skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder to what extent you were just finding actual abstractions that the two of you could share. "For each number/thing in this list, you do a calculation" is an abstraction from an old school "for (i = 0; i < n; i++)" loop. A lot of modern conveniences in programming are abstractions that ordinary language has had forever.

A lot of people in programming think of abstraction in terms of AbstractFactoryFactories or LifecycleConfigurators and then start to complain about architecture astronauts and leaky abstractions. But there are more basic abstractions that we use every day, which are perfectly precise, don't leak[1] and are near-indispensible.

[1] Except perhaps in terms of performance.
"Unbreakable" worked for Oracle Corp, so why not "Secure Channels?" ;-)
I feel the planning is the most decisive symptom. A person who doesn't see a future won't project themselves into one.
Absolutely. But I doubt he'd find as much value for his time by writing journal papers at the moment, given that Stripe will essentially pay him a decent salary to continue his open-access research. There's always time for a retrospective book :)
>>The expected win is infinite because very rare scenarios have huge payouts.

Not quite. The expected win is infinite because of the one single scenario where the games continues on an infinite basis.

The average win is approx $46 if the bankroll is all the money in the world.
Stuff like this and Adobe's efforts aren't really Software as a Service - at the most it's just Software License as a Service. You still download, install and run it on your own hardware.

The value of actual SaaS is that the expensive management of the software has been taken off you hands.
Yeah, it's a huge culture issue, but not a technical problem companies can engineer solutions towards. Tech companies don't exist as government regulators of natural philosophy. On the other hand, tech companies do suffer from monoculture and it hurts them when they only play to their own ivory towers instead of understanding the world as it exists.

When it's expedient to engage different groups it does happen though. Apple didn't buy Beats because their headphones are the best designed things in the world. Apple saw a company that managed to manipulate an entire (racially motivated) youth subculture and wanted to steal some of that power for themselves. Apple also wanted that elderly executive guy who dresses as if he's a teenager from the south and rambles incessantly, unprepared and unrehearsed, at keynotes.

The future of America is clearly not-white (over 50% of children born in the US are now "non-majority") so the problem will self correct within the next 15 years. Be prepared for 15 years of news reports about how everything isn't diverse enough until, one day, things just end up being diverse by the force of history.
The Codeless Code – fables of the art and philosophy of software development
I feel the same way. If you haven't seen it already, take a look at mine: https://munificent.github.io/wren/
I'm speaking as a programmer and a sysadmin.

Lab notebook as it is may not be
that useful, because it gives mostly constrained note fields set. But if we
extend it to a notebook with a sheets of paper that are blank, barring
possibly a distinguished header field, well, I use one every day.

Sysadmin could use several types of worksheets, with fields and checkboxes
designed to aid in particular tasks, but those would be exactly that: sheets,
not whole notebooks.
Knuth wrote the entirety of the first version of TeX on yellow legal note pads, and then typed it all in, and then started debugging. Ditto for MetaFont. Both are the equivalent of about 10kloc (after the Tangle preprocessor removes the voluminous comments).
Who needs numbers if you have structures
That's really been the most enlightening part of the series for me.

Reinforces that the hardest part in engineering is rarely the technical problem. Distributed databases are really f*ing hard, but infinitely harder if the people can't work together or don't open up to faults.
Most Jet Fuel is bought in long term contracts, and swap deals are usually put in place as a hedge.
My guess is dehumanization. The betrayer has to shove down their empathy, and that blocks them from thinking of actions that flow from caring about another's feelings - except instrumentally. So direct feeling manipulation, "positive sentiment", goes up.
Log utility is a fairly extreme way of discounting huge rewards. A less extreme way is to consider that there is only so much money or wealth in the world, on the order of $100T. Huge payouts would require printing more money, reducing the relative value of all money. So a linear utility function for a finite world looks like x / (1 + x/$100T).
Hello, Craig Thomson? Are you here? Did you, indeed, become a programmer?
Again--that's a big assumption. Would love to know what data you are basing that on.

It is dangerous to assume a certain narrative about a certain demographic like that.
Serpy: Fast Python Serializer for Django and Django Rest Framework
It seems trivial to avoid detection: Just generate a random number, and if it's a valid x-coordinate, only then backdoor it. Sure, you'll only backdoor half the keys, but then you have to weigh whether the probability of being detected and severity of it is worth the cost.
We've been using PXC, which is still Galera but a Percona variant of MySQL instead. No problems at all.

I've been strongly considering MariaDB on Galera for encryption-at-rest. Is there something about MariaDB that was not working well with Galera?
This java library (among several others, certainly) provides color schemes for data viz, including the ColorBrewer schemes

http://www.dishevelled.org/color-scheme/
Some traits shared by Mark, Bill, Steve, Jeff, and even PG apart from being born white, not poor, male, lucky, etc:

1) self driven

2) loves to build

3) doesn't let things get in their way

4) goals based on their version of the future

5) deep thinkers / intellects

6) holds their own values and priorities

7) evidence driven / scientific

8) conqueror's mindset

9) idea person, doer, dreamer, student, teacher all in one

10) never was about the money, and more about passion

I don't claim this list to be 100% accurate or exhaustive, but the point is there is more than just luck and DNA, and many of these traits are acquirable. The demographic to me says that the chances of becoming that person are higher under those circumstances, but the demographic itself does not directly enable or cause any such success. Just as all presidents were white until Obama, maybe we just need someone to shatter the stereotype.

Personally, what I respect most is their capacity to generate their own philosophies and to then apply them to their products, to their companies, and to their lives. I find people that can do this are successful at any level.
Dyslexia Screening by Eye Tracking and Machine Learning
Remote Year
Think less "town" and more "cave". Spaces created by natural processes also lack any feeling of purposeful design, but still have lots of interesting variation. The feeling of exploring an untamed natural space (which even the creator of the game hasn't seen before!) is part of what makes these games fun, I think.
Mixing the perfect drink may be a digital swizzle stick away
Shifting demographics won't inherently change diversity issues in places like Silicon Valley. The problem is far wider than numerical distribution; it's education, home stability, environment, poverty, etc etc, and 15 years isn't going to correct all of that just because national demographics are gradually shifting.

The proof for that is all around: black people are 15% of the population, but a fraction of that in major tech companies. The same holds true for latinos. There's a reverse example that makes the point as well: asians as a percentage of the national population, versus representation in tech companies in Silicon Valley. That more than makes it clear it's about skills and education, not demographic percentages.

Baltimore is ~65% black. Do you think 65% of the programmers in Baltimore are black?

If your theory were correct, we'd have seen a lot more black people working for Twitter, Apple, Google, etc. a long time ago.

It doesn't matter if the future is 80% non-white, if people that are non-white don't develop the education and skills required for the jobs in Silicon Valley. That's the issue, and it won't change just because the percentages on demographics do - ie it is not self-correcting. If it were self-correcting, you'd see proof of that in US cities that have had very large black populations for a long time.
Why don’t people have more sex?
Bootstrap evaluation of clusters
PP+jailbreak+iOS+8.4.1+let+loose+iOS+Jailbreak+Tools+and+Jailbreak+Guide
My Classroom Economy
Do you hire J-1 interns (frontend)?
That's good stuff. It seems a bicycle, or even a motorcycle, might be said to only approach a state of "balance". For any particular path, a different amount of lean is required. If the vehicle and rider had exactly the right amount of lean, the tires could simply travel the path. Since the actual lean is always somewhat "inaccurate", the tires (especially the front) must oscillate around the path. The greater the angular momentum of the tire/wheel, the smaller the required magnitude of oscillation for any particular lean inaccuracy. At some large lean inaccuracy, the required oscillation will exceed the capabilities of the rider and there will be a crash.

As you say, we're repeating each other. Still, I think I understand this topic better now than I did before.
> This assumes GDP doesn't plunge because of disincentives to work

UBI doesn't create a disincentive to work, UBI replacing means-tested programs eliminates a disincentive to work.

> and/or hiring costs for low-wage (now medium-to-high wage) to skyrocket.

Why would hiring costs skyrocket? The elimination of the perverse incentives of means-tested programs should drive down low-end hiring costs.
Rust and UEFI
Using Python to Investigate EFI and ACPI
Goat Life
I think you might have a misunderstanding of what a compounding pharmacy can do. They can't just whip up some chemical on demand. If a new drug is not for sale they can't compound it.
Another interesting risk analysis problem is where you have a million boxes. All but one box has a fixed sum of money X under it, and the remaining box has a bomb that will kill you if you open it.

How high would X have to be for you to be willing to play the game?
You can do that on systems that support it, like JACK and PulseAudio.
ProcessWire 2.6.16 core updates and ProDrafts Q&A
There is a delay between rising living standards, education and number of children finally decreasing. It's unrealistic to expect things to happen much faster for them than it happened for everybody else.
If I pay 2 dollars to play, I have a 50% chance each game of at least breaking even and being able to continue playing.

If I pay 4 dollars to play, I have a 25% chance each game of at least breaking even and being able to continue playing.
I haven't seen that message from Bing. However, when I go to Google in IE, I get the same type of message. It says: "A better way to browse the web" and "Get Google Chrome".

Google has been doing this for years. Of course, that wasn't news.

Note that Google is showing its message -- which is essentially an advertisement -- on a search page that has a monopoly market share. Nobody else can buy advertising there.
Toyota to Finance $50M ‘Intelligent’ Car Project
Awesome music.
Discover+Your+Audience+and+Build+Stronger+Brand+Relationships+|+AddThis
Is there a point to writing journal papers if you're not playing the academic publication / citation game? Web sites are easier to publish and have wider distribution than academic journals.
How I Went from $1,000 to $200,000 with Apps
So if JetBrains goes bankrupt and the license servers go down then we all have a month to sort out a new IDE
Handrails? Fire pits? Patrols walking trails?

That isn't wilderness. That's disneyworld. If you put a ladder up the nose (el Capitan) it isn't the nose anymore. It isn't wild. It isn't beautiful or majestic. It's just another theme park deserving of the hordes of fat impolite and irresponsible tourists it will attract.
>UBI doesn't create a disincentive to work, UBI replacing means-tested programs eliminates a disincentive to work.

UBI has complicated secondary effects. Some of them can be contradictory. One who gets welfare would have disincentive to work because of the loss of benefits in today's govt programs. UBI may spur some (not all) of them to join the workforce. However, another scenario is the mass populations of part-time workers earning mininum wage ($7.25) that total less than $11k a year. That's ~1500 hours of lost labor hours for those who are perfectly fine with not making more than UBI's $11k.

It's definitely not as simple as saying, "UBI only creates incentives to work and never any disincentives, and GDP can only go up or stay the same instead of down."
Is finishing my degree worth it after working at a startup for a year?
Hey everyone,

I left school last fall to take a job at a startup. It was my final year and I had 2 classes left but I ended up failing them in the summer semester and moving onto work anyway. 12 months later I’m dissatisfied with the startup and want to make a transition. I’m wondering if it would be worth it to go back to school for 12 weeks and finish off my degree, while looking for work at the same time. I have a feeling that it would be difficult getting past many HR recruiters without at least a degree under your belt, so that’s one of my principle motivations for going back to school.

The ultimate question I’m trying to answer is: Should I forget about the degree entirely and try to get a new job without it, or should I go back to school for 3 months, complete my degree, and then start job hunting once again?

Some potentially relevant information:
- School I go to is a top 25
- My GPA is abysmal (1.996). I’ve never put my GPA on my resume and I’ve never been asked about it and I’ve interviewed at companies big and small so I don’t exactly know if this is a “deal breaker.” The issue here is that I would need a 3.0 GPA this final quarter to graduate. Doable but my track record is less than stellar (see GPA).
- Already been in school for 5 years…this would be the first quarter of the 6th
- Not the best coder, so this might hurt during code interviews. I plan on prepping for them though, but i’m not immediately good at them, meaning if you tested me on them right now I might not do so hot. Plan is to build out an app or two in the coming
Is there a release date for Foundation 6? I'm just starting a new project with 5 and I'd love to upgrade to 6 if it's coming out within the next month.
I myself have been in this position since a long time. I am struggling to do basic layouts in CSS. I think its better to hire a consultant than to make this buy do CSS for you. There are lots of frustrating hours spent trying to get some details right.
Yeah... Creative Cloud... every time I see some of my company's assets being put into a proprietary Adobe format, I wince.

I guess they'll just have to learn the hard way when one day Adobe won't let them open their own files. It's another one of these things that boggles my mind over what people will accept these days. Having to pay a subscription just to keep being able to use your own (really important) files. And doing all this relying on a company that will very unambiguously pursue goals that put its own interests over those of their customers.
“Call Me Maybe” was the #1 selling single of 2012, was nominated for 2 Grammy awards, has been covered and parodied by numerous other artists, and is still played all the time on pop radio stations. The Youtube video has been viewed 700 million times. I don’t think it’s going to be forgotten anytime soon.
A disappointingly shallow analysis, which seems to depend on the implicit assumption that sex is a completely free choice (historically almost the exact opposite is true) and that there are no countervailing forces that seek to circumscribe and direct sexual activity.
Is there any data store that has come out of these tests looking good? Every Aphyr post I've read had a pretty big failure at some point, even for datastores I considered solid, like Riak or Cassandra.
With a Revamped Apple TV, Company Hopes to Camp in Your Home
The article highlights something called the Hidden Genius Program. From their website: "The Hidden Genius Project trains and mentors black male youth in technology creation, entrepreneurship, and leadership skills to transform their lives and communities."

I find these kinds of programs troubling. There are a ton of impoverished "hidden geniuses" in this country, and not all of them are young, black, or male. If these programs are intended to encourage diversity as they claim, they have a funny way of showing it. Rather, this program seems to promote exclusion.

Edit: Those of you that are downvoting this, a) I have karma to burn - do your worst, and b) a downvote for this comment is an upvote for racism and sexism.
i only just made the jepsen connection, so i'd believe that while "call me maybe" might achieve meme status, people will have forgotten who sang it.
What I learned when an I article I wrote went viral
I really love JetBrains software and use IntelliJ daily, and this initially had me really annoyed.

However, after looking at the detail, I'm intrigued. I have a personal IntelliJ license that's a couple versions old, and an even older AppCode license. For $149/year I can get the latest of all of the products. Do I need them all? Maybe not, but I want them!

I for one will strongly consider that subscription, even if I wish I still had the option to buy a perpetual license.
Honestly, that first graph showing the de-link of corn production and land use should be at least as alarming as it is inspirational. That sort of breakaway from a limiting factor doesn't come for free.

In this case, it represents the outcome of GM monocultures and intensive irrigation.

GM crops are, so far, a nearly consequence free gain. The use of monocultures presents a bunch of risks, but until and unless they pan out, it's a simple gain.

The aggressive irrigation required to produce so much corn from so little land is rather more hair-raising. In the midst of a serious drought, we're finally facing the question of whether the Ogallala Aquifer is going to give out on us altogether. At current consumption rates, the answer appears to be 'yes'. This isn't about using the world more efficiently, it's about diminishing land use in favor of massively unsustainable water use.

When we see our production break away from it's usual constraints, that's not a time to celebrate the preservation of nature. It's a time to ask what we're consuming instead.
Bay Area housing activists plan to sue towns for NIMBYism
Online browsable manual: https://archive.org/details/NASAgraphics

Direct PDF download: https://ia801501.us.archive.org/16/items/NASAgraphics/tmp_26...
Yeah, I opened a can of worms with my comment, didn't I? For the record, I'm one of the people who has complained here on HN about whiteboard interviews. Just because they taught me that I rely a bit too much on the compile/run cycle doesn't mean that I think coding exercises at the whiteboard are the right way to do interviews!

I think your use of the term "latency" is a very good way to describe some of the problems around whiteboard coding.
Everything russian, from Antonov to the Bear bombers, are designed for rough strips. The classic russian design criteria are high-wings and oversized landing gear. The classic american design is tiny gear and low wings placing the engines within feet of the ground.
Central Government War Headquarters:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/content/articles/2005/11/22/u...
* The massive tax increases this will be on the middle class (primarily due to changes in tax deductions)
* The massive tax increase this will be on the upper middle class to rich (primarily due to changes on taxation of capital gains and dividends. Changes, by the way, that most economists oppose.)

Well, UBI isn't supposed to be a tax cut for everyone, surely it'll be revenue neutral for everyone making over, say $50k?
Any approach that targets particular underserved minorities can always be labeled 'exclusion'. But that's a much smaller evil than the one in front of us. Do we really need to fix that problem too?
I would argue the locals having "hiker feeds" and handing out free beer are a cause of some of the problems. It seems hospitable, but it leads to bunching. When you have one hiker feed a year in a spot, you will attract everyone there at once. And they aren't coming for the love of the trail and to meet fellow hikers, but for the free food.
Heh. On OpenBSD you'd have libsoundio on top of libsndio.
I was thinking the same thing. Diplomacy is one of the best multiplayer games ever designed. This should be ideally suited for writing as a mobile app. I'd love to know if there any out there worth checking out.

There's this at the iPhone App Store:
"The Game of Diplomacy by Chris Hughes"
https://appsto.re/us/iCIzt.i
No, although that was another interesting battle.

I'm referring to the determination that DNA, not protein, was the hereditary molecule. I probably just worded this poorly, to give the implication that coding capability was limited to proteins. It's just that most people at the time thought that DNA was found in either nA (a string of As), nT, nG, or nC, or random arrangements. More than anything people just didn't think that DNA could "code" for anything, while proteins could, because people didn't seem to realize that unique sequences of heteropolymers was a valid form of coding. It was mostly thought that the information was stored in huge structures formed by proteins, and that the coding information was architectural.

See Mayr, "Origin of Biological Thought", final chapter, starting with the section on Meischer. Or Crick's "On Protein Synthesis" where he proposed the linear code: http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/scbbzy.pdf
Props to you and parent poster. I'm with you both. And thanks for the pointer to Wren. I didn't know about it.
There was no such analysis in what I responded to, nor anywhere else by him when I typed it. (Not sure there is even now.) Am I supposed to read his mind?
"Our men at the Wernicke and Broca Station Posts suggest that the good Ambassador Moustache is not as trustworthy as he seems..."
Yes that's true. It's a very simplified, guaranteed to be wrong, calculation. But it gets us past the first order objections ("it's too expensive we couldn't afford it") to the second order objections ("the reduced incentives to work would crash the economy"). If you have a model for dynamic effects, I'm all ears.

Incidentally, from the linked comment:

The level of "afford" I'm thinking of is a scenario where the USA suffers zero productivity loss and the middle & upper class do not see a decline in the standard of living.

This seems an unreasonable standard to apply to anything. Hardly any policy is a Pareto improvement. Applying such a tough standard amounts to very strong status quo bias.
Not successfully, because other companies paid more and were draining away Google's talent. I would also suspect that Google paid less not because of the cartel, but because of the stock options. Once the stock stopped rising dramatically, engineers would not have settled for less salary.

Microsoft went through a similar transition.

Creating a cartel is one thing, but making it work is quite another.
One of the few two-star airlines in the world!

http://www.airlinequality.com/ratings/2-star-airline-ratings...

The only one-star is, unsurprisingly, North Korea's airline.
> It is going to happen and it will be great, but do you have enough money to play long enough till it happens?

I think this can also be said as "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".
Sex stops being fun when you do it to close a gap between your marginal utilities.

That sentence right there is enough to kill a boner dead.