skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just read this article for the first time. And even though it raised some interesting points that I completely agree with, he builds his argument based on some inaccuracies. Most importantly, his writing gives the impression that autoconf was written by some dot-com wunderkinder.

Autoconf's wikipedia page says it first appeared in 1991, very likely to solve configure problems of the mid-to-late 1980s. That's as far from dot-com as you can get.

He also bashes the m4 macro language. I have never learnt the language but it's possible the obscurity of the langauge is due to not a lot of people spending time to learn it. And should they? I can't say for sure, but I do know the motivation for why m4 was created. It was meant to be a feature-rich and consistent alternative to the C preprocessor which is full of warts and is not turing complete (which m4 is). There are C programs out there written without a single line of '#' magic, using m4 preprocessor instead. You could say m4 syntax ugly, but you cannot easily defend that there is no need for a turing complete, preferably general purpose, macro language. C++ templates try to provide another alternative, and unsurprisingly, are known to be one of the syntactically complex aspects of the language.

And today we don't have Cray and DEC and all those obscure architectures, but we do have ARM, and 32/64, and GPUs, and so on. So the architecture proliferation doesn't look like dying anytime soon. And we have the autoconf/configure alternative LLVM, very loosely speaking (an attempt to let one source code work with multiple architectures), which is by many standards an order of magnitude more complex than the former.

Just trying to put things in perspective.
Big Data vs. Bad Data; a $ 3 Trillion Opportunity
Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 Published as ISO/IEC Standard 26300:2015
I thought 10. was fun, couldn't get under 35 characters though:

([bcdfghjklm]).(...)*\1
This doesn't really bother me because you can use Google Authenticator-style TOTP codes instead, which are free, and I don't expect Fastmail to run their own SMS infrastructure, so they presumably have to pay someone. It would be nice not to have to manually append the code to your password though, as the set-up page suggests, because this would mess up password managers. Why not detect when someone's logging in with 2-factor authentication and present an additional panel for the verification code, like most websites do?

Also agreed that it's not 'true' 2-factor authentication if you can get product support or log in with only a master password. That opens up a lot of social engineering attacks. But then, true 2-factor authentication is also a support nightmare when people lose their passwords, so I'm sympathetic, but it doesn't change the fact it's not ideal.
Have you ever told this to your client?
The term "emergency legislation" always makes me nervous. Laws are the nation's source code; precise wide-scoped constraints that need careful design. I'm happy this legal equivalent of technical debt is being combated, but how did this happen in the first place? Who decides a piece of legislation must be "fast-tracked"?
Her App – The Lesbian App
Every 3-4 hours just go outside and walk around for ~20min.
Show HN: Fork of Screenly (Raspberry Pi digital sign) adding basic auth
So the OS is EOL. In that case why should 3rd party software go out its way to support it?
CERN had a similar problem too, and the only solution was just to throw away a lot of their data. Do you expect this might happen with SKA, or is the hope that they can capture everything for later processing?
It depends. Classes can greatly help the understanding of a map. It ia much easier to recognise and identify few classes than it is to interpret a vast continuous scale. But really, it totally depends on your data and intentions.
Took me an embarrassingly long time to figure this out. The key issue that I've latched on to is that they've lost 99 - 98 = 1% of their water content, which is false.
> The government has guns and is allowed to use them.
What have you done to measure your productivity?

I used to do something similar to you - 12 hours coding every day, with a couple of hours of Counterstrike, for about 3 years. I thought I was being very productive. But then I started to measure my effectiveness (purely out of interest rather than any belief I wasn't working well) - I measured my billable hours, lines of code, commits, issues fixed, etc. Over the course of about 3 months I found that I did less work when I was in front of the screen for 12 hours compared to 8 hours. Spending more time in front of my computer reduced my effectiveness. I put the reasons down to the fact I could do exercise, sleep better, have a social life, etc - by being healthier I work better. That said, my Counterstrike skills completely disappeared, so there were downsides.

My suggestion would be to take a few hours to build something that tracks how well you work, and then vary the hours you put in for a while. See what happens.

Regarding your eyes, try to make your screen brightness match the ambient level of light in your environment, sit at a distance where you don't need to actively focus (use glasses if necessary), and pick a theme for your IDE that's quite dark. The less work your eyes have to do the better.
Yes definitely, from the page, without looking the video it's hard to tell what is this about at all? Why would I sign up?
Securely stream video/audio in iOS,Safari and MAC OS
Look at Singularity project from Microsoft.

It is, from bird's eye view, an operating system with only one process, in managed (as "with garbage collection") language like C#.
Yeah, it's terribly thought out. I wouldn't mind if there was a link to dismiss it that sets a cookie so it doesn't appear again.
And now that we have HTML5 and CSS3 the technology for writing web pages with a text editor is better and simpler; many techniques and features have transitioned from impossible to easy or from convoluted hacks to straightforward.
The two pillars of current web page overengineering are generating pages from server-side templates and preprocessors (not only automating cruft production but hiding horrible HTML and CSS code from users) and Javascript abuse.
It's due to the perceived wisdom that every car suddenly becomes a lemon after hitting 100k miles. The "low social status" attributed to driving an older car is also at play.

Here in Europe, it's not uncommon to see cars in good shape which have over 400k miles on the clock. If you think about it, a European or Japanese mid 90's car with no rust and a rebuilt engine will give you more trouble-free miles, for a fraction of the money.
Bernoulli: Exposition of a New Theory on the Measurement of Risk (1738) [pdf]
> and the undersea cables (more inhospitable than the remote desert) are far, far higher bandwidth

Terrestrial cables are likely harder to lay: you have to worry about land access—national parks, native title, private land—and the W.A. outback is an extremely challenging environment to work in.

Getting dedicated DWDM fibre to Murchinson is a big project unto itself.
Follow 20 20 20 rule

After every 20 mins look at a point that is atleast 20 feet away from you for atleast 20 seconds for your eyes.
Can't help but feel we are incredibly lucky to have a free press in the UK. A free (and very aggressive) press means that snooped-upon data about MPs themselves will become valuable enough, and considered public interest enough, that it'll get purchased and published, which in turn motivates MPs to vote against its collection in the first place.
I honestly don't get that reddit rant. What's his point?
Welcome to 2015, where Push Notifications are a feature and not default anymore.
Have you dealt with mitigating Asymmetric partitions in Raft? http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-857.pdf shows that a single defective node has the potential to entirely render a Raft cluster useless, specifically in the case of asymmetric partitions:

> The mobile devices will often be disconnected from the majority of other devices, thus running election after election without being able to gain enough votes. When these devices rejoin the network, they will force a new election as their term will be much higher than the leader. This leads to frequently disconnected devices becoming the leader when reattached to the network, thus causing regular unavailability of the system when they leave again.

> [...]

> It is also interesting to consider the impact of a single node being behind an asymmetric partition [...] This node will repeatedly re-run elections as it will not be able to receive incoming messages, each RequestVotes will have a higher term than the last, forcing the leader to step down.

Specifically, they required to add client request caches, exposing serial transaction IDs in every single record and log entry, specific timeouts and measures for livelock bugs this introduced, which include replacing an entry by a noop value to be replicated on some read-only operation done at a later time. On top of this, these modifications may end up reducing the serializability constructs to bring it closer to what a Master-Follower replication may give in a DB -- i.e. it doesn't guarantee one true serializable sequence of commits anymore, but only that the state replication will be consistent across all nodes
You sound exactly like me - same age, same skill set, same people telling you to goto college.

I prefer a full time steady job (and have one) but if your happy with contract work - great!

Every programmer needs to continue to expand they're knowledge - it's a constant learning process. For the longest time I relied soly on systems administration and PHP - I've expanded into Objective C and AngularJS most recently - trying to teach myself React now as JS frameworks seam to be the "wave of the future"

An example I always give and especially remind my godson who's 16:

My wife is a very bright person - went to a private school for high school, full ride. She then went to a great college, full ride also graduated with a 3.9 and magna cum laude in Phycology. Wanna know the job she held after she graduated from college and for 9 years after that? Secretary.

That's not to put my wife down; it's to explain that regardless of your education, it's all about your drive and motivation. Some people goto college and don't do much with it. Some of us didn't goto college; work our asses off and succeed anyways (I make more then both my brother and sister who both went to college and got they're MBA's)

Work hard; focus on your goal and don't worry about the degree.

(my wife is now back in school for dental hygiene - still with a 3.9 gpa)
Can you point one which wasn't downvoted to oblivion? This one is pretty bad example to give, when you're trying to convince people that "thousands" were of this opinion. I really recommend reading comments in that thread.
It was a result of the European Court of Justice in April 2014 ruling against previous legislation.

The usual reasons were given: ISIS, pedophilia, Syria, general terrorism.
Stowaways and Crimes Aboard a Scofflaw Ship
Well this was unexpected.
That document has been around since March of last year; it's not a terribly recent thing. See also:
https://www.joyent.com/blog/best-practices-for-error-handlin...
Does that mean they preempt the network request to the div's contents completely, they only hide the div via css/js, or both?
Looks very good.

For the size legend, the defaults are a bit odd. You should almost always be using d3.scale.sqrt() as you're comparing area, also zero in the domain should usually map to zero on the range.

I made a similar legend for circle areas, but they are stacked within each other. http://bl.ocks.org/aubergene/4723857
I agree that many politicians wouldn't care about privacy unless they themselves were threatened, but I also think David Davis and Tom Watson genuinely care about everyone's right to privacy as an ethical matter.

They're https://twitter.com/daviddavismp and https://twitter.com/tom_watson on Twitter and well worth following.
The residents forced to pay £14,000 before their homes are torn down
CLOUD-NATIVE DEVELOPMENT ON HEROKU
If one were to take a look in the long run, what does it mean to the software industry as a whole that bugs are being exploited by script kiddies to mess around, protesters who want to block access in order to raise awareness, criminals that want to steal money or trade illegal content, police that want to catch criminals, secret police that want to keep track of everything a population does, spies that want to keep track of everyone, and military that simply want to break things and take down the bad guys. Each and everyone depends on the same software bugs being unpatched and kept a secret.
I would much prefer that the press focussed on bills being proposed and those in the initial stages of the process, rather than pretend to be apoplectic when terrible legislation gets royal assent (i.e. too late).

We absolutely need to be more worried and indignant over legislation in the very initial stages, regardless of the risk of 'crying wolf'.
"ROMULUS (“Réseau Opérationnel MULtiservice à Usage Spatial")" Nice reference.
You still have widths expressed in pixels which still limits the chance of your text being readable on some smaller devices. At least I can report that your page is fully readable using Safari on iPhones in the "reader mode" (which avoids all the original formatting of the page).
That is a lot of hyperbole about a technology whose functionality isn't even explained. Does anyone on HN know what "digital displacement" actually is?
Singularity has tons of processes called SIPs and they communicate with each other.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/
It isn't that I do want to go back, its that I'm trying to determine if the advice of my grandfather (and a few other people) is something I should follow.

I don't really see what I will gain from it either, but like I said I've never had a computer science course so I'm not sure if I'm missing out.
Thanks for the feedback. I didn't want to sway the question with too many of my own opinions but I have been feeling the same way.

The biggest hurdle I've faced is that of proving my worth to others. Have you faced similar issues?
"Pushing glass" to make a 16" mirror would probably take considerable effort as well as time. I gather it's quite physical.

I've had some 5 inch blanks for a couple of decades with the intention to have a bash, just to see if I could get within 1/4 wavelength. I suspect I'll never have the time, or patience/skill with testing it.

I built a 9 inch Newtonian using bought mirrors and focuser, and plywood etc for everything else. It would be one step cooler to grind the mirrors too.
Carburetors are still prevalent on a lot of other small engines - think lawn mowers, tractors, snow-blowers, chainsaws, etc.
Buffer exploits are possible even in bounds-checked languages. Bounds that are checked are allocation bounds, not the logical bounds, which can still be misused on be incorrectly programmed. Some categories of bugs can be eliminated, making everything safe just by selecting any language is not actually possible.

There's no silver bullet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
Incredible that the age we live in, we section off large swaths of land just so we can read radio waves from planets so distant we will likely never visit them.

We're not looking for places to visit. The reason we do space science (and lots of other fields of science) is that the more fundamental knowledge we have about the universe, the closer we can get to understanding how the universe is the way it is, and that makes it more likely that we'll be able to solve problems we have here on Earth.

Ignoring the fundamentals, the desire to do astronomy has lead to more than a few useful inventions. Figuring out how the sun works is the basis for our research in to fusion, which could lead to solving humanity's energy problems forever. The charge-coupled device in every camera in every smartphone was originally developed for astronomy. GPS only works because we can use satellites to track deep space objects. Aperture synthesis in MRI scanners (combining several images in to one image the size of all the cameras combined) came from combining the results from telescopes together.

A big field in Australia is a tiny price to pay for what the SKA could come up with.
My claim is that there is a line between free speech and harassment that some will attempt to blur by claiming that prohibition of the latter precludes the former.

To clarify, are you are suggesting that some people are harassed more easily than others, or lie about being harassed? I don't believe that happens very often.

> And if free speech doesn't include the right to say things that other people disagree with then it's meaningless.

It's not about disagreement. I find it very hard to believe that people are making false claims of harassment because they simply disagree with others.
> most minor-but-with-small-damages crashes are reported to insurance companies, but not to the police.

I'm not sure if it's the same way in America, but in South Africa insurance companies will at least ping the police for information if you make a claim - so drivers generally always get them involved if they plan to claim.

The reason why that wouldn't work here is because there are a few hidden costs if you make a claim: people frequently fix small bumps out of their own pockets. This means that not even insurance companies have decent stats on the type of accidents that Google is talking about.

Could be similar in America.
Harvard-Singapore team unveil potential Parkinson's cure
An explanation is one Google search away:

http://www.artemisip.com/our-technology
He's an overview what he cares about: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/10162/david_davis/haltempri...

Typical Tory with a few strong opinions in some areas.
Politicians used to kill each other (legally even) over politics. Just bullying and abusing each other is progress.
They are electronically controlling valves in a hydraulic pump to switch cylinders into and out of service.

There is an animation and a good description here:

http://www.artemisip.com/our-technology
Google blames careless humans after first driverless car injury
Bootstrap Pricing Table with Column Layout
This has been my biggest pain point with Promises, I have spent hours trying to debug an issue only to find out I hadn't used an error handler in a Promise somewhere and an error was being thrown. It is so frustrating.

I know some Promise libraries have an option to report unhandled errors which makes life a lot easier but there really should be something natively too.
The compiler isn't the issue here, the runtime is, and runtimes inherently have to be written in unsafe code because the underlying hardware architecture and operating system APIs are themselves unsafe. (With the exception of some very obscure and obsolete hardware from the 70s and 80s.)
Ask HN: Why Does Most Forum Software Have Flat Commenting?
It seems like a lot of forum platforms make their commenting flat making it really hard to discern what is going on.

Why aren't there more packages where the comments/replies stagger like Reddit or HN?
Were we talking about harassment laws?

I thought we were talking about a much wider definition of harassment, wider even than reddit policies - one which might include /r/coontown (and perhaps also /r/politics).
I guess the cabs want customers that don't give them problems and use appearance as a proxy for that in the absence of other information. With rider ratings I guess that's better info than appearance. I chatted to one Uber driver who said he worked for another cab company before and had a problem with iffy customers just running away at the end rather than not paying which also is not an issue with Uber.
Looks like David Davis only made his first tweet 2 hours ago but is already a verified account.

I've been impressed how both of these MPs have defied their own parties to make a stand.
I think this is the most significant point. Filler material doesn't work anymore. I can and will watch reruns of old content rather than unexciting new content or filler stuff like commentary.

I will gladly pay a premium for someone to present me good content in an easily consumable manner, but I don't want filler stuff like talk shows etc about the content - that isn't where the value add is. The value add is in creating a package of actual content that I want and presenting it to me in a way that doesn't require a lot of work or nickel and diming of me?

I watch a bunch of magic the gathering on twitch, and there are two competing "brands"for casted live tournaments - WotC themselves, and starcitygames. WotC thinks they should be ESPN with a lot of talk in between, SCG thinks they should be just content, with a few really talented commentators mostly doing colour and play by play. SCG gets much higher viewership and better feedback despite running an objectively lower level tournament series, from having more content and more in tune with audience commentating talent.

I think that is a microcosm of where we will be going. Content and a small pocket of talent rather than huge productions that tries to cover gaps in content.
Why the Original No Time to Explain Sucked
Chrome at least logs the error to console

http://jsfiddle.net/sb1zqjdm/ (using native promises)

And it seems that the "Pause on exceptions" debugger feature works on unhandled promise errors. Doesn't seem too bad to me.
Good news, but it still can be appealed, isn't applied immediately, etc. In the meantime, the spy agencies have complete unfettered access to everything, as I understand it.
Or... y'know... any car from the past couple decades (this material is pretty dated).
This is a great post. The link at the end of the post gives a great insight of what kind of jobs are going to become obsolete for a human to pursue.

What I think is some of those jobs are already automated in lots of countries. And there are some jobs that are falling in high risk bracket, however, that's not going to happen. For example, poeple argue that in future, waiters will be replaced by Robots and I feel that this is highly unlikely.
"Based on this insight, Zynga optimized for monetization by creating buildables that had a number of parts just a bit out of reach of a users’ friend network. That way, a player would get most of the parts from their friends, but would be unlikely to gather all of the parts from their network. Since they were so close to completion, they would just pay for the last one or two parts to complete the buildable."

If there is a Gamer's Hell; once a day George and Charles Parker, Gary Gygax, and Milton Bradley will come down from Gamer's Heaven and kick these guys in the balls.
What Indian parents want for their children
The legislation was rushed through to protect what had long been in place now that it was exposed. Politicians, constantly worried about risk exposure, love surveillance. It's cheap and probably effective, as much as we like to argue that it isn't. If someone hurts a bunch of people then a whole lot of bullshit has to take place: inquiries, increases in resources to bullshit cause X, better police funding etc. They're down with having their kid's selfies, wife's neurotic texts, dick pics, GPS data etc sucked into a great spy apparatus because they care about their careers more than the great digital kaiju that privacy advocates have worried about since George Orwell summed up what was to come in his book 1984.

The real conspiracy: we're governed by emotionally unsophisticated, intellectually misshapen prunes who value money and prestige over progress, and surveillance is a tool that helps them get what they value with minimal effort.
On the Role of Platform Based Peer Production
Escaping the new media cargo cult
Why would you buy an iphone if you are against closed implementations and protocols?