skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I realised that the only thing that motivates me in software engineering is learning new things and trying new fancy toys, not building something working and useful

I used to feel this way as well, but at some point things changed for me and I began to care deeply about the impact of a technology far more than what components it was assembled with. The obsessive, myopic phase is good for awhile because it gives you the motivation to build useful skills when doing so is hard work, though it does become a burden eventually for the reasons you list.

Others have recommended speaking with a therapist or counsellor, and I agree with that advice; you may be surprised at how deeply-held attitudes or patterns of thought can hold you back.

Finally, I can tell you what changed my goals, though this is obviously anecdotal and not treatment advice. I joined a big tech company, which gave me the ability to work on projects with a ton of reach. I didn't realize how tired I was of working on little-used web apps and experimental stuff that never saw the light of day until experiencing the contrast.
At the end of the day, it's very clear this is a story from a young woman as relayed to the author. NYT isn't making any kind of claim otherwise. Additionally, the snopes article cites the State Department giving warnings about the drug in Colombia, Thailand - snopes only doubts it's prevalence in the US.
Facile.
This is really well written and researched. I can't imagine reading so many century old letters and papers.

The most interesting part of this was getting a glimpse of a totally different society. Little details, like all these notable people that knew each other. And how many of them published in widely different fields. Or their totally different style of speech. Or how Babbage had 8 children, and all but 3 died.
In this context, it's a runtime check inserted by the compiler to be sure that an object retrieved via a generic interface matches the more specific type the caller expects.
Right, for direct guarantors it makes sense. But there's also occasionally news from Japan of "Japan Rail [..] charg[ing] families of suicide victims more than US $2 million" e.g. covered in this reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1khj2n/til_i...

So I can definitely see how this makes perfect sense when it comes to doing "damage" to apartments (even if only due to reputation / superstition) if there are direct guarantors, but as the news about JR show there must be something deeper going on here.
Wired reported on it in 2011. Seems like a real thing. http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/04/start/mind-c...
If your functions take any parameters, Nim will use the parameter types to distinguish between them, just like C++ does when you overload functions.

OTOH, if your hypothetical is that programmer X writes `to_me()` while a different programmer Y writes `tome()`, and the two functions just happen to be identical in all parameter types... well, that can already happen anyway where two programmers each independently write a function with the same name.

Nim has a simple, clear specification of how identifiers will be compared: http://nim-lang.org/docs/strutils.html#normalize,string

There's no secret magic happening.
I wish this blog post contained a visually appealing time-lapse video, as an example.
We think it is.
You misunderstood me. I was not criticising the submitter, kudos for the change. I was criticising the clickbaity title of the article.
Can someone elaborate on what methods JIT uses to boost perfomance as compared with AOT compilation? Do modern JIT compilers use statistics about what code actually got called to optimize call dispatch? Where can I find more info about this topic?
great explanation, thank you
From a layman's point of view I am struggling to understand how come we have not pinpointed the cause yet - there are so many various groups of children all over the world to draw correlations from. Obviously I am wrong, what I am failing to see?
Exactly. thanks
You didn't do any load testing before releasing this on HN?
Also, the blog post buries the lede somewhat. I found that this was the most important bit:

Update: Turns out the “unexpectedly positive” was a reaction to day 3,
which covered pre-IUT material. Today, when things turned to the IUT stuff,
it did not go well at all. See the link in the comments from lieven le bruyn
to a report from Felipe Voloch. Unfortunately it now looks quite possible
that the end result of this workshop will be a consensus that the IUT part
of this story is just hopelessly impenetrable.

So while there was an early sense of optimism that the gathered mathematicians would be able to find some way through the papers at the beginning of the week, it seems that optimism has soured as the week progressed.
The part of this (really excellent) writeup that caught my attention was this:

someone writing a bootloader or firmware can stick to using Swift structs and have a simple guarantee of no dynamic overhead or runtime dependence

There seems to be a pretty strong implication here that Swift could be used to write firmware/bootloaders, and other low level constructs - including operating systems. Has anyone worked with Swift yet on that type of project?
Lockheed's New Laser Super Turret Could Change Air Combat Forever
This is why you should use twister instead ;-)
I know you can't share your entire life context in a short question, but upon reading this I really wondered if the employers that fired you would have described novelty-addiction as your problem. In many cases, "novelty" is just another word for "avoidance".

Is it possible you are just abandoning ship on any project as soon as it gets hard? The first few stages of any tech - googling, researching, following tutorials - is pretty easy. Shorter projects are easier than longer projects.

When you read textbooks, do you actually do the exercises, or do you just skim? There's an entire second part of learning that involves thrashing and struggling against your own limitations as soon as the tutorials run out, and that's where the real learning is. The trick to that is to accept that it's supposed to be hard and you're supposed to feel helpless and dumb when it happens. The successful ones are the ones that keep trying anyway in spite of their own feelings of stupidity.

Anyway, ignore this comment if it doesn't apply, but your question can be read in a variety of different ways, and this one interpretation is just if you haven't toughened up and learned some tenacity.
>Stephen Wolfram does add a few self-congratulatory remarks.

This is the man to a T. I think he would have done well in Victorian England. He is a clinical narcissist, and is incapable of mentioning any topic, subject, or fact without inserting a remark about his achievements.

It gets comical once you get to know him. I'd start pointing things out to him if I ever spoke to him.

"Stephen, this steak is delicious. Didn't you invent the software that allowed the design of the temperature sensors on modern grills?"
You can not get anonymous phones in all countries. In many places, sale or activation are bound to your personal details.

Besides, a state-backed attacker will still be able to figure out at least the region where you bought / used the phone for Twitter activation.
I am not trying to be condescending, I am just trying to explain things that perhaps should be obvious. You said you have to trust the scientists, I don't think it's true, and I explained why.

But then you say:

"I try to debate it and leave a few, friendly pointers here"

So perhaps what I just said is not obvious to you! Instead of understanding what the actual scientists' model of AGW is, you're looking for ridiculous reasons why it's not true. Exactly what you shouldn't be doing if you agree with what I wrote above. And I left you a "friendly pointer" of what you should be reading.

You should also be charitable to other people. Yes, we are all aware of the irony of these climate conferences. But what do you want to do? James Hansen is a good example (his short talk from the conference is probably the best one, by the way). He decided to leave the politics in mid-90s, and focus back to science, only to recently return, because he's just p* off by inaction. So yeah, people tried not to use planes, but to what effect?
It's not much of a report. No references, no names and dates, packed full of appeals to authority, and appallingly vague. It sounds like something someone knocked together in 30 minutes after reading some urban legends, TBH.

I'd have thought that if this were a real thing, it'd be way better known - the psychiatric industry would be committing minor flesh wound to get their hands on it, for example. A drug that can suppress free will while leaving the patient conscious and responsive could revolutionise therapy.
I enjoy feeling dumb. This means I can learn something new again! :)
Admittedly the more interesting part will be the software flying the drone. It seems we are going to need a lot of these [1] and targeted people will need to wear safety goggles.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/aAh4jwq.gifv
First Look at Android Emulator 2.0, the biggest and the best update yet in years
YepJet: Stripe for airlines
Looks interesting. Impact matters, of course. The problem is that there are not many impactful tech companies headquartered in Switzerland, where I live (except maybe in finance, but they are just big, not doing new things), and not many big companies accept remote developers, but it's worth looking for opportunities.
I always find morning time more productive than late night, but you get the time pressure of having to finish soon (probably for work) compared to working at night where your sleep time is the only thing holding you back.
Read about polymorphic inline caches which Java and Javascript JITs do.
‘It’s designed to scale from “hello, world” to an entire operating system.’

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Swift/...
>the possibility of extremely cheap drones that approach the victim's face very quickly and pierce a bolt into their brain through one of their eyes.

That's super impractical for many reasons. Drones don't move fast enough, nor can they change their velocity quickly enough to do that. People will almost certainly react if they see the drone coming for them, and cover their face, or swat it down, etc.

But even if it did work, it's not a serious threat. For some reason people spend a ton of time thinking about all the ways new technologies could be abused by terrorists. For some reason they never consider that tons of existing technologies can be abused too.

Many people have come up with really effective terrorist ideas that would kill lots of people, or do lots of damage. The reason the world is still here is because terrorists are really rare, and really incompetent.

> Short range slingshot mechanisms are several orders of magnitude cheaper to build than firearms.

Not necessarily. It's actually not that difficult to make a firearm from simple tools and parts from a hardware store. And it will be way more deadly and accurate than a sling. Not to mention simple pipe bombs and stuff.
In similar situation like you.

What helped me is outsourcing the administrative stuff (book-keeping, taxes) to an accountant and forcing myself to meet with him once per month physically, best is to make an appointment a month ahead. Insisting on the physical meeting is a trick to force myself at least once in a month to prepare for the meeting (getting all the documents together, travel receipts, invoices, letters). It costs a lot of money but it is worth it for me.

The next trick has a similar pattern: find somebody to spend talking time on a regular basis, at least once per week. Not necessarily a therapist, but a friend, partner, colleague with whom share some common interests. Then force to keep those talking meetings. This helps, because you can talk about your anxiety, talk about what new things you have found, etc. I do it with a friend on a weekly basis and with a psycho-analyst at least once per week - if I don't travel.

The third trick I discovered only lately when being under huge pressure, in a situation in which I didn't know a way out: I started writing as a form of talking to myself. It worked best by "switching off the screen", i.e. typing without seeing what you type (either by literally switching off the screen, or by putting the font to same color as background - I made color scheme mode Vim), it gives you an additional motivation to re-read it later. When I first discovered this, it felt later like magic. I use this trick only when under big pressure - didn't make it to a habit, yet.

Maybe this advice helps.

I wish you to find a way to cope with your life and get to a situation where you can have a decent and more stable life, but still learn new stuff. Good luck.
In practice neither GCC nor Clang seem to be willing to believe that the vtable is immutable. See https://goo.gl/y0cx1r, for example, which shows only the first of two calls being devirtualized. The call to fprintf within B::work is sufficient to cause to both compilers to reload the vtable pointer, preventing devirtualization of the second call.

Interestingly enough, when a use of placement new is visible to the compiler it can prevent the conservative behavior mentioned above. In https://goo.gl/Y8rwYG the vtable store that placement new conceptually generates allows Clang to devirtualize the second virtual call. GCC doesn't appear to catch this case.
Javascrtipt Deep Copy
> The problem is if the aptitudes don't get used they agitate. Deeply.

I really wish your response was higher up just for this line. It really hit home for me in helping me understand more about myself. Thanks for the response.
Avast Internet Security 2016 License File Till 2050 Free
> Chairs with arms

I don't remember where, but I've heard that chair with arms are not optimal since they constantly apply pressure to the interior of your forearm.
The Twitter could charge bitcoins for those who want to remain anonymous. It would prevent creating accounts by the hundred, or Twitter could find other ideas if it's just about checking spam.
Please add 2012 to title
We have identified various causes and we know that wearing glasses actually makes shortsightedness worse, but what can you do? It's like saying "I'm struggling to understand why people die in car accidents, when we all know what causes crashes."
Multiple screens and monitors make it bearable.
Sure, but isn't that more of an argument that the media isn't being diligent?
I really like this walkthrough. GPG/PGP is pretty complex and getting all the pieces correct is very difficult. In fact, one major reason that I don't use encryption more is that I'm scared that I'll forget a passphrase, or not transfer my keys to a new computer, or lose my "master" key.

However, I wonder if something like Keybase.io might be better. Using Keybase I can do everything outlined in this walkthrough but in a much more user friendly way. I can even instruct other users on how to send me encrypted files without too much trouble. Does Keybase replace the need for shuffling keys around and worrying about losing my keys?
That's awesome that Matlab is such a good expensive product. Personally I'm an open source guy all the way so I support R and Python (and Julia, I suppose) at every opportunity. Yeah, maybe there are some rough edges, but my thinking is that since they're good enough at this point, I can work around those rough edges...and I anticipate that hundreds of thousands of users will eventually drive them to being as good or better than any commercial offering. Take SAS, for instance, I don't like it--largely due to the fact that it's so expensive most companies don't upgrade until they absolutely have to. So you'll run into lots of employers running a very old version of SAS (like 9.2), without any of the extensions which help you solve problems and be more productive. So when I started my new data science-ish job at my current employer and had the option of which tools to use for machine learning and modeling I chose R and Python. But to each their own. I just dislike contributing to the market share of software I could never afford to run on my personal computer.
I think it's mostly a "why are you telling us? The author of the article might not ever even visit HN. Email them." reaction.
Check this https://cloudcraft.co/
That's actually a pretty awesome idea against impulsive browsing. The most frequent kind of browsing.
Looks like it's an OAuth2 client application that you grant permission to top out the reduced free storage with an equal amount of bonus storage.
Thanks for digging in! I saw the same thing with clang last year, in the context of Emscripten, where we were hoping to eliminate the redundant vtable loads as a JS code size optimization.
You finished the level. Time to move on to the next.

You probably have a good idea how great software development should be done. But can you get 10 programmers to actually work like that and stay profitable, while they still don't resent you too much?
How the immune system can inspire meaningful anonymous political participation
Kudos man!
You might want to file a provisional patent as you think about the commercial viability of the patent.

http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2013/10/19/good-bad-ugly-truth-abo...

"Another thing inventors can do to reduce costs is to first start by filing a provisional patent application. A provisional patent application needs to disclose the invention completely as would a nonprovisional patent application, but the exact formalities are greatly reduced making it easier to prepare, meaning it costs less. We can attach documents to support the originally drafted provisional patent application, and we focus on getting as much as possible into the document. In my experience most inventors who pursue the provisional do so because they have made an interesting advance and want to protect what they can now while they continue to refine and work on the invention. Done in that way a provisional patent application makes all the sense in the world because it gives you protection with respect to what you have presently and lets you continue to work to improve the invention over 12 months before you need to file a nonprovisional patent application.

The cost for attorney time alone for a provisional patent application is typically at least $2,000. The filing fee is $130 for a small entity and drawings typically cost $100 to $125 per page, so a high quality provisional patent application for a mechanical or electrical device can typically be prepared and filed for $2,500 to $3,000. As with nonprovisional patent applications, the technology involved and the complexity of the invention do greatly affect the quoted price for a provisional patent application. For example, for computer related inventions and software the cost to prepare and file a provisional patent application is typically $6,000 plus the filing fee and drawing costs. The increased cost for a high quality provisional patent application that deals with software is due to the reality that so much more information is required in these applications. You really need to describe the complete architecture of the system and drill down to the algorithms, routines and sub-routines. See A Guide to Patenting Software, Building Better Software Patents and Patenting Business Methods and Software in the U.S. Of course, these are just ballpark estimates."

http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2015/04/04/the-cost-of-obtaining-a...

Some people just prepare their own provisional patent, without the help of an attorney, but you might not get the protection you want if you do this.
JITs do know the call target. This is a quote from "A JVM does that?"[0]:

C++ avoids virtual calls – because they are slow
● Java embraces them – and makes them fast
● Well, mostly fast – JIT's do Class Hierarchy Analysis
● CHA turns most virtual calls into static calls
● JVM detects new classes loaded, adjusts CHA
– May need to re-JIT
● When CHA fails to make the call static, inline caches
● When IC's fail, virtual calls are back to being slow

----

There are several misconception about Java in the write-up. The real reason there won't be a bootloader is the need for the Java runtime and the need to GC. Unoptimized virtual calls won't affect any bootloader for that matter (and you can/should use static and/or private methods for the inner loops)

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL2D3qzHtqY
I used to use tiling managers, but then I found a terminal emulator (Terminator) with the feature of splitting screen and I just run this in maximized mode and everything else in floating mode.
How to reduce Social Media consumption
It seems the launch was a bit premature, there are tons of errors. I think this is a symptom of a single developer writing everything from scratch. I respect both Thomas and Patrick for their opinions, but I think HN falsely equates that to engineering expertise.
Most of Dallas isn't in the flood plain for the Trinity River, but the most expensive bits (Downtown, Uptown, some parts of the Park Cities) are. Those places are, somewhat, protected by the Trinity River levees...the same levees that the occasional person who doesn't understand how levees are supposed to work wants to build a toll road inside of.

Trinity Parkway: http://transportationblog.dallasnews.com/2014/12/10-things-t...
What would you like to do in the long run? There are some things that doing well in school would help a ton on. Other things, not so much.
Someone keeps track of which IMEIs go to which stores.

The stores keep track of which bar codes have which IMEI.

And of course the register keeps a log of when and what is sold.

I read this in a police report. The police went to the store and got video of the person buying the phone. I wouldn't be surprised if long term video storage was a requirement for selling prepaid phones.
Aha! Thanks for sharing.
This is obviously something you care about; probably more so than my dissent. I think that prescribing generalized explanations to human behavior (see Economics) is a dangerous gamble.

I also believe that the media has the onus to report things correctly, in full. As a national or international spectator, it may not be important whom commits these crimes. I was recently living in Seattle when a shooting happened at Seattle Pacific University. My girlfriend at the time was on campus when the shooting started and the media frenzy was actually beneficial for the community.
> Is that guy a wealthy warming enthusiast?

No, the point was, when the s* (like drought) hits the fan, the refugees will be the ones trying to get properties in Canada. Rich people with money savings can do that anytime; they're no better than other humans, also discount the future pretty aggressively.
Novice or not, the post shouldn't be foreign language to you. I mean, if you just start out it's ok if it is, but eventually you should learn about that stuff.

Now, if you only program with languages like Javascript or Python, then you can maybe ignore it, since those have just one method to do those things.

Otherwise, there's nothing that low level in 80% of the post. It's not like low level intricacies of IEEE floating point, or heavy internal compiler workings. Stuff like static or dynamic dispatch are things that all programmers can benefit of knowing, especially how it's handled in the language that they use.
The future seems to be very interesting on this. I'm very curious.
Compare the implementation of a simple numerical program in Haskell

https://github.com/jmoy/avb-econ-hs/blob/f6d65af480c99045573...

to that in Julia

https://github.com/jesusfv/Comparison-Programming-Languages-...

Despite the Haskell program using the elegant facilities provided by REPA, the fact that mutable part (the `writePolicy`) has to be written in a different style than the pure parts since it is a monadic action seems cumbersome to me.