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n17r4mon The History, Controversy, and Evolution of the Goto Statement [pdf]

I kinda understand the feeling your father had. I'm currently tutoring a friend and while I was reviewing a bit of code from the assignment they had written, a simple goto would halved a lot of the complexity involved. Instead I recommended a complicated flag based system that was probably unnecessary. Although goto is harmful, perhaps it should be taught again as an advanced technique once more?

n17r4mon McDonald's Says Goodbye Cashiers, Hello Kiosks

Exactly

n17r4mon McDonald's Says Goodbye Cashiers, Hello Kiosks

The only item I semi-regularly enjoy from McD's is a McDouble Like a 'Mac. Unfortunately when I tried a kiosk, I couldn't order it. If they go 100% kiosks and not offer this delicious mod, I will no longer be their customer.

n17r4mon Scientists scramble to stop banana being killed off

“So if you see green bananas in the shop you know there is an issue with supply because the taste in the UK is for yellow bananas with just a tiny bit of green.”

n17r4mon Of Particular Significance; Matter and Energy: A False Dichotomy (2012)

My understanding is that when you smash particles together with high enough energy, you end up with a total particle mass greater than before, and so, yeah, in a way, it must be.

n17r4mon Ask HN: What tool do you use to do advanced custom graphs in?

I've had pretty good experiences making custom graphs using plotly ( https://plot.ly/ ) - They push hard for you to use their cloud offerings, however everything can be done offline/local as well.

n17r4mon Stephen Hawking has died

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him?

Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!

However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.

-- Stephen Hawking

n17r4mon Utility poles

Lwta swrt JOIN OF SRrt.

n17r4mon Ask HN: How do you manage to go through so much of good content posted on HN?

Excuse me for replying to myself, but on a different topic. What ever happened to bookmarklets?

LPT for those that enjoy going insane by reading things at super speed: http://spritzinc.com/get-spritz . [no affiliation]

n17r4mon Ask HN: How do you manage to go through so much of good content posted on HN?

Firefox mostly, but I get what you are asking for. Ultimately my brain, I know I should bookmark more great links, but I guess in the end I just hope I remember them.

Besides that, just have my own forked merge of exolymph's and m4tthumphrey's replies.

As in another discussion, it's just part of life.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16338723 . If it wasn't HN, it would be slashdot, or ars, or medium, or searching deep into the web for ghost hosts.

n17r4mon Sedate a Plant, and It Seems to Lose Consciousness. Is It Conscious?

Suppose it is hardcoded? what difference does that make?

edit: I know about hardware and software, but since we are all wetware, maybe we should think about it as its own class and/or function?

n17r4mon AWS Cloud9 – Cloud Developer Environments

I'm also a long time Cloud9 user. I agree that with this AWS changeup, it will suck and be awful that to share a workspace with other users, it will [probably] require them to also be on a AWS account.

n17r4mon The irony of the modern internet

Yes, this would have been a more impactful artical if it was self-hosted. Nonetheless, it is a good artical. September never ended, but I still hope for October.

n17r4mon China plans to ban sales of fossil fuel cars entirely

IIRC, a car engine runs at about 25% efficiency and a power plant usually exceeds 40%.

n17r4mon Windy.com

https://earth.nullschool.net as well.

n17r4mon Flash Is Dead: What Technologies Might Be Next?

Personally speaking, I wish this was Meteor.js - If only there was more hoorah for this tough as nails framework.

n17r4mon Kerbal Space Oddities

Not a tutorial per-se, but rather a series of KSP youtube shows, https://www.youtube.com/user/BeazaYT has done some amazing story telling, and a lot can be learned by watching his build teardowns.

n17r4mon “We currently have no plans to support Xwayland”

I can only speak from my own experience (2-3 GPU rigs running tensorflow) but I have never had any trouble. Full Ubuntu desktop. Training models on the GPU does not cause any problems with display lockups etc.

n17r4mon Ask HN: How should i decide which JavaScript module to go with for my Product?

Passport.js (mostly by word of mouth, I only used it breifly) seems like a robust sign in solution.

n17r4mon Discovering Gnome 3: My experience, and why you should give it a shot

Poor performance on Elementary OS, et al, could be caused by this kinda severe bug: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2016/11/22/a-ta...

Should be fixed up with GTK+ 4.0. That said, I also love the extensions on Gnome 3 and have been using it as my daily driver for a while now. Every once in a while I get the kick to try something else, see how unity is, check out KDE, enjoy Awesomewm for a bit, but I keep finding myself back with Gnome.

Protip: if you like dark themes, install "Stylish" for Firefox and search for "dark" and install them all. In addition to the desktop UI theme, most of the web can be painted with a pleasing light on dark grey style, and I have no complaints.

n17r4mon Powerwall 2 and Integrated Solar

The specs list it as 90% efficiency round trip.

n17r4mon Show HN: Can You Beat the Machine?

Interesting mechanics.

n17r4mon Ask HN: What's the most mind blowing video demo of a recent ML breakthrough?

Maybe this?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rfhxy2w3Qi4

Using a gram matrix across several layers to hold the style, and more conventional activation optimization for the content. Trained on VGG. It combines the two loss functions of style and content to optimise noise towards a output image. The amazing thing is being able to mathematically separate content from style; in a similar fashion to how the brain can perform this task. See: https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576

Fwiw, I'm part of a group trying a similar thing on very deep residual net's with recurrent net's to improve upon the temporal sweeps.

n17r4mon Ask HN: Recommendation for open-source self-hosted collaboration software

tiki.org is what I usually turn to, and it works well enough after a bit of setup. However there may be better solutions out there. (and if there are, I'd love to know about them!)

n17r4mon Ask HN: How to become a Unix/Linux power user?

Yep, can't agree. Try Gentoo instead.

Also: http://samrowe.com/wordpress/advancing-in-the-bash-shell/ blew my mind.

n17r4mon Decryption Challenge

So, it is base64 data... from there.. the 'file' utility doesn't recognize it, so (I gave up) maybe translate from unicode data (base 2^8 | 2^16 | 2^32 ) to something else? ("warmer/colder" would be appreciated).

n17r4mon Ask HN: Which tools are used for remote pair programming?

C9.io works well for me and my coworkers. YMMV

n17r4mon I can read 780 wpm, and I read most of HN this way

oops, yeah, that is totally a parked domain. WTF?

n17r4mon I can read 780 wpm, and I read most of HN this way

ok, I just wanted to link a good starter link.

n17r4mon I can read 780 wpm, and I read most of HN this way

http://spritzinc.com/

really?