skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi folks,

My partner and I have created an app that we hope can help users reach and track their goals while also adding a bit of social media. We have just released our first build and are of course trying to improve it in any possible ways.

My question though is this; what kinds of things do people really want to strive for? Is, at this point, technology the best thing to use in order to motivate yourselves to grow?

Things like written to-do list and bucket list are a thing of the past. Is a goal diary type of thing on your cellphone the next step for people?
This is good general advice.

A key difference is whether the type is meant to be an index (counting) or for arithmetic. Indexing with unsigned integers certainly has its pitfalls:

while (idx >= 0) { foo(arr[idx]); idx--; }

But this is outweighed by the enormous and under-appreciated dangers of signed arithmetic!

Try writing C functions add, subtract, multiply, and divide, that do anything on overflow except UB. It's trivial with unsigned, but wretched and horrible with signed types. And real software like PostgreSQL gets it wrong, with crashy consequences: http://kqueue.org/blog/2012/12/31/idiv-dos/#sql
BS. I have seen far fewer Americans in a position where they can take the Friday afternoons off like a lot of Europeans can. Or extended paternity leaves. Or sabbaticals.

I have yet to see a software company in the US with the amount of time off as European companies despite the fact that most of the people I know in the US would trade salary for time off.

It's simply a race to the bottom; with no incentive for employers to reduce the number of working hours (because there are no laws for it, because white collar employees are exempt from overtime, because Americans stupidly believe that they can't achieve work improvements through collective bargaining), it is obvious that they will attempt to squeeze as much work out of employees up to, but not beyond, the point of futility.
Sure, I derive pleasure from work. But I don't work for free, and I would rather be doing a lot of other things that are more enjoyable, but less profitable, than working.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNPJuJSVmNA
Hacking team has been  ehm  hacked
Product Designer? Blockspring is hiring. Must be invisible
...having an understanding of a potential client or recruit's Risk profile, for example, makes it so much easier to connect with them and explain a value proposition...

Maybe I'm not getting this, but I can't think of a reason why I'd supply someone with information to help them deliver a sales pitch or to negotiate with me.
Based solely on stock value. Which, I guess if you had to take a measurement based on something it may as well be that. Assuming we're not in a bubble.

The last two crashes the stock value dropped 50%. Does that mean Silicon Valley productivity drops 50%?
I've heard that there are big differences in quality based on the manufacturers they use. For example, I think for the keyboards they have four or five different manufacturers. The T models use two different ones (while the lower budget models use the other three), one of them being LiteOn (which is the best one), and that depending on which manufacturer you get, you might get a higher quality or a lower one, especially with keyboards.

Have you taken a look at other laptops? If so, which one will you go with next time? I'm a Linux user, so if Thinkpads are as bad as some people say they are nowadays, I might even get a MBP and install Linux on it.
Can anyone explain if this holds true for international companies, say for example Facebook, Google or Amazon? Are the Swiss offices, if any, this different than the States offices?
Most of American workers don't have that choice. The tech world is an echo chamber, and it's do well to realize we are a privileged few who can dicta to our compensation (for now).
It's just that much of the 'innovation' is in a selection of domains with an emphasis on get-rich-quick pyramid schemes. Pressing problems like clean energy, clean water, peace, livable cities, energy saving, waste reduction, climate protection, ... are usually not among these domains of 'innovation'. Machine learning for Internet marketing or mass surveillance though is.
Pedal-powered generators already exist. Using one to charge a battery is better than this gravity-energy-storage gimmick in every imaginable respect, but they still are not used much, because electricity is not scarce. (If you can afford to buy a gimmicky generator, you can afford to buy a real one instead and the real ones are cheaper and better.)
SARL – General-purpose Agent-Oriented Programming Language
Where I live, "moral-free" is called "immoral".
There are a lot of corner cases involved here. The corner cases for signed integers involve undefined behavior, the corner cases for unsigned integers involve overflow. Any time you mix them you get unsigned integers, which can give you big surprises.

For example, if z is unsigned, then both x and y will get converted to unsigned as well. This can cause surprises when you expected the LHS to be negative, but it's not, because the right side is unsigned, and that contaminates the left side.

if (x < y * z) { ... }

This particular case gets caught by -Wall, but there are plenty of cases where unintended unsigned contagion doesn't caught by the compiler. Of course, if you make x long, then y * z will be unsigned, then widened to long, which gives you different results if you are on 32-bit or if you are on Windows. Using signed integers everywhere reduces the cognitive load here, although if you are paranoid, you need to do overflow checking which is going to be a bear and you might want to switch to a language with bigints or checked arithmetic.

As another point, in the following statement, the compiler is allowed to assume that the loop terminates:

for (i = 0; i <= N; i++) { ... }

Yes, even if N is INT_MAX. The way I think of it, your use of "signed" means that you are communicating (better yet, promising) to the compiler that you believe overflow will not occur. In these cases, the compiler will usually "do the right thing" when optimizing loops like this, where it sometimes can't do that optimization for unsigned loop variables.

So I'm going to disagree as a point of style. Signed arithmetic avoids unintended consequences for comparisons and arithmetic, and enables better loop optimizations by the compiler. In my experience, this is usually correct, and it is rare that I actually want numbers to overflow and do something with them afterwards.

All said, if you don't quite get the subtleties of arithmetic in C (yes, it is subtle) then your C code is fairly likely to have errors, and no style guide is going to be a panacea.
The article kind of misses the point. The reason for having a separate queue for connections in a SYN-RECEIVED state is to provide a defense against SYN flooding attacks.[1] An incoming SYN has a source IP address, but that may be faked. In a SYN flooding attack, large numbers of SYN packets with fake source addresses are sent. The connection will never reach ESTABLISHED, because the reply ACK goes to the fake source address, which didn't send the SYN and won't complete the handshake.

Early TCP implementations allocated all the resources for a connection, including the big buffers, when a SYN came in. SYN flooding attacks could tie up all of a server's connection resources until the connection attempt timed out after a minute or two. So now, TCP implementations have to have a separate pool of connection data for connections in SYN-RECEIVED state. There's no data at that stage, so buffers are not yet needed, and a minimum amount of state has to be kept until the 3-way handshake completes. Once the handshake completes, full connection resources are allocated and the connection goes to ESTABLISHED state.

This has nothing to do with behavior of established connections, or connection dropping.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SYN_flood
America needs sane ("first world") labor regulations (mandatory vacation/sick time, longer maternity/paternity leave, etc).
(a) the eternal September was 1993 and (b) there were plenty of bozos around well before then.
I both agree and disagree... in the case of software, in general you usually want two boundaries, regardless of if you are the only one generating them... between your front end and your data... usually front to back, and back to database.

This is part of the reason I don't instantly like solutions that expose databases to web front ends... usually the types of permissions typically needed are made excessively hard or impossible... A resource can be owned by one person, viewed by peers, partially readable by others, and manageable by command structure (management). That's just typical.

Beyond this are the differences between users/logins and accounts... too many systems will conflate the two on the backend even though they can be presented as tethered to begin with, the backend should definitely separate the two.

Given, most APIs are political boundaries within an organization... this isn't entirely a bad things. But that is far from the only reason to create/use those boundaries... security and data integrity are two more.
And you'll still need to pay for it.
Spy on users via Skype, save money on updates. Bonus!
You can decentralize the reporting of an individual's death using Schelling point consensus, which is what we use to decide Augur's prediction markets on Ethereum. In brief, we distribute a token to a "reporters." At the appropriate time, reporters submit their decisions about events. Reporters who deviate from the consensus lose some of their token balance, which is redistributed to the honest reporters. If an event is ambiguous, reporters report that fact itself instead of guessing at what everyone else will report.

Oracles will be fine for some use cases. Schelling consensus works for others. There are many ways to get real world information into Ethereum, and many ways to reflect how well real world actors adhere to their commitments.
Show HN: Kalevala – A multiplayer tile-laying board game in Elm
What's the motivation behind this? It can't really be bandwidth cost savings for distributing updates, right? At least, I can't imagine that the savings outweigh the predictably bad press and the additionally required customer support.
A huge number of people in the UK are on BT's cheapest package, you get a 38mb FTTC connection and a 20gb cap. These are the sort of people who won't even know that a feature like this could even exist, talk about be switched off! I think it's almost criminal that 20gb capped Internet can be advertised as being suitable for a family home in 2015.
It makes sense when you consider it as 'Restricted Python' (although there is another project of the same name).
Yes, but the typical consequences that arise out of that do not fit with design goals of Go.

Just off the top of my head - boxed types, for example lead to Java-style inheritance patterns. This sits awfully with composability and readability of Go code. You read Go code like a tree. You read Java code as multiply linked list.
I'm trying to turn this option off, but the entire control panel freezes when I click the relevant checkbox.

Windows 10 so far seems good, but what a bunch of terrible launch decisions.
Qualities of a Good First Programming Language
And the solution is not to split the country but to fix the broken system.

Leaving aside the preposterous rewriting of U.S. history in your comment (the US was never like modern Switzerland, even when it was significantly more homogenous), your goal is not possible with the current size and cultural diversity of the US.

If you want social safety nets, you need a homogeneous culture that stresses (irrationally) not taking advantage of them, thereby making them sustainable.

I know this is not a happy thought for you. It was not for me, as well, for quite some time.
From the article:

> Xiaoice, whose name translates roughly to “Little Bing,” after the Microsoft search engine, is a striking example of the advancements in artificial-intelligence software that mimics the human brain.

"Striking example"? "Artificial-intelligence"? "Mimics the human brain"? From the example chats, it seems to be just a chatbot, maybe a little more convincing than ELIZA. If there is a piece of news here, it's not about Xiaoice but about people feeling so lonely they can pretend a chatbot is their "friend". I realize this is standard journalist exaggeration, so I'll ask: is there any technical info on Xiaoice that explains how this chatbot stands out from the rest? Is this the current state of the art?
As a boot camp user (only for PC gaming) for the past 3 years, I'm inclined to agree, actually. I just upgraded the boot camp installation on my retina iMac to Windows 10, and it went off without a hitch except for the AMD drivers, which aren't supported.

Except AMD doesn't ship the drivers for it, Apple does. So I have to wait for Apple to ship Win10 compatible drivers for AMD's card, and who knows how long that'll take. Meanwhile this is my primary gaming box (yes, it actually is quite a nice machine GPU-wise) so I guess I can say goodbye to PC gaming until Apple is gracious enough to provide me with an updated driver. (The last driver they shipped was in December 2014, it's been total silence since then. Who knows if they'll ever update it? Maybe El Capitan will have new drivers as part of an updated Boot Camp Assistant? Do they even care?)
This book has been mentioned to me at least a dozen times. For some reason, your comment is the one that just pushed me over the edge to buy it :)

I'm posting this just because it's been recommended so often to me there must be something to it.
So they made their updates p2p? Why weren't they already? Feels like a no-brainer if you ask me. They need to be careful not to use my bandwidth in a way that I would notice (so basically when idle) and I also feel it would be appropriate to at least ask as there are some people who have data caps to worry about. A connection may be through wifi but still to a capped mobile broadband, such as when connecting to a smartphone. In such cases you often have a limit you unlikely want to use for updates to others.
And it looks like Google treats their cattle better.
Seems like you have plenty of time to observe the habits of your fellows.
It's more than that. The design of NNTP is much like POP3 - you download entire threads and messages all at once. It doesn't work all that well on the web compared with say IMAP.
Blizzard have done this for WoW updates forever. MS may run into some liability for inducing data overages depending on how up front they are about it and how badly it bites people.
Manjul makes it so simple. The odds of two numbers being relatively prime is 6/pi^2 so where's the circle? You can kind of see rotation symmetry if you draw the relatively prime pairs of numbers in the coordinate plane. However that symmetry is far from perfect.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-786-topics-in-alge...
You raise a very interesting point.

In fact, python and C being my favorite two languages, and I'm trying to do some metaprogramming in some python-C hybrid way, I'd be very interested in looking into this.

The other thing I'm spending a lot of time on these days is 'TeX' (specifically LaTeX but I've explored the internals of the system a bit). As TeX is also a macro system, which probably could be made to work as a general-purpose macro system, I'm interested in how cpp, m4, TeX, and lisp/scheme macros compare and contrast.
Not experiencing undefined behavior is a desirable thing for arithmetic so unsigned has some appeal for arithmetic too, I'd say.
I see kickstarters trying to use this to weasel out free work.

If they're engaging in such activity, their financial predicament probably isn't too good to begin with.
Although Sweden has a long history of giving away natural resources virtually for free to private interests, while Norway has made sure to get paid adequately, and then put that money into funds. As a result, Norway now owns 1% of all global stocks.
Yes you're right of course.
6 Weeks here + quite some legal holidays
As someone who failed to reach the top of the e-sports scene a little less than 10 years ago, I can tell you that I developed valuable skills and tenacity that serve me well today.

Anyone who struggles for the top will be transformed.
Facebook Taking Open-Source Software Ethos to Drones
I don't know the actual transcription error, but how's it going to find a 5 being made a 6 or something?
With Spotify, the aim was low latency. If you click on a song, it should start playing immediately. There's no such requirement for software updates.

Back when the only data center was in Stockholm, the only way to meet latency requirements was P2P. Now that we're a grown-up company we've disabled that and use CDN's instead.
Isn't Switzerland one of the few countries with a higher proportion of adults having guns than the US ?
Comments here are a dearth of actual examples. You can argue APIs are a Broadway musical if you don't give any clue what kind of APIs you're talking about.

For a few years I was involved in trying to get session-layer security into a networking library.

The disputes were "nominally" technical, in that they were couched in technical language, but there was a strong political dimension. Here were the talking points:

* Knowing that security code is likely to have bugs, isn't it better to do nothing and know it's insecure, instead of doing something, believing it to be secure, and being wrong?

* What cryptographic methods are acceptable? Do we defer to some standards body, like NIST? Or do we reject NIST methods, because they are NSA shills?

* Do we retrofit something off-the-shelf like TLS? (Which implementation?) Or, as a project that defines new protocols, is it within our mandate to innovate on this?

Because there was no consensus on these questions, after several years it's still plaintext-only. There are, however, various "dark forks" that take minority positions, because writing code is easier than convincing people to your side.

Lack of political consensus (on many issues besides this one) is killing the project, to whatever extent it isn't dead already. And even in its death throes there is this desire to pretend there are no political questions.
Retro ThinkPad Survey 4: Miscellaneous
Hasn't MSFT ever heard of a 'Loss Leader'?
Different problem.

The bad interaction between the Nagle Algorithm and Delayed ACK still irks me. I designed one, somebody at Berkeley designed the other, and by the time I found out about it, I was out of network architecture and doing something else for a different company.

That 200ms fixed timer in delayed ACK was a bad idea. The whole delayed ACK thing was a hack to reduce overhead for character-by-character Telnet, which mattered to Berkeley back then because Berkeley used a lot of dumb terminal servers. The fixed time delay is based on human response time and the time UNIX needed to process a character echo. If a typed character has to be echoed, the ACK can be piggybacked on the reply packet with the echo. This is one of the few cases in which delayed ACK is a win. It might also be a win with some quick request-reply APIs.

Really, delayed ACKs should be off by default, and should only turn on when the connection has been showing a consistent pattern of "packet received, ACK sent, application quickly transmitted reply so ACK could have been combined with reply."

John Nagle
So it's about how updates are distributed? Would be interesting but the page seems to be down -> http://sitemeer.com/#lauren.vortex.com/archive/001116.html
> this is using a loose definition of "life" which includes 23 hour nights at freezing temperatures. Not for everyone.

That is when we exert our five+ weeks of vacation and travel to a warmer place...
As I understand it, they centralized Skype because mobile phones couldn't be supernodes. (Not defending it, just explaining it.)
Yeah, there's a number of reasons. But I do think that's why there's been no good web front end ever.
I plan to work until my brain doesn't function anymore.
"Facebook is developing advanced telecommunications, complete with autonomous laser-firing drones, and it is doing it as if it were a big software project." ---- pretty cool!
I'd like to see more follow what Balanced Payments did: use it's public facing APIs to power its dashboard. Not only that, it open sourced the dashboard.

https://github.com/balanced/balanced-dashboard
LogicalOperationStack Is Broken with async-await
You'd probably have to limit the use of force to things almost everyone agrees on, like detaining people to prevent imminent harm. For other things, sanctions are probably effective enough. Given universal, stable, cryptographic identities, you as an individual would "enforce" your rules and desired contributions to public goods by consulting your chosen sanction list before trading with someone.
There's evidence for the opposite:

* clean energy: http://blog.samaltman.com/energy plus Tesla / Solar City

* clean water: https://angel.co/water-purification

* peace: (not sure what would fit here)

* livable cities: self-driving cars, Uber

* energy saving: Nest and similar smart home efforts

* waste reduction: very diverse topic; Project Ara is one of the efforts to reduce the consumer electronics waste

* climate protection: affordable sattelite imagery (Planet Labs, Skybox), and clean energy efforts (see above)
That could cause confusion with CPython (the main python implementation) and possibly also Cython (C extensions for Python).
clean energy, clean water, peace, livable cities, energy saving, waste reduction, climate protection

Those solutions are more political than technical in nature.
Debt Fe fbdfcwffcwwffefdfwdvdcdvwddxdcesccdce cc exec © feed
There is also the fact that mathematics isn't in it. It's a list of abstract non-physical technologies that includes writing and software and excludes mathematics. I am not sure whether money should or should not be there (trade and value-store are both pretty transformative concepts for sure). But the idea of encoding the rules of behavior of the world in a form amenable to direct manipulation over those same rules seems to either be missing (math), or presented as a 21st century discovery (software).
Wow, that just looks hideous... at first I was hoping this was some kind of Java preprocessor for linq constructs... but it's just plain ugly.. it's even worse than the method chaining you can do in C# with lambdas, which I prefer over linq syntax...

var result = someEnumerable.Select(x => x.Bar < 5).ToList()

Still a lot cleaner than the type specific mess in the examples... I think sticking to for-loops is probably cleaner than that mess.

I don't mean to be critical here, it's just I don't think it's really any better than without the "LINQ" for Java in this case.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fe92x/im_ashley_b...

> So you're saying that the mt gox bank account was his own personal account? I wired money to his personal account??

> Yes

Maybe it wasn't correct in 2014, but apparently it was true when Barr worked there.
And the reason there are less women programmers, is because less women want to be programmers. Just as less men want to become fashion designers.

There is nothing to "solve" here. Let people do what they want to do.