skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the problem with trying to create your own trading system.

How do you back test it to know that it works. If you back test over the past 5 years then you are only testing your model against a huge bull market.

If you back test over the past 20 years then I'm not sure it helps much as the market of 20 years ago didn't really have any of the major market drives of today's markets, HFT's, huge numbers of hedge funds and the money they bring, and huge passive investing via ETF's, all those factors were there 20 years ago, but they weren't the major market drivers that they are now.

So for back testing you are damned if you do and damned if you don't:(

I think I've said this before but in my experience, a decent trading system is 70%+ market insight. And there are only really 3 ways to get this insight, hard earned experience, applying new streams of data to the markets and applying math to existing streams of data to unlock new insights.

All 3 are being done every day by scores of MIT Phd's.

So if you are writing your own trading models you should start by answering the question of what's your alpha when compared to everyone else....
> the entire burden of proof on the person who desires to take it down.

That's exactly the point though - If a person can successfully defend the existence of a fence against your insistence for change, they've not demonstrated that the fence is required beyond all doubt, they've demonstrated that YOU are not capable enough to be the one that changes it, since your knowledge of the domain can't even defeat a "silly" insistence of maintaining the status quo.
Rational and delusional are nearly antonyms.
YAGNI.

Software should be implemented as simple as possible, and then refactored as necessary when new functionality is required (the only exception is things you are very sure is going to be needed, e.g a password reset functionality on a password dialog).

Anyhow that is my development philosophy.
I recently installed it at work due to offensive political advertising during our last elections (non-usa country)
> Their Android application still didn't support federated contacts even when it was based on XMPP

If I remember correctly, it did, and then they removed the feature.

They claim it was due to spam, but really, there are a number of ways to solve that problem without removing the feature entirely (ranging from better spam-prevention heuristics to requiring an explicit opt-in).

Hangouts is in all ways inferior to Google Talk. It's really a shame.
> I can't make a strong argument for the Earth being flat, does that mean I don't understand the question well enough?

Yes.

Have you never used a flat map for navigation? Did the map deviate from what you observed on the earth by enough to notice? The curvature of the earth is very small, so it is trivial to come up with a world-view in which it would be "obvious" that the earth is flat.
I've arrived at a similar conclusion, with a few exceptions:

Never changing past migration scripts should be a guideline, not necessarily a hard rule. With Rails, I generally prefer to use ActiveRecord in migration scripts (rather than raw SQL) for the purpose of keeping things more readable (again, guideline rather than hard rule). As you mentioned, sometimes changes in application code can break past migrations, hence the need to occasionally alter a past migration (e.g., placing parts of the migration in a conditional). With practice, this actually encourages one to write relatively "future-proof" migrations, anticipating possible future code changes and creating each migration with as few assumptions as possible.

At times, as in your example, a migration may alter data (not just structure), and sometimes old migrations alter data in an obsolete way that isn't really helpful anymore. Occasionally (especially if the migration in question is time-consuming), I'll revise an older migration, but I always keep it around (so the version still exists) and add comments to note what is being removed and why.

One thing that really helps is regularly running all migrations in sequence. My test suite would routinely run them all, and I never use a schema.rb to load a schema directly. Vagrant dev environments are always built using all past migrations. Doing that regularly helps ensure that the current database schema is always a result of repeatable deltas.

One more thing: I avoid migration rollbacks whenever possible. I've seen them cause more chaos than relief in already-stressful situations. In practice, this means (1) making sure the codebase before and after a migration can handle the database state before and after the migration, (2) writing migrations that allow you to easily restore the database to a consistent state if they fail midway through, and (3) whenever possible, fixing a migration and redeploying rather than attempting to roll back changes. A rollback is, after all, a migration itself, prone to its own set of potential bugs and failures.
> And there is finally no social stigma related to nerds.

People are just not telling you to your face anymore, because they want your money. :/
I'm right there with you on every point and I'm only 32.

Job hopping is more difficult, and the quality/appeal of available jobs is no longer what it used to be.

I've been thinking about this lately and I've come to the conclusion that most programming jobs aren't technically challenging to me at this point in my life. As I learn more and get older, I also look for greater challenges to overcome. The best paying jobs in the industry (and in the HN hiring thread) are all about making the same things I made in 2001, just with different technologies.

The above conclusions have forced me to start thinking about what's next. Is it really starting my own business? If I'm going to take the time to learn business development, marketing and sales, is programming really the most lucrative use of my time?
Wouldn't it be interesting if neutrinos shared properties with photons?
There's a post by Mike Pall, author of LuaJIT, which explains why writing C is very suboptimal for maximally performant VMs:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/75426

Worth noting that IIRC, for a while LuaJIT in interpreted mode was able to beat V8 in optimized mode not all that infrequently (although it depended on the use case, they are different languages, and I do not know if this is still the case).
I loved this talk from David Aldridge of Bungie detailing the networking in Halo: Reach:

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014345/I-Shot-You-First-Networ...

...and a link to bungie.net for the slides:

http://downloads.bungie.net/presentations/David_Aldridge_Pro...

Bungie has some awesome publications on art, design, and engineering.
> IMs have had those features for decades

Yes, and 90% of my contacts have been “away” 100% of the time for just as long. Presence information is useless, I’ve been ignoring it for years.

What is the problem you want to avoid? People interrupting you. This is much better solved with a client side option that you control, without relying on the other user’s judgment.

I really like the Do Not Disturb feature in iOS and OS X: it works for the entire system instead of a single program and I fully control it, it doesn’t depend on you interpreting my signal that I’m “busy”.

Send me whatever messages you want any time you want, if I can respond I will, if I don’t want to be interrupted my phone won't make a bleep no matter how hard you push.

Preemptive rebuttal: “the system can turn off notifications when I set myself as away” then why set away in the first place? It has no meaning other than “do not disturb me”.
I'm the CTO of Bellhops, Ask Me Anything During Codementor Office Hours on 8/20
My above claim indicated that there was a lot of risk in competing directly with government and for about the same thing they're offering. It doesn't preclude that success is possible. Besides, most of the examples you give are poor because, as you said, the private firms weren't trying to offer the same thing.

For instance, much USPS expense comes from the fact that they have to ship cheap anywhere. The overlap between them and private sector is the closest you come to a valid example. Private security in most states doesn't have to do much past issue warnings and call the police, while police can take direction action. A bus that runs directly to your campus isn't a general purpose bus or serving most people. So, yeah, it's certainly easier to offer a service that does less than the government one for fewer people and be successful.

Back to the actual topic at hand: fiber infrastructure. Laying out fiber all over the place has a high cost with low amount of money coming in. That's for lowest tiers. The Tier 1's expend 8-9 digits maintaining backbones. So, if government started competing, you can bet the private market would suffer & re-consider new fiber investments. The only model making sense at that point would be offering value-added services on top of connectivity while doing private investments where government wouldn't go.
Also, "Tinfoil for Facebook" has explicit Orbot support (Tor for Android). Works very nicely. There is a "Tinfoil for Twitter" too which works much the same way.
If you really want to be pedantic, going east in level flight you are at less than 1G due to orbital momentum and in vary small part due to altitude. So, in theory you could do all of this and stay under 1G.

PS: The weight thing can be significant for hypersonic+ aircraft. Also, you use slightly less fuel going east than west due to earth’s rotation, though winds are going to be far more important.
The list seems to be missing the simplest naughty string of all: The empty string!

(Well, the text file has empty lines separating the comments and example strings so it technically includes the empty string, but it's not in the JSON file.)
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10033172
I really want this with an opacity filter = masking just like Photoshop.
This is a great story/summary, and it underlines the value of being able to "hear from" the code's original author (either by contacting them, or preferably by referring to high-quality documentation saying "this looks stupid, here's why").

I've had the joy of seeing code which broke completely if you removed the line while(false){}. Some hideous synchronization bug was solved by this line, and while it obviously wasn't the right solution, simply deleting it produced bad outputs. Profilers and processing tools are, as you say, other likely causes of dumb-looking code choices.

The stupider the "error", the more suspicion you should assign to its presence in any half-decent code.
> How do you back test it to know that it works.

You don't. You turn it on and see if it works. Which does have a certain degree of intellectual rigor to it.

> So if you are writing your own trading models you should start by answering the question of what's your alpha when compared to everyone else....

Well right, that's the core question isn't it. But clearly the allure of wanting to test ones own set of biases and insights for alpha is fairly understandable and appealing.
Indeed. To me, this article seemed like a PR piece designed to increase HomeAway's stock price.
Because "we should have more freedom of speech" is not a universal truth. This should become obvious if you compare Israel, where holocaust denial is illegal, to the UK, where it is not. Clearly the 2 nations have different opinions on the limits of freedom of speech.

Laws get changed all the time, which doesn't mean the
underlying ethics changed.

Are you sure about this? I would have thought that laws change precisely because moral and ethical sensibilities do change.

If what should happen is defined by what's already law...

I don't think that's being argued.
Consoles don't need Vulkan, since they've always had low-level (or non-existant) graphics APIs.
I dunno, building a wall around SF sounds pretty SF-ish and weird to me.
It might be using it partially, but it still relies on that plugin blob. No idea why they can't use a pure WebRTC solution.
Similarly, a lot of users will call tech support to complain that "the Internet is down" when it's merely their email provider, or Facebook, or League of Legends, and everything else is fine... :-)
Accepted a pull request which is nicer.
go get em tiger, screw all the haters! good for you for trying to better yourself and doing it while following 'the rules'.
The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work
Chesterton's fence doesn't require you to prove that the doohicky isn't staving off Cthulu's wrath, but merely to know that that is the purpose.
How can this fix prevent this class of attacks?

The malicious app has local access to the user's machine, which means it has the ability to read and overwrite all files that the browser manages.

In the worst case, we could create malware that just reads the browser's client public key and create our own session with the same one.
Does Plea Bargaining Add to Criminal Caseloads?
> So why aint you rich already ? smart guy.

Downvote for facile argument and unnecessary insult.
The author is confused because they think a 'hacker' is a tangible thing. It isn't. It's an idea without shape, a calling without purpose.

The prototypical self-described hacker is an insecure person who attaches themselves to a romantic, powerful identity in order that they might attain these qualities themselves. But the power of the hacker is that of a magician: conjuring tricks in order to amaze the public and seem mysterious, powerful, skilled.

Here you see a normal web server with a firewall. It's totally secure. Nothing up my sleeve, as you can see. But wait... Alacazam! Now I have a remote shell!

If the author wanted to 'resist' traditional economic institutions they could become a circus performer. But then they couldn't fulfill the true 'fetish', which is that anti-authoritarian action through intellectual skill and craftiness is a pursuit to be proud of; one that the audience should revere.

The fact that this author's lofty rejection of traditional economic forces packaged in a sexy identity also has the ability to provide them a very comfortable living is, it would seem, totally accidental.
I'm not sure I'd go as far as irrelevant - rather, I would say that documentation is what you do to keep other people from needing the principle of charity. They're two directions on solving the same problem. As a maintainer you should assume good intentions, but as a creator you should work to clarify your intent.
> "Consuming fewer calories than you burn is the only way to lose weight."

You need to look at what is driving the calories consumption/burning.

Suppose I have a problem with my sink and call a plumber. He looks at it for a few minutes and then says: "Sir, your sink is overflowing because more water got in than got out." No shit, I knew that. That doesn't tell me anything useful. I want to know if drain is clogged, or if someone opened a fire hose in it.

The question to ask is 'why'. Why am I overeating?

Think about it:
You don't see a deer spontaneously explode because there was too much food around it. When it's full, it stops eating.

What you eat influences how your calories are partitioned; what your body does with them.

If I inject you growth hormones, part of the calories you ingest will be used to make you taller. You'll be hungry because your body is growing.

Similarly, if I inject you an extra dose of insulin, you won't be able to just "exercise it away". The insulin will prevent you from accessing the energy in your fat cells (while accumulating more). And because the body sees less energy 'available', it will shut down excessive energy expenditure while sending you a big hunger signal.

> "(and thus enabling you to consume fewer calories by consuming less calorically dense food)"

I don't know why you shifted from total energy consumption to the energy density, but that's just wrong. You can eat fat and still lose weight.
Jack Dorsey and Other Twitter Insiders Make Show of Support
I appreciate this pushback against my use of "them". I appreciate your astute description of what it is like to be a person.

...Forgive me, if you want, when I contradict myself!

I think there's some value in cliques. I was reminded of this recently when some buddies and I started an every-other-Sunday RPG group. (Heroes Unlimited, FWIW.)

The conversations that come up in that group are really great. The common ground that we share[0] allows me to really get down to brass tacks with ease. ...More easily than I can do here!

Granted, wishing that my public-news-and-commentary-website would be more like my-four-man-paper-and-dice-gaming-club is downright unreasonable. That being said, the fact remains that there are little corners of the web (net!) here and there where discussion about changing the world via tech won't get sidetracked by some perverse anti-SJW point-hunting BS. Wait, ARE THERE? :(

0: physics, respect for the rules (of the game/physics/conversation), puns, beer.
There is a pull request pending that fixes this.
The recent spike you've seen might trace back to http://blog.getbatterybox.com/which-browser-is-the-most-ener...

I make no claim about it's veracity, just saw the headline recently - probably on HN.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10033907
It's a shame when physics is presented as how reality works!

Rather than what it is: our best model.
If he'd actually read the article he'd know that Sam directly admits they have a positive feedback loop

> A lot of the best entrepreneurs in the world want to join YC.

There's a ton of evidence (for example, many founder testimonials) that YC has a great deal of authentic value add. So his comment comes across as uninformed sour grapes to me and I stand by my question.
Exactly, you got it right. One indirection less, and no jump table in the cache. And CPUs are very well optimised for this kind of indirect jumps, because of vtables.

There is also one step further - emit the actual jump instructions, making a direct threaded code. It is a bit more complicated and not very portable, but if you want to squeeze all the cycles you can it's still an easy and fast option before resorting to a full-scale compiler.
SSDT is fantastic for this. I wish it worked for something other than SQL Server though!
Some of you will present this tale as proof of Job's restless devotion to perfecting the Macintosh down to the last detail. I see it as an anal retentive bully having his way. For all we know, the original calculator app might have looked great. It just wasn't how Steve would have done it. So instead he wastes his programmer's time with tedious changes. (The fact that he wasn't finished with just one round of revisions tells me either Steve couldn't communicate what he wanted, or wasn't sure what he wanted.) Was the calculator app really that much better in the end? And were the improvements worth all that effort? Only the original mac team would know. Who knows--The original calculator could have looked better.
The BatteryBox folks did some tests and posted the results:

http://blog.getbatterybox.com/which-browser-is-the-most-ener...

>> TL;DR; If you’re a MacBook user, you’re losing an average of 1 hour of total battery life by using Chrome. Firefox is a little better, but Safari is the clear winner. You’ll want to use Safari if you want to get the most battery out of your laptop.
Vancouver, Tokyo, Cebu, Singapore, Bangkok, and Kharkiv all show EOF.

Paris, Roubaix, Manchester, Portsmouth, Budapest, Tokyo, Bilthoven, Vleuten, Utrecht, Manila, Sovetskaya Gavan, Tyuven, Singapore, Bangkok, Taipei City, Kiev, Kherson, Ashburn, Mountain View, Rowley, amd Newark all show 503s.

It's more than just the Great Firewall. :-)
Thanks for your perspective and valuable insight.

> as czbond pointed out, most developers don't care about those topics

Unfortunately, not caring about security isn't the same as not needing it. They can not care about it all they want, but if their app is insecure in a way that an attacker knows about, their users will suffer for it. This is a huge problem.

To complicate matters, I don't know of anyone that cares about security as part of their job, who isn't also currently being serviced by hundreds of vendors pushing marginally-superior-to-snake-oil solutions for $X00,000 to $X,000,000 per year. And even if I manage to find this audience, how do I speak to them and their interests? This isn't something I've been able to find valuable insight into from a Google search.

My background is not in business or marketing and although I've attempted to learn as much as I can about the subject, it isn't something I understand intuitively. Maybe there are obvious answers to these complications that I just don't see. Or maybe I'm just asking the wrong questions, for that matter.
This article is bound to ruffle some feathers around here.

The writing is spot on but will cause some cognitive dissonance for some as the words ring true but conflict with the structures they have set up in their minds and in their lives.

I think that the commercialization can be good though... the culture gets to live on and propagate when there is a way for hackers to make money doing what they love. Any successful counterculture is bound to be co-opted and exploited, but that doesn't mean that true participants in that culture shouldn't be able to subsist off of it.

Author makes the comparison to hip-hop culture which I think is a good one... there is a highly commercialized side of that culture in rap music, but there are still "underground" emcees not to mention deejays, beatboxers, graffiti writers, and others who are able to build up their culture due in no small part to the money coming in. Of course, to maintain a good balance, you need keepers-of-the-faith like the author who are willing to smack down arrogant upstarts who think they can piss all over and redefine the culture they claim to hail from.
Are they adding an extra tier, or replacing the lowest? I thought they were replacing the lowest.
i hate being a human.
Over-generalizer, know thyself.
Let’s Pull Public Comment into the 21st Century with San Francisco’s Prop. E
A few things:

1. There is a long list of businesses that failed because they "didn't want to compete on price".

2. It is impossible to build a brand on a platform as commoditized as Android. The barrier to entry is too low. You can't market a $600 flagship without someone like One Plus coming and eating your lunch.

3. As more people switch to BYOD plans, they will begin to realize how unnecessary a $600 phone is. Expect much more downward pressure on mobile prices. $300 will be the new $600.

The only brand I see playing it right in the Android market is Motorola.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10032671
Indian here. I wanted to try for H1B, but after studying the waiting period, conditions under H1B employment, it makes so much sense to go to Canada instead.
i keep my options open until I find a better solution.

i'm assuming engineers that build FB messenger, WhatsApp, Twitter etc. could be using similar approach, but I am more than happy to be proven wrong.
There is only one thing I care about: will they be producing condoms bigger than the FDA currently allows? Some guys have this problem. ahem
To be truly pedantic, you could be landing and execute a slow sinking flare, which can be < 1G right up until the moment the wheels contact the pavement and the momentum of the aircraft results in > 1G force - but then you aren't flying any more!
Technology has some phase changes, where it suddenly changes from "doing X is extremely hard" to "hey, X is actually very easy to do!" without any ado, and no obvious reasons.

There are too many histories where after a long time of nothing happening, everybody suddenly starts working on the same problem, without any kind of coordination.