleasant. Try to imagine a government that is freely elected by the population, and is totally funded by itself. This government is totally efficient, because all that it does is what governments do best; spend money.

To entice thought, and heighten your curiosity, we will now briefly describe the Free Human Societies plan for the economy, and our governments. In the free human society, government’s primary roll will be to make a plan for the future of humanity, and then fund it. Elected officials will create budgets which provide equally and fairly for the entire world’s population. Government will not be limited to what they can spend, because there will be enough currency available to fund any project.

It is time to introduce another new term. The Free Human Government (FHG) is the Government of The Free Human Society. It will be formed to replace all existing governments. Exactly how we will do this peacefully is detailed in this publication. The Elected Officials of The Free Human Government (FHG) would swear to protect and defend the Universal Constitution of Humanity, which guarantees equal Freedom for all, and peace forever. This means that every elected official in The Free Human Government (FHG) will be responsible for equally serving the best interest of every living human beings. Elected Officials in the Free Human Government will be the highest paid people, and will be held in the highest of regard of all people in the Free Human Society. These independent patriots of an Equalistic Society must put aside their personal ideals in order to protect humanity forever.
I've /never/ seen -O3 used in the wild (nor -O0 actually). I've essentially only seen -O2 and -Os actually being used in-production. Perhaps that has just been luck of the draw…
In simple terms of time and money, yes. But in terms of not producing mountains of asphalt, especially.

It's merely hot and dusty work, it doesn't stink at all.
I liked the little summary at the end:

> So in all it took 1.5 years to learn Coq well enough and to find the right abstraction, and 2 weeks to do the actual work.

That matches what other people have told me about Coq: the learning curve can be brutal, but you can be surprisingly productive once you get over it. (To be fair, this sort of problem also feels like a really good fit for Coq—proving theorems in more developed sub-field of mathematics is much harder.)

A pretty cool project all around!
I use Olai[1] for my blogs — jjude.com & tech.jjude.com. Of course I would use it, since I developed it :-)

[1]: http://olai.in
Network security is not NSA's job. Nor is information security. Communications security is, but only for "national security information" (i.e. classified) and military communications.

Defense against "cyber attack" isn't even NSA's job, and where NSA participates in such endeavors that's on .mil, not .gov

DHS does have responsibility for cyber security on .gov however. But what is DHS supposed to do if OPM decides to throw open the keys to the kingdom to any random "authenticated" contractor handling background checks?

P.S. NSA might somehow have caught this despite everything I mentioned if they were engaged in better "monitoring operations" on other government networks and international communications relays... is that really what you want?
Nice concept, but is $9.99 per letter a good value?

Also, some basic message templates to choose from would be helpful, like "Barking dog", "Please mow your grass", etc then just let the user edit/tweak the rest.
Where are all you hackers? Don't you recognize genius when it right it front of your face? Read this then let's have an intelligent debate.
I can confirm that it currently just "drops in" when linked against nginx. This initially took a few small patches, but these have been merged into LibreSSL mainline.

I've been testing this against each release for some time and I'm very happy with it.
Finally, App Store Ratings Prompts That Don't Suck
I do not agree at all. Mutilated? Explain how. Your hubris in assuming that everyone agrees with you is rather irritating.
WWII wasn't possible without the railroads because the interstate highways hadn't been built yet. They are now, and as a result our rail network has become useless for personnel and troop transport. Sure, we can press our amazing freight network into service for logistics, but there's no reason to prop up Amtrak to keep those skills and infrastructure around, since the freight carriers show no signs of being in danger of extinction anytime soon.

But that's freight. If there's really a situation where we need to move vast numbers of /people/ around the country, the few dozen passenger consists that Amtrak owns or leases are just not gonna do the job. It would need to be the highways (probably pressing transit and school buses into service) or nothing.

It's possible that the NE corridor services could be helpful in an emergency, but for the vast majority of the country, the idea that Amtrak could be pressed into service as anything other than a minor sideline during a major evacuation or emergency is a just a weird fantasy.
Why? I'm amazed people expect a light and airy, responsive, material designed enterprise control panel that is redesigned yearly. These are backend tools. The UI works and was (1) not meant to be sexy and (2) not meant to push sales.

AWS is in a race to the bottom, cutting prices all the time. Hiring 50 UX devs to rewrite their web interfaces doesn't comport with Jeff's lean vision.
This is a more general declarative vs imperative question so if you search for "declarative programming", you should find lots of examples. But here is one, taken from Bret Victor[0]:

Consider a classic drawing API:

// stem
fill('green')
rect(146, 60, 8, 200)

// flower
fill('red')
circle(120, 30, 50)

// leaves
ellipse(173, 120, 40, 20)
ellipse(123, 130, 40, 20)

Now, imagine we first wrote the code for stem and leaves, than later added the code for the flower (in the reference, copied it from elsewhere). The code has a bug in it - the leaves are red. This is just one example: once you have a "hidden" state, you have to manage it. You always have to be aware of the effects that every line makes on the state and how the state affects the other lines. A "React"-like (simply declarative) API would look more like:

stem = filled('green', rect(146, 60, 8, 200))
flower = filled('red', circle(120, 30, 50))
leaves = [
filled('green', ellipse(173, 120, 40, 20))
filled('green', ellipse(123, 130, 40, 20))
]
plant = [stem, flower].concat(leaves)
...
draw(plant)

The code is now referentially transparent, I could replace uses of variables by their values and nothing would change, since the functions have no effects. The effects are pushed to the edge of the code, in this case the call to draw which actually performs the drawing, or when React updates the DOM with the results obtained from a render method.

http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming
I do plan to continue to use what works for me. I also plan to experiment with React. I'm just pushing back a bit on the suggestion that Angular is not a viable framework in its own right.

Regarding services vs. events, I guess that's down to personal preference. I find a singleton service holding shared state much easier to reason about and maintain than I do events (for certain things, like shared client side session state...I certainly do use events when appropriate).

Regarding "doing things your own way", I guess that's a personal preference as well. Personally I like to nail down a few common implementation patterns that get the job done and then repeatedly use those and save my focus for the business problem at hand. I'm fine with the framework strongly suggesting or even requiring those implementation patterns as long as they work and aren't overly cumbersome.
> Most of the Wikipedia articles on technical subjects, and especially on mathematical topics, are terrible as introductory exposition.

Yet they are trivial(and often more helpful) as compared to the arcane material in a math text.