skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Definitely. Seems like way too many drivers in traffic only see road space in front of another vehicle as "an opportunity to change lanes and go faster" rather than "that vehicle's following distance". I drove a moving truck halfway across the country one time and was amazed at just how often in the cities small cars sped in to fill whatever following distance I created in front of me. And yes, a couple of them nearly got rear-ended as a direct result of their driving, not mine. I can only imagine dealing with the same scenario but with a semi instead. Scary thought!
jQuery.

I'm the sole developer on a "rails monolith" (254 tables, 540 models/classes, 4 years old), with enterprise-like architecture (ecommerce, event ticket sales, booking engine, access control, etc) and I'm positive the only way I'm able handle it all is because I stick to basic jquery.

My secrets:

- The rails-ujs adapter

- $(document).on('event', '.element', ..) is fantastic. Never debug events ever again

- selectize select's for "find or create" relationships

- cocoon gem for nested form relationships

- parsley for form validation (hooks into html5 validators)

- bootstrap 3

- datatables.net + following the pattern of ajax-datatables-rails (gem - separate classes for each table)

- a single javascript function that accepts a DOM element (body, a modal, section) and initializes all the elements the app knows of (selectize elements, date/time pickers, etc) inside that container

- above function is hooked into by bootstrap's 'bs.modal.shown, bs.modal.hide, tab's, cocoon's 'cocoon:after-insert', etc.

rake stats says:
33k LOC models, 8k LOC controllers, 23k Javascript (though this must be all plugins. I'd guess 3-6k lines of javascript, max)

Needless to say, I don't believe in the frontend javascript hype.
Part of the issue is that many people are ready to perceive themselves as correct before perceiving another as correct. So the U.S. divides into numerous positions with everyone casting blame on others and making unsubstantiated generalizations. And progress then becomes elusive.
You may also like http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~gernot/benchmarking-crimes.html
Complexity and Intelligence (2008)
Valgrind is good.

Gprof is good too.
In what quantities?

1 gallon of milk weighs about 8.3 lb. For that you get 1632 calories, 38.4g fat, 195.2 g carbohydrate, and 131.2 g protein. It's about 16 standard servings, and half to 80% of a day's total calories. If not UHT-treated (not practiced much in America), it keeps for about a week. Cross-country truck transit would be 4-5 days. Rail about 2 weeks.

The same weight of beef is far more concentrated: it would deliver nearly 7,000 calories, 235g fat, a staggering 1142 g of protein, and is 40 servings of food.

The beef doesn't require pasteurisation (heating is expensive), can be frozen, doesn't slosh (though hanging sides can be hazardous truck cargo), and frozen it will keep for months.

Shipping routes into California generally require crossing high mountain ranges, which further increases shipping costs. It's something on the order of a 1 mile elevation gain being equivalent to 400 miles of level travel, if I'm recalling earlier research properly. Outside California, your available dairy land would be Oregon and Washington (both affected by drought), or points east of the Mississippi. That's a long way to haul a heavy, awkward, perishable, liquid cargo.

Wisconsin has few deepwater ports within 7 days shipping time to the West Coast.

Your alternatives:

● Powdered milk. Stores indefinitely, much more portable (no water weight), but taste and consistency issues. Much surplus milk has traditionally been powdered.

● Condensed milk. A compromise, but expensive as I recall.

● UHT. Though as noted, it's proven unpopular to date in the US. It's possible that might change, but it would be a significant change.
In the same year, the french Maurice Martenot invented a similar instrument, but much bigger [1]. Here's a performance from a piece from french composer Olivier Messiaen, who integrated it in a lot of his pieces [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ondes_Martenot
[2] http://youtu.be/1LobZ8vg9qE
Look for bottlenecks. Are you overwhelmed with work? Can you partition off some of the work and explain it to someone else to do in less time than it takes for you to do it yourself? Will the work bring in more money than that person will cost?

If the answer to all those is yes, it's time to hire. Otherwise, it's not.
I thought React was designed specifically so you won't have to buy into the entire stack (unlike Ember and friends). I've used React components without ES6, using plain old jQuery and AJAX calls during component mount (and nothing else). I didn't feel any particular temptation to add more things. Okay I'm lying :) . It's tempting, but it's possible to do without.
The Dark Side of the Ashley Madison Hack: Adultery Is Illegal in 20 States
Jesus christ, is the argument here, "You're all paid too much and don't deserve it. Let's push you harder?" There's a huge difference between pushing ourselves and what we're hearing about Amazon.
I totally agree. My experience working for companies with low margins showed they were able to stretch whatever they had very far. Many were way too conservative compared to Amazon. They were hesitant to take chances even when it made sense, like proven by other firms. However, they get stuff done and many stuck around for 100+ years. I've yet to see a Silicon Valley firm get closed to doing that.

And, no, IBM doesn't count: more like a profitable version of a traditional firm with excellent government connections on top of that. Microsoft also an exception in the data. Oracle and SAP come closer in terms of success plus probability of duplicating it. Yet, they don't run like the firms that make Hacker News often. So, although I don't push their model, I think a combination of the old wisdom and modern innovation can go a long way.
Why some leaders oppose test driven development
> I didn't understand how Don Syme needed to convince Microsoft since he is part of Microsoft.

You haven't had to convince other engineers in your company to adopt a new practice or management to build a new structure?
My take is that's because brains don't do those sorts of things natively. Meaning, no there isn't some level of abstraction in animal or human brains that does lambda calculus. Which paradoxically makes us think that being able to do lambda calculus as mark of intelligence when nothing is further from the truth, it's just our brains are bad at it.
We could seek to build an animal brain, which would also be very useful.
The L.A. freeway system is not about L.A. It's about Southern California. Comments that suggest public transportation don't take into account the unique layout of SoCal. Here are just a few of the things to take into account, coming from a guy that grew up in NYC and now lives in SoCal.

--SoCal is not like NYC or SF where you can walk a few blocks and take a bus or a subway. SoCal blocks are incredibly large. I get in my car to go 2 blocks away, because those blocks are huge. Two of those SoCal blocks are like 6 of my old NYC blocks.

--SoCal is made up of many, many cities over a large, large area. There is no way to get from one corner of Fountain Valley, in a subdivision, to a job in Irvine (relatively close) where the office in an office park is no where near a bus stop. And that's just Fountain Valley to Irvine. This is definitely not an easy situation like covering Manhattan (a single, centralized destination where many of the jobs are.)

--There is no way to setup a workable network of busses/trains to mesh all the cities involved. What's the solution for Costa Mesa to El Segundo? Torrance to Burbank? West Covina to Anaheim? Newport Beach to Norwalk? And so on.

--The bus system we have usually covers a single city and maybe an adjacent city. Going to work for most folks involves going thru 7-10 cities. A simple commute from Costa Mesa to Manhattan Beach could involve going thru (winging it here from memory): Costa Mesa to Fountain Valley, to Huntington Beach, to Westminster, to Bellflower, to Long Beach...(catches breath since I'm not even half way there on the 405 Fwy) to Wilmington, to Carson, to Torrance, to Redondo Beach, to Lawndale, to Manhattan Beach. And you're only at the freeway exit -- now you need to get to the exact office location which means driving thru Manhattan Beach. Take a series of buses, if even possible at all, and you're looking at a 3 hours commute one way.

I would love to take public transportation. It's just not possible. I can't even walk to get lunch. In centrally planned Irvine, they put the housing in one area, the commercial offices in another and the retail commercial spots in another. Even when they are semi-adjacent, the blocks are huge. It would take 30 minutes to walk to the nearest strip mall to get a burger. It's 5 minutes by car.

It sucks, but it's not just an issue of freeways. It's how SoCal is designed.

----------

Edit: adding my solution ---> tax breaks for businesses that allow telecommuting. Keep us off the road and the problem goes away.

+higher quality of life

+less wear and tear on the cars

+less pollution

+less expenses on gas, eating out for lunch

+less maintenance on the roads

+less need for new buses/trains/employees to run them

+less congestion for those that need to be on the road
Another article about the game:http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numbe...
Ah now I can see a more valid point. The problem is not so much that people specialize in certain problems/'issues'/fields/tools/..., it's more that the fields are arbitrarily drawn and rigid. That I can agree with.

"People will doggedly pursue answers to their questions without such rigid social structures" -- that is a good observation imo, and I think science progresses best when it is oriented around problems. The specialization then comes as devoting large amounts of time to a deep understanding of the problem and the different tools necessary to get it solved. But perhaps it's only natural (or human nature) to split tools into categories to study them separately and effectively, and be able to draw upon people who know those tools very well.
Web developer sort of implies a jack of all trades, but master of none. It sounds 90s because it's very similar to Webmaster which now has a bad rep for the same reason. Keep in mind that the 90s was an era where you could know everything, and that just doesn't exist anymore in one person.

Front end developer is nicer because it implies that you're a specialist and can work as part of a larger team. Also the web is so much more complex than it was in the 90s due to the number of things you need to know well and the wide range of browsers and platforms that are available.
Maybe not, but it does take me 8 hours to get a Powershell script right.
This would have helped me tremendously when I was studying complex numbers for signal processing. I guess I'm a visual learner. I find that to be helpful in some field in math, but held me back when I was studying statistics.
It's running pygopherd

http://gopher.quux.org:70/devel/gopher/pygopherd
a)Yes it does transform audio data into text, provided you have audio data to start with. One good free data base the creators of Kaldi championed and support is called Librispeech which is available here:http://www.openslr.org/12/.
b)Kaldi gives you access to some of the state-of-the-art algorithms for modelling speech acoustic models. This includes deep neural networks, long-short term memory recurrent neural networks, hidden markov models and a variant called subspace Gaussian mixture models. It differs from other well known projects like HTK in terms of its licensing - it is released under the Apache licence and the suite of state-of-the-art algorithms it offers. So it can be modified and adopted for research and commercial use. Additionally, it has supporting scripts or "recipes" for some benchmark data sets like the Switchboard data set and Wall Street Journal read speech data.
People loved XML syntax?

My impression was that the only thing wrong with XML was the syntax (hence the JSON revolution). After all, apart from syntax, possibly some of the ill-advised "external element" stuff ... I think XML is strictly better in every meaningful sense than JSON.
This works in most cases but "Will the work bring in more money than that person will cost" sometimes isn't so cut and dry.

Customer service is a great example of this. A good CS person is going to create value for you in the long run (retaining customers, and preserving relationships). Your still going to be aligning income to staffing, but the numbers may be a bit less tangible in some cases.
Thing is, all these cryptography will still be beaten by phishing attacks as long as we have humans as user and password field for authentication.
I doubt SQLite can ever be used on S3. There are two problems with that, first is that to preserve consistency SQLite requires working locking, which S3 by default can't provide (for sane reason using SQLite on NFS is not advised).

Second problem is that S3 does not allow to modify files, each time you make a change you need to reupload the whole thing.

I think you might have better luck trying DynamoDB.

Regarding the post, I don't know what to think. The SQLite was banned that way because it supposed to be light, I feel like adding things like JSON is going away from that principle.
So, for multi-threaded, it's within a factor of 2. That's not bad. I wonder how much of that is likely to be eaten up in a real-world application. Interesting that woo is so much more performant for the single-threaded case though. But it hardly matters as both support multi-threaded, and both are much faster with multiple threads...
Excellent article, very clever optimizations given the tradeoffs. From the article:

> We were talking about students' tendency to let the compiler substitute for thinking

This is actually why I use OCaml. Not going to comment on whether useful error messages are a detriment to pedagogy, but offloading thinking to the compiler is a lifesaver.
I agree that a PM who simply play the role of a telephone between design, engineering and marketing is indeed useless...though i disagree that PM in general add no value building product, even in a team of A players.

You work at google, and google is a place full of A players. It also happens to have hundreds if not thousands of product managers. Surely they are not there to just look pretty.

I can't speak for you, but from my own experience, I get into the weeds with engineers on technical tradeoff and debate over user experience with my designer on a daily basis. I run user testing, I scowl over metrics to understand what's working vs what's not. If that's not contributing to the product in a meaningful way, I don't know what is. I hope at some point, you get to work with a PM that is able to do that with you.
They did. Especially web design crowd. Its syntax and tech are crap, though, compared to what came before it. Another lesson never learned by mainstream IT. That amount of developer and user effort would've achieved more results by using superior technology.

Already gave a nice comparison here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10044598
Show HN: Deckchair – Holiday Management for Small Teams
Of course I have - including when I was at Microsoft.

The difference is that I don't refer to my employer in the third person. I thought the phrasing was strange. It confused me why he needed to convince Microsoft ("MSCorp") since he is a part of Microsoft.

Reading the blog post linked in the comment I was replying to brought the needed clarity: he was talking about convincing Microsoft-not-Microsoft-Research ("MSCorp") while he was at Microsoft Research.
I truly value a PM/ Program manager hybrid type person if I'm on a big team that has to interface with other big teams, because I don't want to have to be calling up all these other devs to figure out what they need from me, what I need from then, how our roadmaps correspond, or even have to pay 100% attention in combined team meetings.

But otherwise I can't see why a startup would want a PM, unless they also have a "community manager" and believe in all these fluff roles because I guess who cares, they have the funding.
While it's certainly possible to get water borne illnesses, the likelihood of that happening is low. Otherwise humanity would have died out long ago. Quoting from http://bwca.cc/tripplanning/waterfiltration.htm :

> Thirty years ago, we didn't fret about lake-water microbes. We just drank the water straight or spiked it with iodine. Today, that is changed. Many of us grip our water filters and cautiously take a sip. In fact, Giardia and other water-borne pathogens often star in those scary mind-flicks we conjure from bears, bugs, and huge, wind-swept waves.

> Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that six months of recurring diarrhea isn't something to ponder. Just don't panic if you swallow a mouthful of lake water. The Boundary Waters isn't a New York sewer. Much of the water is clean. The problem is, we can't distinguish the clean sources from the dirty ones.

> That's why I filter, boil, or chemically disinfect the water I use for drinking, washing dishes, and brushing my teeth. On the other hand, canoe-country author Michael Furtman has roamed the Boundary Waters for nearly 40 years, and hasn't treated a drop and has never been sick. He's not alone. Quite a few Boundary Waters old-timers and wilderness guides drink the water. But they are careful about where they collect it.

In any case, my water filter for camping is only a ceramic filter. It doesn't change the oxygen or CO2 levels. If TillE's proposal is correct, the output after filtering should still be 'stale'.

What you said about well water is true, but my examples were structured to avoid ground contamination. If you collect rainwater, and let it sit for a day, does it taste 'stale'?
That's amazing! Believe it or not I was mocking a very similar thing (besides rails). And select2. What made me rethink was the heavy dependencie on using datatables and mobile compatibility. Am I worrying too much and datatables.net "just works"?
Rumor has it, that a somewhat big bank, somewhere in Europe used batch files to drive it's business back in the day...
You weren't using JSX?
Ha! Ship it
That is a sure way to lose your flagging privileges. Assuming we're talking about the same video, it's plain as day that this is relevant content for HN. You may not like it; that's not an acceptable reason to flag it. Flagging is for stories that don't belong on HN in the first place.

I'll give you that the title "The Secret of Unicorns" was asinine, but that's just the usual linkbait and fixing it just the usual moderation.
Understanding the context of art is frequently as important as direct experience. Jackson Pollack has been decried as an alcoholic fraud by some, but like Da Vinci, it is the techniques he pioneered as much as his works that are fascinating. There was a study that claimed he (Pollock) represented fractals, even Chaos theory in some of this work. http://phys.unsw.edu.au/phys_about/PHYSICS!/FRACTAL_EXPRESSI...

On a tangent, this is the soundtrack to the eponymous movie, Pollock by composer Jeff Beal. Give it a listen, while taking a look at some of Pollock's catalog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD0nFjjUCQo&list=RDoD0nFjjUC...

Like nwatson, I wasn't moved the first time I saw Mona. But understanding her history brought her to life the next time we met.
I'm thinking of selling mine given I've not touched it in years.

https://www.ted.com/talks/pamelia_kurstin_plays_the_theremin...
Ritzy – A collaborative web-based rich text editor
That's right but doesn't take into account lead time. Finding a good employee, especially early in the life of the company can take months. There is therefore a significant risk element involved in looking and planning ahead.
Definitely. It doesn't prevent, say, off-by-one errors (and in general, errors when you manipulate several items of the same type), but if you structure your program correctly, you can be very confident about your code.

Though OCaml's errors are not always the most explicit or nicely written.
I did. It's part of React proper and merely syntactic sugar over React.DOM calls. You can use React.DOM directly, but it doesn't really change your level of investment in the 'stack', IMO.
Guns do kill people. That's the whole point, and why I'm a 2nd amendment supporter. There is a fundamental right to self-defense. Any politician who disagrees is an incredible hypocrite, as they cavort from place to place with a cadre of armed bodyguards.

Nevermind that studies show a weak or non-existent link between banning guns and homicide reduction. But even if they didn't, the right to bear arms is more important than letting politicians decide who has the right to self-defense.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_Kate...
Ask HN: HFT Trading Software Worth Its Weight?
When I try to google on the subject, it seems that everything that comes up is a paid advert for software 'foo'.

I'd prefer to trade stocks than Bitcoin/Altcoin. I have a trading bot for that & it used to work well with some market volatility, but it's a waste when the market's sideways.
And to be exceedingly pedantic, a signal handler should only modify a 'volatile sig_atomic_t' variable. I assume this is just typedef'd to a machine word on all typical POSIX platforms though.
You should try powershell. It's actually pretty good and is much better than unix shells.
The good thing w/ HFT trading software is that with small sums of money you can hop on momentum movements and make pennies here and there. In the grand scheme of things, these pennies can lead to a few hundred dollars a day.

I have used Sterling trading software and I was able to 'gap trade', or capture market swings with simple (Ctrl + B, or Ctrl + S), which you can't if you are using a brokerage account with your bank.

If you are going to use HFT trading, you must consider a superb internet connection (what if you get locked in a trade and your home internet dies) and never Short sell, or else it would wipe out your account.

For level2 activity you can also use : freestockcharts.com and they are amazing.
Most product managers, in my experience, greatly overestimate their own level of knowledge. Your whole post smacks of this too, and when you say you "get into the weeds" on technical tradeoffs, it's quite likely that you're wasting the engineers' time trying to debate things that are either utterly inconsequential or are obviously wrong to anyone with a basic grasp of the technology.

Also when you refer to engineers and designers as being "yours," this is a huge red flag. They are not your subordinates--at least not in any company that's worth working for. You would do yourself well not to think of them as such.
If anyone could point me towards Speech Recognition in the field of healthcare, would be grateful.