skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I dare you to construct a normal sentence in which the particular usage of "begs the question" is not completely clear from context.

I'd say that in every case that it is used in its classical sense when heard by person who uses it to mean "raises the question." Using "begs the question" that way is an actual mistake. One can have only heard "begs the question" used properly, but if you weren't familiar with the phrase, easily and understandably take it to mean "a question is begging to be asked", then go on to use it incorrectly.

Using the phrase "begs the question" incorrectly is probably only an hour younger than the phrase itself. Correcting someone about it without completely explaining its actual meaning (because you'd have to, at the least, explain the difference between formal and informal fallacies) is about a minute younger than that.

It's hard to make a case for it being language evolution if the incorrect usage is as old as the correct usage, and isn't growing any more than proportionally with it.

People being upset about being corrected about it isn't new either. People who use it correctly will continue to use it correctly, and people who use it incorrectly will use it correctly after they learn formal fallacies and can't think of a better, pithier way to describe that particular one.

Using it incorrectly, of course, is a sin akin to using an eggcorn (http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/) : everybody has misheard or misunderstood many things, and then misuses them. The problem with finding them is that one has to use them in a conversation with someone nice enough or brave enough to correct one.
Ask HN: Alternatives to HN for tech news and discussion?
I've been finding myself getting more frustrated over time with silent flagging of articles where they suddenly drop from the HN front page without any indication as to why.

What are some good alternative tech news & discussion sources?
Smart and intelligent are different things. If a person has succeed up until a given point by just being intelligent/workign hard, and relying on higher ups to notice to get promoted, I don't see why s/he wouldn't continue that previously winning strategy a little while longer. It's easy to fall into the trap of "I just need to work harder" when working harder has worked before.

So, either his feedback loop was lengthened because it was input that didn't match his past experience.

Or, maybe he wasn't/isnt that great on picking up social cues (something he eludes to).
I'm more annoyed by their (apparent?) removal of simple synching of a single branch.

That was already the only thing I used GitHub for Windows for, and that's only because Visual Studio doesn't speak SSH.
There's a good conversation about this, humans and cell regeneration specifically, in the movie "Waking Life" (as well as many many other great conversations about a variety of philosophies)
The answer to this may have a serious impact upon whether my github account is full of awesome code examples that I wrote myself.
So, I'll just put on my angry hat here, and say what a lot of us are probably thinking:

For b, life is too goddamned short to waste hours making other people feel like their fuckups weren't fuckups. Once you get the deep-in-your-bones acceptance that a company doesn't care what you're doing (as is clearly the case if the winning strategy isn't to, you know, do the optimal thing for the product), then it's a question of, "How I can exert minimum effort and get maximum return?".

That's fucking toxic.
Think about the following factors when choosing a stack:

- How mature is it ? Is it a latest new cool thing or does it have a proven track record?

- What is the purpose of your project ? Is it just to learn new things or you actually building a real world busines ? How quickly can you time to market ? This is critical.

- What kind of support ecosystem exists for this stack ? Can you easily debug, ask other people and get answers quickly ?

I don't think RoR will become obsolete in the world of web in the next few years. If you really love it as you say, then go use it specially if you are building something important to do as a business. But by all means go try something new if you want to learn or try as a hobby.

while we are discussing, some of the stuff that I have come across while building a web project in 2015:

### Front End

Angular, React, Meteor, Knockout and of course Jquery.

### Back End

Laravel/Lumen (for php), Django/Flask (Python), Rails/Sinatra (Ruby), Nodejs
I don't think that the schema here allows you to do this kind of query even in MySQL. They are throwing everything in that blob, which makes it pretty difficult to sort on anything that's in the blob. So, I think they would have to do what you are describing, denormalize everything... or get all the data and do the sort in the app. Which is precisely what would be required with Cassandra or another NoSQL system. Am I missing anything that would invalidate what I've just said?
I want to start scholarships for students from my high school that are from humble backgrounds and want to attend community college for the beginning of their college careers. Eventually I would like to start a scholarship fund. I haven't really found a lot of good resources for starting a scholarship. How did you go about setting up your scholarship?
Mozilla has tried to enter the OS space with Firefox OS. Unfortunately, that hasn't worked out so well for them so far.

Entering a mature market with a new product often winds up a fruitless effort. I think they'll have a better shot with new categories like Smart Watches, Smart Mini MP3 Players and those Smart Flip Phones/Sliders. Android is having major issues entering those categories for quite some time so that leaves a good opening for competition.

Another thing they can do is to build their own phone. Make it the best phone that they possibly can and support it for 5-10 years. With the only revisions making it smaller and cheaper but otherwise the same (ie. same architecture but miniaturized). Even if during those 5-10 years it's not seen uptake Mozilla will have built up a unmatched reputation for supporting their devices. So when the successor is announced...
https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/Cubieboard
I'm glad there is a simple $5 plan. This makes hacking on my small project (http://fireform.org/ - plug) a much more reasonable proposition.
> If the author is capable of developing systems that save the company hundreds of millions of dollars per year, why the fuck does it matter if they are a "great person to work with"?

If the author is a narcissist, they would be mistaken about saving the company hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

Remember, this is from the author's point of view. Allegedly, he was working with PH.Ds and others who disagreed with his metrics. A man who within his own rant claimed to be smarter than everyone else in his team.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Dunning Kruger effect is real. A man who says nothing good about his own team (that he admits has PH.Ds that were disagreeing with him) is hard to believe. The author is probably honest about _believing_ that he was saving millions of dollars per year. But perhaps he was an idiot and his metrics were wrong.

And based on my experience, when a rant begins with:
> I love to solve real world problems, and in many ways am the perfect type of person for Amazon's culture

You can almost certainly believe the guy is on the "Illusory superiority" side of the Dunning Kruger effect.
Where did you get that from? I'm not saying that, not at all.
Do I think that living and open relationship (not necessary polygamy, because the terms implies numerous relationships each with the same affective and contractual status) is the best way to go? Yes.
Does that imply that humanity, freed from the religious oppression, would go for that? Not at all. There might even be some biological bases for monogamy, but we are rational beings. We can work around our instinct. We do that all the time. Some of us can successfully do that for monogamy, too. It would be great if that could be more largely accepted.
Why stackoverflow is a good workplace for women
I gave an answer on Reddit a week or two ago to a what might be considered the current limiting case in clinical practice. In another comment in the same thread I tried to point out that there are a lot of edge cases, even where it seems to be a bright line.

It seems reasonable to me that we should monitor this train of research closely, and I'm pretty confident people will.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3g31m0/are_fetu...
Summary of what's changed is available on their blog: https://www.firebase.com/blog/2015-08-19-announcing-lower-si...
I'm doing GPU graph processing: http://gunrock.github.io
I think another critical aspect of getting high performance graph processing is load balancing. Also, there are tons of papers talking about how to reorganize data to get coalesced memory access. Combining the above strategies can outperform pre-processing such as sorting. At least on GPU this holds.
>> why the fuck does it matter if they are a "great person to work with"

Cause no one wants to work with an asshole, no matter how smart they are. There's plenty of other engineers out there that can build systems and save money, maybe not to the specific degree that OP claims to be able to, but unlike OP they'll work with their team.
Haswell (Iris Pro) has 128MB of eDRAM on chip enabling it to do some benchmarks and games reasonably well. But, even low end (50$) GPU's have 1GB of DDR5.

So, it's yet another huge compromise. Granted, having huge amounts of L4 cache could in theory be very useful when you disable the graphics. Which they might do, I don't know a lot about Iris.
I've been thinking about the extreme of this - free-writing on paper. I do a great deal of "programming" on paper, sketching designs, making notes, asking myself questions, making lists. The free-formness of it is critical to fast, intuitive thinking.

Humans are naturally intuitive thinkers. Rigor must be trained. We see the struggle all the time, with unsophisticated computer users trapped in some nightmare of a form that they can't understand or use effectively. A lot of communication is lost that way, and a lot of time and mental health.

Coming from the other end, I have the rigor of an experienced programmer, but also the mind of an artist. Music, photography, and other pursuits keep me deeply in touch with my intuition. Being able to think rigorously about intuition is pretty useful! Many years ago, I took jazz theory lessons. My teacher emphasized what he called four-way learning. I was to read the chords on paper, say their names out loud, watch/feel the shapes my fingers made on the piano, and listen to the sound the chord made. These overlapping inputs, he said, were vital to memorizing such complex material. And committing it to memory was the key to accessing it intuitively, on the fly - to creating complex things (in this case, music).

To this day, it's why I prefer pen and paper as my first data capture for ideas. Even if I never look at that page again (and I usually don't), the physical sensation of writing it that way, the visualizations I can create, lend power to my ability to memorize and synthesize the ideas.

So what does this have to do with tablet forms? Well, in many cases, the data we need to capture isn't rigorous or easily structured. Imagine a situation where, say, a doctor is trying to get a description of pain a patient feels. Imagine the patient can draw that pain, rather than translate to words. Wouldn't that be useful? But that's not really accessible, either with the physical limits of paper forms or the rigorous content and inputs of online forms.

So yeah, I like this article. Made me think.
Annoyed by all the "feel-good" pieces out of wherever. Push "all the bad things" into one little scapegoat and suddenly the rest of life becomes nothing but good.

I mean, that's great for the people for whom it works (if there are any), but, guess what, when "the rest of us" want to "emulate that person", we get a few steps and realize we can't be that person because all of us are imperfect.

It'd be more inspiring if these kinds of posts also included existing "skeletons-in-closet" to make the person seem more mortal.

And not the interview answer "I'm too much of a perfectionist" skeleton. What does it really take? "My wife resents my success." "My kid doesn't even like/know me." "My grad student actually did all the work." "I'm sleep deprived and suicidal most of the time." "Half my statistics are lies."

Seriously, nobody has a perfect life. What does it really take to make (at least) a "successful" one?
I'm confused. I don't know what ionic is, so I go to ionic.io. I don't see a link for that, so I actually need to change the URL by hand.

Then I notice a light-gray on white "Ionic" link at the bottom. Here it is! but it brings me ionicframework.com which has similar message, but is not the same, as ionic.io.

Maybe a link to the main project and a simple explanation of what it is would have been better than that fancy animated text?
Thanks for the correction, I'm not a native speaker, and it shows. I'm always looking for constructive criticism to make my written English better.
Yes, I used 'Palas' as a base template for my company's site. Support is in general good, I'd say: lots of elements are worked out so you can build your layout with building blocks very rapidly, and configurability is often high. You still need to do work if you want to have your site look like something unique, but in general these templates are a great way to start.

And they are the same thing, templates from bootstrap or from 3rd parties: you get an example site with several pages, pages with building blocks on them, less based customization css on top of bootstrap, documentation which block does what so it's easy to find where to customize e.g. a header color / font.
THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER
If done in HTML, it is rocket science. When I started reading and they mentioned that only a graph is cross-platform, I was thinking - "oh, they probably used OpenGL". Little did I know...
Funny enough, its funded by Bezos
Internet companies across China are embracing Programming Cheerleaders
I agree and was being sarcastic.
Is that durability rate per-... user? project? s3-wide?

Important detail left out.

If there are 10,000,000 projects with 10,000 objects, then a system-wide durability of 99.999999999% would expect to drop 1 object per year.
The Dropbox economy: A teaching point on securing data in the cloud
Why American Fell in Love with the Most Useless Crop: Your Lawn
The question usually is: Business or leisure? If it's for fun trying out something that's as different from the stack you're used to as possible (like Haskell or Lisp, for instance) will allow you to get the most out of the experience like learning new paradigms and gaining a different perspective on your favourite stack as well.

As this is for business I'd say stick to what you know. Creating a useful software product that can be marketed successfully is difficult enough as it is. There's no need to complicate the process any further.

Regarding hiring: First things first. You won't hire people in the beginning anyway I suppose. So, that's a problem you should consider later on. Besides, development lends itself to working remotely so area isn't really an issue anyway.
How to fix yellowed plastics on old computers [video]
Cut off their H1B access, then. They clearly don't believe in a shortage of tech talent since they make no effort to retain it.

If talent is so plentiful they can dispose of it without care, they don't need to be importing it.
The Startling Poetry of a Nearly Forgotten Japanese Modernist
Sure.

But, maybe you can try to recall all the other people saying pretty much the same thing about working for amazon? Does that help you judge this post a little more favourably/give it more credence?
I was expecting to see a story about some new colony that has no porn and lots of surveillance.
Why your project may not be ready for microservices
Hopefully enough has been altered that they can't be identified too easily. That said, it looks like they can, maybe should find better elsewhere.
Thanks for this simple explanation.
If you're comfortable or want to learn a new stack, there are plenty to choose from.

If you want to quickly build a web project, hire some engineers, charge for your service - why not build it in RoR? This will save you time troubleshooting and learning the ropes of a new web development framework.

Also, you could always hire remote workers if it is difficult to hire locally. See: https://weworkremotely.com/
I think number of contributors would be a good metric, even though it penalizes lone projects, but I suspect that would be relatively even across languages compared to other metrics. For example, LoC is proportional to verbosity. Commit count is emphasizes languages that tend to have more bugs.
I am glad there is now support for vendor directories, albeit experimental at this stage.

https://go-review.googlesource.com/#/c/10923/

Go 1.5 vendor proposal:

If there is a source directory d/vendor, then, when compiling a source file within the subtree rooted at d, import "p" is interpreted as import "d/vendor/p" if that exists.

When there are multiple possible resolutions, the most specific (longest) path wins.

The short form must always be used: no import path can contain “/vendor/” explicitly.

Import comments are ignored in vendored packages.
Hey, Techies, Burning Man 2015 Is Buggy. Except It’s the Creepy, Crawly Kind
At Amazon, when resolving an issue in our internal ticketing system I recall there being "Act of God" as a reason code. Seems applicable here.
Is DevOps at odds with change management?
A so UPS on the cheap a real UPS is always running of the battery Telco style and you are testing your gensets at least weakly and checking the tanks every month or so.

At BT they where tested every day for the really sensitive systems.
There is absolutely no evidence here that they have dunning krugers.

In fact, their continued employment at a company that routinely cuts the lower performers is probably evidence against them having dunning krugers.
Nope.

Anyone who has worked in this industry knows that middle management can make or break a team. All that the news has told me is that some middle management at Amazon sucks.

Which is true for all companies. Some middle managers are absolutely awful at their job. The engineers then blame the company in its entirety, not realizing that it was their direct supervisors who were messing up.

I'm sure Amazon has their fair share of awful managers. But all companies do.

Honestly, a professional would write up specifics beyond "My analysis says that I saved millions of dollars but no one else on my team believed my numbers".

Which is the crux of his entire argument unfortunately. I don't see anything here about awful bosses micromanaging him. I don't see him mentioning the turnover of his team (My sister had an awful boss. Her entire team left within 6 months. She was the last one to get out about a year later. The entire team took a paycut to leave for another company)

I know what awful bosses sound like. Failing to give a promotion to one dude who self-thought he was doing good is not necessarily indicative of a mistake.

Tell me the numbers. How many team members (or what percent) has left the team in the past 6 months? How have _other smart_ team members been ignored?

When a team is awful, it effects more than just you personally. The people who complain with true vigor are the ones who see it in their coworkers.

If its 100% personal anecdote of a self taught self-described polymath... sorry, I'm chocking it up to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
What Can We Learn from Ashley Madison?
Other than Oracle being a part of the equation MySQL is still an open source database and too quote the article:

"Aside: I still recommend startups avoid the fancy new stuff — try really hard to just use MySQL. Trust me. I have the scars to prove it."

In many ways, Postgres is cutting edge with it's features and capabilities. I see lots of updates from Postgres that include new SQL features (json objects) - conversely I see lots of updates from MySQL that are about durability and scalability e.g. (galera cluster, percona updates etc...)

From the use case Pinterest exposed in the article, I'm not sure what the additional features of Postgres would actually buy them?
Are you saying essentially that "There is no such thing as a surge protector, they don't physically exist. Only surge reducers exist." Because that's what it sounds like to me.

EDIT:

All right, I'll rephrase. According to Google's infobox from nat'l geographic, lightning generates up to 1 billion volts.

-> Are surge protectors at even the highest-end data centers simply not rated to a billion volts of surge protection?
You should read the whole thing. The author may come across as a narcissist at the beginning but that wanes rather quickly - he is also quite honest and forthcoming about his own shortcomings.

Everything he writes will resonate with anyone who has worked in large bureaucracies.
This raises a relevant concern that's been on my mind: what's the best way to back up cloud services? Given that services like S3 and Google Drive have many more nines of durability than any local storage system I could devise, are backups even worth the trouble?

There are a lot of cloud-to-cloud backup services out there, but to me that seems like the blind leading the blind, especially with regards to malicious data destruction. For instance, I've recently been experimenting with Cloudally to automatically back up Google Drive, which seems like a good solution at first- until you think about the fact that Cloudally uses Google accounts for authentication (and doesn't use 2FA for native authentication). In other words, an attacker with access to my primary data (Google Drive) would also have access to my backups. Worse than that, Cloudally actually increases the attack surface, since its lack of 2FA presumably makes it easier to crack than my Google account.

Similarly, I'm guessing a lot of cloud backup services share data centers with the services they are backing up.
The full dose isn't pushed. It's on a drip IV over half an hour or more. But I fully agree that you should have a competent, experienced doctor doing it, preferably an anesthesiologist.
> you and I have agency and free will.

I don't buy this argument, I only feel like I have free will, as a model of my brain would. How could you convince me otherwise?
Please note this from 2010.

A very nice article nonetheless.
Better title suggestion: Lawn & Order. /s

Seriously, what has American society devolved into.
Any business in it for the mid-to-long term is a marathon, rather than a sprint. Yeah, there are times when a all hands on deck is needed to fix a bug or meet a deadline. The problem comes when you realize that you have to do it every year (or every release, or...). It's better to plan and avoid burnout than set yourself up to fail when critical staff walk rather than keep at the grindstone. While some folks are truly capable of working extraordinary hours, most aren't. Satisfy your customers and keep a stable staff.
Yeah, it's amazing. We've had decades of improvements in hardware performance, only to end up with software that's slower than anything that came before it. Yet apart from a small minority, nobody seems to bat an eye.
Apps are a Big Deal
How does IBM keep doing cool stuff like this when every impression I have of them is a slow moving, lumbering, IT services monster that's lunging to provide solutions for Big Business?
These guys are using similar technology to the Boahen lab's:

http://web.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/index.html

In fact, I think some of the alumni now work at IBM, on this very project.