skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fuck, what is up with this?

I don't care about the audio latency this article is talking about and I never used to have this problem either. But recently, maybe just since I flashed latest CyanogenMod my phone sometimes responds instantly, but sometimes doesn't respond to the headphone button press until I press the power button or wait 30s+. It's incredibly annoying. I'm using CM on a OnePlus One with Xiaomi Piston 3 headphones.

Considering the power button works, I suspect this may have something to do with sleep states?
Skynet is coming.
Interesting. Java generates twice as many security flaws as C++ (per megabyte of source code), but C++ generates more critical flaws. .Net generates more security flaws and more critical flaws than C++.

Looks like sandboxing and garbage collection aren't a cure-all...
Your self-image may influence how you set goals, research shows
Given that the android tv devices are (imo) more important in this aspect than a phone or tablet, I would have liked to see what latency was on things like the nexus player, shield tv, sony tv (baked in), apple tv, and roku maybe. I assume they would be similar, but perhaps they made some special modifications that will later be incorporated into AOSP?
This uses the default ssl verification in whatever version of python you have. Even though all API requests use public key signing (so nothing really private is ever sent), if you're worried about someone MITM the API requests to letsencrypt.org, please use python 2.7.9+.
For real? Did you not learn about white flight in high school?
I really wish people wouldn't link to ten-year-old drafts without checking on current research. The article Atwood links to makes some totally bombastic claims - here's the retraction and clarification of them:

http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...

While a consistent mental model for things like assignment is a good sign, not initially having it doesn't mean you can't learn how to code. Lately, researchers have found that certain pedagogical techniques (especially pair programming) are pretty effective at overcoming these deficiencies.

I wish I could understand why so many programmers are eager to assume their skills are due to something 'innate'.
They're not stunting out culture, they're convincing us to stunt our culture, and we're giving in.

It's trivial for us to say no, and yet we don't.
In the US there is a blood alcohol level below which it is legal to drive. There are also frequently legal definitions of how much alcohol can be in one drink.
This time, we'll get it right for sure.
Be careful with Route53 if you have low-latency requirements. In my experience, Route53 has highly-variable DNS resolution latency. When I contacted Amazon, they basically said it was good enough. Tellingly, Amazon itself uses Dyn for Amazon.com.

I do absolutely love the feature set and convenience of Route53, however.
That seems to do it.

let func = () => {};
console.log(func.name); // func

and in stack traces:

let func = () => foo();
func()

results in:

Uncaught ReferenceError: foo is not defined
func @ test.js:1
To take the discussion on a slight tangent, how uncommon is this phenomenon? An applied tool works really well but nobody knows why. I can give another example from the domain of formal verification: SAT solvers which are at the core of most modern verification/synthesis tools.

You can download open source SAT solvers today that work spectacularly well on "real" SAT instances with millions and millions of variables and clauses. Yes, SAT is the quintessential NP-complete problem and in fact it is pretty easy to come up with a SAT instance with only a few tens of variables/clauses that would kill these solvers. But somehow these "hard" instances almost never occur in practical problems generated in hardware/software verification/synthesis as well as ton of other applications (planning, constraint programming etc.)

So this must there is some characteristic of the problems that we generate in practice that makes them "easy" but we don't have a good understanding of what this characteristic is. All we know, for now, is that we've somehow stumbled upon a near-perfect set of heuristics that work amazingly well on the SAT instances we encounter in practice.
I think you are overstating how easy it is to get interviews for development positions. From what I have seen, someone without some demonstrated coding experience, professional or hobby, won't even get the time of day from companies looking to hire developers. They will never get to the take-home assignment phase.
There's a lot of back-and-forth over whether it is easy or not or whether one comparison or another works best.

I think it's fine to compare learning to write code with learning to write human language. The best of us will still make mistakes; plenty of us will always be incapable of writing well. Once upon a time the idea that everyone needed to know how to write was laughable. These days, it's arguable how well everyone needs to be able to write, but there's a general agreement that it's worth giving people the opportunity to reach at least a basic level of competency, even if their daily lives require little writing.

I had a miserable time learning to write (i.e., failed many assignments) until a few things fell into place, and I saw how writing could be an important part of thinking, learning, feeling, expressing, etc. I had a miserable time learning to code through coursework in highschool and college until a few things fell into place and I saw how code could be an important part of thinking, learning, feeling, expressing, etc.

How did/do we sell everyone on trying to learn to write human language? AFAIK, with some superlative rhetoric about how useful/necessary writing can be without much dithering over what portion of the population will ever be good enough to make a living at it.

So there are varying levels of irresponsibility when it comes to saying everyone should code. There's probably a big potential social upside to fudging things a little to suggest everyone should learn some programming throughout school; it's much more negligent to tell someone with a boring but stable job to quit and blow a few grand on a coding bootcamp without an inkling that they're prepared.
IIRC, that one was a decent overview, though he has worked on similar issues in older papers: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.99.1...

It has been a while since I read those papers, there may better references.
There was a great article called The Space Doctor's Big Idea, published in the New Yorker a few months back. It explained Einstein's theories in the top 1000s English words used in America.

While sone might wave their hands and call this an eli5, it was quite well done and between that and some xkcd comics I was able to learn enough to ubderstand how orbit works and a few other awesome facts.

I am interested in finding something similar for machine learning. I am not embarassed to admit that, Super-Linear Gate and Super-Quadratic Wire Lower Bounds for Depth-Two and Depth-Three Threshold Circuits, is just way too complex for my casual interest but would like to know more about how AI/ML works conceptually. Clearly the discipline underpins a bunch of services I use regularly and as computing and techniques improve it will start playing a more conspiscious role.

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-space-doctors-big...
Can you recommend a good introduction tutorial on SAT theory?
Hashcat and oclHashcat have gone open source
Previously... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10624595
effectively playing a similar game as being played out on college campuses, forcing the establish of safe spaces. Safe from freedom and rarely anything else.
How is that paragraph evidence of illiteracy?
The paths are cumbersome, but I wouldn't call them asinine. Apple's toolchains are versioned by SDK. That's why they have xcrun, so you can do things like:

# xcrun --sdk iphoneos clang [...]

On my system, clang's path is even worse than your example:

# xcrun --sdk iphoneos --find clang

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/clang

You're not supposed to remember those paths. Xcode and xcrun remembers them for you.

Apple doesn't touch the base OS folders for non-OS software, which is why stuff goes into /Library and /Applications. Besides, (Apple has never used /opt, and doesn't even document it, last I checked: "man hier" doesn't mention it.)
Let me make an analogy: we're not going to teach kids how the food industry works before we're teaching them how to bake a cookie. We're also not teaching them about city planning before they had a chance to put some lego bricks together.

I think the important thing here is that kids need to see the necessity first. Only then can they start to deal with more abstract concepts. And actually, I don't think this applies to only kids. I think it is the reason that "learning by doing" is so much more effective than anything else.

To give an example related to programming. I have seen CS students use preconditions and postconditions (i.e., assertions), on functions, without understanding why they were using them. They just wrote those assertions because the teacher said they had to do it. Of course, the assertions are useful, but only for large, more complicated, programs. But since the assignment programs were all small, the usefulness of this particular software engineering instrument completely eluded them.
From a non-CS degree perspective (on the hiring side), it seems that CS undergrad is meant to produce CS professors. Most (yes, MOST) have never touched anything higher than C++. While fundamentals are great, teaching them to the exclusion of immediately tangible skills does a disservice to people who are effectively paying $200k for a ticket into the working world. The reason we consider boot campers is because they typically have a work background demonstrating an ability to be useful as well as a recent educational background demonstrating an ability and willingness to pick up foreign tasks.
Yes, but then you're forcing sober people to commute with the intoxicated, which opens up a whole different set of problems.
>What I learned in Automata, Discrete Math, Algorithms, and the other more theoretical classes has been worth it's weight in gold.

That was my intention when I signed up for University too. However, I've only had two maths modules, and they haven't been particularly challenging.

One of the things I was looking forward to learn at University was hardcore cryptography, since I believe that's one of the few things for which getting formal, structured education is the best way to go. Sure, you can learn the fundamentals on your own fairly easily (even more so today - Stanford's online course in cryptography is very good), but you need to learn about attacks or you'll write code vulnerable to known problems like hash length extension attacks, ciphertext modification...

However, the only time cryptography was mentioned - at all - in my entire BSc was in first year, where we had a few lectures explaining the rudiments of RSA. Interesting, for sure, but pretty much useless without the remaining 80% of knowledge required to have a full picture of what's going on.
Fortran IV would let you GO TO out of a DO loop into a whole different procedure's DO loop. (It didn't have FOR.)

But why limit yourself to GO TO to fixed places??? Fortran IV also let you GO TO an arbitrary statement that would only be chosen at run-time "assigned goto".

Fortran 77 still has that capability but you can limit it to specifically selected statements and it won't GO TO outside of the current unit (a concept Fortran IV lacked.)

Dijkstra's remarks were contemporary of Fortran IV.
Germany more likely outsources a small portion of its pollution to China. Germany's top five import sources:

Netherlands: €87b

China: €79b

France: €66b

US: €49b

Italy: €48b

So €79 billion in imports from China in a €3 trillion economy.
Pittsburgh uses free parking as an incentive to draw people into commercial areas. Ironically, those commercial areas are well-served by the mass transit system generally, but Pittsburgh's suburbanization pattern doesn't align with how the mass-transit system is laid out (and, yes, plenty of suburanites appear anecdotally to think of the bus system as for "Those people").
That cars enable upward mobility and easy access to jobs devoid of the ever reaching control from the central planning agencies?

More power to them.
First, I agree that the statement presumes a lot without offering any evidence. Second, I essentially agree with it; I believe most people cannot code and can't be taught it.

Coding requires a turn of mind that at least half of the population lacks: abstraction. You must be able to map a problem space into a form that is amenable to decomposition and solution using data and instructions. I think most technically inclined folks would be surprised how many smart people lack this ability (like doing basic high school math). Many others lack basic skills in logic, or the ability to define a reliable procedure. (I say this after 60 years of life, working in both white collar and blue collar settings). It's not that these people are stupid. Their minds just don't welcome abstract thought and the hierarchy of formal sequential models that is code.

In my experience, the set of skills peculiar to writing software well is surprisingly uncommon.
Yeah. You could (can) call a number, order a taxi, get one five minutes later. Typically with a very nice and polite 40-50 year old driver who has doing this for decades and knows all the streets AND is the best source for local gossip. When you pay (with a credit card!) you get a nice receipt. It's all quite nice.

I'm talking about the civilized northern European countries now, of course. In other parts of Europe, Uber is a major disruption because the existing service more resembles the US taxi non-service. Except possibly with even higher risk of being ripped off if you are not local.

In all parts of Europe though, just tapping in an app with automatic payment is more comfortable than calling a phone number.
I don't know if I should interpret this common sentiment as programmers being humble about their jobs and lives, or being braggy about it.

What is the huge difference between programming and most other white-collar jobs, really? Is programming so incredibly liberating and personally fulfilling compared to them? If so, why? It's not that I can't believe that it is true. I'm just curious why it is such a massive difference, apparently.

On the other hand, even for people who looove coding, there is no shortage of those of them who complain that they don't like their coding job. A programming competition is different to coding your own project by yourself, is different from coding whatever greenfield project for a job, is different from being stuck with a monolithic codebase as a maintenance programmer.
> When the end goal of significant numbers is despotism, collectivism, or hegemonic religious rule, those very freedoms become exploitable weaknesses

Few people hold "despotism, collectivism, or hegemonic religious rule" as end games. Instead, freedom is traded for safety and stability for one's way of life.
This view has also been put forward by Bernard Haykel who appears to be regarded as a notable secular authority on Islamic State.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Haykel

"What ISIS Really Wants"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...
Commendable approach with "many small tools that communicate well"
>> Getting an accurate enough sample from your breath without cooperation and breathing into a tube is probably impossible.

> There are numerous companies working on artificial noses that car manufacturers have been looking to integrate in order to have an equivalent of white noise generators but of course for smell.

These are completely different things. To detect intoxication for drunk driving, you need to accurately estimate the concentration of alcohol in the driver's blood. Detecting the "smell" of alcohol in the car does not do that.

It's also likely impossible to detect blood alcohol concentration in real-life conditions by sampling ambient air (what if they're the DD driving home a bunch of drunks? what if the window's open? what if they had liquor spilled on them?).
Err, SDET _is_ a professional software developer. It's in the title!

Working in a non-development group doesn't somehow make you not a software developer.
A lot of very useful information on intermittent fasting can be found on the Leangains webpage:
http://www.leangains.com/
I'm a bit torn on this one. Some languages and concepts are harder than others. Some people are more visual than others. Some people would excel in low level languages where others would excel doing front end web dev where things are a bit more visual and often a bit less abstract.

The biggest thing with coding is finding something you like... Passion is the key here. Some things will come easier than others but if you're passionate, even if you're not a bloody genius and it takes you many times before you get something, you'll spend enough time and eventually get it. And over time you'll get better and better.

In 12 years working in the field I can say I've worked with a fair amount of devs. I've worked in very small software companies, medium sized companies and fortune 500 companies. I've worked with self taught devs and people with degrees. The biggest difference between someone who's great at their job and not is not the education but the passion. Its not even the book smarts. Some people are smart as hell but just aren't passionate and don't enjoy what they do at all. Every year your job feels a bit different. Languages evolve, technologies evolve, libraries and frameworks evolve. You're constantly working with new things. Some don't feel 100% different, others do. Once you've learned a bunch, some new concepts are very easy to grasp. But at the end of the day, if you hate it, you probably won't keep up and will quickly be obsolete. Most new jobs will require a lot of learning. If not new languages then new processes, infrastructure, code bases, etc. If you're passionate enough to keep learning and patient enough to spend the time it personally takes you to grasp concepts, then you can learn.

Its not for everyone. True. But not everyone will be developing physics engines for games or deep learning algorithms.. Some coding skills are easier to grasp than others and most people can, given time, become decent at some of it.
It's not quite so simple. The whole point of the 1996 Telecom Act was to get rid of the legal monopolies and get the government out of the business of regulating them. What we have now are incumbents not monopolists. However, in a low-margin industry (Verizon's wireline operating margin is 2-5%) with enormous capital costs, that's kind of a theoretical distinction.
The internal process that a human (you in this instance) is doing can be process mapped out, engineered and then implemented as a automated software solution.

You have just got more criteria then Netflix implementation.
No, I think that very attitude has been very consistent since then and it's clear in the way Facebook operates and profits.
Cool. This looks like what I had in mind.
A Google Developer Video on BigQuery for #MusicTech
No, they were successful because they deliberately flaunt existing regulations that would otherwise reduce their profit margin.
Show HN: Malaria Data Exploration Tool Using D3.js
Mobile Learning – The Next Big Thing
The article's main point is solid: Learning to code is hard mostly because coding is hard -- not just because there aren't enough learning opportunities and not just because we aren't welcoming enough. And learn-to-code merchants who say "Coding is easy!" are a bit untruthful in the infomercial kind of way. As those of us who do it professionally know, coding is often tear-your-hair-out difficult. Misery loves company! :-)

That said, I have two problems with the article.

#1 - I don't like the idea of qualifications. Sure, the lack of career-path guarantees sucks, but that anarchy also benefits us. If I can get my hands on a computer, I can learn to code on my own (with lots of hard work, yes), build what I dream of, change my life. I can sidestep red tape, bias, prejudice, and credentialism that might work against me elsewhere.

#2 - I dislike the vague word 'aptitude', which the author uses many times. The idea of 'aptitude' may help distinguish Mozart from Salieri, but not Salieri from his cousin Fred. What I mean is, at the level most of us operate at, mightn't factors like motivation, persistence, and health affect us more than 'aptitude'? If the article replaced the word 'aptitude' with 'motivation' I'd like it better.
rnpm – linking your react-native's iOS/Android native deps by one command
Or Indifference?

IS never really threatened U.S. or Western interests, the Paris attacks were the first time they reached so far. They (along with the Syrian regime) have been butchering Syrians by the thousands.

Btw, the Daesh captive was Nicolas Henin, and he's actively campaigning against airstrikes [1] as that's exactly playing into their sick plans.

And he speaks that they're deluded enough to think they'll find support despite their inhumane acts. Muslims despise Daesh, heck the orthodox the individual their hatred for these individuals deepens.[2]

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/02/nicolas-henin-v...

[2] Source: My family and friends, I'm a Muslim born in the holy city of Makkah, no one I know doesn't actively despise Daesh and their kind. Most of us identify more with western values.
As someone who lives near Phoenix Arizona, I can see that at least out here it seems to be a result of the fact that the city only really came into existence fairly recently. Compared to much older places like London, which obviously predates the automobile, New forms of transportation were taken into account when zoning regulations and other things were made. As an example, all of our major roads are spaced 1 mile apart and are at right angles to each other in a nice grid. I'm happy living in the suburbs just because it means I get more house for my money.
One big skill learning to code teaches that is overlooked I think: how to look stuff up online, research, and find answers.
I have been eating one meal a day for over a year and I notice significant benefits, mainly a better ability to focus.

I find that eating a low-carb diet keeps me satiated throughout the day during fasting.

What do you think about calorie restriction diet?