skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love using doctests in my Python code. They can't replace proper tests, but its great to be able to guarantee your docstrings are correct.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. It's entirely possible to believe that large-scale farming should be made more sustainable without believing that local, small-scale farming is an improvement.

You're also assuming that local, small-scale farming has no impact. In fact to produce the same amount of calories requires vastly more land and more energy and the total impact is larger. Organic farmers also use pesticides and fertilizers; they just use different ones. It's not at all clear they result in less environmental damage. Is spraying a vast amount of nicitinoids over a larger area better than a smaller amount of organophosphates? Not at all clear.
I wonder if the snacks become a necessary medication for boredom, and taking them away places the level of boredom in sharp relief.
"Fundamental moral axioms"? Do you mean the kind of thing that philosophers write whole books about? I was under the impression that it's exactly those ideas that are developed through the most rigorous debate.
The problem is that Scrum is rather lukewarm agile. It's mostly about toe-dipping, not making big changes in how you think about how you work. It can lead to this, but it just really often doesn't.

Firstly, Scrum too often becomes the waterSCRUMfall - you don't deal with the problem end-to-end, you insert a version of Scrum in the middle of a broken organizational context.

Secondly, Scrum also mostly has a lot to say about team organizational structure, reporting, and process (which managers like) but not so much about software development practices (which help you do your job). This can lead to busy work and misinterpretation from those who "manage" software rather than those who "do" software.

Thirdly, I have a theory that a lot of the fallout from Scrum and agile not working is due to people trying to find something easier to digest than Extreme Programming, which includes nearly all the development practices that scrum teams pick and choose. Once you look for something easier to adapt to, meaning you don't have to change everything, it becomes easier for agile consultants to keep modifying the already lukewarm process to be a 10% improvement of the mess you already have rather than a leapfrog replacement.

And the few times a leapfrog is OK, it requires a lot of organizational air cover and buy-in, top to bottom, because you can't "force" people to work in a very different way without it being rejected.

My view is - if your approach to building software is broken, and you want to do something different, you have two choices:

a) build a process organically from the top down and bottom up simultaneously - perhaps a mix of Kanban for change management, and individual development practices that the software teams & senior developers want to do.

b) if you have the willpower and lack the knowledge or patience, adopt a "more extreme" agile method like Extreme Programming, and complement it with organizational change management techniques like Kanban. And ensure you have people or partners that can really help you with it (at all levels - not just as "coaches").

Finally, Kanban is not a software development process. It's a change management process. You an evolve a software development process out of Kanban and picking/choosing from other ideas from XP or others. Kanban is good in that it allows you to tailor an approach that deals with "big picture" organizational change issues first -- trying to do too much and piling up requirements inventory or work-in-progress. But it doesn't say anything about how to build software.
"Gmail Makes Developers Shun Email", I can't think of any developer I know that shuns email, and they all pretty much use gmail.

I think you've misinterpreted the phrase "Gmail Makes Developers Shun Email". TechCrunch writes:

Gmail and its plethora of rendering quirks is a big reason why developers avoid working on email.

This suggests that developers shun email clients as a development platform (i.e., working on email), not that developers don't use email themselves.
It's nice to see this published proactively. At the very least, transparency like this helps users understand what the circumstances are ahead of time.

Best of luck to the Fastmail team, I hope they are able to weather the storm out.
I find it entirely unusable on a Macbook touchpad, and even worse with a magic mouse. Sometimes I forget and go to the site, only to have it freak out on me part way through trying to do whatever I'm doing, while lagging like crazy of course, because at some point Google stopped giving even half a damn about performance, company wide.

Google Music kicks on my fan after a while. The only other thing I run that does that is Kerbal Space Program. One simulates space flight with nice (ok, decent) 3d graphics, the other plays f*cking music.
Thank you! Go has made me enjoy programming once again.
Ok, fair enough, that’s how far I got when I tried replacing my Gulpfile with a Makefile. However, things become more difficult if the output files have a different extension. E.g. converting jsx files to js files. I didn’t find a way of handling that case that wasn’t way more complex than the corresponding code in Gulp.
If the parts that are done don’t change much, it’s not Agile.

Agile is if no piece of your software can ever be called "done" because you are constantly changing things to be able to react to the market, as the market always changes.

If your software has clear requirements, has a point when it is done, and only requires minimum maintenance after that, you aren’t writing agile.
The only reason why H-1B is needed is because Green Card processing is so slow - takes 10 (sic!) years in many cases.

If Green Card processing was fast - there would be no need for H-1B.
Source for the bit on Mesos?
The Elves leave Middle Earth: http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart...
Account suspensions: A transparent alternative to shadowbans
Loading Animations #3: Asana’s Logo Animation
Chicago is not exactly rural. And don't try to tell me you're in Chicago if you work in the burbs. You're in Oak Brook, man, that's not Chicago!
This is a job nobody asked for but everybody has to pay for.

As an author I am very careful about what I say in my papers and how I say it. If something sounds stilted or odd, there's probably a reason. Words mean things and subtle changes can affect their interpretation. For this reason I do not like being edited by a non expert. If I feel my work needs such attention, I'll ask for it.
>[Swift] is practically forced upon you if you want develop for one of the most important platforms today

>Apple has made it clear that you'd better learn Swift

Can anyone point to any statments to this effect by a leader at Apple? I haven't found any with a web search.
Let me just remind you that you seem to be rationalizing your depression as coming from your professional prospects, which it is not. Because objectively, opportunity-wise, you are doing all right. You already have one degree, can go anywhere within EU, and get paid to study for another degree, and another, and another, until you decide to enter the workforce.

You're not "left" with your degree. People in my parents' generation were done with studies, and that was it, they could never go back to uni. We can, and we get paid to do that. That's awesome.

Come and study in UK[1].

[1] https://www.ucas.com
The same goes for better keyboards or chairs for employees. I'll have a coworker say "this keyboard is uncomfortable" or "I'm squinting a lot at this monitor", and when I offer to order something different, they reflexively say "Oh, don't get anything too fancy!"

If the company's going to ask someone to work years of their life away, the least a company can do is make sure the damage to vision, posture and wrists is minimized. Note minimized - it gets a little more clear when you realize that nobody really comes out of a career with better health - even if it's just age.

(someone will probably pop up and say "But I'm more healthy working now that I've lost weight at 50 years of age than I was at 30!" Fine. But you'll never get to be 30 again, fat or thin.)
Spring even integrated some OSS projects from Netflix into Spring Cloud: https://github.com/spring-cloud/spring-cloud-netflix
I don't know whether small, local, organic farms are a model for feeding the planet but the premise of the article is flawed in the opposite direction.

My produce doesn't beat Walmart prices but then, we don't have the luxury of govt subsidies, scale, and undocumented underpaid labor. Once you start paying people what they deserve, and charging people what it actually costs, the prices are more truthful.

This type of food only seems like a luxury product because the scales are tipped so unfairly towards cheap/bad food.
check: http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/08/fenzo-oss-scheduler-for-... and post anything else
I guess I'm thinking of the traditional startup IPO, where the first handful of employees get "fuck you money" while everyone else only gets a small piece of the pie (despite possibly doing just as much work).

But also, more importantly, people outside the C-level rarely get a say in how the company gets run.
The issue here are systems like Internet-of-Things devices.

90% of the people buying your smart washing machine will never ever update it. Never.

So change is non-existent in the code you are delivering.

And we’re going to have more and more IoT devices.

Already today we’re seeing Smart TVs with preinstalled apps for online streaming sites that don’t even exist anymore.

We have to be able to separate those pieces of code that will surely change and require constant change from those that will never get updated.
Yeah the Victim mentality is something that seems really strong with the blogs kind of posters. Thanks for your comments, enjoyed reading them!
Though I agree with the analysis of Elon Musk presenting the Powerwall, I'm not sure I agree that the same theory of 'The Move' applies to Jobs presentation of the iPhone.

If I understand correctly, Musk presented the Powerwall not how it compared to other batteries, but rather, ignored the battery market all together and presented it as improving the world on a global scale.

Jobs clearly presented the iPhone as a comparison to other devices, so why is 'The Move' now that he has us imagining a phone that is both smart and easy to use? If Jobs was using 'The Move', I suspect it would be more along the lines of discussing the impact that computers had on the world, and how they had continued to become easier and easier to use, and now anybody could use one, now, here's a computer that does all the things your other computer does, but it fits in your pocket".

I don't understand enough about MatterMark to comment on that slide.

Thoughts?
My take on it is that my life is divided into two realms: work and home. I spend maybe 40-45% of my waking hours at work, and the rest at home on nights and weekends.

I can use extra salary to improve my home life (renting a bigger apartment, going to nicer restaurants, traveling to exotic places, etc), but there's not much I can do with it to improve my work life. If my boss suddenly gave me a 10-million-dolllar bonus tomorrow, my home life would change a lot, but my work life would be nearly the same.

On the other hand, a $5 improvement to my work environment affect the nearly half of my life I can't otherwise improve on my own. This is why perks like free food, nice monitors, a cool office, etc have a value to employees that is decoupled from the financial impact of them to the company.
Personally snacks aren't huge for me. They are normally junk food or something "healthy" like baked chips which I also don't eat. Now fruit is something I would be interested in but the short shelf life of things like that normally makes it unattractive to businesses. Also drinks don't interest me much as I drink water all day. All of that said I've worked at places that had snacks and worked with coworkers who took advantage of those snacks all the time and they seemed to really enjoy that perk. So I don't hate when a place has snacks/drinks it's just not a value-add for me 99% of the time.

Now free lunch every once in awhile? That's a very attractive perk. I once worked for a company that took all the employees (max of ~15) out to lunch once a week which was a lot of fun. We rotated between everyone to choose where to go so everyone got a choice and just about anywhere you would go there would be at least something you liked. Now I get that snacks/drinks probably cost way less but we wouldn't have had to go out to eat. I've got friends at jobs that regularly cater in food which is pretty awesome as well.

Right now the company I work at has a cafeteria (with subsidised prices, lunch is max of $5 more or less) so cost of food and need to leave campus really isn't an issue and every once in awhile we have a free lunch event like for Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, Christmas, etc... This ticks so many more boxes for me than free snacks/drinks ever would.
Let's not resort to comparing credentials here. For the record, I've designed and built audio hardware, and I'm the author of a sample-rate conversion library, which does SIMD band-limited sample rate conversion, and I also wrote the accompanying test suite. I'm not just some dude who read a blog post about audio.

Let's talk about bandwidth. If you have a pure sine wave and want to measure its amplitude, you can do a DFT on your signal and measure the appropriate bin. Let's assume that the sine wave does land in one particular bin. If your data is 16-bit with dithering, the dithering and quantization will add noise to all of the bins, but the noise will be equally divided. As you increase the length of the sample that you're analyzing, the bandwidth of each bin decreases, and the amount of noise in each bin decreases as well. However, the signal will always be concentrated in that one bin.

So, as you decrease the bandwidth, the quantization noise decreases as well. This is equivalent to saying that you have increased resolution.

I know this is counterintuitive. However, this is the foundation of how most modern ADCs work. It's called delta-sigma modulation, and it uses a low-resolution ADC internally to derive a high-resolution digital output. It's also been used in DACs. For an extreme example, look at DSD, which gives high-resolution outputs using a 1-bit signal.

The argument that "if 16 bits is enough, why do we need dithering" is kind of pointless, because we don't use 16-bit audio without dithering. It's like asking, "if this amplifier is good enough, why does it use negative feedback?" The answer of course is that negative feedback increases the linearity and flattens the response of the amplifier, and makes it less sensitive to variations in manufacturing and temperature.
Lets assume that your plan works first year and there is almost zero gaming the system.
Companies like BoA or Wells Fargo, the ones who are clients of TCS/Wipro etc, what do you think they will do to account for the change in landscape (and still keep their profits high), there will be lobbying in foreign countries, and, they may make it easier for BoA or Wells Fargo to setup offices in India and move some less important divisions there if not the most important divsions? Here its hard to predict whether common sense solutions will solve the problem, because you dont know what the Nash equilibrium solution here is or you dont know how other rational actors will adapt to this rule.

So the govt will have to go back and forth to get this right, the energy is better utilized in the big ticket job items that have costed america millions of jobs (not a few 10 thousands like in this one).... see my other comment on this topic.
Biotech Hype and Speculation: East vs. West
I'm most productive 2:00 am to 5:00 pm after of that hours must sleep 2 hours more 5:00am to 7:00 am and at the 8:00 am I'ḿ ready for go to work
I agree to some extent; different languages require different coding styles – that's totally fine. But that doesn't mean that there aren't valuable features to be taken from other languages, nor that they the language's design doesn't have problems. I strongly feel we should resist the temptation to believe that just because an idiomatic design design exists means there is no room for the language to become even better!

I won't harp on about generics in Go, because I think it's far from the biggest issue – but the hardcoded magic generics show that such a feature is useful. I'd love a simple set implementation, for example – but I often find myself reduced to writing dumb, ugly, difficult-to-read code to work around the fact that it's not possible.

SICP famously says "programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." And I can't help but feel, whenever I'm writing Go, that I'm spending far too much time telling the computer what to do – and nowhere near enough telling future developers what I wanted to do.
I designed my computer case to pull massive quantities of air through a furnace filter so my apartment is relatively dust-free...

So at least not me.
Okay, then let’s think about it.

You write your software, you deliver it, you discover that your software, running in pacemakers, is insecure.

What do you do? How do you send out security updates? How do you expect to be able to constantly update that software with agile?

There are many cases where updates are literally impossible.
Ooh, a tricky one. It may be much more difficult.

SOURCES := $(shell find foo -type f -name '*.jsx')
TARGETS := $(patsubst foo/%.jsx,bar/%.js,$(SOURCES))

.PHONY: all
all: $(TARGETS)

bar/%.js: foo/%.jsx
mkdir -p $(dir $@)
minify $< > $@
It did change my behavior. It's a heart, for things I'm emotional about (LEGO nostalgia) I'll heart a lot faster and a lot more. A fav was more a stretched bookmark used for non public sign of interest.
Ah, we're getting a C in communications.

> "does this bag of data have any properties?"

WOW! That's one heck of a hard question! There can be a LOT
of properties! No properties
might mean random. So, one case is old random number testing! People settled on the Fourier test -- essentially hypothesis testing.

You seem to be saying that hypothesis testing requires
knowing something too specific
about what is being looked for. Well, in some of the elementary
stuff.

But there's the old distribution free two sample tests: Joe teaches calculus to
30 students, and Mary teaches the same subject to 25 students. Is their different performances significant?

Specific? We are not saying much
about what is different, but we do get estimates of Type I error, that is, saying that there is a big difference when there is not. So, how? Put all 30 + 25 student scores (right, something specific, unidimensional, but see below) in a pot, stir briskly, pull out 30 and 25, that the difference in their averages, do this 1000 times, get an empirical distribution of the difference under the hypothesis that there is no difference, then see where the actual difference is in the empirical distribution and estimate false alarm rate.

For measuring several quantities not just one, can look for a significant difference even if have no idea what the heck the cause is. So, are not being specific about a cause.

Generally in making AI decisions, what to have
some sense of being correct.
A first cut approach is
hypothesis testing.

A second cut would be, say,
looking for a diagnosis. So,
have some data and 20 candidate
diagnoses. So, do hypothesis
tests on the appropriate data
for each of the 20,
maybe different parts of the
data for each of the 20, and pick
the diagnosis based on
the Type I estimates.

Hypothesis testing has a cute
and powerful idea: Make
an hypothesis of no effect
and use that to calculate
some probabilities. There's got
to be a good role for that
in AI.
You can look at the heat map scale on the bottom right, just remember that it's a bit misleading because the heat map only covers the range when data was available (2002 through 2014 for CO2 concentration, but late 1800s to 2014 for surface temperature). Usually when we developers look at heat maps it ranges from an absolute zero (like number of clicks on a Web page) to a local maximum, but here "zero" is really a global average that is much higher than absolute zero temperature as defined in physics.

The reality that these graphics represent is absolutely dire, but the way they are presented here isn't exactly the most honest representation of the data. For example, if we had CO2 concentration data for the last two thousand years, this graph would be much more informative because we'd go from grey to yellow over the time period 1700-1900 and yellow to red in the last century, which is much more representative of the changes in human CO2 production.
How many tomatoes, or other vegetables, do you grow there? What about the environmental cost of living in a place that allows you to have a garden big enough to grow vegetables at all? You are using more fuel to get to and from your place; you waste more energy heating/cooling it, you require subsidies to get power, water and sewage infrastructure to your house (subsidized by the commons, btw). How much kettle or poultry do you grow? How do you contain their pollution? What about scaling - how does your proposed lifestyle scale?

The science is clear, and people in the field don't even question it: high-intensity farming (and living) are the true 'green' way of organizing our society. Low-density, 'farmer's market supported', everything-local is a luxury product, affordable for an elite only, and the popular conception just needs to catch up to that reality.
> That never happens anymore

Really, it never happens?

Forget about me, if the worlds greatest value investor Warren Buffett and his managers are buying. What more do you want.

As I said you missed the whole point of those books. You should read the books again, it takes multiple readings to understand them.
Companies are more than willing to pay for software, but there's little incentive when they would otherwise get it for free and you're asking for a charity handout. I'm sorry but that's just reality. If I were you, I'd figure out a way to earn money off of your project, perhaps by going open core and making a premium version with business-friendly features.

I found these blog posts valuable:

http://www.mikeperham.com/2014/10/01/the-path-to-full-time-o...

http://www.mikeperham.com/2013/10/01/how-to-make-100k-in-oss...

Relatedly, this is why I intentionally didn't make my newest project open source. The project is DataDuck ETL (http://dataducketl.com/) - if it were open source, companies would have used it for free and I'd be stuck maintaining and supporting them for free. Instead, I've already made five figures off of it, and it has only been out for a few months. I'm calling this "Supported Source" (http://supportedsource.org/) and I encourage anyone to follow this same business model. In short, the code is publicly available online, and I'm open to collaborating or receiving commits, but companies need to buy a license to use it beyond a free trial. This is not open source, I agree, but it's similar to open source in many ways, and ultimately more sustainable than open source for certain types of projects.

It's probably too late for your project but if you want to make money sustainably from it, I think you're going to have to move away from the charity model and more towards selling licenses with an open core or Supported Source business model. Or just regularly ask for donations and lower your expectations until its better aligned with what you're finding you can make.