skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, for me both examples are totally unreadable. I think math's is the most unreadable notation ever and even a cross between PERL and Brainfuck would be better. Mathematicians are masochists, and I refuse to follow their lead. I prefer meaningful variable names, good use of horizontal and vertical whitespace, context-free grammars, and the like. So maybe this is the difference and the reason for me perceiving the notations as more or less equivalent: I'm not biased, as most people, in favor of infix, but rather biased the other way.

Anyway, let's try doing something with your postfix example (I hope it displays alright; also, I think you made a mistake in your translation to postfix, but I left it as it is):

c_z x *
s_z y *
s_y *
c_y z *
+
c_x *

c_z y *
s_z x *
-
s_x *
-

d_z =

Now, this is much more readable than unformatted infix version you give and that's before factoring this into smaller parts. I didn't read that much of Forth, but I'm 97% sure that it would be factored into 3 or 4 words, I think. And it also has an advantage that you read the operation in order they're going to be executed, while with infix you need to read the entire expression to know which computation occurs first.

Of course, it's only more readable for me, with my particular background knowledge and habits; I'm not saying this is or should be the same for anyone else. But, if there are people who see one form as more readable and people who see the other form as more readable, then I think that's a solid argument in favor of both forms not being drastically, qualitatively different.

The problems you point to are definitely real; it's true "the operator doesn't show which operands it has" by default (for example) and you need to go out of your way to show it. But infix notation has it's problems too, and you need to work around them as well. Like operator precedence, which is frankly a terrible idea.

> Postfix also suffers from not making it clear how many operands a given operator takes. With infix, this is always clear.

No, not always. J has words which take one argument on the left and, for example, two on the right. Or three. Or a variable number of arguments on the left (granted, they are `tied` with ` word, but still) and nothing on the right... And Ken Iverson says it's very readable! (To him, at least).

To summarize: I'm still not convinced that there is a major and unfixable difference in readability between the notations, and I still think you can make all 3 notations as readable as any other.
Women != distinct subset of women who have the opportunity and resources to enroll in expensive bootcamps.
new what? Usually you'd say newItem for example. Also, if you really want, in C# you can write @class.
A response to Ron Jeffries
Pre-GCSE was even worse. Taking screenshots of each step of copying a folder to show that we knew how to do it.
Alpha Centauri Redux
FIT: A Distributed Database Performance Trade-Off
"Suitably scaled, its summit sits at a telltale value: √2N"

Doesn't this statement apply the any function with a maximum?
Learn Cloud Computing Course at SRY IT Solutions
This is true, and it's happened to me too. The first time it did, I pinned my version to a working stable one, and thought maybe I should write some unit tests for org. That was years ago, and I've been too busy ever since, but there's always the possibility to contribute (or fork . . . ).
Wouldn't that argument also apply to men?
> We should not stratify construction workers into classes.

Of course. Any crane operator can be easily swapped for a forklift driver. When the latter are in shortage too, replace them with the bricklayers.
Short Sequin Embellished Spaghetti Strap Dress
There's a program called `motion` that I've used in the past for a similar setup.

http://linux.die.net/man/1/motion
I don't know enough about sculpture, but regarding architecture, there were many innovations during Middle Ages.

First of all, medieval builders constructed churches and palaces that were bigger and higher than ancient ones. That's what Gothic architecture is all about (even though the name "Gothic" is a later pejorative). This was possible because of new innovations in structure of arches etc.

They were also able to construct these buildings with real windows, which was not actually the case in ancient times. (For instance, look at Pantheon: ancient, and quite big and impressive, but no windows, just the oculus at top).

For construction tools, medieval times came up with e.g. the wheelbarrow (although this was independently developed in China much earlier) and various types of cranes.

If we look at politics, law and economics, well, medieval politics was sophisticated in many ways and I cannot see why we should call it regression. As I wrote in another comment, during Middle Ages the development achieved, for instance, abolition of slavery and things like Magna Carta. As well as the start of merchant banking and foreign exchange contracts.

And many of our well-known poetic legends are medieval: Roland's Song, Carmina Burana, The Canterbury Tales, the Divine Comedy, Beowulf, and if you go to religious arts, people like St. Francis.

Edit: regarding sculpture, I'd imagine that the Greek had easy access to sculptable stone materials that medieval Central Europeans had less so. There's even less stone sculpture in northern Europe where the bedrock is granite and it takes absolutely modern tools to sculpt them.
Site’s down; cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3...
Pg_paxos: High Availability Data Replication for PostgreSQL
Great story. This machine was remarkably capable for it's time and age for both business and personal use. I was lucky enough to spend a few years with this machine as my primary, only can imagine if I was exposed to unix on top of the graphic, digital creation and other tools.
The mentality is not accidental, it is a cornerstone element in propaganda related to health and environmental concerns.

It used by oil companies, agro-businesses, and other industries, and of course tobacco companies. As part of their campaigns over the years they have instilled those ideas pretty well at at fundamental level in everyone's minds specifically that:

1) Stuff is safe unless we have hard scientific evidence that it is not

2) One should not interfere with or harass big companies too much, because if you hurt them it will hurt the economy. They know what they are doing, are smarter, have better scientists and in general are mature enough to police themselves.

3) Only conspiracy theory people, hippies, and communists worry about health and mother earth, those people are irrational and crazy. You don't want to be like them. You want to be an American.

When consumers would say "we'd like to label explicitly this and that", or "this seems unhealthy, we should probably disallow its usage in food" the reply is "Where is your sauce? Do you have hard science? No? Ok then we are a rational science based society so we should allow it".

It is a very effective tactic in general and no wonder it is used all the time.
To any defined class, really.
What Microsoft should really provide is a "sensitive data environment" switch which switches off all of that collection and enables to comply with the various regulations in term of confidentiality of data for certain professions.
Unfortunately, that's not what you hear/read/see when you follow any gender activist in tech.
But it's easy to perfectly prepare tofu.
Interestingly there are some projects that try to do a similar thing:

- Camlistore is a store where all your stuff is available as JSON or raw bytes, and all "application" just hit into it

- Cozycloud that puts everything in a single CouchDB so all your "applications" access the same shared data that is also JSON or raw bytes

I'd love to see a similar model with mobiles, where all your activity (contacts, payments, messages, pics, anything) is stored inside a common database synchronizable and accessible everywhere. Put focus back on data rather than on applications.
I use org-mode everyday, as well. And the org-babel literate programming environment is a game changer, and something I find new uses for all the time. Check out this literate devops video [1]

But I share your sentiment for the stability issues which I think reflect problems with emacs in general. One day, you update your packages and suddenly your favorite mode does not work anymore and you have to spend 1/2 day figuring out why literally digging into the source with edebug. Because of this I take the following measures. I use melpa-stable which as the name indicates are the stable versions of emacs packages. (The problem is not all packages are in melpa-stable so you have to deal with that too.) Also, I manage my own version of org-mode cloned from the canonical org-mode repo that I update when I decide and I can back out of if there are problems. Finally, I run emacs within docker which allows me to freeze dry and rehydrate environments that are completely under my control so that I don’t encounter problems with a changing environment either. Here is my literate org-babel .emacs, if interested [2] (I don’t have the Dockerfile on github, yet, unfortunately.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dljNabciEGg
[2] https://github.com/julienchastang/dotemacs/
In my experience they're 30-70 ppm off, never seen one over 100, but it's extremely easy to adjust and all apps pretty much support it, most tutorials tell you right off the bat how to do it. Once you've got them configured they're surprisingly pretty solid.

The rtl-sdr.com dongles there say 1-2 PPM, but that's only 1-2 PPM temperature drift, right? The one I linked also uses the R820T2 tuner, which does seem to be somewhat more accurate. You're still going to have to mess around to get the right offset at first. Just less messing around for the first 5-10 minutes while it heats up.

Honestly, if it's something you're really interested in and want to put some money into I'd buy a HackRF instead, $300-400 but you'll be able to dump way more spectrum and transmit.
Although the article doesn't mention the rationale, I imagine the "Rock Lobster" moniker was chosen to follow Lorraine because "Quiche Lorraine" was another (albeit later) B-52's song.
At a bare minimum this is all I need. Your loading animation may be aesthetically pleasing but in the end all I really want is feedback.
> I might have to finally try it if so many people are claiming life-changing effects!

Org, much like emacs, is like catnip to a certain minded type of individual. This might stem from both being written in lisp (http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html).

Both are infinitely malleable to your needs, yet surprisingly effective out of the box for their intended use cases; the tweaking only comes later when you go "I wonder if I can do this." It also opens your eyes when you realize it's all just text (http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3996068979/the-levels-of-em...).

Beware though: you can go pretty deep down the rabbit hole, it can be made over complicated, but if you KISS and keep disciplined, both emacs and org are powerful tools.
Bluesmart (YC W15) Is Hiring a VP of Software Engineering
> if we could get the rich people ... to fund this idea

One problem is that there is very little incentive for the average rich person to care about making education affordable. After all, if poor kids can get a good education, then how is the rich person supposed to make his or her children competitive in the job market? (although, I admit, rich kids generally don't ever need to get normal jobs)

Another problem is that the current rip-off book market would lobby very strongly against anything that makes knowledge affordable. After all, they already do put their foot down anytime a school tries to use used books or otherwise cheaper alternatives.

A third problem is that there are currently a plethora of "brands", if you will, of books for any given academic topic. Having a centralised source of knowledge would put the majority of the authors out of business. You can expect a lot of these people to work against any proposition to re-use existing (especially unrestricted) knowledge.

Personally I have felt for a long time that the educational system is ridiculous, in not only the financial and efficiency realms, but also in other areas. Mainstream education is far too focused on preparing people for -- you guessed it -- becoming teachers themselves. It's as if, just maybe, those devising the curriculum are biased in their idea of what an education is for. This phenomenon is similar to when parents bring up their kids in such a way as to prepare the kids for walking in the parents' footsteps, rather than recognising that one size doesn't fit all. For the majority of people, a vocational path would be far more efficient.

On the topic of your proposal, what I would like to see perhaps the most is that quality learning material on a given topic be re-used and built upon directly rather than having hundreds of people constantly and continually re-inventing the wheels of education. Also, academic knowledge and learning materials themselves need to be freely available. The money that people and the government currently put toward buying overpriced textbooks needs to go to making for-the-people electronic learning materials. With proper oversight, I bet we as a society could make even better learning materials than those currently in mainstream use for less than a quarter of the money that's currently drained into the system.

I also agree that we have the technology to vastly improve the learning experience. Unlike advanced AI and other technologies which still have a long way to go, we have more than enough CPU power, bandwidth, storage capacity, and know-how to make a very effective learning system that's completely automated.
What is the Firmament.io scheduler?
A chart about what makes every Pixar movie tick
Ask HN: Any Black Friday deals for devs?
OK, this looked rather scary and also rather unbelievable so I did a quick research and unsurprisingly it turned out this is blown way out of proportion (if not downright wrong).

The article claims DiagTrack collects "your name, email address, preferences and interests; browsing, search and file history; phone call and SMS data; device configuration and sensor data; and application usage". That description is credited to Microsoft itself ("As Microsoft explained"). But if you follow the link it turns out it's not really Microsoft's explanation, but just what some user on official Windows forum wrote. My guess: Windows Technical Preview did (or had ability to do) that and user confused one thing with another.

Next thing, DiagTrack came to Windows (TP) via update KB3022345, so let's check that update: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3022345

"The Diagnostic and Telemetry service collects diagnostics information about functional issues on Windows systems that participate in the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP). CEIP reports don't contain contact information, such as your name, address, or telephone number. This means CEIP won't ask you to participate in surveys or to read junk email, and you won't be contacted in any other way."

Of course, it's still possible there's some foul play here, but I'd prefer it would be investigated first and accusations thrown later, not the other way around.
This - Every time I hear about stories like these I cringe. I know people who have been educated in cs ad worked as full time coders for several years and some of them are barely adequate in my eyes. I'm fairly sick of these people trivializing a craft that takes decades to master just because they can copypasta some stackoverflow or github repo and make a slight tweak - I did stuff like that when I was 5 years old. Since a few years after that I learned to write real software and believe me I'm still learning alot
When Pfizer and the Times Worked Closely
You sound like you've been reading a lot of Rod Dreher :-). If you haven't been, you might be interested in his blog, where he discusses "The Benedict Option" as a (Christian) response to this sort of cultural decline. He's also working on a book on the topic...
Top 20 Pentest Tools in Kali Linux 2.0
Your analogy is a good one for types of programmers - that disciplines of construction/software worker are not interchangeable (though lots of crane drivers can also drive a forklift).

It misses the point of the article though. The article is tired of people saying "forklift driver's aren't real construction workers"... which sounds pretty silly. I think very few of us drive past a construction zone and question the validity of who's on site. But we do it in tech all the time.

People and skills aren't interchangeable 1:1. Some jobs require far more ability than others. Still - if you're in the field, you're one of us.
The number of women in the software industry when they join it might be roughly equal to the number of men, and their salaries might well be higher, but after a few years a lot of the women have left. That's the problem. The industry is set up in a way that isn't inclusive, doesn't treat people equally, and in a lot of cases is actively anti-women because hiring practises don't deal with things like pregnancy well enough. Looking at people who're entering the industry is interesting, but looking at people who've been there for 5, 10 or 20 years is more interesting.

Something to note about the average salary - the fact women are paid more is probably a function of them being hired by more progressive and successful companies that pay more. I doubt they're being paid more because they're better - developer quality isn't related to gender as far as I know. Ideally if women had an equal chance of being hired across the industry, including the poorer companies with rubbish wages, then the average pay would be the same.
> I know what to do and what not to do under US rule.

That's not a benefit of living in the US over living in China or under any other tyrannical rule.

People under Kim Jong-Un's rule know exactly what to do: Avoid upsetting him in any way, or perhaps more accurately, avoid giving him an excuse to fuck up your life. In a broader sense, the same principle applies anywhere where people have rulers.

If you upset your rulers, you will be punished for your insolence, no matter if it's saying bad things about The King/Emperor/Putin/Mao/Hitler, smoking a certain herb, pointing out the government isn't following its own rules, or collecting rainwater on your property.

Sure, it's much nicer to live in a "representative" (hah!) democracy than in Russia, but the fundamental arrangement is the exact same everywhere: rulers ruling over their subjects.
No. Privacy is not a "feature". That implies that the only reason you don't want a company to have your data is that it's sensitive. I don't concede that point, it's my data and I should be in control of it sensitive or not.

Data collection needs to be opt in not opt out.
It looks like Feeding the world is no longer a high priority objective for YC, but at least we get financial services and Hollywood 2.0!
If I understand correctly, those coding academies are new and exactly the thing that are trying to end that discrepancy.

When they become more common, and their graduates are becoming more common in the industry, we can put it to rest.
South Korea Trains Student Hackers to Fight Kim's Cyber Elite
> Is one discipline better than the other? Is a front-end developer not a “real” developer if she can’t describe what a bubble sort is or does?

In that case - objectively yes - one of the disciplines is better than the other. If you know C and Haskell everything else is trivial in the language world. Also anyone that demands of you knowing about O(n^2) sorting algorithm is not a person you want to work on any serious task with. So she of case given should run away as fast as possible from that company.

From an old joel spolsky post:

I have never met anyone who can do Scheme, Haskell, and C pointers who can't pick up Java in two days, and create better Java code than people with five years of experience in Java

The coding ability is the least valuable you have. We live in the real world - there are no spherical cows in vacuum here. You must know what blocking script are and how to avoid them, you must know how the data gets from your server to the browser - (I had a case once where the connection was closed prematurely due to overwriting HTTP 1.1 header with HTTP 1.0 from one of the servers - ngnix I think - so content encoding chunked was ignored so the file was half read), you must be ready for lag spikes in any of the scripts you load, you must know how the VM manages memory, how the DOM behaves, some of the dark corners of javascript where the unindentified behaviors lurks. Or the counter-intuitive ones.

Elitism is saying - "you are not capable of learning that". Saying "you must learn that so I can give you my recognition" is not elitism. What the folks given in the article are saying is "Kid, you must know a lot more to be able to do your job properly".

Graduating coding academy teaches you how to code. It does not teach you how to be engineer or developer.

Edit: Just to be elitist jerk - If I want to torture someone on sorting I will say - i have a file with 1000000000 int16, sort it in O(n) while using less than 512K of RAM.
> But they’re solving a very real and important problem, and they’ll get better at it.

Yes. The "very real and important problem" is not what we're supposed to think it is - diversity - but it is real nonetheless. The "very real and important problem" is that capital hates high labor costs, and needs to find a way to slow or stop the rise in developer salaries.

All these articles about the terrible, terrible shortage of developers, about the importance of diversity in tech, about the necessity of lifting immigration restrictions, about how we need need need more developers in software engineering programs right now, about how actually screw it, just more developers in boot camps would be good enough - it's fundamentally not about any of those things, it's about how capital can control labor costs. It's about how to make software developers a) cheap b) plentiful and c) interchangeable.

And now you understand why articles breathless about developer elitism and coding academies and articles that discuss ageism in tech are almost without exception disparate sets. Older developers ask (or are expected to ask) for more money.

This is no surprise; this kind of behavior was well-known and documented even as far back as Adam Smith. But it is always disappointing to see how much of the apologia is supported by tech workers themselves. Or at best, we accept the framing of the problem and then argue about whether developers are actually elitist or not, and about whether people who graduate from code academies are good developers.
Maybe it's a qualitative difference, as in parallel by design, not just throwing a bunch of nodes together in a typical Beowulf configuration.
FWIW, I use OneNote to do this. One section per month, and then a tab for every week. I put high level tasks under each week and put my notes in as appropriate.

I tried using org-mode but it took too much time to learn when the alternative I had on hand (OneNote) was much easier to learn. Yes, I don't get the same feature set with org-mode, but all I wanted was a work journal.
Isn't that a little bit disingenuous to claim "non technical" to "technical" if you already knew how to code?
Project this a decade into the future and I envision all sorts of talk-radioish belly-aching from middle-aged GamerGaters who pretty much did it to themselves by sticking strictly to the easy bits and building MVPs without ever diving deep and building something great.

I'm not quite sure why this is happening, but I have noticed the trend. Future Shock maybe?
GROWING elitism problem?!