skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been programming professionally for 15 years. But I cannot say that I was ever bored programming.

My favorite story about this comes from my first job, in 2000. We were working in C++, and we were turning a program designed to run in one machine into a client-server system, because nobody made machines big enough to run what we needed. The plan to do that involved replacing the old function calls with code that serialized the data, sent it over a wire, deserialized it on the other side, and call the actual function. In essence, a small bit of smart code, surrounded by a lot of boilerplate, slightly different for each function. Months of boredom looming for a team of 5.

But I said: Why do all that serialization and deserialization manually? What If I can just read the headers for the function calls, and generate the code that would run it all? Way too hard, our dev lead said: It'll take us longer to write a code generator that read C++ header files than the months of boredom. I disagreed, and asked for two weeks of my time to show it could be done, with less bugs than if we did it by hand. And then when functions changed, all that we needed to do was add a step to a make file, to regenerate the whole thing. Ultimately he decided it was OK to let me try. After all, nobody expected any real output from the guy right out of school, and failure might teach him to respect his elders.

But it was all done in two weeks, by one person right out of school, because building a lexical analyzer,a parser, and a simple generator is easy. Instead of a team bored for months, we had fun work for two weeks, and then on to better things, without that dev lead.

So if you are doing something long, and slow, and boring, always wonder: Is there a way to just eliminate that entire set of boring tasks? You'll be surprised by how often, the answer is yes.
It's a courageous study in the current environment. Is it even legal in the US to suggest there could be an intellectual difference between sexes, even at a certain age?

It reminds me of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
> Pleasure as an end in itself seems both circular and ultimately extremely dull.

If it's dull, it isn't pleasure.
Switching from OS X to FreeBSD – Both Desktop and Laptop
Just to list one killer feature: instant fixup. Apply your staged changes as a fixup to any earlier commit, doing all the steps of stashing and rebasing for you.

Also, makes partial staging so easy, and applying individual hunks from, say, a stash.
I would not be surprised to learn that a codebase is 20-50% made of stuff literally copied from SO (with occasional variable name change). Why? Because most work is not that unique. Rare are the jobs where you're building something new in software; usually it's solving slight variations of the same business problem.

In particular, people copy-paste a lot of JS from SO, and again, it's no surprise. Most of the web development isn't done by superstar sexy rocketship startups on the bleeding edge of Node.js ecosystem - it's done by small companies employing barely competent programmers, and it doesn't require any innovation. It's just taking the same components everybody uses, configuring them in the same way everyone configures, and wiring them together in the same way everyone does.
The more radioactive something is, the shorter the half-life. High-level nuclear waste from spent fuel rods has three components:

- U-238: less radioactive than uranium ore, makes up most of the waste. Only a problem because of all the other stuff that's mixed in with it.

- Transuranics, mainly plutonium: radioactive for millennia. About 3% of the waste.

- Fission products: the broken-up atoms. The most troublesome are radioactive for decades. About 1% of the waste. Since they have fairly short half-lives, they're the most radioactive.

So it's the fission products which make lots of decay heat and have to be kept cool, but that heat production goes away fairly quickly. It's the transuranics that have to be stored for millennia, but they don't need cooling; since they have long half-lives they don't generate much heat.

However, the U-238 and transuranics could be used as a fuel in more advanced reactors, either fast reactors or molten salt reactors. So actually we only need to store that waste until the more advanced reactors become available.

In the article Thiel advocates pursuing new reactor types, including those that can eliminate long-term waste. If we do that, we'll end up with less long-term waste than we have right now.
> I don't see any static language trying to move in a dynamic direction.

C# added "dynamic" keyword in 4.0.
Official: TopReviews.co is live
Exactly, and most business problems are not all that unique. User input from form X goes to storage Y, output in report Z. There, I bet I've described, in a very high level summary, at least 50% of programming projects out there in one sentence. SO is a valuable resource because all these wheels need to get re-invented over and over everywhere. Unless you're lucky enough to be working on an inventive project at an inventive company, programming tends to be like plumbing: run this pipe from the source here, through that wall, to the sink there.
Working on an actual NeXTCube as well. Now that's attention to detail!

http://i.imgur.com/8KxqM.gif
Empirical data tends to find local maximas. You need someone with a vision how it all fits together and which guiding principles to embrace.
> For instance, 90% of web development is regurgitating the same CRUD for different customers.

Maybe on the face of it, it looks like this to you but in reality it's bit complicated esp if you're aiming for more differentiation from your competition but if you're looking for just cookie-cutter, run-of-the-mill, copycat solutions, then all the products on the market definitely look the same.
Software designed in such a shitty fashion as to require special hardware to use it in 2015.

I tried to pitch in, and my input was summarily rejected.
I agree, although, it’s not as bad in this case. I find it far more annoying on sites where the header is always there, as it breaks page down / spacebar functionality (when you page down, the header will cover some unread text).
Makes sense in Facebook mobile app, where you often actually want to use the toolbar (it lets you create a new post). Elsewhere, I don't know. Probably people copying UX solutions from other people without thinking about whether they're needed.
https://goo.gl/fVYYbY -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr
If I understand you, this is indeed possible and has been recently implemented in Python. Take a look at dask: http://dask.pydata.org/en/latest/

> Users interact with dask either by making graphs directly or through the dask collections which provide larger-than-memory counterparts to existing popular libraries:
Sadly pre-Snowden. Security engineering has changed dramatically now that the extent of the surveillance state has been exposed. Knowing Ross Anderson, I would wager he is working on the 3rd edition now!
> You can rewrite it from scratch, using a different language or technology. This way, you learn something new rather than patching legacy code. And if your architecture doesn’t allow this yet, you can take steps to improve it, and learn some devops skills in the process.

In a professional environment, we develop software not because it's fun, but because it supports the business and/or because it is the business. The primary purpose is to make money and to pay our salary. Now, that doesn't mean that coding can't be exciting or that you're not supposed to have fun. Not at all. But I feel that the author largely fails to see the business perspective. Rewriting things from scratch, adding another language to the overall architecture, using some fancy new technology, etc. are not wise business decisions in /most/ cases. Especially the comment about "using a different language or technology" will lead to a maintenance nightmare in the future ...
Thanks, you should write this to the author of that article.
Tutorial: Building Rumprun Unikernels
Point. And it's a non-trivial implementation, from the look of it. A lot of static languages have "a thing that can be passed around as a 'dynamic' value but has to be cast back to a static type to do anything", but the C# feature is much more than that.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264736.aspx
It's a wise decision if you care about engineers being engaged and liking their job.
ARM CPU's aren't really comparable to anything above the Intel's ATOM line in terms of benchmark performance, and raw real world applications still give x86 based CPU's a huge advantage.
http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks...
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_te...

Allot of the "performance" of most of these SOC's actually comes from the GPU/DSP portion of the SOC rather than the pure CPU.
So far it seems that Intel's bet was correct it will take them just as much time to reduce x86 (Skylake/Core-M, Bay-Trail/Cherry Trail/Willow Trail) power consumption to ARM SOC levels as it would take ARM SOC's to come close to x86 performance, and Intel will still win at the end.

Keep in mind that in 2007-2008 Intel was very seriously considering licensing ARM and other technologies to compete in the ultra portable and mobile markets and we are all better off that it didn't do so.

Intel now has offerings which are better or comparable to ARM based SOC's without fragmenting the ARM ecosystem even further and with having another avenue of technologies and intellectual property to keep the competition going and to offer an alternative to ARM/RISC with both the ability to streamline transition and having a fall back option which is always needed.

An all ARM ecosystem is just as bad (or even worse since unlike x86 it doesn't guarantee compatibility) as a monopolized x86 one.
We should also be quite thankful to ARM and it's users as they have been the driving force behind much of Intel's work lately as AMD was not really offering competition since the old Athlon-X64 days.

The new Core-M7 offers 2 cores at a boost clock of 3.1ghz, and a 1ghz GPU and beat every ARM SOC out there in terms of performance especially in places where it actually counts while having a TDP of 4.5W which is comparable to high end SOC's like Apple's A9x/A8x and considerably lower than the NVIDIA high end offering although that one blows everything out of the water when it comes to graphical performance as it has desktop GPU core's in it.
> In the field of computing, I think the greatest contribution to the world vs least fame & fortune goes to the inventor of the World Wide Web.

See also Clifford Cocks.
“Twist” by Ketchapp is gaining momentum
Yes, it makes about as much sense as the assumption by many renewables advocates that nuclear technology can't improve.
I sometimes think I'm one of the few people happily using Mozilla Thunderbird. It hardly ever seems to come up in these recommendations and when it does, it's usually accompanied by plenty of criticism about it not being updated regularly enough. But I'm happy using it for 5 email accounts and the ability to copy the entire profile folder to a new PC (or even use it directly from a USB stick if you're that way inclined) has been really handy for me in the past. The same profile folder can even be shared between 2 different OS's!
Scala has a dynamic feature as well.
very interesting article!

It seems that machine learning could be used to stabilise a nuclear fusion reactor through a real-time control strategy, e.g. optimising the reactor's environment/conditions via micro-adjustments.
I think you missed the last sentence of my post.
I've been to the offices that look like that - I always assumed it's a typical startup setup. Frankly, I probably wouldn't last more than a week in such conditions - I don't respond well to sharing personal space with other people for prolonged periods of time.
http://sortedchef.com
That's the thing, experienced programmers are also better able to use the type system to encode program invariants, beyond just making sure you don't pass a string where an int is expected.
Some information on this is located in the fwknop tutorial:

http://www.cipherdyne.org/fwknop/docs/fwknop-tutorial.html
Show HN: Meal and Mealplan Nutrient Calculator
I'd add Napster to that list too. Pretty revolutionary for all the wrong reasons!

Paint Shop Pro and WinRAR as well. :)
I mostly agree with you. Hence my list of key points that have been the reason for adoption of or migration from a language for production systems. Far from a jab, it's a start at objectively measuring PHP's value vs other languages.

I actually have this data for a number of systems languages from studies done in 90's and early 2000's. Despite much talk, I've yet to see a PHP proponent post such objective information in a discussion. So I asked again as I know somebody has to have done an objective analysis or comparison. Yet again, all we hear is (a) critiques are BS, (b) many people use it, and (c) therefore PHP is a good choice. Sounds solid to me! ;)
I made a website for making meals that can then be drag-and-dropped into up-to-two week long mealplans. % macros and vitamins/minerals/nutrients calculated based on your specified requirements for A) each meal, B) each day of your meal plan.
I would say Java (the native syntax) is over engineered. The runtime is a beautiful thing.
I think the wider concerns were addressed with "We'll look at this and get back to you."

Which can be interpreted in any number of ways - some generous, some less so.

Personally I'm not yet convinced. Udemy makes its instructors jump through all kinds of hoops when they upload courses.

And yet plainly the QC process doesn't include any checks for duplication or piracy.

This seems strange, and not entirely believable.

But we'll see what happens next week.
I've seen these types of projects where a few developers just went overboard with all the new frameworks and languages. Two years or so later most of them have moved on and other devs are stuck with technologies that are now considered outdated. Especially in the JS world, that's a real scenario.

I am all for keeping your engineers happy. Heck I am one of them. "Exciting" can mean "better architecture" or "extensible", but I think that adding a new language is always a bad idea.
The earth's core is going to be spinning relative to the black hole. Of course a lot will fall in but any material on the outside will not make a straight line for the hole - its going to start picking up angular momentum, interacting and colliding with material which is trying to move directly toward the black hole and deflecting it.

Remember anything which doesn't land on the event horizon is going to spiralling around and deflecting anything trying too.

This is why blackholes glow in the X-ray in space and it would apply here too.

Sure, matter will stream in at a constant rate - but there are real mechanical limits.
Encryption isn't just a lock, as you no doubt know. It also enables undetectable concealment and deniability.

Also, since keys are trivial to hide and destroy, it's also impossible to prove who thwarted a search.

In other words, the same level of care that it takes to go up against a state actor unconstrained by the law would easily thwart a supposedly legal warrant.

State power isn't absolute, and states will have to get used to that.
But the two typed languages are ones that have poor type systems. I'm more productive in OCaml than I am in Ruby or C#.
I think it would be interesting if data used in the article is posted to Kaggle as a competition.
What makes this more interesting is that Imagination now owns MIPS.
You hold CEOs to a different standard because they are the public face of an organization; their personal brand impacts the brand of the company. That's not elitism, that's common sense. If a common employee holds some unpopular opinion, why should anyone care? But if the CEO does, it damages the company, and the company should care about that.
"All occupations have an associated body of knowledge that practitioners dip into when they need to complete certain tasks. Visit any lawyer's or accountant's office and you'll find shelves filled with books that they use for reference."

This analogy to the tech world is appropriate. My dad is a lawyer. Very rarely can I ask him a question he knows the answer to off hand, unless it's in his very narrow specialty and regarding the state he practices in. But he knows how to look stuff up and has a general knowledge with which to analyze legal matters. And he's a civil attorney; he pretty much can't answer criminal issues at all.

I think programmers are a lot like this. If you want to grok the browser, you're going to lose. And that's not useful anymore anyhow.
great, great, so HOW MUCH did two "$9" computers cost you? postage, tax and all the bundled garbage included?
Cutting the Lights: Vulnerabilities in a Billboard Lighting System
I used to be a hard-core command line only (no fancy shmancy UIs here GitX!) git user. I have also been an emacs user for 23 years. Since I discovered Magit I will not touch command line git anymore. It's that good. Single key-press for all major features, easily add arguments the same way, and q quits any temp buffer for viewing. Diffs and reviewing history is a breeze. It's exactly what I would expect git + emacs to be. If you haven't tried it, do so and give it some time. There is a cheat sheet here:

http://daemianmack.com/magit-cheatsheet.html

That should get you well on your way to using Magit.
>I would say Java (the native syntax) is over engineered. The runtime is a beautiful thing.

It's not over-engineered. Making syntax in this way was a design goal. AFAIU, authors of the language thought that when you specify as much as possible in syntax, the code is easier to maintain. That's why it's so popular in enterprise world where code often lives for 10s of years.
Even Intel, of course. Windows NT started development exclusively on RISC: the Intel i860 ("N-Ten"). Shipped supporting MIPS, DEC Alpha and PowerPC.
Nasa Confirms Extraterrestrial Life Does Exist on Other Planets
The Generic City
What's the potential downside?
There is also an interesting story of the way they were propelled to success, pre-smartphone. I think it went something like Apple needed a chip for the Newton. That begat ARM as an Acorn spin-off. Then Nokia picked it up for GSM phones that needed a proper CPU. Nokia would have been enough to take ARM to a billion unit per year before iPhone. Apple has strict power requirements, and Nokia provided continued focus on power management. Is that about right?
It's interesting to witness Lovecraft's work rise from being considered obscure, poorly written schlock to mainstream greatness. Much the same happened with Philip K Dick. It took many decades, but their work is now part of the canon. It always makes me wonder what other great, underappreciated writers are out there right now, who we might not learn about for another fifty years.
> In our team, we try and prevent anyone from working on the same code, product or dataset for more than three months. This period is a bit arbitrary and perhaps too short for larger companies. But we generally believe in fast rotations.

To contrast, here is Rich Hickey on Mastery: (https://gist.github.com/prakhar1989/1b0a2c9849b2e1e912fb)

A wide variety of experiences might lead to well-roundedness, but not to greatness, nor even goodness. By constantly switching from one thing to another you are always reaching above your comfort zone, yes, but doing so by resetting your skill and knowledge level to zero.
Hodrick Prescott Filter Analysis – Python in Finance
FYI: I am a black employee, but as I said, not American. It goes without saying that I'm speaking only for myself. YMMV
Maybe. Or maybe not. The data I presented is insufficient.

Kotlin initial commit 8 Nov 2010 - https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/commit/369b1974782b821e4... . Note that this does not mean it's the first work done on the project, only the first commit.

http://www.nondot.org/sabre/ says "I started work on the Swift Programming Language (wikipedia) in July of 2010. I implemented much of the basic language structure, with only a few people knowing of its existence. A few other (amazing) people started contributing in earnest late in 2011, and it became a major focus for the Apple Developer Tools group in July 2013."

In any case, it's clear that neither was influenced by the other, at least during initial development.
Just small detail with rounding. In http://sortedchef.com/app/view_recipe/5/ it says:

Pantothenic acid (B-5) 2.9325 mg

I thing it would be more user friendly to round it to 1 or 2 decimals (2.93 mg)

In http://sortedchef.com/app/browse_recipes/ in the "Add" column if I touch the up/down arrow I get a nasty error message window:

DataTables warning: table id=addRecipeTable - FieldError
Invalid order_by arguments: ['']
Here's how I would interpret things. Each method ("old & boring", "new & interesting") has costs and benefit for the company, and cost and benefits for the developer. The naive way to make a decision on which tech to use is to do a CBA for just the company, but this essentially incurs hidden costs for the developers (boredom) which eventually is inflicted on the company (quitting). So make your best effort to estimate those hidden costs and factor them into your decisions.

That doesn't mean always choosing new & interesting, it just means that when the business CBA gives only a slight preference for old & boring, you instead err on the side of new & interesting. This is just advice "on the margins". When the boring tech is clearly much better than the interesting tech, you still stick with the former.
Ha. I mean, every engineer loves a green field project, and everyone wants to do a technically sweet project. But engineers of all people should understand that not every project can be technically sweet, and certainly not every project can be greenfield.

Could you imagine if everytime you wanted your HVAC upgraded, your contractor decides to rip out your entire current system and replace it with something new ("this new polymer ducting is awesome!") just to keep their engineers happy?

There's a time and a place for all types of projects, and the mark of a successful engineering effort is to have engaged engineers regardless of the 'cool factor' of their work.

In fact, this whole thing stinks of poor leadership (not just management) and undisciplined engineers.
How to Program in Binary Machine Code – Raspberry PiDP-11
How long has it been there?

Also, I observe on the docs page this little note that says "As of Scala 2.10, defining direct or indirect subclasses of this trait is only possible if the language feature 'dynamics' is enabled."

Almost all the static languages have some sort of dynamic feature already, and generally have since day one. The mere existence of "dynamic" features isn't my point. The question is, how often are they used, and is the language tending towards more of them or less of them? I don't do Scala, so I can't speak to it, but does every little Scala program use this dynamic package, or is it something rarely reached for, and even perhaps considered a code smell by the community? If it's the latter, then it's not a huge notch in the "dynamic" belt.

I'm discussing the first derivative, not the current state of the world.
Insects in the stomach
It does matter to them, though, because if the computing market turns towards ARM tablets (tablets seem to be what Microsoft is pushing), and they get one without realizing it, they won't be able to run any of the stuff they used to be able to on Windows. Windows has a long history of backwards compatibility and if ARM becomes dominant, it will end up being pretty much pointless. CPU architecture isn't a huge difference when they are compatible, but this time it is a big deal.