skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They said the same about the clipper ship, I'm sure at some point in time someone thought that smoke signals were a pretty good idea and that now all would be different.

So yes, we can do all this stuff better, faster. It makes for a huge difference in degree and if that difference is large enough by itself it becomes a qualitative difference.

But I think the mistake is to think that a change like that is enough to significantly decrease or increase our ability to build empires or to destroy them because those forces tend to balance out (assuming both sides have roughly equal access to the technology).

That's why none of the other technological advances from the past made a huge difference either, the 'empire' that was expanding brought their technology with them, it became adapted and then was used against them or they simply regressed.

The only times it worked was when the natives were entirely slaughtered or intermixed and those countries typically ended up declaring independence.

Empire building is a losing business in the longer term, and there is no proof to date that a complete and unobstructed view of the world or instant communication are a key element to empire success (or failure).
4 Reasons to Use Java's Semaphore
that explains it...
That's been around since around 2003 at least : http://www.slideshare.net/Mark_Kilgard/robust-stenciled-shad... see slide 25...
or for half that price online http://www.knotstandard.com/ (yes I work for them)
That and Java not having value types.
In ES5+, the global `undefined` is immutable, so it should be pretty safe unless someone declared a local `undefined` var in an outer scope.
Mathematics and Science for High School Students
`typeof` is useful when the binding may or may not exist at all, this is almost exclusively an issue with global variables which may not be there (toplevel APIs or libraries missing).

If the binding exists at all, you can just check for its value. And parameters always create a binding pretty much by definition.

So no, there is no reason to use `typeof` to check whether a parameter is `undefined`.

If you fear that somebody rebound the global `undefined` for some insane reason, you can use `void 0` instead.
I was always instructed to use typeof when determining if a variable or property is undefined. Some attempts to access an undefined variable will result in an exception being thrown.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27509/detecting-an-undefi...
Software development is mostly not about syntax and programming languages, but domain knowledge and understanding humans. If a non-programmer could really describe what he wants, then you could write a compiler for that text.

But it's not possible yet, as the AI would need to have a human-like intelligence, and that's very far away.
For those who don't know Joanie Lemercier, he is a famous artist that have been working with unusual displays,projections and hollograms for the last 15 years. I think he should be taken very seriously by anybody who is willing to pay for Holus.

493 backers have paid 600$ in average for something they might not expect. If you have a friend that backed that project, at least make him read the article. If he still want to spend money on this so be it.
wow, what a shameless cash grab.

> Order, take a photo, and share the campaign to create change

Hilarious.
Corporate innovation is broken
Question for clarification: the title uses the word "fix", implying that this new program repairs code that was broken. But in reality, it optimizes repetitive algorithms. Is that the correct takeaway?
A part of me hope they vote in a republican again. ISIS gotta go.

That third Bush maybe...?
> But in the Midwest and Northeast, where the electricity grid tends to rely on coal power plants, the damage from emissions ranged back up toward five cents a mile.

I'm very skeptical of this claim. NYC and Upstate NY are known to have some of the cleanest electricity grids in the U.S. See chart on page 2 of this EPA report, for example.

http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/documents/egridzips/eGRID_9th...
Agreed. His statement is based on opinion, nothing objective. I could argue that in languages like C# the coalesce operator '??' has a similar meaning, so it is intuitive for people who know C# concepts.
That's only a serious issue if the binding may not exist at all, which is an other way to say that it's only useful for global variables. A function parameter defines a binding by definition.
How do you avoid damaging the consistency of Python objects then?

I think the only way to do that would be to have a reentrant lock for each object individually. Isn't that potentially a big performance issue?

I think that is the main reason behind this quote from the article:

> Several attempts have been made over the years and failed
to do it without sacrificing single-threaded performance.
This. I used to recommend TextSecure to all my friends, but it didn't interact well with other services, and then IIRC it stopped working with SMSes entirely.
tl;dr: use Babel to get default arguments that are both more readable and more robust, along with a bunch of other JS Harmony improvements, for free.
Currently.

He was indicating that they would be receiving higher resolution images over the next 6 days unless I misunderstood him.
Reverse Engineering the Subway Android App
For the risk you're taking, you'd be better off as an investor. If they fail you get nothing, but if they succeed you'd have equity, not just a product or service.
Bullshit. Using foo = bar || baz is perfectly valid when used judiciously.

foo = bar || baz is perfect when parsing inputs where unset is passed as "" or 0. To no great surprise, HTML forms are one such beast.

The Boolean operators are simply a shorthand for if (!foo) foo = bar -- when you mean if (foo === undefined) foo = bar; then simply write that instead. At least omit the unnecessary braces and white space.

Verbose code is not necessarily more readable. You may be able to code your way around a reader not comprehending JS rules regarding Boolean coercion, but those rules are based on real world inputs which often do not have a special 'undefined' value.
Creepy Cyber Coincidence? Probably Not
80% of revenue and 99.9% of the expenses go to the drivers. So it's quite probable that Uber gets most of the profits.
Interesting. So what would you say is novel/noteworthy about this research?
Check out http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3946/building_quake_li...

"""
What really hurt us was the initial thought of putting a web interface on it. Some things surrounding the game were certainly overly trivialized by us. That's easy to do when you say, "Oh, we're hotshot game developers. This web stuff can't be too hard because so many people do it."

There's a little bit of a humbling lesson there in how much work we did have to do with all the things on browser compatibility and backend database integration and optimization.
"""
Pre 2001 a lot of people would claim that we are also against torture, extrajudicial kidnapping, secret trials, locking people up without trial, mass surveillance, and unprovoked wars. Things change.

Just as between WWII and the cold war people likely claimed "we'll never let stuff like what the Nazi's did happen again!" then the country(s) feel threatened and the gloves come off.
Yes, but in a language like Modula-3 you can have your "well-tuned systems-level program that uses stack, arena, and heap allocation with a good allocator", and still have a GC at your disposal.

Sadly HP/Compaq killed the Olivetti/Digital unit and Modula-3 died, but its ideas can still be applied in modern languages, assuming similar capabilities.
Determinism with fixed point math
> You can unregister here: https://whispersystems.org/textsecure/unregister

Well, _maybe_ you can. I spent several days six months ago trying to unregister, and finally just accepted the fact that TextSecure will never let me go. Oh well.
They just need a powerful lobby - one day depression/anxiety/schizophrenia will be declassified as disorders - just like it happened to homosexuality.
AWS Launches Device Farm, API Gateway for App Developers
Why are Callbacks ugly? I mean that's one of the best things.
It's closer than you think

You are right about humans knowing about domain knowledge, but you don't need human level AI to have computers writing software

Maybe future programmers will be more like spec writers than actual coders
Great work! The opening paragraph is hilarious!

"We've spent decades building America's most valuable industry on top of a seismic powder keg, only to find ourselves outdone by a bunch of Midwestern cotton farmers. How could they erect a more precarious house of cards than Silicon Valley?"

LoL
I don't agree. Replacing all occurrences of default values that use || with a 3 rows long if case would hurt readability.

There are many valid cases where the incoming parameter could be either undefined or null.
In fairness the Atlantis expedition was a very international team.
C++/CX does ARC for C++ for those of us on Windows, but it comes with the cost of making C++ classes into COM ones.
No, this happened in a parallel universe with evil governments. No such thing in our universe.
> tl;dr: use Babel to get default arguments that are both more readable and more robust, along with a bunch of other JS Harmony improvements, for free.

You mean replace perfectly valid javascript with a complicated nodejs pipeline in order to make scripts run in the browser now? hell no.
Couldn't agree more, with this article. IMO, stars belong in the sky and Hollywood. But I haven't seen a better solution.
If || is too ugly use the ternary operator, it's inline and only slightly more verbose. That being said, I think using || is a nice pattern for readability.
Ask HN: Do you use Vagrant or Docker for active development?
I think I understand the use case of Docker for deployment, but does Docker hold its sway at the moment for active development. Data persistence support is not out-of-the-box. Vagrant with its own isolated and shared volume support seems like something that would be very good in active development of software artifacts. What is the view of the HN mass, and what would you recommend?

Apart from these two, are there any others that looks promising?
Transaction Fee Market Develops Amid Surge in Transaction Volume
Show HN: Submit interesting links and share the revenue with the community
Even if this were true, the electric grid has hope: solar, wind & nuke can grow while coal & even someday gas fade.

Gasoline has no hope.
To compare the Internet with a ship or smoke signals requires a level of ignorance and cognitive dissonance that I simply cannot fathom.
> I believe the product to be actually real, and that it will ship to the customers.

I have no doubt that a bunch of people are going to get 4 inclined triangles and a screen. I have some seaweed, which cures cancer, that the backers might be interested in too.
Nothing in ANSI C++ forbids compiler vendors to make their compilers *_ptr<>() aware, but AFAIK none of them take advantage of it.
Thanks! and the project source: http://projects.csail.mit.edu/helium/
#SEOToGo: Hreflang, Phantanda and Blackhat Confessions
They are actively opposing their apps to be published on F-Droid. Instead, they prefer on proprietary services for various (imo bad) reasons>

https://f-droid.org/forums/topic/redphone-and-textsecure/#po...
var skill;

article = skill || 'troll'
Naked pictures or financial info? Users would rather thieves stole the former
Meet Packpin, the Lithuanian startup that aims to simplify tracking packages
The Big Data Trap
I look for more such insightful articles from http://www.codereadability.com/ in the future. /s
The incentive to do that is only if they are extremely short-sited and don't feel that consumer trust is important to their long-term survival.
AUDUSD: Strengthens, Maintains Recovery Tone
The man who cared about your online privacy has died
What I always found "fascinating" about conspiracy theories is how educated, smart people can be convinced by some of them. It's just something that I can't understand.
Not OP, but I would argue that mathematicians and physics folks deserve great tools too.
The thing that is ignored and has to be ignored or you would not have a story, is the near total alignment of the entire West. Economically, militarily and culturally the West is absolutely the dominant force, and that is a good thing.
> The fact that young Americans now realize this isn't indicative of anything

I seriously disagree with that. It's a big shift to go from a highly patriotic new generation to one almost disenfranchised with the whole idea.
Another awful example being the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments which went as late as 1972: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
On Encrypting Magento Extensions
Is this different from wiring 3 relays to a motor and having 3 independent processors try to "work together" to actuate the motor?
It's not just about communicating with your crew, but also your public.

If you don't have a fanbase waiting for your work to come out, it'll be much, much, MUCH harder to achieve a successful launch. I'm very good at launches, and even so, I found that the years of silence really eroded the splash I was able to make with my project when I launched it.

That's why these days I'm making a point to keep on Twittering, blogging, HNing, and so on, even when stuff is months away from release.
In Search of the Longest Subway Ride
He went to CMU?
>My guess is that at some point these companies will pivot to trying to be the backend to a bunch of independents or small shops out there hitting the pavement.

It is already happening. See: Betterment Institutional, Schwab Institutional Intelligent Portfolios, and Motif Advisor
Empire building is about war, pure and simple. Communications lines and information are a tool in the hands of those that wish to build empires and those that wish to bring them down.

But since you're framing the argument in terms of ignorance and such I think I'll bow out here.
Organizational Doxing
it is honest to say that, it's just that americans like to think they are special.
The "whole point" of advertising isn't to remove the voluntary part of trade. It's to improve discoverability and to encourage you to buy. At no point does it compel you to buy.
I strongly suggest looking at udacity's nanodegrees or coursera's certificates.

There are great courses and nanodegrees created by google, facebook, and other employees from big companies where you'll get to build projects and learn best practices.

Udacity recently released an android nanodegree co-created with Google.

https://www.udacity.com/course/android-developer-nanodegree-...

There are great paid and free courses on those platforms that will take you from intro to programming to deeper topics such as Machine Learning, Robotics, etc.
It looks hack.chat is using KaTeX under the hood. We recently added support for environments, but haven't implemented {align} yet. If anyone's interest in helping please see https://github.com/Khan/KaTeX/issues/61.
I have not had time to study this paper in detail, so please take what I say here with a grain of salt.

Dynamic instrumentation is powerful, I think Google is using DynamoRIO heavily. Optimising compilers for DSLs is a trendy topic because

1. We are beginning to understand well how canonically to embed DSLs in general purpose languages, and have to build compilers for languages.

2. DSLs typically work on much more restricted domains than general purpose languages, so optimisation is much easier, and more powerful.

The Pochoir compiler for stencil computations is an example of this. There are many open questions about compilation of DSLs other than optimisation, for example automatic generation of operational and axiomatic semantics of DSLs, and associated tooling. Really interesting research field.

[1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/yuantang/
Walter Bright uses this trick in his D compiler. Memory is not freed, just by the OS.

http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/increasing-compiler-speed-by-over...
The behavior would differ, but it would be the better behaviors for the length of the String.

For large strings, it would work exactly like it did before with fast views. And since the existing code already knew about memory sharing this wouldn't be a new problem for any code.

For small strings, it would now be faster and have smaller memory footprint. Existing programs would be faster and better performing.

I think the main reason this is a bad idea is that String is final. The way to do this properly is with two classes, SmallString and LargeString, and then using hotspot to optimize the program for how they are used. But that is not possible without changing the API.
Build a brain: Can we make consciousness into an engineering problem?
Google could also distribute a differently signed apk to selected users. And there's no way for users to check the signature of an apk (if they didn't have it installed before).

And I certainly trust an open source project much more than a US company.
Similar to what everyone else is saying, I don't get the author's point. I taught myself JavaScript a few years ago, and the first time I came across that || assignment, it made sense. I think many other people would say the same.
I came in here to write pretty much the same thing... the only issue for me tends to be when 0 is allowed. As an interview problem, I will ask someone to write in JavaScript a method that takes a single parameter, that will always return a number or null.. if it's a string that represents a number, convert it, otherwise it should be null.

0 always trips people up in this, or other means of coercion. Other than that one case, I find the shortcut of || to be pretty much invaluable.

This is an example of something you should just learn how it works, rather then assume it's stupid or wrong because you don't know how the environment works. You should have seen how many people went up in arms at LINQ and even Lambda functions in C#. I've seen similar comments about lambda/fat-arrow functions coming into JS.
It's not realistically possible to write a Revlog parser by only using whatever documentation is available; you _will_ have to reference the Hg source code, which will turn your project into "derived work".
It might be. I know I fall into it all too often. When the only thing you can write is "I missed the deadline. Again.", writing a report suddenly becomes a big psychological pain. But of course if you don't communicate, you're digging a deeper hole for yourself, with every missed status e-mail it becomes harder to write the next one (unless you suddenly succeded with everything, that is, but in my experience, when you end up not writing those reports then the problem is usually deeper than missing a date by a day or two).

Since then I learned to force myself to write something, anything, just to keep people in the loop; it makes things easier for everyone, even if it hurts your self-esteem.
Measure and track the accuracy of your mechanical watch with Toolwatch.io
Great quality contact from Philae2014 via ESA_Rosetta last night
> the world's unprecedented amount of peace and stability

... in Syria, Iraq, Libya.
Painfully close but wrong.

Big fish are almost always eaten by small fish. On the other hand, almost all small fish fail. It's the rare exception among small fish that bests a big fish. Stated correctly it sounds unremarkable because it is unremarkable. So much for "Leslie's Law".

His DEC/IBM comparison shows that he somehow stopped reading the tech press around 1990. Intel's decomposed platform ate them all and opened the door to Linux and open source. Intel still dominates servers, but on the client side has been bested by the system on a chip cpu designs licensed by the mobile vendors. The two big client OSs are of course rooted in open source (iOS is from OSX is from NextStep is from Mach/BSD, and of course Android is Linux).

EDIT: Lawtonfogle is absolutely right, so I removed the word "completely" and left "unremarkable". Good point. Also I think most small fish die on their own. Usually because they build the wrong product.
While the American situation is far from perfect and the Statue of Liberty would be a better fit for Switzerland than the US nowadays (I still like that a country's most famous symbol is a "Statue of Liberty"... that brings positive vibes), I much prefer a hegemonial USA over China, Russia or whatever else there might come.
var undefined = "raspberry";

function eatFruit (fruit) {
if (fruit === undefined) {
fruit = "strawberry";
}
...
}

eatFruit("raspberry");
Not for sale, not available... wonder where this $5 price is coming from?
Caspar Bowden, UK privacy pioneer, mourned by tech industry
> If you are a "skilled" person of foreign nationality would you rather go to the US or China if you would have an option ?

Do you know if China is evolving culturally? The reason I wouldn't want to live in a place like China or Russia is that people there are not socially developed. By that I mean, people there are not pleasant and rudeness is the norm. Hopefully, China will be different in a decade or so.
I definitely agree with your assessment. I have considered trying out a bunch of new things -- I've never really done anything not related to computers.
Show HN: PrettyPrintGmail, Chrome Extension to clean up printing for emails
Report: Successful Equity Crowdfunding Campaigns in Nordic Countries
Also, the browser can opt into HTTPS by using a plugin such as HTTPS Everywhere.
First they came for the factory workers, and I did not speak out -
Because I was not a factory worker.

Then they came for the vehicle drivers, and I did not speak out -
Because I was not a vehicle driver.

Then they can for the accountants, and I did not speak out -
Because I was not a accountants.

Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.
production cost maybe? But yea, I wonder too. Anyways, it would be really nice for mining strange algorithms, especially if at that "price"
It's called "defined-or" if you want to search for its documentation. I really miss it in other languages.
I don't agree either.

The first part of the argumentation is indeed based on the author's feelings. The second part I don't think is an issue for most real world use-cases (Objects, Strings and, to a lesser extent, Numbers).

On the underscore (_.defaults) recommendation: let's set our goals straight [1].
Aim for a good level of JavaScript understanding. Instead of library knowledge to make up for the lack of the former.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4anAwXYqLG8
I upvoted because I agree with you. I think the long view -- and I've held this view ever since the IT outsourcing trend started and I was asked to cultivate teams in India, Brazil, China & Mexico to replace Americans & Europeans -- is that globalization the rising tide that raises all boats. And, as painful as it sometimes is, it's actually happening. There have been hugely detrimental repercussions: mass surveillance, one-sided treaties & trade embargoes/tariffs, political & military meddling, and lots of death. But, there is no beating around the fact that technology, global manufacturing, and access to digital information & education has swiftly improved the global economy and overall peace & stability within & between many countries. There are plenty of counterpoints, but from the broadest possible perspective, I think it's hard to disagree with your point.
Is there any way that cookie clicker could have been farming CPU cycles? I remember playing it and thinking that it was consuming an awful lot of resources after a while...
> The only practical consideration raised is the falsy types can trip you up but that is easily negated.

You mean adding an if block to check for the zero and blank string?
I'm pretty sure there's either a Paul Graham or Joel Spolsky essay on the subject, but basically: What's the difference between a sufficiently complete and formalised specification, and a high-level programming language?