skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the same vein, if it helps your reader understand your point, use the most precise word that means what you mean to say and is easily understandable.

Synonyms have differences, and the additional depth is helpful in many circumstances - this is the whole point of scientific 'jargon'.

However, I don't think that conflicts with pg's overall point, perhaps just nitpicking his example. I do think that 'mercurial' has its uses.
PBS Triumph of the Nerds doc online – Microcomputer history
Evernote is cumbersome for me, but where do people save the multitude of snippits from websites they visit and don't want to forget?
> Have you tried writing Rust and Go in a plain text editor and had problems, or are you a happy user of an IDE for another language and waiting for one to be available before you try them out?

I tried both out, but I'm a Scala / Python User mainly and I loved the IDE's I have.
Currently especially Autocompletion and my Shortcuts, like search Classes, Types, etc helped me on being productive. Also jump to definition is a feature I often use.

Yes I could even use java without an IDE or Scala however it's not as comfortable and I feel that when I'm programming on an editor I spent a few hours a week tweaking it.
While on a IDE i just replace 'some' shortcuts.

Still I think even GO needs a better IDE, since the projects with a few lines are gone and even if you don't write as many lines as in java you still getting a pretty big codebase when you write something useful.

Putting everything in his own library won't help / it will make the problem even scarier since you now need to remember a bigger import path.

Rust is similar and still I love it despite the crates/modules system, since I think it has some rough spots.
However they improve the docs regulary which makes things more clear, still it's hard while coming from python/scala/java to have a rust like import path.
So, "write like you want to talk"?
Ask HN: What should my job title be?
Hi, I'm working as a senior tech writer in the software industry. In particular, over the last year or so I've been working in a project owner capacity for my current company's REST API development projects. Right now the scope of my responsibilities far exceed what was stated in my original job description, to the point that it's effectively become a hybrid role.

I should point out here that although I enjoy my job very much, it's more intense due to the REST projects, and I have to work longer hours a lot more frequently compared to before. I didn't really get a pay raise either; I haven't asked for it yet, because I'm still relatively new at this job (1.5 years; the REST stuff started around 8 months ago).

Here's a list of my key responsibilities:
* Write and manage all technical writing content (2 client-facing developer portals + Confluence), mostly aimed at advanced admins and devs
* Write sales/marketing documentation (not so much these days - the company wants me focused on REST)
* Write detailed product specs (use cases, edge cases and error cases) for REST APIs and the new developer portal
* Break down product specs into Jira tickets
* Investigate how related system tiers behave (there is usually no existing specs or docs, and I have to talk to a zillion people and test the product before finally arriving at knowledge which not even the REST devs have)
* Advise REST devs on development strategies throughout the sprint (e.g. add so and so columns to store data, return this or that error code, etc)
* Guide and assist QA in writing test cases for unit tests, and perform exploratory testing
* Sign off on REST APIs and developer portal features

On paper I'm still just a Technical Writer. I'm planning to talk to management to get an updated title (partly because some higher-ups don't seem to have any clue about my present role). However, I don't know what it should be. Any suggestions would be very helpful.
This is neat. I bet Facebook or OkCupid are sitting on all sorts of click data that could be used to develop tools for helping people make their photos look better. (Even if, personally, I can't wait for a cultural backlash against internet narcissism...)

[Edit: Even better, he didn't use click data to train the model, just public likes.]
You simply help him widen his horizons in areas that interest him, engineering in this particular case. Provide him with support and logistics.

Get him smart toys as he's growing, like the thing you mentioned, like Lego, like Makeblock (http://www.makeblock.cc/), toys that encourage creativity.

I'm sure you can find great resources for kids to learn how to code, that's where you come in. He expresses the wish to learn how to code, you find out what's best out there to do it in his age.
phk has a Stanford Research Systems PRS10 Rubidium Frequency Standard (0 MHz rubidium oscillator)<http://www.thinksrs.com/products/PRS10.htm> at his home. Serial # 005597. The short-term stability of this unit is about 5 × 10-12

This particular PRS10 is GPS referenced _and_ drives one of his GPS referenced NTP servers.

He also has (or had) an array of 10 Motorola Oncore UT+ or M12+T GPS receivers sitting on a row 20cm apart, mounted on a shed roof.

UTC(USNO) is provided by the USNO Reference System #2 (Master Clock #2), which is a Datum Inc. hydrogen maser http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/maser.html

The frequency stability "sigma" of MC #2 has been < 2 x 10-15 during the last year.

NIST-F1, the nation's primary time and frequency standard, is a cesium fountain atomic clock developed at the NIST laboratories. The uncertainty of NIST-F1 is continually improving. In 2000 the uncertainty was about 1 x 10-15, but as of January 2013, the uncertainty has been reduced to about 3 x 10-16

So, no, not "more precise" than the clocks you list, but how many of us have a Rubidium standard in our home?

(And when compared to the large number of clocks in the world, yes, I think that the PRS10 is "one of the most precise".)
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66881&cid=6143468

"I propose a new unit of ego: The ESR

1 ESR is basically redefining everyone around you to only exist in your own personal universe, where you of course are the most important person alive. Thus 1 ESR is the maximum this unit can ever attain, anything above 1 would mean instant insanity.

With apologies to Douglas Adams."
$68B CA bullet train project likely to overshoot budget and deadline
looking at the top 100 one can only wonder how Hollywood has figured it out well before mighty power of computer :)
This is alright, but honestly it needs to be catered. Just giving them vanilla Minecraft would work for a start, but moving into the world of modifications would be something the parent should cater to the child. There are a lot of amazing mods, that would help them learn all about the world. There are also a lot of ... I won't say useless.. But more "for fun", such as gun mods and others related..

Overall, Minecraft would also let you play with them, and create a nice family environment. :)
There's a screencap of your project on that Wikipedia page!
Trip report: Fall 2015 ISO C++ standards meeting
You can use Google-Translate to read your writing back to you.
There are some benefits to what the Turris team is promoting, particularly when it comes to guarding against DDoS attacks, but the approach is totally wrong.

Users should be in control of the data that leaves their router. I'd much rather see a 'Turris app' being built for OpenWRT routers, that would allow users could control what information gets sent through it. OpenWRT is effectively just a specialist Linux distro so from a software perspective it wouldn't be too hard to build a distributed firewall app for it.
Yes, California has made up for the low property taxes with other taxes. Like I said though, what matters is where those other taxes come from and how they affect the taxpayer. For example, sales tax is regressive: it hurts the poor more than it hurts the rich. Same thing with income tax: the rich tend to have their income from various investments, which are taxed at a lower rate than payroll.
How One Man and His Twitter Army Stormed the Bestseller List
A Truth in the Law of Small Numbers
"It seems to be hard for most people to write in spoken language. So perhaps the best solution is to write your first draft the way you usually would, then afterward look at each sentence and ask "Is this the way I'd say this if I were talking to a friend?" ..."

The trick that works for me is setting the font-color to be the same as the
background color, blak on black for example. Then you can write without being
able to go back and correct what you've written. With the result, that you
will write almost the way as you speak. Requires touch typing though.

I even made a colorscheme for Vim for this and using it when writing in my
diary or personal emails. Does wonders.
Maintaining a rather old Java desktop application, and I've been using Abeille. It is old, poorly documented but still pretty neat. Code is closed source unfortunately.
> It's broken because our generation lacks the constitution (and possibly aptitude) to push for the changes necessary.

If you mean Gen X or Y, that's just wrong. Those two generations basically got Obama elected in 2008 (who got out and canvassed, and ran his Internet campaign and much of his meatspace campaign, and voted), and look what happened: vontinued never-ending war, police brutality on the rise, drug war on the rise, continued mass incarceration and surveillance state, ridiculous Dem/Repub back and forth showmanship, and so forth.

And please don't say we should have picked better in 2008. Who? Clinton? Biden? McCain/Palin? Anyone outside of the two parties has no chance, witness the party Sanders ran under this cycle.

Could it be that we simply see the game is fixed, and simply no longer wish to participate in or implicitly support this system?

> There has never been an easier place and time to than 2015 USA to enact the changes you want to see.

Oh really? Well, such a pliable system sure has proved remarkably impervious to change.
> "Consider three whole numbers, such that the sum of the square of the first two equals the third"

I wouldn't say that in conversation. I'd say something like: "consider three integers, with a squared plus b squared equals c".

And in writing, I'd go for something like: "consider a, b, c ∈ ℤ, such that a² + b² = c". Which isn't far off.
Just because there's "no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work" doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Speaking from personal experience there is a whole branch of my family (and it's spread over 3 generations now) that lives off of gaming the welfare system (and suing people...that's how they get money...oh and one is an illegal alient). Note that I am not saying we should abolish welfare or even that the problem is widespread, but that the problem is real.
links to http://rubin.rub.de/en/largest-astronomical-image-all-time as source

And they really should offer a torrent, although the web interface certainly is easier to use ;)
FEATURED: Photographer App That Launches Freelancer's Careers
Order cancellation is how electronic market makers change their prices, so you can't simply target cancellation.
> I didn't claim that teachers take their stress out on students. I simply claimed that if they did, they are horrible and unprofessional.

That's the linkage I'm talking about: that ignores the possibility that the job has unreasonable expectations. One person, sure, maybe they have problems but when a high percentage of the field reports low job satisfaction and cites things like long hours and poor support as reasons for leaving, it's irresponsible not to ask whether the system is setup correctly.

Here in DC, hitting the right numbers gets a bonus which is close to 50% of your salary – or nothing if you're slightly low, and the school administrators both track things closely and are prone to saying the only reason for not hitting your numbers is that you don't care enough, weren't willing to put in the effort, don't believe disadvantaged kids deserve quality education, etc. That produces a cycle where you get very enthusiastic, motivated teachers fresh out of college who are basically in crunch mode for the entire school year before eventually realizing that random chance makes it very hard to hit the targets consistently and their efforts won't be appreciated otherwise.

> I don't know how you think teachers have the least agency. Their choice sets include a) doing their job, b) not doing their job and c) quitting and finding a job they don't suck at. (I did the last one, although emotional leakage was not what made me a bad teacher.) In contrast, the students usually don't have the choice of finding a teacher who does their job.

I said one of the parties with the least agency because they don't have control over the students coming in, the curriculum or the expectations (e.g. one school near here puts second-year ESL students in AP English based on age, even if the teacher knows they would learn more with more basic coverage first), and don't have the ability to get the school or parents to provide support. The students were the reason I said “one of” since they do have even less control.

I'm glad that you were able to take the option of going somewhere else but that's hard for many people to do unless they happen to have skills which are in demand in industry. Unlike many other jobs, there are only a few employers in most areas and they hire at set times of year. If you're the CS teacher and have picked up some PHP, that's probably manageable but if you're an English teacher you're probably looking at a career reset or either taking a much longer commute or moving.
The last few times I tried to use the mobile site, it gave an error message claiming that requesting a car via the site was not authorized (it had worked for a few months before that).
Let's look at what phk had to say about esr's advocacy.

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257

Pull quote:

"That is the sorry reality of the bazaar Raymond praised in his book: a pile of old festering hacks, endlessly copied and pasted by a clueless generation of IT "professionals" who wouldn't recognize sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it. It is hard to believe today, but under this embarrassing mess lies the ruins of the beautiful cathedral of Unix, deservedly famous for its simplicity of design, its economy of features, and its elegance of execution. (Sic transit gloria mundi, etc.)"
Squarespace is hard to beat if you want a static site.
Startups aside, how come OpenBSD hasn't made strides in virtualization (not counting QEMU)? Virtualization isn't a fad. Can you imagine OpenBSD as a virtualization host? I'd switch in a heart beat. Can you really justify not being virtualization-ready in 2015/2016?

I use Linux as a VM platform but I've donated to OpenBSD because I've always rooted for them. I'm just disappointed they haven't done much in this area.
> "Slow" and "internet" don't go well together in a sentence. Can you imagine taking this "slow" approach as a startup? You'd be left behind in a jiffy! I guess a not-for-profit mentality shields you from obsolescence. That and the NSA has saved OpenBSD big time.

Yes, I could imagine it. Your revolutionary idea can be implemented with slow, steady technology. I hear tell that a couple of guys even used an old language like Lisp to implement a startup. Might even be cool to implement boring techniques for storing passwords.

Confusing revolutionary business objectives with revolutionary technology is probably a red flag.
Yes and in the UK its strict liability there isn't a defence of good faith if you accept fake id's even if its a very good fake your liable for I think a £10K fine
> brains seem to edit

I'd love to hear from NLP experts on speech vs writing from a machine's perspective.

> not a representation of natural communication so much as an idealised version

Written language lacks stresses and intonation. I wonder if the written dialect attempts to fill in this gap, and whether tonal languages idealize their speech differently.

> conversational tone can improve formal writing about complex topics

Feynman's lectures are a nice instance of this.
On an unrelated note - orthography... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Christoph_Adelung
To the employers and I suspect that HRMC will class Uber drivers as employees as they did for Contractors in IT
Thanks, Devon! Keep up the great work!
Apparently that's not true anymore. I was talking to some Uber drivers a couple of weeks ago in Vegas and they have to provide their own smartphone.
I wish people would understand that it is not ONLY about the money. I live in an affluent suburb, our high-school is 40 years old, the roof is leaking, etc. A few inner-city schools are brand new, modern, etc.

Yes, teachers are better in my town - but the most important difference are the role models. IN my town most families are professional couples, typically doctors, executives, etc. Kids are expected to not only go to college but good college and then continue on to graduate school, to at least match their parents' status. None of that, sadly, is at work in inner city families. It is a difficult problem and not something that money alone will fix.
"Write like you talk" is bad advice twice: It encourages rambling, which - unlike in a conversation - the reader has no means to interrupt, and it offers no clear rules to follow while writing. Orwell's six[1] are, in my experience, much more useful:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which
you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon
word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright
barbarous.

[1] https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
I think this would be sound advice in this context. "Write like you see yourself talking when imagining your speech".
Cubicle Rat Hate
Reducers – A Productive Kafka Stream Processing Pattern
* strcpy, strncpy, strcat: Use strlcpy and strlcat instead.
* sprintf, vsprintf: use snprintf and vsnprintf instead.
* In scanf and friends, the %s format without length limit is banned.
* strtok: use strtok_r() or unroll this into the obvious loop.
* gets: Use fgets instead.
* gmtime(), localtime(), asctime(), ctime(): use the reentrant *_r variants.
* tmpnam() - use mkstemp() or tmpfile() instead.
* dirname() - the Linux version is re-entrant but this property is not portable.

And so, instead of competent systems code of 1995 vintage, we get ESR code of 1998 vintage.

Presumably, someone else, somewhere else, is solving the problem that needs to be solved, which is to get an NTP implementation that is simple but complete enough for the 98% use case deployed based either on thoroughly modern C code (which looks nothing like a heap of strlcats and snprintfs) or a safer language, like Rust or Go.

Maybe that's ntimed, maybe it's something else. It's not this, whatever the hell this is going to turn out to be.
Saying goodbye to my VPS (..and my opinions of cloud providers)
> If you've ever read a verbatim transcript of an interview or conversation, you'll know that actual speech is anything but clear

When I go to conferences and sit in the audience, I type transcripts in real-time. I somewhat agree with you, but I have some other evidence that I don't know what to do with:

http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/

I have found that some people are amazingly well spoken. Absurdly well spoken, as if they specifically chose words so that I could transcribe and type them more easily. Matt Corallo has been really easy to type:

http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/mit-bitcoin-expo-2015/matt...

For comparison, gmaxwell is more difficult to transcribe because of compressed deeply parenthetical spike bursts:

http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/gmaxwell-bitcoin-selection...

and I remember jgarzik gave me lots of trouble recently during his talk:

http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/issues-impa...

For more comparison, here was an impromptu sit-down session with a few (high-energy) friends:

http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/snarks/

Great results abound when making authoritative statements. I find that I sound the most elegant for hours after I am done with some 10 hour high-concentration programming session. I attribute this to paying more attention to the purpose of communication, whether to transfer knowledge or achieve some other goal, and that good writing/speech is very similar to good programming.

And I have low tolerance for communication when the epistemology is all wrong....
This is good advice, but I disagree with his example. The entire paragraph reads[0]:

>The Upper Palaeolithic cave art of Europe was a tradition that lasted for perhaps 20,000 years and it will always be rightly described as primitive. But it is upon those anonymous artists' shoulders — giants' shoulders — that later masters like Picasso were able to stand. The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: 'After Altamira, all is decadence.'

Sure, for maximum clarity, Neil Oliver could have written more like he talks. But this paragraph is clear enough and written in an appealing style. It might not be Paul Graham's favorite style, but that doesn't make it bad writing.

I also think the sentence he picked is particularly unconversational, which is misleading for two reasons. One, it makes Oliver's style sound more opaque and formal than it actually is. Two, even in a more conversational style than Oliver's, you're occasionally going to include something that's a step more formal.

I think Graham knows this, albeit unconsciously. Would he really say "Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas" in a conversation? Probably not, but it reasonably passed his read aloud test because it's a good distillation of his point.

[0]: https://books.google.com/books?id=1Uk0AgAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...
Architecture of Stripe's MongoDB-Powered Event Processing System (2011) [video]
Thank you.

My problem is that I don't know a lot of "smart" things. A normal offline toy shop does not have much to offer. And you have to know what to look for online.

Makeblock looks interesting.
Square scammed out of millions by woman selling bogus travel vouchers
I found a very useful tool for writing clearer: http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
The exact style hasn't been settled yet. We'll be going through RFCs, as usual, for at least the major points. Rustfmt is a start to this, not the final word.

(I would also format like #2, personally. I think Rustfmt might even have a setting to do it this way?)
I'd just really love to help my son develop in the areas he's already interested in

Grant him genuine agency and let him take the lead.

When my oldest was about 16 months old, he decided to put his own dishes away, just like mom. He was too short to reach the sink and began chunking his dishes into the sink like a basketball player, because that was his relationship to the sink, height wise. A lot of parents would have told him to stop and tried to then teach him to pick up after himself later. I felt that was the wrong approach. Instead, I locked up all glassware and all members of the house ate off plastic bowls and plates and drank from plastic cups until he was tall enough to put his dishes in the sink without chunking them.

I told this story once online to someone hoping to foster independence in their child. They thought it was a great idea and announced that they would start making their child put their dishes away post haste. Uh, no. You have completely missed my entire point.

Support his interests as best you can while helping him not hurt himself. It will go stressful but good places and you will have a really neat person on your hands every step of the way.

I do have a private parenting blog that is currently on hiatus. You could send me a gmail address with the subject line "Memoirs of a Mom" and I could add you, if you care to see what is there already.