skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can you elaborate on not being able to trust the browser for formatting? Is the idea that web developers should just be able to use <textarea> and not have to think about it beyond that, and that browsers should provide solid default <textarea> editor?
It should take you a grand total of 2 days. Just open up the spec in one tab, playground in another, and start playing.
It's "six lines", not "six words". I think Cardinal Richelieu would be hard pressed to find six words to be as incriminating, unless they were, "I have just committed high treason".
POSIX-y low-level userspace stuff you'd normally write in C or perhaps C++.
Good rule of thumb for modern kernel and server class hardware : 100's of (native) threads is ok. 1000's will probably be ok. 10's of 1000 is where you will start to see trouble and 100's of 1000 will most likely cause you to pull out your hair. So the comment above about 175 threads being too many is incorrect.
Understood. Point being that manufacturer liability means that there's been exceptionally little innovation in basic private aircraft (e.g., Cessna, Piper) for decades. Your basic designs date from the 1950s/1960s.

Private jets, somewhat less so, but still pretty conservative.
Can anyone ELI5 what the fascination for labeling generations is? It seems so arbitrary and a lot of the talk about "Generation X/Y/Z" or "Millennials" is headache-inducing.
> I think that we need to go to a single-payer health insurance system and get employers out of the business of providing health insurance. If this were done, more employers would consider people over 50.

I've always wondered if small businesses would be more interested in hiring women in their 20's and early 30's if single-payer was a thing. The difference in health insurance costs is non-trivial because of possible maternity costs.
Mysql 5.7 – Native json support
A congestion tax is a fine idea, but I disagree that it is the only potential revenue source that could credibly provide the MTA with the money it needs.

Other options include bringing back the commuter tax which was foolishly eliminated for short-term political gain, and getting more of our money back from Albany and/or Washington.
Penn and Teller are also known to only be business partners and don't communicate outside of work. They are however extremely successful and prolific.
Seriously. I used to enjoy Star Wars, Breaking Bad, LOTR, ping pong, etc. After working in this industry a few years I'm thoroughly sick of all of them.

At this point, for me personally, nerd culture in general can go fuck itself. It's just no fun anymore now that it's more or less a job requirement.
I know quite a few people who have drastically reduced their alcohol consumption after starting to take MDMA infrequently.

For some, the taste somehow changed, making it less desirable (up to two weeks after a dose of MDMA). Others prefer to take MDMA every 4 or 5 weeks and just stay completely sober in between.
Everything I used to use Python for, I can do faster in Go. The notable exception to this is statistical analysis, as Go does not have any FORTRAN bindings, whereas Python does (through Numpy & co.).

golang does have BLAS bindings through gonum:

https://godoc.org/github.com/gonum/blas/cgo

Coming back to the main question. I use Go as my primary language these days. E.g., my dependency parser and neural net dependency parser (which uses the aforementioned BLAS binding) are written in Go:

https://github.com/danieldk/dpar
https://github.com/danieldk/dparnn

What I like about Go: it's C-like without the unsafety of C nor the complexity of C++. Moreover, I've found that working in Go is generally as productive as Python (short compile times, good tooling, completion in vim, lightweight package system), while being much faster and better-fit for large projects.

What I dislike about Go: it's a cliché, but the lack of parametric polymorphism is jarring.
A planning page for asteroids 2009 FD and 2015 TB145
> But we do have a tendency to try and pick apart every potential flaw we see in something.

If as the owner/presenter you aren't looking for that by posting your program/model/business to HN, I think you've not done your research. HN is great for getting constructive criticism. Not all constructive criticism needs to be accepted or acted upon, but if you can't really justify why it doesn't apply to you, then you should think about addressing the problem presented. Otherwise, you're just looking for people to congratulate you, and there's lots of other places to get that. (for the general you, of course).
But if it's the devil talking, you have fair grounds for increasing your suspicion that what's said isn't the truth.

And in this case, if Mr. Olsen did in fact get caught by such an investigation, he may be significantly biased against Amazon. That does not automatically make what he says untrue, but it does increase suspicion that it may not be the straight story.
1. Walk through in real detail the candidate's past work. This requires preparation on your part, as you will need to review the candidate's past work, any code samples, etc. If you do your homework and manage the conversation well, it will be very difficult for someone faking it to get through.

2. Present one or two real-world challenges related to the work the candidate would be doing for you and talk about how he or she would solve them. If the candidate wants to draw or write code on a piece of paper or white board, fine. But this should be a conversation, not a test.

3. Although they aren't always viable, contract-to-hire relationships are your friend.
I was trying to allude to the fact the talent pool where I am is significantly smaller than it would be in a large city. I should have made that more clear.
I'll have to check out this book too. Thanks for the suggestion!
The MOOC is starting today. Here's the course outline if you are interested:

- week 0 Introduction and overview

- week 1 Basic types, definitions and functions

- week 2 Basic data structures

- week 3 More advanced data structures

- week 4 Higher order functions

- week 5 Exceptions, input/output and imperative constructs

- week 6 Modules and data abstraction
Reminds me of this great TED talk, where one person is jealous that someone with prosthetic legs can change their height: https://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetic...
Don't know about you, but "2015 TB145" scares the shit out of me. What if the projected trajectory was an earth strike. There'd be no time to react. Humanity really needs to get together to address these existential threats.
You bring up a really good point. Medium's default layout scheme highlights content over authorship, so you don't get smacked in the face by the fact that this is written by Jay Carney.
That wasn't a suggestion or a value judgement. It was a statement of fact.
US government to require registration of some small drones
Electric Motorcycling Just Took a Massive Leap Forward
Presidential canidate John McAfees answers Slashdot interveiw
The NFL has that. It's called the NCAA; that way they don't have to pay the players.

Now that the NFL is essentially a front for gambling in the form of "daily fantasy sports" (DFS), I'm curious if they'll set up a development league so they can monetize that aspect of it as well.

For those who don't know, the NFL, MLB and NBA are all heavily in bed with DFS from an ownership perspective. The leagues either directly or indirectly (through investments by team owners) hold large investments all the major DFS providers. That's why you see DFS promotions in pre-game, on major sports sites, etc. That's also why the major sports leagues, after decades of fighting against sports gambling, have gone all-in the other direction.
Maybe if you specified it being by "US standards". A lot of us live in places where NYT would be seen as quite right wing.
I don't know if (not) zero-sum is the right way to characterize it, but I agree.

Fields like sports seem to compensate on an exponential function -- the top 1% make stupid sums of money, and even people on the same professional team can make very small sums compared to the top earner.

Programming in comparison is compensated on a more linear function. What that means practically is that you don't have to be the top 1% of programmers to make a good salary.
I've heard comments from a dozen ex-Amazon employees on HN, in this thread and in the one back on the original NY Times article. The large majority of them said the anecdotes described by the article were unrepresentative of their time at Amazon.
I recently went through a job search and began writing off companies that were all 20-somethings who obviously didn't have a lot of interviewing skill. I would say bias against older interviewees is 100% politics. Many of these interviewers were not experienced. They knew they wanted to be top dog in their respective department,s and thought that it was in their best interest to keep experienced people out. It's not until they go through a few cycles of pain and disappointment do developers start to want to work with experienced people. It's not out of respect. It's because they now understand that they are only hurting themselves and want someone to relieve their workload. Mid-tier and experienced interviewers loved me. Early career people tried very hard to throw their best curve-balls, but I had already spent a week working problems. In the end, one company in particular, Facebook, simply just said that I answered correctly but answered too 'slowly.' I knew they had cracked when I heard that word.
A paper that calls itself liberal is not centrist unless they are not allowed to define themselves. When an editor goes as far as saying "If you think we're playing it down the middle you're reading with your eyes closed" that's the exact opposite of an unbiased centrist paper. That's openly stating their liberal slant in an "you're an idiot if you don't think we're liberal" sort of way. This isn't my opinion this isn't some random Joe's opinion this is an editor of the paper itself making the claim.

>Who, in your opinion, is a centrist-ish paper in the US?

Doesn't exist in-so-far of my reading. It's a majority left, minority right split with MSM being largely left to various degrees.

It is my opinion that the general public has shifted so far to the left in the past 10-15 years that everything appears to be right-leaning. http://i.imgur.com/03Qpa94.png
After having read down half the page of responses, your comment was enough to convince me to finally cancel my Prime membership.
Long before the NYT article came out I had been hearing stories like this from ex-Amazon employees. This is only anecdotal evidence, but it's the same basic anecdote again and again. The NYT article may be many sensationalized and the characters in it may not be ideal people, but the story's core message is one I've heard from a diverse set of people in a diverse set of circumstances. There seems to be a kernel of truth in there.
These are great ideas. I told Valentin to drop by. Because DAS is an aggregator with an expert-system style query language, there is sharing among the Python services for caching. It's the caching that makes async code a good option. Preforking might work against this without significant increase in complexity in order to communicate with a single local cache. Remember that this is a web service for the Large Hadron Collider. Nothing about that is small.
"Concurrency is dead simple in Go"
In my experience, concurrency is not dead simple in Go, not even close.
Eagle: Secure Hadoop in Real Time
Actually https://www.mailgun.com/ works just fine, it's just the http version seems to be misconfigured. Also, https://mailgun.com (no www) redirects to a http version?

They really should be using HSTS anyway.
Hmm, how does the law (DMV, passport office, etc) deal with that?
But depending on how stringent your bounding box for "culture fit" is, you end up building an archetype for age, gender, education and ethnicity of your target employee.

The point is is that if you're targeting people who behave like you, have plenty of shared interests and reflect your own way of doing things, those people are going to end up looking a lot like you too.

I think the point that potatolicious is trying to make is that the ambiguity of "cultural fit" ends up becoming a path to hiring people who are very similar to yourself. An alternative approach would be to define explicit, concrete values that your company and team reflect, and look for hires that mirror those values instead of nebulous "cultural" fit.
Vanilla Windows + Visual Studio is hands down the best development solution for writing C++ code. For any Web stuff - absolutely, I would go with a Mac or a Linux machine any day. For C++, it's incredibly hard to beat Visual Studio.
Saying "the best way to start a Data Science project is to start a Data Science project" isn't helpful, especially since the article doesn't give any hints how to obtain, process, and visualize large sets of data.

That is the actual bottleneck to learning how to use data science, and is an area where tutorials are sorely lacking. It's one of the main reasons I now open source the code in my blog posts for data analysis. (example: https://github.com/minimaxir/reddit-bigquery/blob/master/red... )
LMFTFY: pgmemcache: PostgreSQL memcache functions
Famous founder with previous start up success, lots of VC capital, lots of press, lots of growth, lots of hype. Maybe they even have an open office with foosball and Aeron chars (or are standing desks the new status symbol?) As a start up, they're crushing it. As an actual company, you know, the kind where revenue > expenses, they utterly fail it.
Concurrency is never dead simple.
A good minor league for football would be pretty expensive, just considering travel. If you're traveling with 40 guys (the realistic minimum that you could take to field a team), that gets expensive pretty fast. A true minor league could probably work if the NFL teams agreed to subsidize it, and they put it in a single major metro area. Like, the NFL has a 4 team minor league in Dallas, and did a lot of community marketing, played on high school fields, etc. You could build a single gym/practice facility, and the teams could rotate around in it. The problems are that you start to get into affiliation issues (what major teams are affiliated with what minor teams, and what does a major team do when it wants to send down a CB, but there are no teams that play man press with open slots for a CB?) and the fact that football is much, much more a team game than baseball or basketball, and most players need a couple weeks in the system to really make an impact, whereas a baseball player can get traded from one team to another with minimal adjustment, and a skilled basketball player won't need much more time.

The other issue is that there already is a sort of minor league, it's called the practice squad. And if you have minor leagues, the practice squad guys are in a weird limbo, because they are not getting game reps like they would in a minor league, yet they are the guys just good enough to almost be NFL players who would benefit the least from game reps, because of the work they are putting in with the full team. There are actually many minor football leagues, most playing indoor football, and those guys almost never make it to the NFL.

For the NFL, the real solution isn't a minor league, it's doubling the practice squad. That could cost each team about... (using numbers from the article) $1.5 million, and that's probably the best solution if the powers-that-be really feel there is a talent gap.
I still prefer forced data abstraction, i.e. classes as a core construct. GO does not force that. Data abstraction, when properly done maps the code more closely into the problem domain to be solved. In the long run that makes the code more maintainable and extensible.
Python has good co-routine support. In Python 3.5 we have async/await and the concurrent.futures module. For I/O bound tasks like running REST APIs or MapReduce jobs I don't see the GIL being much of a problem; you spend eons waiting to do a few milliseconds of work then wait some more.

> While Go does provide channels, I'd argue that they are not dead simple.

I'd agree.

In my experience it's easier to explain a solution to a fundamental problem than to an abstract one. Channels, futures, promises... all very abstract concepts; useful to the cognoscenti but none are satisfactory at solving the fundamental problem of parallel execution. Hence everyone in their camps about which is right for which tasks.

So even with channels parallel programming is still difficult. You just have the added burden of a different, unique abstraction. Every language ecosystem either has their own community-adopted one or a plethora of them.

I think I'll reserve, "dead simple," for when we have a universal language of parallel execution. Until then... we don't know how to compute!
I like all that except for the odds part. If the odds are calculated across the whole population of (say) high school athletes, the odds are pretty meaningless. As you say above, you have to select for height, so calculating the odds of playing in the NBA professionally for a population where 95% of the people are 5'10" or below is just silly. The odds are going to be astronomically low because of height alone.
You are mistaken. Near the end there is a hyperlink to the claims document. It is titled "Facebook's terrible post" and points to the URL <https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/05/01/graphql-int....
Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P review: The true flagships of the Android ecosystem
Amazon sues 1,114 reviewers, some selling reviews for $5
Top Officials (CIA/DHS) Emails Hacked
Do you think it would be difficult to find credible anecdotes of Amazon employees having positive experiences?
'Slowly' is another thing going on in the industry, not just facebook. They want 'speed' with 'correctness'. I don't know where this leads to.
> (as in, "increase unit price by hundreds of thousands of dollars" expensive).

that's clearly false. maybe "hundreds OR thousands of dollars.
When did you ever have a company state any reason for not hiring you?
>it is still not age discrimination.

The law may not agree with you. Ever heard of disparate impact? "In United States anti-discrimination law, the theory of disparate impact holds that practices in employment, housing, or other areas may be considered discriminatory and illegal if they have a disproportionate "adverse impact" on persons in a protected class"

People over 40 are a protected class in US employment law.

Now, policies that can adversely affect a protected class are ok as long as there is a legitimate job requirement. For example, being able to lift 50 pounds may be a job requirement that adversely impacts women and the disabled but its ok as long as the job actually requires heavy lifting on a very regular basis.

Otherwise people are free to implement policies that are code for discrimination such as "able to lift 50 pounds" for a desk job.

You'd have to prove in court a legitimate job requirement. I think proving" likes ping pong and beers after work" being a businesses concern may be an uphill battle even if you call it "attitude."

Once you realize your hiring practices may exclude a protected class you really gotta do a second look over and ask yourself if it is really a business requirement. Other shops are able to ship products with more diversity and less ping pong.
Moving to Germany for studying. ANY hints on paying expenses?
I'm a Brazilian developer with an entrepreneurial spirit. Any tipos on how to get a part-time job in the Europe? (hopefully for a startup)

Thanks!
IJ.com's Hack the Debate
What's most interesting to me is, after reading the comments on this article, very few people are coming back with "but why do we need age diversity? What if old people just aren't interested in working in tech?"

Swap out gender for age, and you'd see a whole different weight on the spectrum of replies.
>Other than some quite significant performance gains

I am aware that other languages perform better in benchmarks than, say, Python does. But in my experience, I've not ever found the speed of the language to be a bottleneck when I'm benchmarking and optimizing for scalability in a web app.

It's always something else. The database interface, the network, a crappy web framework, whatever. It always seems to be something other than the fundamental language that bogs things down.

I'll openly admit I might be missing something or that perhaps I haven't tried to scale high enough. I just don't get how it's relevant that x language is y times faster than Python when Python hasn't ever been the problem. There's always just so much more low-hanging fruit than the language.
Perhaps not marking rebuttals as follow-up posts might be a good start?

It's one thing to downweight a post that duplicates content on the front page. It's another thing entirely to downweight a post that tells the other side of the story.
The email feature you wish you always had
That was in fact a point I was making.

Journalists lying to support a narrative is an extremely damaging trend that has taken hold on the left and it should be pointed out whenever it happens.

This of course happens on the right but it is not moralized or justified in the same way.
Onboarding Experience Review: Blinkist, summaries of nonfictional books
Imply raises seed round from Khosla Ventures for Druid
Gone, the App to Sell Your Old Junk, Acquires Yardsale/FOBO (YC S11)
The disabled person ultimately gets to decide how to spend their own insurance money on assistive devices, but doesn't always have the full perspective on the impact on their friends, or family, or possibilities of workplace or housing, that can change with one device or another. Plus, they're frequently old or have a cognitive/learning disability or some other thing that makes them staid in their ways, and makes their caretakers wary of change.

I think this video is aimed at reaching out to the people around the disabled person who might currently be adapting their lifestyle to suit the requirements of the disabled's present assistive device, and could be convinced to advocate to the disabled person based on the increased autonomy/decreased dependence it would lend them.
Yes, that's completely true. But while there are still inputs for which terrible accuracy could result, for many of the inputs which would arise in practice, the Kahan summation technique is "good enough" to prevent loss of accuracy. The chances of getting an input for which catastrophic cancellation would result on the doubled precision are far overshadowed by the chances of getting inputs for which the normal summation would have unacceptable loss accuracy, but Kahan summation would not.
Reuters. They're also the most boring/uninformative.

Al Jazeera, The Economist, Bloomberg, and Quartz have well-researched and relevant stories but they usually come with a bias.
Not all companies are like that. We put a huge emphasis on culture fit but it's nothing like what you suggest. We've gotten far more diverse as we've grown.
That's not even it. Parents can care about college and want their children to do well academically, while at the same time not know how one goes about getting into college or why Yale would be more attractive to someone than University of Iowa.
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." — Ken Thompson, Go designer
Finally – a change in course on drug policy
Try that with a GIL, sure, multithreaded Python and Ruby is possible, but it's not for the faint hearted and not as easy to read.

FWIW, you can use a ruby gem like typhoeus specifically for this:

hydra = Typhoeus::Hydra.new
requests = (0..9).map{ Typhoeus::Request.new("www.example.com") }
requests.each{ |request| hydra.queue(request) }
# blocks until all requests are complete
hydra.run