jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Covid WFH is a real issue for our new developers. Especially the ones who are fresh out of college. They're missing out on so much institutional knowledge transfer. Especially the kind of monkey-see-monkey-do experience you need to build confidence using tools such as git.

They're also hesitant to ping coworkers and ask for screen sharing time because they can't sense if the more senior developers are working on something. Mentorship has also been difficult when the mentor and mentee cannot work side by side.

Management is looking into alternatives, such as having volunteers come into the office on a rotating basis.
(2018) -- so bits of this already seem dated, for instance the idea of a profusion of coins being a feature, not a bug, of the crypto space:

> “Think of this as an incredibly efficient barter system,” says Harvey. “Barter is generally inefficient, but if you have a network and you tokenize the goods and services and enable it with a blockchain, it can become very efficient.”

Maybe I just lack imagination, but I am missing where the benefit of this lies. When Apple has a coin and Toyota has a coin and Kodak has a coin (as seemed would be the case at the time this was published) why is it any better to hold any one of these, barter through a set of intermediaries to get to ConvenienceStoreCoin, and settle your candy purchase with that, versus holding investments, selling them for cash, and using that everywhere? Even putting transaction costs aside, my sense is that a natural, shared unit of account / means of exchange will end up predominating and this "incredibly efficient barter system" won't be the paradigm shift the article implies.
Not only would I not like to go back to the office described in this article, I would have left ages ago (and am lucky enough to be able to choose that).

One interesting thing about all this should-we shouldn't-we discussion about offices is that it gives everyone a bit better view - positive and negative - of how different people work lives can be.
Nix looks great, but you have to go all in on Nix. Sometimes it's simpler to install a few tools locally but not control the entire environment.
Aaaaand that is another can of worms.

I have recently had a potential client come to me to help them rewrite an old Java application. They have already been unsuccessful rewriting it once, now the want "somebody with more experience" to do this "the right way".

So I ask them, "What is wrong with your old app?".

Them: "Let's not focus on it, we are interested in how you plan the new one"

Me: "No, really, I need to know what is the problem with the old app. Please, humor me."

Them: "It is Java 1.6"

Me: "Okay, but what is wrong with the app?"

Them: "We need to upgrade to at least Java 11."

Me: "And how about that app, what is wrong with it?"

Them: "We are being chased by our security for at least past couple years. The problem with the app is that it uses old libraries that cannot be upgraded because of old Java. We tried to upgrade the Java but failed so we want to start with clean slate"

Me: "But what is wrong with the app? I mean... if you have been unsuccessful upgrading Java that surely means there is some kind of underlying structural problem?"

Them: "Yeah, we also have a lot of failed transactions but that is because of old libraries."

Me: "Surely, you don't want to say that back when Java 1.6 was new it was not possible to write reliable applications?"

Them: ...

Me: "Also, why your previous rewrite failed?"

Them: "That's simple, the developers were not up to the task."

Me: "But who managed those developers?"

Them: ...

Me: "That's right. Last question, how did you decide to rewrite the application if you don't know what is the problem with the previous one?"

Them: "What do you mean?"

Me: "No, thank you, I learned everything I needed. Goodbye"
LuaJIT is extremely impressive engineering, but also a giant pile of hacks and shortcuts. I'm not surprised.
I spent most of the article thinking how little sense the article made, über confused. AI controlling rockets? AI controlling the Space Shuttle? In 2021? Which Space Shuttle they are referring to? Controlling a rocket being that good? ( I make my own rockets and control it with cheap electronics).
It's the uncanny valley between "might be harming me" and "is detectable by me."

People don't care about things they can't see -- because they can't see them.

But if something is seen, it probably shouldn't have cause to make people worry.
>about 1-2 years after the new laptop model has been released, almost everything works fine

It depends on the category of device and what feature you want. I recently got an X1 Tablet (the 2-in-1 version of the X1 Carbon), and it barely works on Linux; there's a veritable zoo of inscrutable bugs that render the device very annoying to use (for example, Plasma's night mode disables when you re-attach the keyboard). It's clear that the FOSS ecosystem as a whole places little priority on touchscreeny things, either on the device end or the software end; the overlap between people hackish enough to fix weird bugs and people who find 2-in-1 tablets compelling enough to hack on is evidently smaller than with normal laptops.
> I'm not sure if this is satire or not, but certainly the single worst case of using a terminal is file manipulation. Nothing will ever beat the right-clicks or Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V combos. It's just more natural to "see" things than you move.

I've been using a Mac full-time for the last 8 years, and I do the vast majority of file manipulation in Terminal instead of Finder, because I find the command line easier and more intuitive.
So yeah 5 year olds might make poor decisions, but so do adults and we don't let that prevent them from voting.
How are the electrodes in the brain powered? Are they running out of a battery?
You were the one who felt the need to bore us with your opinion. I'm just taking the time to show you how off the mark you were.
>Get rid of newsfeed algorithms that optimize recommendations for engagement.

A reasonable proposition, and it would indeed fix the problem of clickbait/outragebait content. Locally.

People who profit from clickbait/outragebait content would migrate to other platforms that do optimize for engagment, and the cycle begins anew. Thus it doesn't fix the problem globally.

A hybrid solution might be possible if all (or most) service providers agreed to certain baseline restrictions on algorithmic optimization for engagement. Probably unrealistic, because there would be all incentives to cheat any such agreement in subtle ways.

While I don't like various problems associated with it, I support the principle of freedom of speech.
I'm not even American and followed the events with idle curiosity, and I already know her name is Babbitt. NPR, The Guardian, NYTimes, etc all have headlines with it.
> given the track record of how you treat your alleged "allies", I don't feel comfortable seeing these developments.

The USA has no allies, only clients. Some clients get more respect than others but they're all clients.

Remember, the State Department had a mole in the FDP, reporting on the German coalition negotiations. In all likelihood the CIA have a minister or more. The US does not respect anyone's sovereignty who can't and won't make them.
Even broader is the one in the drafted repeal of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, the scope of (b) being particularly worrying - what exactly counts a related purported decision?
'A court of law may not question— (a) the exercise or purported exercise of the powers referred to in section 2,(b) any decision or purported decision relating to those powers, or (c) the limits or extent of those powers.'
“We expect companies to be able to help with this,” he
said. “That doesn’t mean that you always have to write bad
cryptography.”

Yes, actually, that's exactly what it means. What in the world is this author doing giving the NSA the last word? What's really sick is that it sounds reasonable, like he's exposing a false dichotomy. But is it so hard to see that it's actually a real choice?
That is to say, the BBC is supposed to be run for the benefit of the United Kingdom and its citizens, not for the benefit of whoever happens to be the elected leader at the moment.
Any sufficiently complicated configuration language contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. [1]

[1] A variation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule
Have you read Bruce Sterling's "Shaping Things" book that talks about this concept of a design within the object - so maybe that could be called a physical Quine? I like it!
I actually caught myself checking your username to see if it was "Russell" (ref: Russell's paradox, regarding the set of all sets containing itself :-)
What experience do people have with other tools for generating javascript?

https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...

I'm wondering how they compare, and what people have to say.
I am a little surprised I was taken so seriously or even seriously at all.
There was a story the other day that Google is investigating exactly that for supporting legacy applications. If OnLive can successfully stream a AAA video game at playable latencies, then they have pretty much proven that any application is doable.
Here is why this common metaphor is wrong: the only useful thing cars do is get you from point A to point B. Mucking around with the innards is pointless unless you like doing it. Hacking a computer could be both fun and useful for a great variety of smart people. Furthermore, a car is a physical thing with rigid physical constraints on its design. If you want to tweak your car, you need to do a lot of stupid busywork with your wrench before you get to anything interesting. You need to have a wrench, and a garage for that matter. With an operating system, there are basically no constraints beyond the imagination of its makers.
Um, not anymore actually. And also it only worked because Dustin had no SPF records -- again vast majority of users were unaffected.
Because then the form, which you host, has to comply with the same PCI rules that the processor complies with.
Direct link https://pytorch.org/assets/deep-learning/Deep-Learning-with-...
From what I can recall, landfills produce more methane than any other process. How about we build a carbon capture next to every landfill, divert the methane and burn it to run the DAC?
> But it tells us nothing about how prevelent these motivations are compared to genuine concern for the issues at hand.

I found that to be a curious statement, because—and I didn't read the study, just here for the commentary—it seems like we're talking about how certain types of behaviour are differentiated from a whole for some reason. In this case, the effort seems to be toward finding disingenuous grandstanding, but how do we define genuine concern? When does a political belief that someone has become genuine and how do others outside this apparent narcissistic group reflect more noble intention?

My impression for some time has been that genuine concern for any given political topic is a function of the cost in having, revealing, or defending it. For example, if you are Brandon Eich, there is a tremendous cost in upholding his homophobic values; to himself and others. The racist who has never met whoever they hate, the gay man with anti-abortion values, nor the 17 year old who screams on reddit about Hong Kong and Blizzard but still buys their games and isn't in the crossfire quite a lot less.

-- Tried to use contemporary references. Brandon recently did an AMA and refused to answer any question about that controversy, not building too much confidence in his product called "Brave"
Sure just go to the Ratings & Review section on Apple's site and browse there to your heart's content.
Every laptop should ship with a charger and a roll of electrical tape.
Looks promising. Does anyone know any other alternatives?
Mostly software for Macs only, disappointing.
Whether an LCD is opaque or transparent without power is arbitrary, you can build them either way.
^ all feedback is good ^
The difference is during the BLM/ANTIFA riots, people were doing much more serious stuff. One kid got bagged because he threw a pipe bomb over the fence at federal agents (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm_lZxmPxUU) and another one where a guy hit federal agents with a hammer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7vlKbR3Gcs). There was another situation where some lawyers (not kidding) threw a Molotov cocktail into a police car that had police actually in it.
Well except they actually broke a law. This wasn't simply an 1A activity.

18 U.S. Code § 1752 - Restricted building or grounds
(a) Whoever—
(2) knowingly, and with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions, engages in disorderly or disruptive conduct in, or within such proximity to, any restricted building or grounds when, or so that, such conduct, in fact, impedes or disrupts the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions;

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1752
Agreed. I understand they are reticent to allow backups for security reasons - but they're treating their users like idiots by doing this. Some people will have threat models where the ability to retain/export messages is worth the risk this may introduce. Let people make their own decisions.
There’re fields of science, like computational biology, where it’s all about the code. I wish the methods section was always 100% unambiguous, but it’s not the case. And nowadays the computational pipelines have to support analysis of up to terabytes of data. You can imagine how many dependencies such pipelines have. Sometimes I have trouble installing the software even when package manager such as anaconda is used.
One must have the almighty algorithms odd face fetish blessing
Signal, that's another one that requires your phone number?

Yeah, thanks but no thanks.
Indeed! My blog post yesterday was "Across The Political Spectrum, A Rare Moment of Agreement — Thanks, TSA!"

http://iwilloptout.org/2010/11/17/across-the-political-spect...
"Really, HTML is needlessly verbose and annoying"

That "needless" verbosity makes error correction much more robust. Haml has a shit fit over the slightest of irregularities. The XHTML experience should be proof enough that trying to enforce picky parsing rules or highly context-dependent syntax leads to breakage.
> The problem is that it is easier to jump to a conclusion than it is to stop and think.

I think the problem is that our society gives in to stupid people if they scream loud enough. There always has been and always will be fools in the world. People who don't think, don't read and jump to anger as their first reaction.

The difference here is the fool got her way because a school board full of people not wanting to cause trouble backed down rather than confront her.
The 'People You May Know' feature seems to work really well, try that.
There are plenty of people that get drunk and have done things like assault airline personnel. It's not a leap to think that one of them might reach for a weapon at some point.
> vitally important to America

It is vitally important to America if by "America" he means a couple of media companies, their lobbyists and handful of senators who are on their payroll.

Also I like how instead of you telling him what is important for America he lectures you what is important.

How much does it take to bribe a senator? What are they paying him I wonder?
EngineYard - http://engineyard.com. they're built on top of EC2 and a little pricey but their support/service is incredible and they make it a breeze to deploy...
My meaning is that those sites listed above are well designed because they need to be. A designer won't pay money to list their company on a crap template monster website that you code up in a weekend.

Having a good-looking website is required for the MVP rather than 6 months down the track when the "idea" is proven.

My point is that some sites/startups need to look highly polished from day 1, even before you launch.
Well here's a good read about a 11 year long project without any customer feedback and non-pivoting waterfall model in action:

http://steveblank.com/2010/11/01/no-business-plan-survives-f...

Spoiler: They lost some money.
Same negative leaning review at nytimes:

"[Google TV is] all customizable, unfamiliar and mostly baffling, and you don’t get a single page of instructions. (I learned how to use Google TV by shooting a fusillade of questions to the Google P.R. people — an option I’m guessing won’t be open to you.)"

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/technology/personaltech/18...
AFAIK the allcaps "LISP" fell out of favour in 1984 when Common Lisp was introduced, and only the original Lisp implementation and Mac Lisp used the allcaps name.

Much like Fortran (no longer FORTRAN), the acronyms became proper names in their own right.
"Zen Flesh Zen Bones" -Anonymous

Buddhist precursors and a pile of Koans.
Use the right tool for the right job. By your logic, you should never write an assembler in anything but assembly language.
You're right in that these new labor markets, while they remove friction for entities in need of labor, potentially reduce the relative demand for a full time worker.

On the other hand, I would have loved this labor market as a college and university student.

The sad part is that we have an economy where mature adults are in jobs a highschooler could accomplish. No experience or skills necessary. It should not be that way, ideally, but that's how it is.
My experience supports the view that even with aid, American university prices can be prohibitively high.

Back in 2011, I got into a few prestigious schools (CMU, U Chicago) that talked a big game about need-based aid. They trimmed a good bit off the sticker price for me, but it was still more than I could afford without getting into more debt than I was comfortable with. I'm graduating next month from the University of Pittsburgh where I pay no tuition because I grew up nearby and my high school performance was up to par. So my friends who do pay tuition are subsidizing my degree.
You should fall under the free plan for mandrill, 12k emails per month I believe.

It's fast and free to sign up and test it out.

I use it on all my projects and haven't had any issues.

I've heard good things about both mandrill and sendgrid.

Good luck with your launch.
A question instantly spring to my mind -

Why all the virtualization? Lack of experience? I haven't done a large amount of work with virtualization, but stopping and thinking about it would seem to have indicated a problem with the design. Did no one look at this and say, "That's a bad idea..."?
Facts often drive behavior and understanding.

Examples:

- Are there correlations between outcomes and specific brands, configurations, or other attributes of firearm?

- Are there correlations between sales at specific outlets and outcomes?

- Is age and/or experience correlated with negative outcomes?

The assumption is that studying this would negatively impact gun ownership. I don't think that's true. Consider that anti-gun rhetoric over the .50 Barrett rifle. You may find that it's really a collector's item that isn't associated with crime. I'm sure there are many examples similar to this, that are blocked by black and white opinion on the matter, fueled by mutual ignorance.
> authoritarian communist regime

Breitbart is leaking.

But honestly, care to elaborate? I'm genuinely curious.
Relevant - "Matter and energy had ended and with it, space and time. Even AC existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken computer ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man.
All other questions had been answered, and until this last question was answered also, AC might not release his consciousness.

All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected.

But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.

A timeless interval was spent in doing that.

And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer -- by demonstration -- would take care of that, too.

For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.

The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done."

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
The tptacek comments you're probably referring to:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1690871
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1184236
From Thomas' post:

"Get circumvention at all wrong and you achieve the opposite of what the tool is intended for: you put a big red flag on people breaking their local laws. ... Don't build circumvention tools."

That attitude is so wrongheaded I hardly know where to begin.

First of all, anyone who uses something like TOR in China has already put a huge (and very very obvious) red flag on their communications stream.

So, if those people are going to be trying to break through the firewall anyway, why should't they do so with the best tools available? Why shouldn't they try to hide their communication in a stream of innocuous traffic rather than obviously red-flagging it?

And why shouldn't concerned programmers write tools to make the hiding of such information more effective?

Look, many people are going to try to communicate even when they're forbidden from doing so, and they're going to try to circumvent censorship. So we can either try to make it easier for them, or harder. I'm on the side of making it easier.

Sure, some people are going to get caught despite using steganographic software. But I'm willing to bet a lot fewer of them will get caught than using bare encryption systems like TOR.
I've seen loads of people who refer to polyphasic sleep as a solution to staying awake more. It strikes me as something of a myth. HN and reddit both talk about it a lot, so it was pretty easy to find a HN discussion to reference: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1464142

More direct "myths and facts about polyphasic sleep" at http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm

To me, polyphasic sleep seems like it might work for a few people, but it's likely just overhyped. I tried it in college -- maybe I just didn't have the willpower to push through, but after a month or so, I felt like a zombie.

You know what helps me stay up late and focused? All those stupid, boring little things that your mom taught you. Eat good food -- think of it as fuel, and armed with a little knowledge, you'll be well off. Get 30-60 minutes of exercise (heart rate > 130) every day or two. Regular sleep schedule. All that good stuff.
TG2 is using Pylons 1.0 but for the next major release of Pylons, Pylons merged with repoze.bfg becoming pyramid. Now the word Pylons refer to the project where pyramid is being developed. A little confusing but it's explained here: http://docs.pylonshq.com/
'the main' I wouldn't say. As women become increasingly economically independent, they open up the practical ability to get a divorce. Many women used to have to stay even in abusive relationships just because they had no other options. Women who can provide for themselves have the option to leave a relationship when they find it no longer in line with their life goals or desires.
He's a tall, muscular, bald Russian guy who likes guns, sandwiches and has an unhealthy bond with his family physician...I think.
I figured it was a Team Fortress reference. Considering both of the 'agencies' that control the teams are denoted by three letters (BLU, and RED).
You at New Mexico State, by any wild chance? Answer set programming is big there.