skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That part of the city was originally country homes for the city's wealthy folk back in the 19th century. So I'm sure a lot of wells were struck back in those days, probably modernized over time. The estates were big, though, so not a lot of wells-per-acre.
Wow

Thats a great way to put things in perspective. Thanks for that. If you don't mind I would love to use this as an example of the difference between now and then in one of my future essays?
One reason for this is that they're working with tens of companies per batch, and the way the application/interview process works doesn't give them a lot of time to wait for people to accept. If you make the deal negotiable, people will try to negotiate.

Given that this is the. major. problem. with raising money from institutional venture capitalists, it's not hard to see why someone trying to do lightweight capital for new companies would want to avoid that problem.

Remember also: they're doing two batches per year, the batch lasts 3 months, there's a lot of stuff that happens right after the batch, and the whole application/acceptance process is condensed down to a month as it is. There's not a lot of flexibility available in this calendar even as it is.

(Also: at least in earlier batches, there were IIRC companies that did negotiate the % YC was buying for their money).
I think with Google, it is really unclear whether the org. as a whole really believed in their Cloud products. They really don't take selling to the biggest users very seriously. Self-service has been fine for Google's low-margin businesses in the past, but its not clear that they've made any effort to invest in the ecosystem of other vendors the way Amazon has. If the IaaS vendor is low-cost/commodity, then most companies will be swayed by the size and competence of the ecosystem as a form of 'insurance'.

Now that Alphabet is the parent company, maybe this part of google can be taken more seriously. They are very capable of succeeding, but they don't really understand B2B/Enteprise and really never have.
Create an Infinite Scroll List with Bacon.js
_Which_ later classes though? If you disaggregate an engineering set of them might they be doing worse masked by the softballs the majority are taking?
I'm not planning with being combative about it. If it ever happens to me I'll just throw up my hands and walk away. I really love creating software and it is big part of my life. But I will never personally engage in this type of discussion after witnessing this happening in other places in other forms. Those who pick these fights will not see my point of view ever and it will be big waste of energy, which I'll rather spend on creating software.

The reason I engage in this now is that I'm at the periphery only observing. It doesn't take that much of my time and energy to write a small commentary on it.
Agree on all your points. I also think the general structure can be improved by adding a table of contents. This will better guide the user through the wall of text.
So in order to "disconnect" you need to leave everything behind, go into the woods, and make everything from scratch?
Sounds like a great catch-all euphemism for human error. AKA the computer received faulty input from the keyboard/mouse movement.
Why I'm leaving software engineering... :(
As a sort of slight compensation for his behaviour toward women in a sexual context there is always the comment made by a woman engineer who was one of his victims, see the last paragraph of the section title Feynman the Explainer on W. Daniel Hillis' essay: http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...
The future of web development with React, Falcor, and ES6
I had a friend who was a "household manager" in Bel Air. Basically a full-time job just handling the administrative work of running a giant house and staff. While part of the job was to be sure money didn't get wildly wasted, I do kinda doubt they'd have known anything was wrong with the water bill.
You have to custodiet all the ipsos custodes.
There is some relation there, though. The obviously use their own infrastructure to run Amazon, which has significant scaling/infrastructure requirement. Initially, of course, AWS was the "space capacity" at Amazon, now their total capacity vastly exceeds what their store needs.

I think though that Amazon will probably remain more of a conglomerate, rather than divesting any parts of its business. Instead, it seems to add more and more brands, services, etc. In the long this will probably be good for them, since they'll be able to effectively integrate the experience of customers across all brands/services/etc.
> npm: Upgrade to npm 2.14.7 from 2.14.4, see release notes for full details (Kat Marchán) #3299

Is that correct that npm 3.x with the flat node_modules isn't in the first lts tree? We're still very likely to run into path length problems on Windows?

That would be a shame. I know 3.x doesn't fix it but anything to make it less likely is a win. Now we're screwed for nearly 3 years.
Brian Krebs to Do a Reddit AMA on October 23rd
I would argue that a significant number of people were attracted to Lisp\Scheme variants over the years because of the promise of functional programming and the theoretical advantages of being to design programs using functional principles.

The problem with your example is that evaluation of the expression performs a side effect on an internal machine specific to the implementation of Common Lisp, and that it is not a portable and abstract expression defining a return value.

Ideally we would be able to define a return value as a variable length sequence of constituent elements through recursive evaluation, where the process of evaluation is guaranteed to compactly allocate all of the constituent elements contiguously on the same location of the stack.

This would allow the runtime implementation to directly copy the contents of a value of an arbitrary size to a necessary output device, so long as the runtime had access to a portable and functional definition of the value to be copied.

Because the Lisp language family does not provide for this, there has been a need to continually invent new implementation variants which each model different internal machines for performing these tasks.
New York City's Remotest Spot
Its a tech journalist that doesn't understand AWS is built around being the vendor you are locked into.
Or in essence, turning the random nature of mutation into a liability instead of a strength.

The odds of evolving multiple resistance in parallel are minuscule compared to developing it in series.
That's heartening to read! But still, it rather damns with faint praise, doesn't it? With its "in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary" and its "you may be able to get something out of it" and its observation that "we" have never been able to communicate with "the female mind".

Yes, he's presumably trying to be lighthearted and cute and speak in a way that might connect with reluctant colleagues. But it's still awfully condescending.

And yes, I know that Feynman was condescending to everyone who wasn't Feynman. Here, though, he continues a trend of being condescending toward women as a group. Just because he could recognize individual women as talented (his wife, too!) doesn't mean that he didn't have negative (and harmful) attitudes toward them on the whole. And I think that those harmful attitudes have become a more lasting part of his popular image than have the quotes you've shared here.

> "...and supporting women in science wasn't the popularity contest it is today."

This quote speaks volumes about your own perspective.
Blackbaud | Charleston, SC | ONSITE (will relocate) | Senior Engineer, API's

About Blackbaud:
We've been developing software and services for nonprofits for over 30 years. It’s a great market to work in, and we are immensely proud that our expertise is helping our customers accomplish their missions.

About the position:
We're currently building a suite of RESTful APIs across our product offerings. These APIs will enable partner ISVs and our own customers to extend our products and to integrate with third party services. We're seeking engineers to help shape the future of this third party developer ecosystem.

Desired skills and experience:
Proven experience launching a public, production API; Familiarity with distributed systems, operational redundancy, and secret management; Familiarity with OAuth workflows.

For more info, please contact me at ben.jacobs@blackbaud.com or apply directly at https://app.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Job.aspx?j=oY0S1fwB
Thanks for the tips.

I am not sure in which cases the MySQL one doesn't work correctly.
ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE checks every unique fields in table, not just PRIMARY key.

Also, I'll try these suggestions, but you can see that it can be frustrating that simple queries don't work quickly or randomly work really slowly and you have to find some configuration settings to hand tune.
I'm not certain hedge fund managers and private equity barons are subject to most of our laws anyway.
Having just started learning about and using node, I read this release note and then this made me say to myself, "What the fuck?"

[15:39 user@host ~] > node -v

v0.10.25
Show HN: Golang Clarifai Client
Common Lisp had precompiled printing/formatting for ever: FORMAT. E.g. FORMAT is a macro.
Oh, that's a perfect encapsulation of this topic! For the lazy:

> The charming side of Richard helped people forgive him for his uncharming characteristics. For example, in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said. "On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it." That was the essence of Richard's charm.
I'd say you were just simplifying, no over- about it. That seemed like a good level of simplicity for the explanation.
This looks cool. Is there a demo link that I can check out?
One comment mentions a quite significant speedup when switching the variable initialization step of the for loop from let to var. As excepted, you'll also get this if you keep the "let" keyword, but move it outside of the loop.

What kind of optimization step is prevented here?
Sr. Search Engineer
But... Lisp was never (except for clojure) sold as a functional language ! The ml family is more inline with what you think lisp are. Lisp are multi paradigm and that's one of their strong point - with macro.
I love that people understand the long con. It's almost one of the defining characteristics of the current system. Sure everywhere you look, we promised you greater success, but not at the moment when you signed, then it was up to you to believe it. A classic long con move.
Agree that Python 3.5 is a turning point. Async/await in the core language is HUGE, and really makes Python a great language for the future.

Tornado + py3.5 is a very easy and monster-performing platform.
Again, great point.
i wanted to take pics and video at a funeral as there was a family member who couldn't be there, and was told to stop (by other family). Same family member who couldn't there was, days later, at a funeral of her own (in a different country) and received a DVD of the service. Very much 'cultural norms' at play, and it'll be many more years before video of funerals is considered 'normal'.
I cackled and spat on my screen when I read the /s, well played.
I vehemently disagree with this sentiment. Not to argue against the existence of bad managers (nearly everyone has an anecdote from one time or another), but that doesn't diminish the worth of a strong manager (especially in larger organizations). A good manager of technical team server 2 main purposes in my mind. The first is an insulation between the team and and the outside world. Your "problem solvers" aren't going to get anything done if they spend their entire days negotiating with clients or fielding reqs from other departments. Secondly, a good manager acts as a focusing lens for the team. This allows the individual member to concentrate on any given technical problem without needing to expend the bandwidth to constantly come back to how their piece needs to work into the bigger picture.

There might be a whole host of things holding the tech industry back but the idea of the manager certainly isn't one of them.
Fantastic little parable. Saw a part of myself in quite a few of those.

One I'd like to add is the developer who's so enmeshed in maintaining FOSS software that all they can do is label & triage tickets but never quite find time to start fixing them. I've found myself caught in that lately and am trying to figure out how to chip away at the ever-growing Issue Monster I've let form.
of course, they are completely ignoring the conversion efficiency of the fuel sources to electricity.

Let's take diesel for instance, conversion efficiency of chemical energy to work for small engines can be about 30% at best, so a much more reasonable estimate for regular use is about 2.85 days rather than 9.5.

Now the interesting thing is that people have actually proposed using internal combustion engines and fuel as a replacement for batteries in electronic gadgets. to do so one uses tiny turbines micromachined using the same techniques to make microchips. One researcher working on this technology estimates that at max an energy density of 1500 Wh/l could be achieved, which gets us a whopping 1.33 days of run time at regular use!
http://thefutureofthings.com/3063-engine-on-a-chip/
It depends on the country I guess, in France you do pay VAT on food (5.5%), clothing (20%), and for rent it depends on what you're renting but for most people you're right that they're probably exempt.
Any link? This is news to me.
>It's very hard for me to believe combined therapies can beat evolution.

Obviously the faster an organism mutates/replicates the harder it is to slow/stop evolution. HIV for example is "worst case scenario" but with combination therapies we've managed to make HIV a treatable disease.

At the end of the day it all boils down to one hard fact. An organism can't evolve if it is extinct. Selection works by causing deaths in a population (ex selecting those which live on). If you raise the "cost of selection" so high that an organism can't pay the cost in deaths, the population goes extinct.

As a rule of thumb, to fix an adaptive change, it takes 20 times the population in deaths. So if the current population is 1000, it'll take 20,000 deaths (and by deaths I mean removing an unfit allele from the population) over many generations to fix that adaptive allele.

>Of course I don't even know what "combined therapies" is, so I'm probably wrong. What am I missing?

Therapies or methods that employ more than one independent mode-of-action. Ex: Two drugs given at the same time.

This forces the organism to adapt to two things at once, doubling the cost of selection. As you increase modes of action, the cost rises to the point that it is impossible to adapt before the population goes extinct.
Erm, no, not in the slightest – well, I think not in the slightest – I'm going to be totally honest, I don't really understand all of your comment.

But I don't want to influence the outcome "more than my share". I'd like everyone to have an equal share of influence. More than anything I'd like the political process to be one that everyone is engaged in and ultimately moves the country in a direction that is good for everyone.
I think the link in the post to http://jack.ventures/ is a demo.
Kobalt – Build Tool Inspired by Gradle, Written in Kotlin
The Contortions of the Consumer Electronics Market
I assume proving the aircraft airworthy after such an extensive dismantling would be really expensive and time consuming. Disclaimer: IANAP.
Apple Ditches VMware: A Positive Sign for Red Hat Stock?
Did any of your existing angel/seed funding partners raise any concerns about you doing YC?
good article, it reminds me of http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EverythingsBrokenAndNobodysUps...
Doesn't Australia have its own vast remote wilderness? Or is freezing cold preferable to scorching hot?
You said "ambitious projects". Now you're limiting those to scientific projects.

Again I ask, "Do you have a tally of the ones that failed?"

Would it include the Superconducting Super Collider? ($2 billion for a hole in the ground).

Actually, it's a trickier question than that. What does failure in an ambitious science project mean to you? Do you classify the two failed Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (of four) as an engineering failure, or a scientific one, or both?

For that matter, what is on your list of ambitious scientific projects, and how many of them have a success which is not primarily due to being a well-run engineering project? That is, the success of the Large Hadron Collider surely is due mostly to being a successful engineering project.

My experience is that the high-end science projects like what you are talking about (eg, the so-called 'Grand Challenge' projects), are constructed so they cannot fail. They lack a solid, measurable goal, and any advancement is counted as a success. This failsafe means they are more likely to get political backing.
EDW387 [0] (which doesn't have NN0 or NN1 pseudonyms either) seems to be pretty clear about what the "anti-intellectualism" comment was about.

>The undisguised appeal to anti-intellectualism and anti-individualism was frightening. He was talking about his "augmented knowledge workshop" and I was constantly reminded of Manny Lehman's vigorous complaint about the American educational system that is extremely "knowledge oriented", failing to do justice to the fact that one of the main objects of education is the insight that makes quite a lot of knowledge superfluous.

Wish the author went into more detail on why now may be different than during Kay/Engelbart's time.

[0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/E...
Well, you first need to understand the history of C to fully get why it's such a terrible language. I have link (below) with both a long video and a brief summary in numbered points. I think the arguments against using it today are solid and conclusive if you're not forced to for some pragmatic reason.

http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG

Nonetheless, C got a lot of use via network effects. There actually have been many C dialects out there: compiler variants, extensions for specific systems, safe/secure versions of it, parallel/concurrent versions, hardware languages... the list goes on. Probably dozens of C variants appeared and mostly failed. The main reason is legacy: whatever replacement exists must support the existing C language usage and codebase. Any fixes that break apps or require rewrites are rejected. Marketing and community effects are another issue.

Now, we have to ask what is LISP. I think Graham said it best in that it's an axiomatization of computation itself:

http://www.paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html

So, LISP is that concept and core. Its nature lets you express various constructs however you want to. You break the problem into smaller pieces while simultaneously modifying the language to better express their solution. What's best way of expressing a problem naturally varies from programmer to programmer. The LISP variants therefore are the many ways different people (or communities) looked at solving a problem within the LISP core and philsophy. Some stay purely in it, some diverge wildly from it, and some are in the middle. The fundamental concept and approach, though, with many interpretations on expressing it are why there are so many LISP's, though.

Clojure, a new expression of the LISP concept/core, has advantages expressed well in the first paragraphs of the rationale:

http://clojure.org/rationale?responseToken=894e644e3f4488b17...

This philosophy and use of DSL's for expression is no longer unique to LISP. One can see it in REBOL/Red quite directly with some takeup in languages such as Haskell and Julia. Forth also does this sort of thing with stack operations. So, we're seeing uptake of the idea even in mainstream with them recognizing the benefits. All started with McCarthy's reducing all computation down to some primitive, consistent elements that were shown to express or adapt to anything.
This is an excellent area to look for optimizations, but my instinct is that a "pre-runner" approach is going to be of very limited use. If it's 1:1 and the problem is bound by memory latency, the pre-runner is going to go no faster than the working thread. If it's N:1, why not simplify the architecture by doing the computation in the pre-runner?

I think the only case it would make sense is with a heterogenous architecture where you have unlimited small cores available, but in this case there may be better solutions. There's nothing wrong with spreading this work across multiple cores, but in most cases every core will have underutilized memory operation ports. What we need are compilers (and languages) that are smart enough to make effective use of these.

I think this is much better solved by small batch processing and more effective use of software prefetch. Instead of having each core handling one "request" at a time, batch them so that it's handling about 5 at a time (which happens to be half the per core limit of outstanding memory accesses). As a batch, issue all the lookups (with prefetch or directly to registers), then as a batch process the now in-cache results of the previous requests. Magic --- by keeping the request queue full, you've increased your throughput 5x[+] at the cost of a small additional static latency while you build your batches!

[+] This would be theoretical for a memory-latency-bound pointer-chasing scenario. There are caveats once you get away from this to the real world, but 2x-4x is achievable if you can parallelize your latencies.
No, the ones that irk me are specifically the people who make a big show about everything that's wrong with modern life and capitalism and such, and how much better it is to live off the land free of the corrupting influences society, and yet don't see how much they still depend on "The System" they profess to hate so much.

The ones in this piece don't particularly seem to be that type, I suppose, so maybe it's not relevant.
I wonder if using systemtap could have found the problematic code quicker? (I've used stap a bit, but I'm not over-familiar with it, so genuine question)
My interpretation is that those companies are stodgey. It's always one or two guys trying to be in charge of the whole circus instead of having 5 rings going on. Google and Microsoft also have lengthy, old school review processes for performance, security, etc and lots of gatekeepers. Amazon plays more loose. Not sure about IBM, I thought they just outsource stuff and make jeopardy robots.
I had already bookmarked this post because I love the idea. But your response is incredibly thought provoking.

I love the idea of moving to Alaska or Canada in the wilderness, and figuring out how to survive and stay connected.

I'm thinking on the fly, but I think I would be contributing to society. My specialty is web programming and software architecture. I'd even go so far as to call it an art form.

I encounter a problem. Sleep on it for a few days, then bam, things settle into place and I spend a couple days solid programming. Those days that I'm "sleeping on it" if I'm at work, I'm often distracted by day-to-day tasks that usually could have been handled by someone else.

I'm not sold on the concept one way or the other. I do like the idea of a middle-ground solution.

I really appreciate your counter-argument. Good to think about at least.