skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No one is going to listen to this - but what the hell:

The solution is totally obvious. The code we write has a form defined by it's input->output mapping over all possible inputs.

Write a function and you immediately define this input output mapping. All you have to do at this point is search through all previously written functions to find the one that most resembles the one you are trying to write.

Trying to write a nested for loop to pull out pixel values from a jpeg? Start writing it, shit you get it wrong - but the input output mapping is close enough to the cluster of previously written solutions that the correct code pops onto the screen.

Structure aware code search across all open source code would make a lot of the pain just go away.
What really happened: a drug smuggler with ties to a major criminal organization had been investigated and sentenced several months ago and since July Facebook and WhatsApp folks had not complied (actually they simply ignored all requests) with some users data the justice demanded to keep prosecuting the guy and his associates. Allegedly, according to the new https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Civil_Rights_Framewo... if a company does exactly what they did, they can be temporarily blocked by a court decision as some sort of punishment for obstruction. Mark Zuckerberg complained saying it was just one judge who ordered this but AFAIK the block was requested by PA's office.

To be fair, some Brazilian judges are pretty stupid and have no idea how the internet works so it's quite possible the original users data request was super broad and that's why Facebook and WhatsApp just ignored it. On the other hand, it's only through very effective wires and digital data examination in recent years that the Brazilian justice is finally putting some big sharks into jail. That's why I have mixed feelings about all this (and I'm a Telegram user myself).

Source, in Portuguese: http://gizmodo.com.br/investigacao-trafico-droga-bloqueio-wh...
I think both of you have over simplified a much more complex eco system. It's not a winners vs losers. Yes, sure, eat shit die faster but that's not what an environmental vs bad gene pool comes to teach us.

If cancer was an absolute case of being born to the bad gene pool we'd have to tackle the problem in how do we advance our genes to be more error resistive.

Being that it's more of an environmental, the problem suddenly change to how do we as a whole bring up our environment several levels up to a more healthier region.

You can et the healthiest stuff there is, it still won't help you when the can lining is full of BPA. You can excursive every day and it won't help you if the weights contain materials you breathe which disrupt cellular functions. You can eat the most nutritious fish and vegetables and you're still going to be hit by the cancerous materials they've been brought up in.

Adopting the attitude you do, does nothing to better everybody. Only creates yet another us vs them partition in an already well divided society.
In the ideal world, i would program purely at the level of a sugared lambda calculus, free of trivial things like runtime,memory use,network latencies,serialization,platform incompatibilities,dependency management,string encoding/decoding issues <so many others>. Basically everything that makes programming different from math.

However, programming may be lambda calculus at a theoretical level, but execution is a turing machine. All these little real world things that can be abstracted away in abstractions(!!), have to be unabstracted to meet a bunch of very real NAND gates somewhere, limited memory, resources etc.

Thats one reason it "sucks", but thats why its engineering and not math. Maybe one day computers will just be so powerful that we can afford to treat memory as infinite, runtime as infinitesimal, and build all the abstractions we want for free - then programming will be done :)

In this fun world, when i want to build something ill just draw a bunch of squiggly boxes and describe an alarmingly underspecified thingy i want done. Then the program will automatically figure out all possible inputs, quickly perform a "32 questions" kind of thing and resolve any ambiguity, then produce code. Managers will once again be confused why "adding this textbox is so hard", but this time they will be right - i will just tell lambda to go make a textbox.
If you think this makes Brazil "anti-technology" I am curious to know your opinion about South Korea, which despite making a huge fraction of the world's smartphones and televisions has prevented Google Maps from working fully for their country. Point being, there are lots of reasons for countries to block certain things, and the notion that technology is inevitable and unquestionable does not carry water in many places outside the Bay Area.
The Long Death of CGI.pm
> Even if my commute is 8:20-8:50 and yours is 9:15-9:45, we're probably both heading into the city centre from outside, so the same car probably can't serve us both).

If you are willing to share the ride, you can have the same car serve you and someone else who shares a similar route and is willing to travel 10 minutes early (or late - can be incentivize by a discount).

Self-driving cars can make car-pooling easier - it can be a hyperlocal public transport system. Pick up 4 people who are traveling from/to within a 2-mile radius with each other, and peak traffic will be 25% of what it is now (best case). It's even simpler considering that most people commute the same route everyday.
The un-reached goal (Kickstarter)
Excercise Routine for Babies with Down Syndrome
It scares to think that a single decision from a judge can suspend the most widely used communication service in Brazil like that. The whole nation was affected by a decision that concerns to a few people only.
Export Medium Followers With Follox – ChromeExtension
They don't. Even if you use Stripe you are still responsible for spotting fake transactions, and if you let too many through Stripe can actually ban you.
> Even if I believed in following all of these laws, I am now expected to know all of them?

Yes. Yes you are. You are expected to follow all laws of where you have a presence or face the consequences they'll impose on you for it, which is exactly what is happening here.
I just wanted MSN Messenger back. That was the only messaging app that worked well for me.
Not everyone is from US.
Years ago i had issues on mass and would have said the very same (without the open source part) about nvidia as they just worked better. Today most linux based operating systems already ship the open source ATI drivers which is good enough (sometimes even better) for most.
They all swap names to confuse the rest of the world. :-)
What a great way to get over it
I think the series of < 6 month stints at various jobs indicates he's comfortable changing direction early if he's not happy with the situation. But it does seem likely that press like this will provide access to funding that a skilled operator could turn into a mature product.
"Argentina is becoming the new Venezuela": formerly prosperous country adopts ridiculous economic policies (key industries nationalized and handed over as private fiefs to incompetent cronies, exchange rate controls, price caps), sees economy go down the toilet and inflation rocket out of control

"Venezuela clearly is becoming the new Cuba": Not content merely with wrecking the economy, leadership squashes all opposition and turns country into a straight-up dictatorship (of the proletariat!)

Fortunately both statements are hyperbolic, as both countries have just held reasonably fair elections where the electorates decided to kick the bums out, but there are still choppy waters ahead...
We are what normal people rely on to get the computer to do things that they find difficult.

Things are getting so complex for us that we find it difficult to service the requests.

Solution: We need someone to help us to solve the problems. Or more practical - we need intelligent tools which attempt to guess what we are really trying to do.

Far more intelligent autocomplete: "This looks like you are writting a postcode splitting regex, here is one that has been used by many programmers.". "Looks like you are adding a new business layer class - do you want to create an entity as well. Oh also it looks like this is going to part of the new view model you have been working on - do you want me to add a projection in for bl Class, mapping to the un populated properties on the vm?" etc.

We
And Mexico will become the new Brazil, completing the cycle.
Had the same request arrived to FB/WhatsApp from any low US judge, do you think they wouldnt have complied?
Free Programming Courses to start
About innovative tech recruitment structures in Poland
IMHO thats not true anymore. Given i use my GPU for casual mining, generating Hashes on mass and therelike and not gaming. You may can say Nvidia is worlds better in Gaming, but far behind in these specific points.
Amazon Is Capturing Bigger Slice of U.S. Online Holiday Spending
Well me and my friends use it for Secret Chats, so, you're wrong.
Great point.

For me it means there are separate implications:

1. What you can do to help your body day to day (and longer term about where you live, for example)
2. What society and policy makers can do to improve the environment as a whole
#KeepFits: save the feed-in tariff
Run a script during shutdown/termination of an aws instance
I need to execute a script during shutdown/termination of an AWS instance(debian). I added my script to the /etc/init.d/myscript and a symlink to /etc/rc0.d/K01myscript however I noticed that when I terminate the instance I don't see that my script is executed. Any idea?
Once could make the argument that having an MBA is actually a hinderance in tech...
Because they want to enforce their law against a american company.

There are a reason many countries have MLAT's
A talk by Chris Granger in Dec 2015 trying to answer "What does programming look like in 10 years?" was interesting.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8>

A recent iteration <https://youtu.be/VZQoAKJPbh8?t=46m56s> looks wiki-like.
One rule I really try to follow is "Always remember how stupid you are".
The quickest solution to your years of suffering would be getting an iPhone.
Direct link without two tracking redirects: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/17d22fb8-cea2-49...
What I want is a messenger which has all my friends in it.

Sadly at the moment that's only WhatsApp and Telegram to some extent.
If only there would be some protocol or standard that would allow me to communicate across different providers.

But unfortunately such a standard must be technologically impossible, otherwise it would be implemented and widespread already.
Thats simply wrong. See i dont game. I do casual cryptocoin maning, generating Hashes, cracking hashes, ... AMD is MUCH superior in all these cases.

People always assume only Gamer care about recent hardware.
I know. I am so fucking angry no one told me this. I am a creative person I become very depressed without creative control. I had no idea programming was going to be this way and now I am stuck in a life of boring drudgery, wasting my life doing the thinking of some incompetent higher up the food chain. But there is no way out - I have to feed myself and my family. FML
"When it is patently obvious that 'stimulating demand' by giving someone money can't possibly grow wealth"

But this is not the claim. The claim is somebody trying to buy something with money create demand. We all agree that money is different of real wealth.

Even in an alleged two persons barter economy I could buy from you with a promise of something in the future. If the promise is good enough you could even start producing more.

And this is not even the correct framework, because what we are talking are systemic problems in modern economies that don't map well to hypothetical two persons barter economies.
I've had a few people self-host their own instances, and I like that this is possible. As you say this is key-free, which with the benefit of hindsight was perhaps a mistake, but nowadays I'm happy enough with it.

Spammers would need to train their comments as ham for every domain - since if bayasian testing is done it is done on a per-site basis. I think that's probably the biggest reason why they've not bothered.
This article more than anything underscores my feeling that there are too many people in programming who should not be doing it in the first place. It's a skilled profession, but it's increasingly dominated by people who despise the craft aspect of it. This results in both, suckage and bloat on the one end, and unrealistic expectations on the other.

> Hiring developers is an extremely difficult task. Learning to program is ridiculously difficult as well.

If programming was a solved thing, that would mean problem solving itself was a solved thing. It has by nature to be difficult. The question is more whether we manage to avoid additional difficulty on top of that. He's talking about the cost of bugs, but I posit the cost of burdensome frameworks and artificial bureaucracies in software development processes is by far bigger and harder to come to terms with, both of which exist in part to manage this inherent difficulty (often achieving the opposite).

> Lots of rework happens because of miscommunications with the user. Other times, the user doesn’t fully understand their problem

This is not unique to software development by any means. Every organization that deals with end users has to negotiate this interface.

> anywhere from 50 to 90% of the cost of building software goes towards maintaining it after the first release

Whether that figure is real depends largely on the type of software you're writing. If this fits what you're doing, the assumption that at some point the program is supposed to be "done" and every bit of time spent evolving it further must be a sign of inefficiency is simply unproductive. That kind of program is more usefully viewed as an evolving organism, and the sooner management recognizes the nature of this the better it will be handled by the organization.

> Our tools don’t make a good separation of essential and accidental complexity[2]––we are forced to crystalize the essential parts of our programs in a programming language and make them coexist with irrelevant, usually platform-specific code (accidental complexity).

This too depends on the nature of your chosen ecosystem. On the whole, interop has steadily improved throughout the history of computing. We have meaningful universal data formats now, and many options for moving code between platforms. Where interop troubles exist, they mostly exist on purpose (like the iOS example you made). You can absolutely solve most of this problem by throwing computing power at it and choosing an interpreted or cross-compiled environment if you want to avoid writing glue code.
"So how does one interpret this? It sounds like she doesn't really have a good idea as to what makes a great employee, and falls back to magic catch phrases [...]"

How is that your interpretation? She's making a perfectly valid, and fairly common, point: as long as you're smart and talented, your specific background isn't so relevant because we can teach you the specific technologies you need.

I think most developers will agree to this to some extent.
How so? The web is already standardized on REST as the 'universal' API.

Publicly accessible microservices are becoming more and more common over time and some of them are being used to create integrations.

Have you heard of Zapier?
https://zapier.com/how-it-works/

Slack bots also interact with other services:
https://slack.com/apps/category/At0EFT67V3-new-noteworthy

There's also the Huggin project:
https://github.com/cantino/huginn
In addition to the substantive points raised by other commenters, the context is notable. The Geohot story was written by Ashley Vance, author of an unauthorized Elon Musk biography and with whom Musk and Tesla have had prior disagreements. That may influence the degree to which a rebuttal may be felt necessary, and the tone chosen for the rebuttal.
Curated list of articles that complain about Go's imperfection
Here's a comic that makes light of the situation:

http://www.sandraandwoo.com/comics/2014-11-24-0636-hodge-the...

From:

http://www.sandraandwoo.com/2014/11/24/0636-hodge-theater/
You really only have to set foot in the US once every six months. My wife (now a US citizen) and I would have to make trips to the US every six months to keep her green card alive.
Do you have something substantive to add to the discussion, instead of simply offering a baseless semi-insult?

You might even be right, but just writing it without any supporting evidence isn't adding much to this discussion.
I think you are mixing up the countries in your example.
Loved the Louis C.K video! Are any of his shows based somewhat around this topic or is it only on this talk show that he talks about this?
> How much control do we really have over our feelings, our attitudes and our emotions?

How much do people try? Most people don't even try. At all.
At the user experience level, you're certainly correct.

However, as a sibling comment notes, Linux has also preserved binary compatibility (at the kernel level) for a similar amount of time (of course as long as neither of them break compatibility then Windows will have the numerical edge as it's slightly older).

So the question becomes, why is compatibility so apparently good on Windows and so apparently bad on Linux? I feel it's to do with a culture of dynamic linking and compiling your own software. A statically linked X11 application from 15 years ago will, as far as I can tell, run fine on Linux - it's just that such things are rare. You're far more likely to come across either a dynamically linked binary, or a source tree. This seems to be reflected in source code compatibility, which is better in Linux.
Yes it is down to the environment but right now we don't know what these environmental exposures are. I've always considered "chance" and "luck" in science to simply be a placeholder for the unknown.
> While there are many claims that Linux does not need a firewall, I do not agree.

Aren't the claims more like "you shouldn't run the firewall on the same machine that you want to be firewalled"?

I know that programs like Windows Firewall or Little Snitch (OSX) are good enough for most stuff, but when they're not good enough you're going to regret not having a seperate firewall.
At least Telegram has an API and a documented protocol... It could have been a lot better, but WhatsApp is a reminder that it could have a lot worse too.
You can argue that everything can be reduced to human interaction, but mathematics is certainly not about human interaction in any meaningful sense
It solves a fundamentally different problem, AFAIK - it emits CUDA kernels which are then just handed to the driver's interface for copying and running CUDA kernels on the GPU, so if your GPU doesn't support it, they'd need to change the LLVM backend to emit something other than a CUDA kernel (OpenCL, I suppose?).
This has to be a joke. Multi-device sync? Most people don't know what that is.

They just want a pretty GUI, their friends to be on it, and an easy way to send videos/photos/voicemails/whatever.

Granted, I've never wanted to send videos and sending photos works well on Signal right now. But until recently the GUI wasn't very polished.
The Genesis, the First Book of the Bible
Mechanics of Good Pairing
I don't know that more education is necessarily a bad thing. For a startup it's the opportunity cost of someone who has spent several years in an MBA program that makes that candidate unattractive.
You hit the nail right on its head :)
There are MBA programs that claim to be entrepreneurial-focused. Do you think they could be worthwhile?
Can you suggest some books? I would be interested to read them.
Of course they know what that is - and actively use it - just think of Facebook messenger.
Aren't these the same guys - along with few others - who gave a triple-A to Lehman before collapsing?! Why are they still on business?
If it's an illusion why is it set up like an illusion at all? If you don't have free will, it's not like you'd be sad or would do something about it. You have no free will. You can't even think negative philosophical questions about it, as a consequence. We could just as well have been born as an awareness trapped inside a meat suit intimately aware that we are just observing what is happening in and around that meat suit. The meat suit would grow up, get in fights, backpack across Asia, get married, get cancer, die. To the outside world, it would be indistinguishable to a person with actual free will.
It is essentially a communications problem. Brian Conrad summed it up:

For every subject I have ever understood in mathematics, there are instructive basic examples and concise arguments to illustrate what is the point to generally educated mathematicians. There is no reason that IUT should be any different, especially for the audience that was present at Oxford. Let me illustrate this with a short story. During one of the tea breaks I was chatting with a postdoc who works in analysis, and I mentioned sheaf theory as an example of a notion which may initially look like pointless abstract nonsense but actually allows for very efficient consideration of useful ideas which are rather cumbersome (or impossible) to contemplate in more concrete terms. Since that postdoc knew nothing about what can be done with sheaf theory, I told him about the use of sheaf cohomology to systematize and analyze the deRham theorem and topological obstructions to construction problems in complex analysis; within 20 minutes he understood the point and wanted to learn more. Nobody expects to grasp the main points of IUT within 20 minutes, but if someone says they understand a theory and does not provide instructive visibly relevant examples and concise arguments that clearly illustrate what is the point then they are not trying hard enough. Many are willing to work hard to understand what must be very deep and powerful ideas, but they need a clearer sense of the landscape before beginning their journey.

http://mathbabe.org/2015/12/15/notes-on-the-oxford-iut-works...
Good idea but I expect that the hard part is getting the UI right, because instead of just writing the function you need, you need to:

1. specify with enough precision your requirements
2. search through all code for matches
3. vet those matches
4. incorporate it into your code-base

and in the end you don't want a bunch of spaghetti - you want a consistent and digestible architecture.

But I do think this type of coding will become mainstream within a few years. As you say, it's obvious.
That's slightly better but still cumbersome to set up and with the primary device as a SPOF. What does the recovery procedure look like if you lose the master?
It's very interesting that we perceive this (public) shutdown as "dictator-like" behaviour while the US uses gag orders, laws and secret courts to force (tech) companies into complying. If you don't want to, you have to shut down your company (see Lavabit). Yet Brasilia is "anti-technology" (sic) because they're not abusing their power in secret.
> No matter how hard you try, you might still lose.

This is true and inspires tremendous fear. It prevents many would-be successes. I suspect far more than enough to offset the would-be failures. We could recapture this lost value with a universal basic income. We're just too busy chasing down all the "lazy" people while simultaneously declaring their uselessness. It would be funny if it weren't so sad. Why are they useless anyway?
The only screenshot that is visible on the site is from the demo of Metronic Theme - HTML5 theme for sale. My gut feeling is that this is just test for demand and there is no real product behind.

Edit: I was wrong - there is a product. But it looks so fluffy at first glance.
How exactly does adding more to the mess fix the fact that it is, um, a mess?