jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Many many years I was this annoying jr team member that came and asked other people tons of questions. In my case, the other members of the team has something like 10 - 15 years more experience than I. Ultimately what worked was it was requested that I try to find out the answers on my own for a minimum of an hour before I pop up and ask a question of another dev. If I had questions that were non-blocking, I was asked to write them down and email the set at the end of the day instead of having multiple interactions. Nowadays, we use ticketing systems and have watchers and stuff on active tickets and any questions that come up generally get asked within a ticket and other team members are able to respond with timing that is convenient for them. If I am working on something, an interruption could cost me 15 minutes to get my "working stack" back into my head if I am working on something complex. I now have folks that report to me. I basically tell them if they are hung up to work on it for at least a couple hours trying to solve it but consider reaching out to a team member if it takes longer than that. If they are utterly blocked can cannot work on something else, my door is open at any time, but if its just curiosity, gather questions and email and I will get back to them when I can. Ultimately, I try to cultivate as much autonomy as possible on my team so folks can, for the most part, solve most issues on their own. :)
For finite judges of imperfect knowledge it must lead to the use of two different scales of 'morality'. To ourselves we must present the absolute ideal without compromise, for we do not know our own limits of natural strength (+grace), and if we do not aim at the highest we shall certainly fall short of the utmost that we could achieve. To others, in any case of which we know enough to make a judgement, we must apply a scale tempered by 'mercy': that is, since we can with good will do this without the bias inevitable in judgements of ourselves, we must estimate the limits of another's strength and weigh this against the force of particular circumstances.

- The Letters of JRR Tolkien
It's the same principle. Sand in MN and WI is from prehistoric shorelines when the inland US and Canada were covered by a shallow sea. Ironically the same sea that produced the shales that the fracking sand deposits are being mined to exploit.
How will there never be undefined behaviour?
> Hacker News has so many people on it everyday, which makes me wonder why Slashdot fails in comparison. I also hear that the community at Slashdot is less than pleasant, but I'm not sure as to the validity of those claims.

> Why is Hacker News so successful while Slashdot has become a relic of internet history?

Dang, ruthless moderation and community effects.

People underestimate the degree to which peer comments encourage and discourage behaviors in the rest of the participating population. Civility and on-topic-ness are central values of hacker news. The top 5% most active users religiously follow this, and this establishes a clear personality for the platform. This implicitly discourages new users from contributing in a way that strays from those values.

There are 2 possible events where this system goes haywire. Slow takeover and viral events. Slow deterioration happens through complacency. Viral events are when there is an overnight migration of new users to your platform, replacing your culture wholesale. Dang's remarkably consistent culture reminders curb the slow deterioration. For the 2nd point, HN has likely never had a major viral event, but culture war threads are often locked quickly and deprioritized.

HN is the way it is cause of painstaking effort to keep it the way it is. Don't take it for granted. I try my best to be an honest participant. It is one of the few places that still remind of the old internet. I'm willing to be a obedient child if that means it can stay that way.
At a previous job we had certain email lists that were archived and searchable. But I think today everyone would just use Slack.
Reminds me of buying a 144Hz monitor but not enabling 144Hz-mode..
It’s not free. You’re stealing content.
Have you ever been in a situation where someone fixed every problem you have or might have in the future because he or she understood your job and all the problems you face better than you do. Yeah, that has never happened in 20 years of working.
"deregulation" isn't a religion. Just because there are options to use it in a way outside of regulation, does not mean all uses have to fall under it. Forcing that is like forcing anything else, and would be more statist than libertarian.

Bitcoin provides the option to remove yourself from the system if you decide that for you, in your personal context, it is the right thing to do. It's the option that matters, not just doing it for the sake of it to follow someone else's concept of what's important.
I can't find numbers on how many Americans own homes, but 67% of homes are occupied by their owner. That's quite a large aristocracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_St...

52% own stocks.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/162353/stock-ownership-stays-reco...

I'm too lazy to google bonds and gold (both easily available to anyone with a brokerage account).

The means to success seem pretty accessible based on these numbers.
Why wouldn't I want to write that? Clearly you need a little practice before instantly recognizing a partially applied function where the next parameter will be appended to your other string, but that one-liner has actually a very nice computing flow.
I love Galatea, it's such a classic. They say the author's first work includes seeds for all later works, and I think it is true in this case.
Woo hoo ! Awesome. Also, GitHub becomes sort of a borg. If some Russian kid decides to mess with it like Homakov did a while back, we are all screwed.

Congrats Vim.
Careful what you wish for. Instead of one big target bill with a set of laws allowing unconstitutional activity by the government, they will replace it with a ton of tiny laws buried in other bills that are impossible to target as a group.

Actually now that I think about it, Congress barely passes any bills anyway anymore so that would be tricky for them, but since many of them are there for decades, they have plenty of time.

Term limits really would make sense.
I was going to say the same thing: "because they can".

> > wonder why executives earn so much money when there is no responsibility on them when things go wrong

It's not a logics based world we live in, but rather bipedal animals doing what they want and can :-/
The capital police helped them break in, so they don't exactly have much reason to believe otherwise.

If Trump told them to this, which pretty much the entire media has been saying, then it then wouldn't it be entrapment to charge them?
Oh yeah, that's the spirit. Who cares about more than half a million people?! I mean, Wyoming has less than that, just ignore them too! There are like three dozen of cities with population larger than that, so anyone who has less, should just be ignored too, who cares about their problems. I love you people with all your ignorant relativism, but if you were one of those, I am fairly sure that the likelihood of you changing your views is quite high. Maybe not "99.8%", but high.
If you were to look at how much money these products make, it's a pittance.

Most of the money is made on Windows Server licenses and many of these things get thrown in.
I would argue that Amazon and Google are better because I can use their payment system on things other than my phone as well. Whenever I'm on a new site that's selling something, I'm very relieved when I see the amazon or google checkout logo. Other than having to sign up once (which there's a good chance you already have if you've ever bought anything on amazon, and google wallet is spreading more), I don't see how apple's system is better at all, let alone "far superior".
Why? Most people can't even use a word processor or spreadsheet right now, let alone comprehend algorithms and programming.

Besides, we all drive cars and we all use refrigerators and air conditioners daily. Not everyone knows how those work or is able to fix them. If they did, we'd be a world of "jacks of all trades and experts in none." That's not what got us to this point as a technologically advanced civilization.

It's far more important for everyone to know how to drive properly and safely than it is for them to know how to perform maintenance on their cars. In fact, having everyone do their own car maintenance would probably be just as dangerous as putting programming into the hands of people who don't know how to avoid phishing attacks and computer viruses.
Thanks! Looking forward to have you as one of our beta-testers.
That's my take on it as well.

A resume or CV is a piece of paper to get your name on someone's desk, then you get hired by passing the interview. Github is just another way of getting (or keeping) your name on someone's desk.
I'm not sure if this is sarcasm? Are you seriously suggesting those two are even of the same magnitude?
Yes. Even better would be statements like Wyden and Udall have made. They should say something like:

"We won't lie to you, but we think this information should be public and if you knew what we know, then you'd be writing and calling your representative urging them to allow us to talk about it."

They could go even farther by passing judgement with the addition "... because what is being done in the name of the average citizen presents an existential threat to democracy and the betterment of a free and open society."
I honestly didn't expect this definition of cutout to be a first page thing.
Agree- poor choice of words. I think the proper way to verbalize it is 'piss poor user experience, annoying, inconvenient'.
The difference being that I can sell the time I'd spend on Helpouts as consulting time at $x per hour. There was no alternative to the appstore if you wanted to reach mobile devices.
This is sort of like an internship, but for people no longer in school. I've interned three times (finishing my third now) and I think it's a great way for you to get to know a company and for a company to get to know you. That is, of course, assuming the company has a bite sized piece of work that allows you to show if you've failed or succeeded.
On-site interviews are a necessary for the most part, but phone screens have always been the bane of my existence. About 50% of the time I can barely understand what the other person is saying, mostly because the person conducting the interviewer is not a native English speaker. I almost never have an issue in person with non-native English speakers because you're able to pick up so much more context from subtle physical clues. I wonder if anyone else has this problem.

Disclaimer: My parents are non-native English speakers and I can't understand a thing they say over the phone, but in person I have no trouble.
...and incur great expense in constructing infrastructure [1] to replace the roads and parking areas which previously occupied those city centers.

[1] Buses, trains & tracks, bike rentals & bike paths, etc. Choose as you may, it still requires a redesign of the city center.
Talks are a ridiculously awesome way to learn new things. They're low effort. They have someone else summarizing/breaking down concepts for you in digestible pieces which allow you to form your own (and hopefully not your only) base of understanding about the concept. From start to finish, the viewer is undergoing their own personal synthesis of some thing. Granted, one needs to further apply them for the concept to really solidify, but I think talks are as good as any other resource for taking that first step in learning about something.
Applicable how?
High Rise is possibly his most readable. The Elements series (The Drowned World, The Crystal World, The Drought and The Wind From Nowhere) is very good, Drowned World being the best, IMO. Unlimited Dream Company is well worth reading, as is Crash. His short stories are generally excellent, and maybe the best intro: Vermilion Sands is brilliant, but the best value is the (two volume) Complete Short Stories collection.

Empire of the Sun is pretty much essential if you want to understand why he wrote the way he did; why his characters are drawn and act the way they do. There's also a short essay he did for the Guardian a few years before he died, on modernism and death, which is informative (http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/mar/20/architec...).

Also, this site is good: http://www.ballardian.com/
I had a very pleasant (though not high speed) ride from Santa Barbara to San Diego via LA Central 10 years ago.
FWIW, works on Ubuntu, not just OS X.
My hunch is that most Western countries would be hesitant to allow anything that is nuclear + Russian on their shores. This article does not answer your question, but it sounds like as of 12/2020 the boat may be headed to the scrapyard due to needing costly repairs.

https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htseamo/articles/20201225....
Boeing was once one of the country’s greatest companies and is now a national embarrassment. This is what you get when the MBAs and accountants take over and the lust for profit begins.

An engineering company should have engineers as managers from the bottom level all the way up to the CEO. Or at the very least, somebody who cares about product over profit.

Take a look at Apple’s functional organizational structure for an example of an engineering company done right.
Boeing:

- Responsible for 2 plane crashes that killed 346 people

- Engaged in a government cover-up and was charged with criminal fraud conspiracy

- Fired CEO left with $81 million exit package

- No one went to jail

*Fined $2.5 billion - 2% of annual revenue
If you make 75K that's more than double the US median personal income and you still qualify for the checks. It's a good living in the US outside of a handful of cities. Also I think a lot of buyers are young people living with parents
So why can't we have this tech with radioactive waste in our home or cars? With a proper lead shield would it be dangerous or not?
There's always lots of people who want to be President. Certainly way more than the 20 or so who showed up in primaries.

The issue was that a relatively large number of them had financial support and sizeable backing within the Republican party until late in the campaign. That's less likely to happen if there's one outstanding candidate. For example, it didn't happen in 2020, not because nobody else wanted to be President, but because the GOP overwhelmingly agreed that Trump was their best bet.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm not trying to argue a side here beyond describing things from the perspective of the disaffected, and then what the likely outcome will be.

These people are already suspicious of the legitimacy of the election, denying them the transparency of discovery and a public trial erodes that faith further. Gore got a trial in 2000 with a challenge to the electoral college. The mass of mail in ballots this year represents a dramatic change from the norm and I understand why people want more scrutiny. But really, if half the country doesn't trust the integrity of our election system do we even have a democracy anymore?
Sahil is such a good writer. So vulnerable and insightful. I'm envious :-)

His insights on how to live and work better and making me think if my little startup can follow some of these ideas.
Occam's razor suggests to me that some people in the design process defined marriage as being strictly between a man and a woman, and nobody else cared enough to change this.

It doesn't fill me with joy that a 2020 game would make that choice.

Also the choice to have characters default to open homophobia, and for that to be used as a positive in promotional material, is not an indicator of a gay-friendly organisation.
Nobody said it's a crime, but I really don't want to live in a world where the interests of corporate profits outweigh everything else.

We're already pretty far down that path; too far, IMO.
I just can’t fathom they couldn’t see this coming.
I think they took "line" to refer to a Java method signature/prototype, so even if a method signature has each parameter wrapped to its own physical line on-disk, the whole method declaration still counts as "one line".

...at least I hope that's what they did.
Building on an unused standard ensures failure and is little more than masturbation. The use of preprocessor sugar proves this yet further.
>I wonder if I'd still like it if it were set on a seaship in the 1700's or something... But that would rule out time travel for example, which I also always enjoy.

Time travel is no more plausible in the 1700s than the 2700s. Just have the negative space wedgies be in the water, like the Bermuda Triangle or something.
Sorry my reply was meant for @raffraffraff
Oh for sure.

To a hacker ( or a progrMmer, or the guy who's going to have to maintain the code, possibly when it's scaled to 40,000 servers), code beauty is critical.

To "an ideas guy", a prototype is _way__ more important.

But I hope the ideas guy partners with or hires someone like you, or like Tom Christiansen - the guy who got the "write it at least twice. always throw the first version away" meme firmly stuck in my head back in comp.Lang.perl.misc in the mid 90s.

Modern startup techniques, particularly the "fail fast" mantra, strongly suggest that quick prototypes, even if they are crappily coded prototypes, are often a great idea - and are often within reach of inexperienced or non technical founders.

(and yeah, I know what you mean by throwaway code ending up as critical production systems, just this morning I got mail from a cron job trying to run a crappy perl script I wrote over 10 years ago - it's monitoring critical infrastructure for a project I did for a company I haven't been in touch with since 08, and from the grapevine I hear they got sold in 09 or 2010 and I've never even met the new owners...)
It wasn't an analogy but it can be made as rigorous as you like.

Let S be the set of (addressable) storage locations, let d(x, y) = x - y which is the distance between storage locations (an integer). The triangle inequality holds if d(x, y) + d(y, z) >= d(x, z). d is also clearly symmetric and reflexive; thus S and d form a metric space.

Suppose module A contains a pointer to storage location x.

Suppose module B contains a pointer to storage location y.

Suppose A and B each contain a function which reads from z and writes to x or y respectively.

If, with respect to A, d(x, z) = n < infinity, then, using pointer arithmetic, A can write to z and thus write to y. The distance between A and B is bounded (effectively it's n).

On the other hand, if, with respect to A, d(x, z) = infinity (the value infinity might mean d threw an exception or something), then the distance between A and B is effectively infinite.

So the concurrency/parallelism dichotomy boils down to this:

Programs in which such distance between modules is finite are concurrent, programs in which the distance between modules is infinite are parallel.

This example only applies to memory but it can easily apply to other kinds of relevant spaces as well.
I'd much rather read an article that has a couple quick insights, like this one, than the millions out there that are indeed just omg-how-great-is-this-product landing pages.

+ I give credit to those who code and create (valid) content. One is hard enough. ;)
The current production version of Firefox 4 was released about a month ago and it's approaching 90 million downloads.

http://glow.mozilla.com

You are using old Firefox numbers. A lot has happened in the year since Firefox 3.6 was released.
Have you had success with assigning it? Have you seen beginning students learn using it, or have they come back to and said "gosh, I am glad you told me about SICP two years ago, it put me down the right path?"

You might have higher caliber students than I have had (or am), but I have a hard enough time explaining how to use a text editor in one window and run a script in another. To get to actually doing something useful enough to keep them interested via SICP is, well, beyond even imagining.
I think I've tracked him down:

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=483874&authType=...

https://profiles.google.com/rwdryburgh/about

The guy seems to have a lot of experience, but not from education.
This domain seizure nonsense is just the tip of the iceberg.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/383473/white_house_r...
Sorry, didn't answer your question fully the first time, was in a rush.

The languages we interviewed for were Javascript and PHP (for different positions). There are lots of newbies out there who pick up the basics of these two languages (due to their popularity), and then try to get high paying jobs. Most of them are used to copy/pasting the code from the internet.

That's extremely prevalent among Drupal developers. Drupal has a ton of contributed modules, so you can get pretty far without writing a single line of code. It's really really hard to find a good Drupal developer.

I'm completely serious about 90% not being employable (by my standards).
Amazon offers samples of books before you buy (usually the first chapter, or more if it is short) and that kind of solves the try a few pages problem.

I think most people just are more willing to fork over 99 cents for a mediocre book rather than 8 dollars for a decent one.

I have a kindle but sadly prices aren't set for my market (the used papberback shopper).
Alright, I'll play your silly game.

How about Mickey Mouse? One could say that market is well established by the creator by now. Yet the law protects this monopoly.
or is it only pseudorandom taking the time of day and day of week as a seed.
Title gore. "A software mistake caused a Tui flight to take off heavier than expected as female passengers using the title “Miss” were classified as children, an investigation has found."
In Soviet Russia, it (neuralink) loves to control you!

Oh wait...
This is literally the same research group, and the paper you link to is referenced in the article as being the predecessor 2020 publication to this announcement of a forthcoming 2021 paper expanding on the 2020 one.

So yes and no - if you are correct and that paper is indeed the first claim (not up on the literature), this one is also the same first claim, or at least, an extension to it
Yes you are correct. I wrote "go" when I meant "shogi" - fixed.
If you've never done it before, I highly recommend writing a single program with multiple front ends: GUI, TUI, CLI, API. Wrap them up in multiple interfaces: for GUI, make a web-version, a desktop version, a tablet version, a smartphone version, etc. And do it in as many toolkits as possible.

At first, you'll want to keep the program simple. My first time doing it, I made a super simple "simulation" of a fish tank. The fish just moved at random. They'd sure if you didn't feed them regularly. That's about it.

It's a highly beneficial learning experience. You get the case functionality done, and then you start implementing new features. And you start to see all the ways in which one format falls and another picks up.

Definitely try to share as much code as possible between them all. Really forces you to separate concerns.

There is no "GUI vs CLI". It's "GUI and CLI".
For a while parents shipped their children USPS Parcel Post because it was cheaper than train fare.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brief-history-chil...
> TBH I don't feel particularly happy about programmers removing retail jobs.

Is this any different than Caterpillar removing ditch diggers’ jobs, or internet remove postal carrier and television channels’ jobs?
Great, love more chicken.
Not OP, but I think that the consumer market for laptops is basically Chromebooks and iPads for anything < ~$700 and a MacBook for anything over. I would imagine that the number of high performance "gaming" laptops sold in the consumer space would be in the minority comparatively.