skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Maintainable, functional applications are constantly thrown out because programmers don't want to use things they consider "dirty". "Eww, I don't want to go anywhere near that. It's (procedural|PHP|got 'goto' statements|VBA|not the cool thing that everyone's talking about)."

Personally, I really, really don't like Visual Basic. I don't even claim to have anything resembling a rational reason for this attitude. It's deeply ingrained prejudice. And if I have a reasonable alternative to touching VB code, I'll take it gladly.

But I've had to touch a few VBA/Excel based "applications" over the last year or two, and I did it. It was no fun at all, but it was still better than rebuilding those things from scratch. In one case, we replaced an Excel sheet crawling with VBA by a PivotTable which does the same job, is more maintainable, the file is a lot smaller and it appears to run slightly faster.

There is also a part of me that loves picking up some old code written by somebody who has long since left the company, possibly to solve a problem I do not fully comprehend, and fix some obscure bug or add some minor feature. So far, I'll admit I was quite lucky in that those programs I had to touch were reasonably well written, or at least readable and structured in a sanity-preserving way. But still, it's fun, in a way, and the "dirtier", the funnier; at least as long I have a clearly defined task and get to walk away from it when I'm done.

Using the hot new toy that all the cool kinds are using is probably fun, too. But working on a 10-20 year old application that only a handful of people have ever touched, has an appeal that outweighs the distinct lack of sex appeal. Plus, you get to tell some interesting stories about the things you've seen. =)
I have a "Droid Maxx" which is the Verizon version of the Moto X, but with an extra large battery. I love it.

I have the latest generation Nexus 7. It's starting to be slow recently, but I still like it.

I also have an android smartwatch (Sony SW3) and I usually don't bother to wear it.
which makes it a race to the bottom again - reducing ubers profit
Can you show your work? Advanced LaTeX code typography is a very interesting topic, especially for writing programming textbooks.
You are ignoring the key part of what he said. Why else would there be racial covenants explicitly excluding non-caucasians?

Sure, fear of crime was one of the mechanisms of white flight, but American fear of crime has a big racial component to it. Historically, America has kept black people poor, confined them to poor neighborhoods, and then blamed blackness for the high crime rates that go with poverty and desperation.

This game continues today. Donald Trump recently tweeted something with totally made up statistics blaming black people for murders of whites:

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/11/that-racist-trump-tweet-abou...

It wasn't just wrong and it wasn't just racist. It was literally neo-nazi propaganda.
It's cute how he compares his "for loop parser" that handles C for-loops with Clang's, that handles C++ stuff including range loops - to show how his code is simpler :) Silly silly Clang developers for making their code too complex!
Popcorn Time Community Edition
It's a neat extension to the concept of using water towers or higher-altitude reservoirs for similar effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
I wonder if I've been lucky, or if different states or counties have different types of juries, police and justice systems, or both.
The chief DA is elected in Texas. The police chief isn't elected but works for the Mayor/City Council. Many judges are elected and others are appointees. Differences in local politics and structure exist, but IMO it is fair to say that those positions are political.

>>and must appeal to the masses.

As to GP's assertion that those people must appeal to "the masses", I think that one must be very careful as to how they define "the masses"; to me "masses" is not the correct word since IMO there is usually a much smaller faction of the local population(s) of people that vote, and/or are active in local politics.
Automated Code Repair
Spotify, where's my star?
I tried this for over two years at a job, which inevitably resulted in "well, John has 25 years of experience, and you have 5".
Oh, definitely. And so much of what they hear doesn't fit with the actual history, so it's easy to ignore their first encounters with the facts as weird aberrations. I was shocked when I finally learned this stuff.
I was the foreman in a murder trial, and the experience, for me, was also inspiring and uplifting. There was only one bump in the road for us. Early on, people starting bringing up a hesitation of rendering a guilty verdict, for fear that the man would be put to death, and they didn't know if they could do that. I don't know about other districts, but we weren't voting on the sentence. The judge would do that later. It was an easy argument to point out that this wasn't under our purview, and people dropped that concern quickly.

We were done in 2 hours. It was a drug robbery; someone got shot and died. "Felony murder" makes it really clear: everyone involved is guilty. The statute made things very easy.

The thing that haunts me about my case is that, out of 3 people (the shooter and his 2 accomplices, who were to be tried together in a separate case), our guy produced the gun for the police. If anything, the case made me wonder why there isn't tribal knowledge (unfortunate phrase wording, in this case) among inner-city, young, black men that YOU DO NOT DO THIS? It was open-and-shut, despite all the nonsense about a coerced confession and its subsequent retraction.
I paraphrased one of his statements under the "Split Ends" heading: Advertisers take a small or imagined problem and magnify them to the point of irrational paranoia.

Well said. And that is what is happening today in many forms. I'm under the impression that hiring managers (kids in their 30's) are totally irrational about skillsets because others don't know exactly what they think they should. There is paranoia about making a wrong hire to such a degree that they will most likely make the wrong hire!

What you stare at, you steer for - Bob Goodnough
Remember, you can only say nice things on HN. Blind agreement is ok, blind disagreement isn't.
I'd love to see some kind of universal "Hailing" API. Something that would allow a single app to coordinate rides wherever you go.

I travel as well, and really wish I didn't need to have an entire folder of transportation apps on my phone.

But alas, I have a feeling that many services would not go along with this because of direct competition in the same market area. And some probably just aren't sophisticated enough to publish an API, much less adopt a centralized / standardized interface.

But I can dream.
Neither does Python. For example, % operator and .format().
You are responsible for the taxes, but an estimate of those taxes will be withheld from your paycheck. However your employer doesn't know all the details of your tax situation, so the amount withheld is not exactly correct. Each year by April 15 you file a "tax return" which calculates how much you actually owe, and you'll either get a refund or owe. (The taxes withheld from paychecks are set up so that most people get refunds.)
Here's the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1YP8QP9gLA
"make babies outside of your own ethnic group."

No, you should not: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080207140855.ht...

For example, for women born between 1800 and 1824, those with a mate related at the level of a third cousin had an average of 4.04 children and 9.17 grandchildren, while those related to their mates as eighth cousins or more distantly had 3.34 children and 7.31 grandchildren. For women born in the period 1925-1949 with mates related at the degree of third cousins, the average number of children and grandchildren were 3.27 and 6.64, compared to 2.45 and 4.86 for those with mates who were eighth cousins or more distantly related.

The autism rates in the Iceland are not that high, being 1.2% (Korea has twice as much autists as Iceland with their 2.6%): http://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/2013/07/05/autism-prevalenc...
Listen to the advice of thr Tor developers themselves.

They say Tor should be but one tool in your overall privacy/anonymity/security toolbox.

Relying on Tor alone is probably a bad idea.
You may want to look at Redlining which for example controlled who got mortgages or not based on race.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

> In the United States, redlining is the practice of denying services, either directly or through selectively raising prices, to residents of certain areas based on the racial or ethnic makeups of those areas. While some of the most famous examples of redlining regard denying financial services such as banking or insurance,[2] other services such as health care [3] or even supermarkets,[4] can be denied to residents to carry out redlining.[5]
Likewise. I was expecting an analysis of all the DNA floating around in the tunnels.
"This is silly. Everything has a learning curve, but once you understand that everything exists inside an object you are good to go. The rest is just design patterns that are proven to make your life easier!"

Maybe it's just me but this is my main gripe with OO. I sometimes need to write involved data processing tasks and it's much simpler if I first think in graphs or through a relational model. The objects are light and either a way to encapsulate state (as in parser), a simple structure (as in a vector xyz) or a container.

Complex data lives in relationships between the data - as opposed to 'encapsulating into an object' - this keeps the system small, easy to understand and modify.

Sure, objects are a nice way to offer an interface to something but I've found the statement 'objects all the way down' usually means poor design.

This gripe is of course mainly pedagogical - students (like I was, once) are exposed to a subotimal abstraction of software composition when objects are introduced as the way to design and implement software.

Sure, they are nice in some places, I don't deny that.
Here's a business idea (maybe exists - I hope):

An app that functions much like Uber (handles payments, hailing, logistical things, etc.), has a recognized brand and federated logins (users can travel and use it in different cities, much like they can Uber), but which can be sold to municipalities, counties, and states, as a means for managing their taxi infrastructure. In other words, Uber, but for licensed cabs who manage and publish their own pricing structure through the system.

Now, I'm not suggesting that this would necessarily lead to immediate gains in customer satisfaction, but it avoids creating a monopoly on driver employment, which really bad in the long run, for many reasons. Some of the bad things that can and will happen, if Uber corners the global market (they haven't quite yet):

1. Replace all drivers with self-driving cars, starting with the busiest routes first

2. Raise both fare prices and the percent they charge to drivers (we've seen them experiment with the latter many times)

3. Take (even more) shortcuts to increase profits, at the expense of driver and rider experience, since there is nowhere else to look

So, while Uber makes most taxi companies today look bad (quality, and price in some cases), the situation is not sustainable when they become a monopoly.
A small shelter at each buss stop is fairly cheap to build. However, with a bus tracking app you don't need to spend much time waiting outside at most stops. Just where you transfer from bus A to bus B which makes this even cheaper.
> These graphs have to be embedded into a computation device to be real and changing in time.

No, no, no! These graphs are meant to be more fundamental than spacetime. They can change in the sense that there are algebraic rules for stepping them from one state to another, but this step isn't in our time. Our space and time should be generated by operating on these graphs (let's say "stepping" them, as long as we remember that it's not a time-step in our spacetime, but just an algebraic operation).

EDIT> I should say that this whole idea is a model. The question of whether a model is real or not independent of the system being modeled is a philosophical one that we can't really do justice to in an HN comment thread.
So what kind of answer are they expecting for that question? I genuinely can't tell. It seems obvious to me that people who answer "yes" should be excluded, yet I feel the opposite is true.
They try to shut down nuclear and coal at the same time, with an emphasis on nuclear. This actually means that coal mostly stays the same.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Energiem...
(Black and brown are coal)

The nuclear exit also isn't really an exit. The reactors are already over their lifetime they were first built. It's just that nobody replaces old reactors because building new ones is prohibitly expensive.
Could then-suburbs be a result of socio-econmic divide rather than racism? Poor people / minorities get left behind. Maybe a then-bonus was homogenous grouping (which, historically, people tend to prefer), but it seems that a driving factor would be to get out of crowded space. The covenants, yeah, racist people did and do exist, but was that the majority? In your linked Wikipedia, it says that the desegregation of schools happened much earlier than the White Flight, and that many whites stayed and, sometimes violently and often politically, tried to prevent minorities from moving in to their areas. Could it be the more racist of the whites stayed in the cities (covenants aside)? Without more information, I don't see this yet as suburbs == racism bolstered by the availability of the car.
Edit: apparently I replied to the wrong comment. And mobile makes it hard to rectify.
How content marketing drove one hospital’s web traffic from 8,000 to 4M
I want to be fare to Google but their response was not satisfying to me. There should be no leakage of students' data that will persist and have an effect on students' digital (and physical) lives later in life. I side with the EFF on this issue.

In the comments, a parent advises their kids to only use their Chromebooks for class activities and never for personal email and web browsing. Great advice, and should work fine for children with privacy respecting smartphones.
> I really don't understand the mentality that eating and/or cooking is a "waste of time". Not picking on you specifically it is a common idea and part of the idea behind products like Soylent. I prefer to enjoy the moments of preparing my food and eating it.

I think it's best summed up as "people enjoy different things."

An example for you: I'm a cyclist. I love to assemble and work on my bikes, because I derive enjoyment from the process of working on the things I will use. This is incredibly similar conceptually to a cook who enjoys cooking their meals; it's not a "waste" of time for either of us, because in each case we derive satisfaction from the act of working on the thing we will eventually enjoy.

I also really enjoy eating (good) food. And so you might think that I would share the same interest in food preparation that I have in bicycle maintenance, but I absolutely do not. I cannot stand cooking, for reasons that I could not really articulate. It simply does not quite manage to tickle the right parts of my brain.

Left to my own devices I'd probably subsist mostly on "good enough" food that requires little or no preparation (such as nuts and fruit). I understand Soylent from this perspective, and the intermittent fasting / one meal a day thing makes a great deal of sense to me as well.
Converting an Obsolete Mechanical Keyboard to USB
Location: Upstate NY, EST
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No, my family has strong roots where I live.
Technologies: HTML/JS/CSS (and associated frameworks), Java, C#, F#, Oracle, SQL Server.
Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fluentprogrammer
Email: rwhitcomb@acm.org

My name is Rob, I've got an MS in CompSci and a decade of experience developing software, focusing on building web services and applications. I'm interested in pretty much an aspect of software development. I've been recently learning as much as I can about F#, and I really enjoy it! If you're interested in working with me, drop me an email, thanks. Have a great one.
SEEKING WORK

Location: Mumbai, India

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python/Django, Flask, PostgreSQL, Apache Spark, Deep Learning, NLP, ReactJS, AngularJS, MongoDB.

Blog: http://blog.apcelent.com

About: We are a bunch of hard-working tech founders putting together this web shop, to help build and scale awesome products. We in our previous avatars have built, payment processing gateways(acquired), ERPs, CRMs, hyperlocal apps, RESTful APIs for banking systems, and much more.
You should read more about us on our site - http://apcelent.com

Email: sales [at] apcelent [dot] com
In many mid-sized cities, cabs are basically on-call services only. They don't drive around looking for fares.
https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/29/phishing-and-malware.html
The Thin Community We Get from Marketing
Wow, that's awesome guys! Do you have more background info on this? Anyway one can get involved?
It's strange, nothing in the hosts file, any ping says it can't find the host http://techblog.netflix.com/, or even anyone of those check ip sites says the same. Asked some work colleagues here and in Ireland and it seems our company is blocking it, I guess through the firewall which unfortunately I can't disable.
Why Nobody Cares About Your Company's Story
So sorry for your loss. Thank you for sharing your experience.

I work as a developer at a large-ish (>20,000 employees) healthcare system. Our CIO carries around a thick 2-inch binder from his infant son's medical treatments back in the mid-90's (his son died at around a year of age). The binder is meticulously organized and includes sections for various departments, complementary organizations (long-term care hospital, specialists, etc.), etc. It was their only way of coordinating care at that time. That experience led to the push in our system for electronic records back in the early 2000's, and we're continuing to pursue standardization and interoperability to make records accessible across departmental and organizational boundaries.

To every healthcare organization—for/non-profit—that sees interop as a threat to your ability to sell licenses and fill beds, fuck you. Your customer's lives are much more important than your supposed competitive advantages—and, in the long term, the companies that share data will be the winners.
Exactly. While there are obviously some decent drivers, as a group, they are a slimy bunch both in the car as well as outside the car.. Committing violent assaults during the Uber protests, throwing bricks, setting fires and just being altogether distasteful.

On several occasions in Avignon, I pre-paid for taxi service to the train station and during the first instance, the guy never showed, the second instance the car arrived 30 minutes late. Still attempting to get the refund.

I've used Uber all over the world and never once have I had issues like this. I have no sympathy for taxi drivers. They don't care about me when a freelance client wants to underpay me, nor do I expect them to. I'm a big boy. If some business condition arises that affects my livelihood, I don't go set fire to the Prefecture, I adapt.

Driving a car for money is still a thing. Supply and demand exists. Thus the market can solve this. The taxi crowd wants to distort the market to protect their fiefdom. While that helps the special interest, it harms the overall public.
I don't quite get why it matters if it's for profit or not. If its about the uber-driver split then we're talking about lowering the 20% fee, not a huge deal in the scheme of things. Presumably the fee will not be that far from that 20% cut.

The more substantial part of the grievances that taxi and limo drivers usually have with uber is about prices and the number of participants in the market. That is a negative sum game. Drivers' gains come at the expense of consumers and (often) other drivers.
> This year, Bill Gate has been all over the internet, "saving the world". But most of the money he gives away is invested by his "charity". And it goes into companies making military equipments, mining, extracting oil, etc. causing direct destruction of the causes they are pretending to protect.

Any source for that?
Thanks a lot madcaptenor. This totally makes sense now. And what happens if I start for example in January 15, this means I'm only responsible for 3 months until April 15 right?

Also what happens when I'm absent for example for say 2 months (March,April), can I do it later?
It's not a breach of privacy if you inform all users beforehand.
I'm shocked and also confused in reading this.

Why? Because the standards are there!

The ACR/NEMA standard dates back to 1985(!) and is nowadays known as DICOM. Here in Germany/Europe, the medical imaging systems as well as the archive systems (PACS) are designed to follow that standard. DICOM covers everything, from the exact flavour of lossless(!) image compression, to the metadata structure which covers fiels more than you ever need to describe the patient, up to the archiving of data.
There are even Free Software / Open Source clients which do a great job in visualizing those datasets (OsiriX is a well known example).

I thought that this is an international standard. How can any hospital afford to buy crap medical devices that don't care about such an important 30-year old standard?

Did I get something wrong about DICOM?
What do you else expect from a jew, other than blatant lying?
I'm sure, that she intentionally drove into the car "for fun" with the objective of killing a goy!

HH
Afero: A Universal Filesystem Library: December Blog Series
>It's interesting to note that these people were the techno-optimists of their time.

The thing is, people knew in this time period how inefficient cars were for moving people. Cars take up way more space than equivalent public transit and this was used in advertisements for streetcar companies (who were getting killed by congestion caused by cars).
Uber doesn't care. Drivers are resources they exploit. They're after riders, so they pander to the latter.
This Is How Interior Design Matters for Your Office Relocation
Depends on the scope. "apple[i]" is more readable than "apple[apple_index]".

Long names are for globals or longer lived scopes.

Java programmers are notorious for using long names in small local scopes. Don't miss the forest for the trees.
We know how to do this. Plenty of other industries have solved this problem. It takes organizational will to make it a priority.
For reference, a simple search for "Verizon" on ArsTechnica yields many similar articles.

On Verizon failing to meet its obligations to a city:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/06/verizon-ordered-to-f...

http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/06/22-years-after-veriz...

On Verizon letting their copper landline decay:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/why-ve...

http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/07/verizon-let-us-insta...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/verizon-union-see...

I really hate that they're the best service in my area, because I think they're scum. But then, I think all the major telcos are scum.
No, it will be done by the end of the year so your earnings in 2016 will result in an adjustment in April 2017 payable a little while later.

Tax years are calendar years.
Interactive showing how much U.S. earnings have grown by occupation
How I Mocked Comic Sans and Made Friends on Email
I disagree with the text being too large. On my 1080p monitor it looks just fine.

The two column text is annoying though; I have to scroll down and then up again.
Why you should learn Node.js
One Click Manufacturing will help to revise old fashion PLM-ERP integrations