skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Counterpoint: I was with a bunch of friends when I was young, we wanted to play some music, and we had a computer with some MP3s on it, AND speakers, but we happened to not have a screen lying around at that time.

Didn't have. A screen.

So I asked the guy, "Where are your MP3s?" (Answer, "D:\Mp3"), turned on the computer, then hit:

- WinKey-R
- D:\ <Enter>
- Mp3 (quickly, in order)
- Context Menu Key
- P (as in "P"lay in Winamp)

Voila, music started.

Let me see you control a computer blindly with nothing but a mouse :).
I don't go out of my way to modify my language (although I can see how without extra context, like the fact that I met these people at a social event not a professional event, you might object in this particular case) because I don't believe that cultural attitudes to gender are the primary cause of this sort of harassment, or are a big problem in general.

On the contrary, I think that men whose behavior is harassing or otherwise immoral, are primarily responsible as individuals for their actions. This is closely related to my original point. I think that another bias is that people, especially men, who attain positions of power tend to be likable, either because that's what got them there, or because people tend to like powerful people. Therefore people make excuses for these men, blaming the culture in general for actions that are really the fault of the individual.
To be completely unhelpful, I've found it's largely instinct. Some people can look at a thing and find a way to break it. Only those people benefit from formal QA processes.
I thought hacker news would have more libertarians than this. I'm saddened.
Related is the "Test Heuristics Cheat Sheet" [1] that she and others put together.

[1] http://testobsessed.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/testheuri...
> Lyros

Lycos
Technically the Soviet Union was one of the allies, and if you asked the Soviet Union they would say they "liberated" Poland.

If you remember, there was a large conflict between the US and the Soviets for much of the 20th century over exactly these types of claims.
I don't know the cultural origin of the tradition, but some people keep the ashes of their relatives in their homes. I have friends who have an urn with a parent's ashes in a place of honor.

Ashes pose no public health risk (they're often scattered in public places, parks, and bodies of water), so it's surprising to learn that any government would require that ashes be interred below ground.
I've always wondered if there was a limit to human knowledge.

Just like a Chimpanze can't even 'comprehend' how to use a cell phone.....

If we are indeed animals and monkey descendants would that mean that there's a limit of understanding the universe that human will never be able to surpass?

And are we getting closer to that limit?
There's a fascinating history of Usenet beef around this: http://www.log24.com/log05/050725-Crank.html.
Good questions you raise, nhaehnle.

First of, I don't try to pretend to be a scholar in economics, so please bare with me.

That a capital system contains people/entities that accumulate wealth is exactly why I finished off with the Thomas Piketty comment. His very interesting book, Capital in the 21st Century, argues that our current system favours capital owners and we should tax capital, not income.

About labour being displaced, I can recommend Second Machine Age by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, however it does not contain silver bullets. :-)

I can only theorize on what Stephen Hawkings meant with his answer, but to me it didn't look like a general critic of capital, but more the system we have now.
This simply is an artifact of the original design of CLI. You start by writing the command or function, and then you provide parameters or arguments. The order in which these things are provided leads to poor discoverability.

Instead of starting with the command, we should start with an argument. Given a "thing" (that likely exists in your UI), such as a file, a song, a person, a chunk of text, show me the list of commands that accept it as a parameter. You'll quickly discover that a chunk of text can be passed to functions such as "tweet", "copy to clipboard", "create memo", "search on Google", "translate". Congratulations, you just invented the contextual menu, which people have been using for decades.

"Things" are easy to discover; you can see them. Commands that interact with them, are not as easy to discover; you can't see them. Let people touch or name things (with or without a query language), and once they grabbed the instance they care about, show them what can be done with it. It's that simple.

Before:

> /tweet "some random thoughts" // where you had to know 'tweet' existed as a command

After:

> "some random thoughts" -> tweet // where 'tweet' was auto-suggested, along with 'search', 'translate', 'copy', etc.
I think you might be interested in this article on the end of capitalism: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-...

"Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.

Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.

Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue."
Did anyone else notice the "survival package" numbers?

Base package costs $15.99 * 9,000 units = $143,910. Wow....
A lot of those things seem like commands specific to your environment though (read: things someone would have to develop out). Does Cortana offer some sort of API allowing you to add additional "commands" that she understands? That would be pretty neat.
Do you want your children to live a better life than you? Do you want your grandchildren to live a better life than you? Do you want you kids to see their grandchildren live a better life than theirs?

If so you need infinite growth.
Let's hope that the rich and powerful don't win. They could choose euthanasia for the unproductive.
You're both right and wrong. Text doesn't mean obscure and cryptic. Things are converging. Emacs, light table, ipython notebooks. REPL, text, different views, both expressive and welcoming.

GUI are to harvard for me, data and actions are two distinct worlds, too distinct worlds.
It's still unfortunate that `x + 1.0` rounds incorrectly. Python is one of the few languages that has correct (infinite-precision) float-int comparisons, so it's reasonable to expect addition to work similarly.

That said, I'm not aware of a language that does better, and I'm aware of many that do much worse.
How cultures around the world make decisions
Oddly enough, the team that built Slack first worked on a MMORPG.
EURUSD: Threats Builds Up Pressure on the 1.1459 Zone
I am not entering the conversation in any way other than to point out definitions as it is a common misunderstanding.
Makes argument for text. Uses images to illustrate point.
LENR has never recovered from the shellacking Koonin and Lewis gave it.
would it be easier to download a list of available domains?
What most people don't realize is that GUI and command line aren't mutually exclusive. There's nothing preventing developers from creating apps that have a beautiful and informative GUI while providing a way to use text-based, specific commands. Use the best from both worlds.

It would be great if there was a system-wide, standardized way to do this in every app, but until an OS with this ability exists, we'll just have to do it ourselves.
You can reproduce some of the image processing described here with software today.

For example, in Figure 3, the histogram at the top right is a "periodogram" of the original image data. It shows that the original image is skewed towards the high end of the frequency spectrum. They apply a high-pass filter (discard the lowest frequencies) so the processed image shows higher details than the original.

If you had the original photograph as an image file, let's say an image of the surface of Mars, [0] you could filter out the lowest ten frequency components with a Python script: [1]

pip install avena
avena filter high 10 pia19676-fig1_ml_mcam04403coloradjusted24bwscale.jpg

The result: http://imgur.com/a/ASusx

Notice the details are more visible.

[0] http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/msl/pia19676/geological-contact-zone...

[1] (shameless plug) https://github.com/eliteraspberries/avena
It's not at all clear from the evidence available before the hostage-taking that Dykes was going to harm others.

We must be careful when proposing imposing our own version of 'normal' upon others. When we're in a minority, and all of us are, a majority might chose to do so upon us.
Companies are absolute dictatorships generally owned by a very tiny class of wealthy elite capitalists. Calling them "groups of people" is deeply dishonest.
Even if things in fact balance out in the way you described, the problem is that it takes too long. The market has intertia. Sending everyone to school for retraining could be good idea if not for the fact that those people who have years of training ahead of them need food now. Since they're unemployed, they won't have money to buy it and they will die a horrible death. Unless, of course, you propose for the public to feed them through the process, at which point we've got basic income, so we may as well get rid of the retraining part entirely.
Why do you think so? Why would cloud services work worse without economies of scale?
What if you relocated YC to somewhere that was both a nice place to live and had sane urban planning? Does YC have enough momentum of its own now to turn that place into a startup hub?

I don't know if such a place exists though. Seems like everywhere nice to live is rife with NIMBYism.
Is he a troll? If so why does no one say anything?
Of course there's a limit. We don't know whether we're close to a limit, but there is a limit.
This argument is actually correct when it comes to pharmaceuticals. The number of drugs discovered per $1B in (inflation-adjusted) research spending has dropped by a factor of 80 since the 1950's. Do a search on 'Erooms Law' for the relevant papers.
That is a better article. I'd have submitted it instead if I'd found it last night.

One interesting fact that neither article mentions but which is mentioned at the end of the Wikipedia article is the impact that the break-up of the Great Raft had on the Mississippi river.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Raft#Consequences

The removal of the log jams hastened the capture of the Mississippi River's waters by the Atchafalaya River and forced the US Army Corps of Engineers to build the multibillion dollar Old River Control Structure.
I'll explain the reason, BTW: a hash value of -1 isn't valid in CPython because that integer is reserved as a flag value. So any hash method that returns -1 quietly gets its value changed to -2.
The FBI Hostage Rescue Team is an amazing group of professionals, the premier hostage rescue team in the US. They are the civilian equivalent of Delta Force as they can't normally operate in the US. Historically Delta and the FBI HRT even do hostage training together.

Pretty amazing how highly trained these people are
Welcome to science.

First rule, exponential growth is not capable forever.

Second rule, duplicating what is already there is far easier than creating something new.

The second rule is what is important. All of our 'innovation' from 1750 to 1950 was because we decided to interact with the world using the scientific method. Once we started correctly classifying observations and experiments we quickly learned the limits of physics. Light speed is light speed and there is no getting around it. Instantaneous communications over long distance is not possible. The problem we have is non scientists attempted to make predictions of the future with no understanding of how reality works. This gave us the incorrect expectation that we could use unlimited energy forever. Just using more and more energy to get the job done is not innovative.

With all the easily observable gains taken early, the things we do now are highly innovative, but require massive amounts of data to do. The reduction in the amount of energy required to accomplish a task will be the legacy of our century.
And it doesn't help that many man[1] pages are incomprehensible to some people.

If I had FU money I'd set up a project to improve man pages, coordinating with the other documentation projects.

[1] on Linux. It's a bit different for the BSDs.
Really? Such as when Mary-Beth Ruskai had to talk to the quantum chemists to solve inequalities foundational to quantum information today, or when Longuet-Higgins discovered the importance of geometric phase in quantum mechanics? Or when Alden Mead argued the Planck length[0] was on the atomic scale?

[0] http://ctpweb.lns.mit.edu/physics_today/phystoday/Alden-Reps...
2012's biggest individual contributors: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?cycle=2012

The first two items in the list are both Sheldon Adelson

ActBlue is primarily individuals donating to democratic candidates they support.

#4 backed republicans almost exclusively. Interestingly, their founder funded Oliver North's legal defense in the Iran-Contra scandal. More on his 2012 campaign funding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Simmons#2012_presidenti...

Only when you get to #5 do you see union money. But, the interesting thing about that money is

Most of the political work of the Service
Employees International Union is funded
by about 300,000 janitors, nurses' aides,
child-care providers and other members
who voluntarily contribute on average $7
per month to SEIU's Committee on Political
Education (COPE).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10...

---

So, the top 5 list for 2012 literally consists of 2 people on the Republican side and hundreds of thousands or millions of people on the Democratic side.
Next step: the Internet is a glorified telegraph.
Come on, nobody's used CAD programs with integrated GUI and command line both equally accessible?

It's super intuitive, entirely customizable, and every button press results in a listable text record of each command with combined access to either windowed variables (spline radii, inputting coordinates for start and finish points, entering macros on the fly, routines, accessing algorithms)

This has all been old news for decades.

Now, adapting Autodesk's approach for other fields?

Can't be impossible. Still, engineers in many fields have enjoyed such flexibility as a matter of course. Take a page from their experiences.
First image of Mars ever taken from the surface of Mars — yes.

The first image from Mars (although from all accounts not actually a successful picture of the martian surface) goes to the 70 scan lines that poor old Mars-3 sent in 1971 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3#Entry.2C_descent.2C_lan...
Waste-of-time advertisement posing as article is waste-of-time.
To put this another way, most of medical advancement is because of computing advancement. Simply put, the amount of information processing that must occur before a medical advancement is discovered is beyond what humans with paper and pencils are capable of. The story of our future is the story of the computer.
Yeah I'm not happy about PV, but there are solar systems that are not as polluting (solar concentrating systems, heating systems), and wind systems are relatively inert compared to PV or nuclear.
I had similar experiences. And that applied to MCAD too, not just general 3D modeling. That is a complex UI space to manage.

The data is complex, there are nearly always multiple interaction modes, selections, etc... going on too.

Back when I learned on 8 bit computers, it was kind of easy because they didn't do much. One soon found themselves into the guts of the machine doing assembly language to make any magic happen. All from books, magazines, peers, etc...

Looking at listings was high value.

Well, today we've got YouTube and it's awesome! I can watch somebody model, or program, or do both.

It is a deep curve, but we've got so much better learning now. Back when I learned CAD and things like MAYA, I had to do it old school. Get the book, go. I had the advantage of some peers who would give me some help, or do a quick tutorial. Know what? I videotaped one of those, a little precursor to what we have today.

There is a worry I have of hobbling great UI models by over engineering this learning curve bit. Where we can simplify, we should, but not at the expense of the peak use capability possible by experienced and adept users.

MAYA, and many CAD packages are bending that line, and it hurts at times. People who know their stuff could be sharing it just as much as relearning or working around the changes needed to reduce the need for said sharing.
Scrolling has OS/browser-specific behaviour that is dependent on user configuration. Read that as, "it takes your own preferences into account". For example as I mentioned above, I despise smooth scrolling and this website is forcing it on me.
Am I the only one sick to death of fucking JavaScript? It's an abomination of a "language" but loved my web devs because hurr durr anything other than web is too hard for them.
This is brilliant. Do you have suggestions for where I can go to read more about this idea?
If that's a serious concern, now would be a good time to encrypt, backup your data remotely and re-format everything.
> You mean sex ? I don't think you need to be social to see sex happening.

Uh, can you clarify.
Is there a chance it could ever reform naturally ?
To be fair, not many companies understand how to operate businesses effectively with remote employees.
My gas cap isn't locked in the least. Anyone who walks by has access.
>It seems that excluding extreme cases (e.g. mental deficiencies and the unicorns the likes of Newton) overall intelligence has more to do with your early development than your genetics. This has been getting more and more supportive evidence from adoption studies (including separated twins incidents), use of surrogates, egg and sperm donors show very little correlation between pure genetics and IQ or academic performance.

This is, to put it charitably, not the consensus of the relevant science. Once you get adequate nutrition, which western countries have, IQ if influenced far more by genetics than environment. Adoption studies show consistently that adopted children's IQs resemble their genetic parents not their adopted parents. Twins separated at birth tend to have very similar IQs and personalities. Programs like Head Start and brain training regimens have proven to have little impact on IQ and future outcomes - which you wouldn't expect if environment was the prime factor. We are biological robots, we should expect our source code to have a significant influence on our cognition.

The "environment is all that matters" idea is basically Lysenkoism and its popularity is more do to ideology than science. Your statements are from a mirror world. I assure you, you're misinformed.
> Won't nail down the customer's actual problem, describe it clearly to you and let you come up with a solution. They will just pass on the customer's proposed solution and insist that you build it.

It's actually a bit worse than that. Customers almost never know their problems; instead, they understand their problems through the accumulated knowledge of their profession, and have a very hard time stepping out of “the way things are done” to nail down their ultimate goals.

One of our biggest challenges as developers is that software engineering is very much a meta-profession: Being fully competent in computer science is only useful if you can apply that competence to real-world problems, and that inevitably means having to become expert enough in a field to which you may never have had any exposure.

A good PM understands this and turns development into an iterative process in a tight loop with customer feedback: You push the project forward a little, check with customers, apply their feedback, and lather-rinse-repeat until you've come up with a good solution—one that typically innovates on the status quo.

A bad PM tries to spec everything ahead of schedule and never really gets off the ground, her best possible outcome being automating existing processes at the tail end of a waterfall-induced nightmare.

A worse PM is overwhelmed and avoids nailing down details, seeks no customer involvement, and leaves things to fester for weeks without any feedback. I don't know anyone who enjoys being on the poor team tasked with dealing with that kind of work.

Incidentally, this is what I've always taken agile development to mean: It's not about stand-ups and kanban boards, but rather about acknowledging and embracing the fact that programming is an inherently inexact science.
Fix Detroit: Demolish the shit hole to the ground. Leave it several years and then rebuild a new small city and see where it goes. I say leave it a few years because if you rebuild it straight away the same scum is going to gravitate back and start shit again.
That's engineering. They had nothing compared to what we have today, and they got it done. Love it.
As a mathematical peasant who does modelling.

# If you have a small data set - you set notation.

# If you have 100s of larger data set - try to formulate your problem as a graph theory problem - Its easy to walk small graphs.

# If you have 10,000 data points - start to think of your problem in terms of matrix.

I know there is going to strong disagreement about my rule of thumb but I found it useful for many problems.
>I get the worries, but this is Python - you should know what domain you're working on anyway, because you have to. It's a different philosophy to statically typed languages

The only real benefit to this appears to be some shortcuts that shave a few characters off and do so, IMO, at the expense of readability.

E.g. this reads easier for me:

len([x for x in xs if x > 10])

Than this does:

sum(x > 10 for x in xs)

Martelli may call this stuff contortions but to me it feels more natural.
As someone who is currently finishing up Fullstack, you do have to work in groups but it isn't the bullshit you have to do in college. You pair program with different people each day to work through workshops. You work in groups on projects, but everyone pulls their weight and it isn't at all what I had experience in groups in college. If you don't know how to work in a group, then you don't know everything you need to get a job. Pairing and working on teams is going to be your life as a programmer, so you are going to need to learn it. If you are at all interested and it is something you can do I'd highly recommend applying. It will push you to work with people, but it is a supportive community that'll insure you do well.