skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems to me that the NFL needs a good minor league system. It would help teams evaluate potential performers and help players meet an adequate standard of living. I know it was tried with the XFL but that was a PR mess.
I'm in my 50s, and I used to say that I never saw age discrimination. Then a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed for an Internet company, and my age and experience was commented on by the majority of the interviewers. Which is fine, since most of the comments were positive (e.g., we need people with more experience because we have so many new graduates), but it was still a bit strange.

Then the technical interview came, and one of the interviewers was instantly hostile as soon as he saw me. It was weird. Weird to the point where the other tech interviewer started playing good cop, saying things like "he just covered that" and "no, that's true". Whiteboard coding is strange enough, but doing it with zero feedback and a hostile interviewer who keeps trying to push you in bad directions (inheritance over composition, singletons, etc.) is, well, interesting. The application came back with the inevitable "good skills but bad culture fit" euphemism.

As with all discrimination, the unnerving part is just not knowing. Was it really age discrimination? Or maybe I just looked like this guy's hated father or ex-boyfriend or something. Or maybe he's just a bad interviewer with low skills, and really didn't understand the stuff I was telling him (I usually sneak in a couple of technical questions for the interviewer and he blew those questions); that's hard to judge when there's no follow-up questions. Or maybe at the end of the day it was just money and the company didn't want to admit it. Who knows? I'll never know, and I suspect the company won't either.
I'm not trying to keep the internet in plain text, I'm trying to keep the internet a place where i can trust the certificates and not having to worry about a CA in china issuing certificates for the sites i visit because they can be CBA to check.

An attack against a self signed cert may cost more then what ever but that wasn't what we were talking about initially either.

If you can MITM which they can and can get cheap valid certificates it's game over.

And while the NSA might be able to get certificates no matter the case, people have managed to buy certificates for domains they do not own multiple times now.

Which puts the ability to MITM real world SSL sessions in the hands of individuals.
Sorry to be pedantic, but I'm sure a Brainfuck (or other similar languages) version would differ at least by that much
Which will end first, the employee's career or the startup? Funny that this is a consideration given how short most runways seem to be.
You should at least explain why you might want to say that: yes, GHB has fewer chronic effects on health (or possibly none). In that sense it's "better" than alcohol, assuming all users dose it correctly. This is, for example, why GHB has been successfully used to fight insomnia.

However, life-threatening acute toxicity is easier to accidentally attain than with alcohol, because of the lower active dose and absence of harsh digestive reactions like alcohol tends to cause before acute poisoning. This makes alcohol compatible with reckless party settings, where GHB would become very dangerous.

Concerning the addiction potential, comparing GHB and alcohol is like comparing two genocides of two types of plagues: they both suck.

As for the whole 'date rape' argument, it really shows an excessive media demonization based on a few isolated cases, as opposed to the non-stop global catastrophe of date rapes caused by alcohol. I suppose nobody talks about those because, well, "it's nothing out of the ordinary".
laughs maniacally
175 threads use a lot of memory and cause a lot of context switching. I would never write an application so that it needs 175 OS threads, because if it needs that many, how many am I going to need down the road? It's an ominous sign for scalability in my view, even if it works for a while.

[Edit] I'm a assuming a CPU with 8 cores, not some 64 core monster.
I've found that HN demonstrates this problem far less than other sites (which have a similar format). That's not to say that this isn't a problem on HN, it just seems to be the best of the breed.
Amazon DynamoDB workshop
Thanks for feedback. We will make note on this :)
Eset nod32 Antivirus 6 Username and Password 2016
I used to think feminism was very a sensitive topic, thus untouchable like you describe. It appears not. Most times I've posted skeptical comments against the current form of feminism, I expected to be told off and maybe excluded from HN. I have seen a workmate being fired for such a discussion. In reality, my upvote balance was between 4 and 35 points. It doesn't mean I'm the one who's right, it means it's possible to gain upvotes by echoing part of the people's opinions.

That said, I still feel I'm earning a Godwin point for evoking this topic.
Yep. Java looks good on paper, is mature, has good libraries, good IDEs and good support but boy is it painful to write it in any large quantity.
That is an excellent point. Well done. That being said, speaking as someone who regularly complains about old people in just about every capacity, I think good old fashioned prejudice is playing the biggest role.
Absolutely, even if you sum floats, if you care about accuracy you should sum them using double. I've read the discussion of Julia implementers that have discussed Kahan summation but strangely didn't pick the simpler approach of not using floats for partial sums of floats. Albeit it was an old discussion and I don't know what's the present state.
And the yelling/bullying. What is it with managers at startups and yelling? I got enough of that growing up. I have zero patience for it from my boss.
Interesting. SWIM always felt that MDMA(Dosed correctly) gives many of the same effects as Alcohol.

It does take a long time to learn how to control MDMA and i think that it's mostly because of the intense Oxytocin overload which can make people do weird shit like taking of all their clothes, touching and feeling others inappropriately, trusting people they shouldn't etc. But once you know your dose SWIM think it's a great alternative to alcohol. At least for SWIM, it has many of the same desirable effects, that alcohol does, and i think that a large part of that, is the Oxytocin

If you think about it, it's kind of the same with alcohol. For me at least, it took a looong time to control, and to this day i still can't control it though that's mainly because of culture on social norms where we encourage and pace each other to get gobsmacked drunk. And lets be honest, alcohol makes us do weird shit too..

This article shines some light on SWIM's experience, and i can only nod while reading through the article.. And maybe, just maybe SWIM could try clean Oxytocin sometime in the future.
No one seems to talk about the elephant in the room: salary. Isn't a more experienced person going to cost more? Are you going to feel comfortable offering them a low salary (relative to their experience), because that's all you got to offer?

And the other way around, even if you would love to have an experienced developer, what do you do if for the same salary you can get an average developer (who will get the job done, because you already have experienced enough people to help), and another profile (sales for exemple)?

This is especially true at small companies, where there just isn't that much latitude to adjust the salary.
In my personal anecdotal experience, the opposite is true. After having smoked cigarettes for over a decade (I'm in my mid twenties) I switched to vaping and can't even smoke a full cigarette now, the taste feels disgusting and the satisfaction just isn't there any more.

Most smokers I know who got into vaping are the same way, but obviously this is still anecdotal. I'm not aware of any respectable studies on the question, but clearly at least the statement "it doesn't work that way" is false in general.
Can anyone comment on what the CMS DAS web service is? I'm having a hard time understanding what it is supposed to do. I'm sure the audience knew or maybe it's obvious and I'm just missing something.
Uber: (Getting Over)^3
Dyson Sphere
Interesting to see the requirements for the elite Old Guard unit of the Imperial Guards:

- under 35 years of age at entry

- at least 10 years' service

- at least three campaigns (some had as many as 12 campaigns)

- had to literally face enemy fire at the front and survive

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Guard

I wonder what the tech equivalent is?
Not sure if this is meant to be a sarcastic reply that imitates the usual negativity of HN, due to the subject of the article, or a legit reply.
There's an XKCD for this, actually: https://xkcd.com/1497/
> So, branch predictions and faster sync primitives would be great, not least because they would speed up channels in many cases, which would be cool; it would be nice to widen the use cases for channel-based communication significantly, but they're just VERY slow if you want to use them at scale in a large application.

These operations are already pretty good on IA* processors, at least in comparison to the less mainstream architectures. Other architectures focus on either bandwidth, parallelism (but often without a great synchronization story), and optimizing power usage. So I doubt that Go lang would benefit from moving to Power.

Some choices the Go people made about how channels how limited their options for optimizing channels / increase the complexity of a lock-free implementation (don't have the mailing list link handy). If you don't need all these guarantees you can use pick a SPSC, SPMC, MPMC implementation that might work better for your use case.

> (Did you know that for i, _ := range is often 3 to 4x faster than for _, v := range? Do you know how awful code written down four or five nested loops that uses indices looks?)

Yes, in the second version you have to make a copy of v. Depending on how large v this is how large the impact will be. The first version just references the array cell via a[i] and for that there's no copy needed and it's one assembly instruction. Maybe the optimizer can become better here but I'm guessing it might break some language contract.
I am a member of the early 40s club. I've had what you call an interesting career. I have delivered technology solutions wherever I have worked and they have on the whole been pretty successful. One of my dreams is to work in Silicon Valley and I have no doubt that I could be successful. However, it's not a goal I am pursuing for various reasons, one of those reasons is the perceived age bias that exists there.
Writing C is like handling venomous snakes. There's lots of people that think they can do it safely and, for the most part, they usually do. But if you do it for long enough, you're going to get bitten. All it takes is the smallest mistake. And when that happens, you better hope it's not in the wild, because if left untreated, it gets bad in a hurry.

Rust can't mature fast enough.
Look at the scales for the graphs on page 9. What a ridiculous comparison...
One of the nice things about bacteria/yeast is that once you've booted up your app, you can collect a sample, store it, and then re-grow it in the future. As long as you have growth media, an app could result in a lifetime of joy.

More info and some examples of what people are programming cells to do: https://goo.gl/lfweYy
The Ethics of Ad Blocking
I've never read "The Wisdom of Crowds" so maybe I'm missing some stuff, but from the general statement I think it would be a terrible mistake to take it as meaning "commenters are right" or "consensus is right." It's much more subtle than that.

Crowds, in certain structures that yield a useful dynamic, produce wisdom. People transacting in a market allocate resources effectively. Gamblers and bookmakers betting on football matches make good odds. Wiki-editors nitpicking away in wiki-world produce an incredible encyclopedia. Open source, etc. There are also lot of examples of crowds being stupid, and structures that yield a stupid dynamic.
tl;dr: HN presents a variety of opinion.

Also: misspelled neutral in one of the graphs.

Nice post, though. Keep it up.
Yes. 39 here and I feel better now than I did in my 20s, and I can run a mile faster now too so I at least have some objective evidence I'm not totally fooling myself. :)

I'm far from svelte today but I've really improved my life by taking better care of my health.

To everybody in their 20s: the health-related stuff you can get away with in your 20s (poor diet, no exercise) might be working for you now but it's not going to fly forever!
That said, I'm not really surprised about the performance details. My experience was that Go made it pretty easy to "light up all the cores" on a machine. I say this as a person who spent a lot of time releasing the GIL for multithreaded C++ code hiding behind python front ends.
> companies are forced to cut costs and survive by hiring young people whom they have to pay less

.. and yet still starts up in Silicon Valley, among the highest salaries and real-estate prices in the world.
Should prostitution be legal?
Do you guys think prostitution should be completely legal? It brings more money to the government, sex workers will be safe and the pimps will not make money. According to the http://www.wikisexguide.com it saves a lot of lives and money if it is legal according to the research.
You can look at this from a slightly different angle:

"...It is often said that “Youth is wasted on the young”. Based on my little spare time study, in this context, it seems truer than ever.

The youth have all the energy and time to spend, no obligations and no financial worries. But they have very little life experience and exposure to these hidden problems. So what they end up solving are the kind of problems primarily young people have. This certainly makes for some very amazing products, but I can’t help feeling a little disillusioned. The amount of time and energy that goes into fun, but ultimately useless ideas, rather than fixing some of these hidden problems is mind-numbing.

On the other hand, the older generations are exposed (aware or unaware) to a lot of these hidden problems. They have experience on how to solve them because they understand them. Yet by that time, most of them have to provide for a family, pay of their mortgage, tuition fees, healthcare, yearly vacations and the 3 cars. They also often lack the imagination on how to solve things in a new technological paradigm.

So I now realized that there is a potential goldmine of problems we simply don’t know of, because the people who are exposed to them aren’t connected with the people who have the opportunity and creativity and energy to solve them. Which begs the question:

Are the old and young generations wildly underutilizing each other as resources?
..."

http://000fff.org/the-problem-with-problems
I think this is a key insight; experience demands compensation. The question I have is; when is the experience really necessary? I took a job once, I was recommended by a former colleague to the dev maanger of a fast growing company. I was one of the best developers this person had ever known (I found out later this is how I was sold). I even flubbed a couple of the technical interview questions, but was still hired at my required salary.

My work at this company consisted of maintaining an application written in framework X (where X had long since fallen out of favor). The idea was to rewrite, but due to business requirements this never happened. Had they done the rewrite, my salary and experience would have been justified, but doing maintenance on an old app? They could've gotten a green or junior dev to do that for half the price.
I don't hate Go, as much as I detest the breathless fans of the language. I am a "former-ish" python programmer who now uses D for present projects with an eye towards Rust for building libraries and low-level system stuff. I also use Nim in place of Python for a few personal scripting projects.

All these languages are statically typed and in my understanding of Programming Languages, way better than Go.
Companies like IBM and HP are busy shedding experienced US-based staff and replacing them with relatively inexperienced but much cheaper workers in India.

I don't know how many are getting jobs, but I'd guess that a lot are taking early retirement. If so, the number of older workers is falling....
What's the saying? They ridiculed Einstein? But they also ridiculed Bozo the Clown?
Enterprise Machine Learning – Seldon extends your data science team
Would Rust be a good alternative? Can you get constant time calculations in Rust?
Case Study: How we doubled our newsletter click through rate (4.2% – 8.8%)
> It's why Al Queada use suicide bombers its cheap to train and does not need high quality recruits

I think Al Qaeda uses suicide bombers mostly because they're hard to detect and let you strike a target with zero warning; it's an ultimate guerilla tactic. That young engineers tend to be particularly happy to wear the explosive vests seem to be incidental and not the reason for this tactic.

I agree with your French/British example though.
That "wisdom of the crowd" thing only works when the crowd isn't influencing each other. Otherwise - groupthink.
I have been brought in, as an independent contractor, at the tail end of enough projects to "salvage" them to have a somewhat cynical point of view on this.

In all of the worst cases the projects probably had no one over 25 working on them.

I'd figure eventually enough money will have been lost on such failed projects for tech companies to change their minds on this.
In this case it's definitely ASN.1; the problem is that "objects" are defined with OIDs, which are sequences of integers (called arcs numbers) like { 1 2 840 113549 1 }. The first integer is always 0, 1 or 2, and with 0 or 1, the second is between 0 and 39. But the other integers can be arbitrarily large, and it's important not to overflow: https://www.viathinksoft.de/~daniel-marschall/asn.1/oid_fact...

You need to use some sort of bignum function if you want to display large arc numbers in decimal. Which is what OpenSSL and LibreSSL do, and that involves creating and destroying BIGNUM objects. The problem is that someone in LibreSSL moved the free() to outside the loop body handling the arc numbers while they were cleaning up. So only the last BIGNUM used gets freed.

Oh, did I tell you that arc numbers are encoded in base 128, with the first bit of every octet used to signal whether it's the last octet of that arc number? Because they are.
Are prostitutes making too little money?
Could you link her GitHub profile?
I've been in this situation. Games company. Promises of payment coming "any day now" from investors. Here's where our good ol' CEO is now: http://www.thejournal.ie/interzone-marty-brickey-big-collisi...

Run away.
Η+μαύρη+λίστα+του+Web+Hosting+No3+-+SEO+|+WEB+DESIGN
I also developed before web framework proliferation and stackoverflow.

I see most of these things as speed boosts. If you take the rose colored glasses off, in the old days - we simply worked slower on easier (though more interesting) problems. We didn't have to deal with so much damn integration and the mountain of spaghetti we've built!

The non extendable solution gets the job done as well. No need to worry about 'technical debt' when the vast majority of your projects never see scale. Moving faster is better.

When I see a developer wasting too much time on the above - not googling the solution, spending too much time overengineering, and not using the libraries available (not hacking together components)... well, I guess I'm disappointed.

In the old days, I did think more in your terms. I changed to fit the needs of the time.
You know there is such a thing as documentation right?

If you have to read and understand 200 lines of code with no documentation, take it up with the incompetent developer.

This argument holds no water whatsoever. Bad programmers can cause all sorts of damage, why should everything be dialed down to their level?

Clojure forces you to deal with concurrency issues in a way that might be premature optimization at best, tremendous waste of time at worst. As opposed to DSLs in CL with reader macros, I have no choice in the matter, it's all or nothing.
Yet I don't see you complaining.

Good DSLs (meaning they map very well to the problem domain ) are irreplaceable. They can make a problem completely disappear.
Regarding this discovery, I would argue that debates about the quality of the KJV translation are beside the point. This is a tremendous historical discovery, especially for historians of the early English Reformation. The KJV formed the mind of British Christianity for centuries, which in turn formed the mind of the British Empire. In other words, the KJV translation is important not merely for early Reformation studies, but for world history more generally. Anything that could give historians greater insight into the process of the KJV translation, as well as the theology (theologies?) of its translators, is a great discovery.

(A side-note regarding the Empire and Christianization: in the early centuries of the Empire, the British were primarily interested in trade and conquest, but not so much in evangelization and conversion of native peoples. The East India Company (EIC) was a good example of this: as long as profits and goods flowed in from India, the leaders of the EIC were content not only to leave native religions alone, but even to intermarry with native Muslims and Hindus and allow each wife to raise her children in her own particular faith tradition. Hence the creation of a new ethnicity: the Anglo-Indian. However, in the 19th century, an evangelical revival effected a sea-change in British Christianity, and thus the Empire became a vast instrument of evangelization and conversion. At this point, I think, the KJV became important for world history, rather than British history in particular.)
> The old guy hasn't kept up with the times, and is stuck in ancient (and outdated) ways of doing things - manual management of memory, FooBarFactoryFactory, etc.

Interesting you brought this up, because I've noticed two different approaches to this from older developers. One group is exactly like you describe, still tracking every single precious byte their code uses.

The other is like "my first PC had one megabyte and cost $3000 so don't tell me I can't allocate half a gig to this process here's $5 just go buy some more RAM!!".
Older people don't want shitty deals, and they've seen it all. They've seen the latest fads in both the development sphere (every new framework under the sun), as well as management (think: Agile, Scrum, etc). They can smell the BS, and many have lost their inhibitions enough that they'll call out the BS. That gets them labelled as "toxic" or "not team players". Younger devs, meanwhile, will put in the overtime every two weeks when the latest, predictable "sprint" crisis occurs.
Obligatory rebuttal of statistical claim: does this analysis suffer from survivor's bias? OK, so these are the few startups and projects that have had reasonable-to-great amount of success...what about all of the startups that we can't think of off the top of our heads [1], because they died? If the number of those is much greater compared to the group OP selected, and they also faced a majority-negative bunch of comments...why shouldn't we conclude that those founders should have obsessed over HN skepticism?

[1] I'll start: Fab https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444387
Github profile is pretty meaningless as an evaluator of professional skill, outside a very small number of fields.

Almost everything I've written professionally in my 15 year career so far is closed source and not going to turn up on Github.