skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If they are communicating through a heirarchy, you've got the same total communication volume over a smaller number of channels; either you don't get as much information integrated where it needs to be, or you do so on a slower best-case path; in addition, each non-leaf node in a heirarchy is a single-point-of-failure for all communication (and decision-making) involving the leaves underneath it.

Heirarchy is both more failure prone and has worse best-case communication time between nodes than network, which is why many nominal hierarchies end up routing around those limitations and acting like networks, where formal authority follows the hierarchy, but much practical communication and decision-making is done on a network model, because real humans are pragmatic and route around the failures that inevitably arise in a hierarchical organization. This ends up compromising the ability of the hierarchical command structure to impose uniformity.
Another explanation might be that he wants to get everyone else playing the set of lineups his algorithm is spitting out. In GPP (guaranteed prize pool) tournaments, there are usually very large fields and the prize structures are heavily weighted toward a tiny pool of top finishers. The key to winning these tournaments isn't necessarily picking the lineup with the most expected fantasy points, but rather having lineups that very few others have, because you are looking for an extreme result that is different from that of your competition. GPPs are won much more through application of game theory than they are through any analysis of the specific games or players.

If he gets a large percentage of the DFS player pool to play his algorithm's lineups and he goes a different direction, he'll crush the GPPs.
I do some hobby programming for fun, but I don't expect everyone I work with to do that. I do it for fun and wouldn't otherwise. When I interview developers, I ask them about their hobbies in general. Sure, I throw in some technical questions depending on the position (usually language/platform agnostic), but those aren't the focus or the best way to hire to me. I want to know if they have an interest/curiosity into how things work (problem solving/debugging skills), can communicate effectively (can work as a team) and are passionate about something in their life (tells me they can focus on something when needed).

I follow up with questions about how they solved some difficult problem in their life (could be programming or could be just learning how to change their oil). I ask them how they came up with a solution and what they learned about it. I want to see if they learned enough from it to be able to explain it to me or anyone else in the interview.

Doing that gives me an idea of how their communication skills are. I want to gauge their problem solving and debugging skills during the interview, because I think almost anyone can be taught to be a better programmer, but it's much harder to learn to be an exceptional troubleshooter/problem solver and that tends to be a majority of what software developers do.
A bank persuaded Twitter to delete my tweets
Users even blame us when the App store fails to download updates and leave 1-star reviews
As a key issue with DFS is state laws in which "gambling" is legally distinguished from "games of skill", yes, in context, it does.
> On strict aliasing, I'm against it without explicit opt-in over a delimited subset of source code. I understand that using & is going to harm the performance of my code; I think that's an acceptable tradeoff for more predictable behaviour.

I believe that you and others think that's an acceptable tradeoff. At the end of the day, though, most people want C compilers to produce the fastest code possible. Compiler authors are just responding to what users want. The example below is actually an excellent example of this.

> If it harms the performance of C++ vector iterators, for example, I don't care: strict aliasing rules are a worse cure than the disease of C++'s poorly thought out abstraction tools.

It's not just C++. Consider (from Chris Lattner's blog post):

float *array;
void zero_out() {
for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++)
array[i] = 0.0;
}

People saw compilers missing the optimization to compile this to a memset, and filed bugs against them. As a matter of fact, though, that is an illegal optimization to make unless the compiler is able to take advantage of strict aliasing. That's because, absent strict aliasing, array[0] could legally be a type-casted pointer back to "array" itself, even though almost nobody would actually write that code.

The reason why compilers implemented strict aliasing rules is that their users demanded that they fix "optimizer bugs" like the one above. And, honestly, I can't blame either the compiler developers or the users. Strict aliasing ends up being one of the things that's often important for performance. The problem, if anything, lies with the C language.
UK Police Are Using Hacking Tools, but Refuse to Say How
Hardware already does insane amounts of optimization. The modern superscalar out of order processor basically does it's own JIT from X86 into their own internal micro-ops. Reordering instructions on the go etc. That's another 2-10x speed difference on modern computers.
I just had to deal with someone like this for six months - he always interrupted people, always thought he knew everything, was a terrible coder but thought he was great. However, he stressed multiple times that he never regarded himself as better than everyone else. His actions said otherwise, and pissed off the team (especially me).

You might be an egomaniac, or you might not. It's impossible to tell from one comment, because you've only mentioned a subset of the behaviours, and egomaniacs don't always have the self-awareness to judge their own behaviour.

If you listen and engage with your peers about programming, and not just dismiss everyone else's opinion outright, then you're probably not an egomaniac.
And? Like all the usuals suspects like Microsoft and Apple.
For new code and for actively maintained old code you are perfectly correct. But there is a huge amount of C code we still rely on that isn't getting enough attention and I don't want that getting broken either.
I haven't but there are plenty of examples of governments solving hyper or high inflation by reissuing a currency and resolving the cause of inflation in the first place.
From scratch to a full ESP8266 toolstack updating over-the-air, in 5 statements
When China pegged it had completely unassailable reserves of USD. Pegging currency leaves you highly vulnerable to speculative traders and limits the extent to which you can pursue fiscal policy that promotes the prosperity of the populous.
I get no such message. And I am using uBlock Origin.
Improve your team's work when working with diverse culture
I think they assumed people would embrace the Metro UI... cos the windows metro interface was battle tested (windows phone, zune, media center) and most importantly, it was an award winning interface.

I also think they forgot or underestimated the most important factor which influences the feeling of ease or neural fluency - familiarity.

They've learned their lesson as instant Familiarity is a chief goal behind windows 10.
It also means anyone who has your phone can login as you, regardless of whether the phone has your password saved.

Honestly this is a step backwards. IMO focus should be on improving user experience for randomised passwords (paired with 2fa)
Hyatt is the latest hotel chain to spot malware on its systems
What clients/apps currently speak JMAP?
interest on 100K won't cover visiting your family, having children, or any safety net if you get sick, unfortunately. Also a conservative fund return is more like (a volatile) 4%, and subject to the whims of 'previous performance doesn't predict future performance' (e.g. even that 4% can't really be relied upon).
https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/commit/d995c87b51
“There are really only 25 songs people really want to hear.”

Yes, and they've been the same 25 songs for 40 years.[1]

Of course, there's this one [2], which had advertisers angrily canceling ads when it came out. Very seldom, and never on chain radio, will you hear that one.

[1] https://xkcd.com/988/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5IXlfJSEi4
> Clothes are an exception here

If I could buy all my clothes online I would. The problem is sizes are at best a rough guid - different brands and even different styles in the same brand, fit completely differently. I guess I could find one outfit that fits and then just buy that online when I need a replacement :)
Dude, we're looking at a deal where a city gave away MILLIONs of dollars worth of fiber cable away to a private company for $1.

The city of Provo spent roughly $39 MILLION on building out their local, municipal fiber. And then they gave the network away to Google.

> You'll see that they're all bog-standard.

There is nothing standard about giving away MILLIONS OF DOLLARS worth of fiber away for $1.

The only thing "standard" about this, is that Google, a for-profit company, accepted the deal. Obviously, because gaining a huge amount of infrastructure, debt-free for a single dollar is massively beneficial to a company with loads of capital, and allows Google to expand into the ISP space.

> Another thing. Remember the fact that iProvo was sold to another private company five years before Veracity and Provo decided to let Google Fiber manage, maintain, and upgrade iProvo. [6] In your opinion, how does this situation [7] compare to a city changing the specialist company to whom they contract out power plant operation and maintenance?

Simple. Broadweave actually paid more than $1 for the deal. Much less fishy. In fact, Broadweave (later Veracity) paid a total of $40 Million on the deal.

Still fishy of course: Broadweave's debt was owned by the city of Provo, which is how Provo got into the mess in 2013 where they are still paying for the fiber they gave away to Google for $1. As far as I can tell, the city is just incompetent and grossly underestimates the value of their home-built network.
Maybe we are all better served by faster compilers that create straightforward binaries (and less bugs overall both in the compiler and application code.) Optimization researchers could focus on source-to-source transformation tools with intelligent human-in-the-loop guidance. Or else they can work at the hardware/JIT level if they prefer.

Right now compiler writers are playing in a kind of local minimum (premature optimization as I said.) This may produce 3x-5x faster binary code today but also forces CPU manufacturers to retain backward compatibility causing them to also stay stuck in this local well. Eventually a new architecture is created (with 10x the registers etc.) and the cycle continues.
I can't help but be reminded of the "Neckbelt Recall" clip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiuOQHTsNg

The engineers will have to fight Murphy tooth and nail to make this safe.
Show HN: KeyReply – use your own canned responses on iOS and mac
Tl;Dr: sideways errors add up, lengthways errors cancel.
also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10783012
Reminds me of the guys who sell books on wining at blackjack. If your system is so good, why are you selling books?
I don't think it'll nessesarily work, if you take an adversial example for one network and plugs it into another.
This is the core use case of IPFS: https://ipfs.io/

Neocities has just collaborated with Protocol Labs to host their content "permanently" on IPFS.
I agree. This has always been my feeling about learning a second language as an adult. English is my first (only) language. I've been making a half-hearted effort to learn Spanish the past few months. Recently someone was trying to teach me a handful of rules and I kept trying to tell them 'I don't care, it doesn't matter if, at this stage, I use the wrong verb ending, or even if I say araña (spider) instead of naranja (orange), it won't matter so long as you know I'm trying to ask for an orange to eat or tell you there's a spider outside by the door, understanding has been achieved - that's what's important. We are all just trying to understand each other.

Maybe children have an advantage because they aren't able to talk properly when they are young due to physical growth limits, so we make a lot of effort to teach them.

It takes children 5 year to reach 95% - 100% language fluency, and will go on to learn many new words over the next 15 years, and some will go on to study their mother tongue, read, and learn more about their and, other languages, all their lives.

By 5 years of age, anyone (including unfamiliar listeners) should be able to understand the child’s speech in conversation 95-100% of the time.[1]

I'm willing to bet $100 dollars anyone in full language immersion will reach at least that stage of fluency in 5 years. And remember, children can be very talkative, so they're always making mistakes and learning.

I guess adult language learning is how it is because adults are generally too busy to make that sort of commitment. It then follows as self evident that children and adults learn languages differently. Adults solution space is constrained. We have to try to learn a language around busy adult lives.

Children's brains are also still developing, so there's going to be some physical differences also, it's not clear whether that should be an advantage or disadvantage. Maybe being able to map a second language to what you already know is an advantage, we already have a framework.

1. http://www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/library/2013Facts...
Also we're all waiting for the strict aliasing checker.
The last thing we need is a tax on children in societies with sub-replacement fertility. A world without growth is a terrible place. (Before you object: yes, economic growth isn't the same as population growth. But to get economic growth with a declining population, you need productivity to grow faster than the population declines, and we're already having trouble keeping productivity growth up.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/business/economy/imagining...
Hotelling's law
The existence of an arguably worse dictator someplace else with US support does not excuse China from providing support to a terrible dictator in Africa. That logic doesn't work in either direction. For example, if I think the US is doing something bad, I don't feel any better about it if I discover that China is doing the same thing but worse.
I'm not sure that's the best example. In that case, the knowledge that the 'array' global never has its address taken allows you to perform the optimization. You can also rewrite it by copying 'array' to a separate local that doesn't have its address taken, and ordinary SSA construction solves the problem.

I feel like a new systems language needs to come and make aliasing explicit in a way, so that it doesn't surprise programmers but still allows them to get the optimizations that they want. Tracking uniqueness like Rust is a good first step, but it doesn't work for unsafe code or anything with more subtle aliasing relationships.
For the engineer, they may be able to choose wisely between company A and B. But if company A has a 1% chance of getting rich and company B has a 5% chance, it's still only a 5% chance. So any skill in choosing a winner is diminished by the fact that winning is still unlikely.

VC's however, can place many bets and come out winning if they play enough.

Because this is all high variance, a large sample size favors those with skill. Small sample size favors luck.
"Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future" - lots of lessons and an inspiring read.
Startup Camp in Iran
Because programmers graduating today literally can't imagine a world full of non-HTTP protocols.
I don't envy you your job search if it's important to find an employer who'll let you sleep during work.
LLVM IR isn't architecture-neutral. It encodes type layout / alignment, as well as ABI details. You can construct an LLVM target that is itself compilable on multiple architectures (see Portable Native Client), but it requires a nonstandard ABI.
At work, we migrated a small codebase this year to VS2008. It was "painful". This week I put it through asan and found five buffer overflows or similar with about a half hour of work, but the thing still spits out a hundred warnings or so when you compile, and that's with default settings. This project is about 1% of the code, by line count, that my team is responsible for.

At home, I turn on -Wall -Wextra for starters, enable about a dozen more for good measure, with -Werror as the pièce de réisistance.
I am a PL researcher and I too believe you may not fully understand what's going on.

To keep your analogy, the idea that a PL needs syntax to be used is comparable to the idea that a vehicle needs acceleration to get moving. Different flavors of syntax correspond to different means of propulsion.

Perhaps we will find good way to get rid of context free grammars (the horses in your example) and replace them with automatic pruning of parse forests (the current Tesla car of compilers) or even something more fancy like semantic editors (a fusion engine in your example) but unless you change the laws of physics, you can't get a vehicle without an accelerating engine nor a PL without an input syntax.
I must be missing something here, but can't you simply not invoke undefined behavior in your program? That way, you don't have to worry about what your compiler will do when it encounters undefined behavior.
No doubt that I am most proud of (cannot say I invented it, more correct would be that I stumbled upon) the agile and Maker centric TimeBlock method http://timeblock.com

We started using the method Jan 5'th 2015 and now we have a SaaS app with paying earli bird users and more users of the method not using the app.

Two of the companies using the method (besides us), attribute their growth directly to TimeBlock.
A few points

http://www.nature.com/news/caution-urged-over-editing-dna-in...

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/new-dna-construct-can...

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.5787.pdf

You release not only a gene but a technology into the wild. This is something that can not be undone. You may easily underestimate the scale, rapidness and evolutionary pressure of a fast replicating species. Throw a few atomic bombs on Brazil. The effects are

a) temporary

b) geographically limited.

If something screws up with the CRISPR/Cas9 system, the effects are

a) not temporary

b) geographically unlimited.

Proceed with caution.
Merry Christmas from Tech Women
HTML 101 – Limited Time Free 2+ hour course
You're making a categorical error here. The entire discussion is not about storing programs but about entering them. If you want to use a database for storage then the UI you present to populate your database will become syntax.

The idea that you can have multiple syntaxes for the same language is not new (eg multilingual pascal or basic) heck even different semantic models are possible (eg LLVM) but any UI that enables a programmer to tell a computer what to do is ultimately syntax.
"String theory wars" -> Star Wars. While talking about string theory Woit exclaims: "It's a trap!".
Completely agree :) But even better to push C code straight down to the hardware and let it crunch on that! Let it allocate a few thousand registers, or spawn off an FPGA compiler to create a few new instructions. Crazy?
Veering a bit offtopic, but does anyone have any pointers to important recent work on parsing? There are alot of papers out there and I guess I don't know how to sift through them. I've heard the "parsing is solved" line before, but so much of my time is spent doing some type of parsing that even incremental improvements are extremely interesting.
Define "uninteresting."

Also, it kind of defeats the purpose of neural networks to do substantial feature engineering like that.
Can I access the benefits mentioned on Coursebirdie's homepage?
As OP said it's one thing to be financially rich, but there are other forms of wealth. The idea of working 10+ hours a day, 5 days a week (if I'm lucky), 50 weeks a year for the next 40 years just doesn't appeal to me. You are right you could earn more at Megatechcorp, but by freelancing I can work on stuff I find interesting and still live life on my terms.

Also getting into a company like Google isn't something that everyone can do, where as it's pretty easy to start freelancing (especially if you are European, hence don't need to worry about healthcare).
What prevents gene drive techniques from working on humans? The implications are disturbing, considering that humans have numerous ancestry-specific markers.
On the historic art of price gouging
Why do you think any other industry except manufacturing will be better off unless these are fixed?
Yes, you can access benefits when you sign up.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
I'm not in computer science or anything but... is there like a big ML vs. ML-skeptic divide in the field? Where could I read about it?
This might be of interest:
http://www.constructedintellect.com/learning-ai-resources-li...
Ribbon Farm: Complete 2015 Roundup
just in case people miss that:
this was written by Marc Andreessen
Would this allow Rust to be run on AWS Lambda?
You're are in a tiny, tiny minority.
Remember teaching PCs back in 1998 or 1999 and realizing that Microsoft hearts or soltaire was an excellent way to teach retired people to use the mouse.

The games were familiar and fun helped them stop clutching the mouse like it was, -I don't know, something that was trying to escape.

Didn't know until now that it was purpose-built for teaching.
To be fair, even if you were an egomaniac or thought you were better than anyone else, that doesn't mean you're a bad developer. There are obviously cases where egomaniacs are great developers. Linus Torvalds being exhibit #1. Not defending the practice of thinking you're better than others. Just saying that it's not simply binary.
> But I don't think there is enough demand for such a thing so that it will get written.

Isn't that basically what we have academia for?
The Pandora Christmas station is decent but Spotify's are terrible. The formula is pretty straightforward as this article describes.
Maybe they should bring back Inkball? I had too much fun with that even without touchscreen...
I can probably help if you can narrow things down a bit. Are you parsing deterministic languages (e.g. for programming languages), general context-free languages, binary file formats, or something else?

Because parsing is a field of little active research interest where most of the work happened more than 20 years ago, there are a lot of techniques from the 70s, 80s, and 90s that are relatively unknown.
Jepsen Research Ethics
It's great to see a company building technology and open protocols without walled gardens and lockin.
'Compiler Construction' by Niklaus Wirth[1] is a pretty good book too. It's got the hands-on feel of Crenshaw's book with a quick but, not too superficial, introduction to theory. The book is little more than 100 pages long.

The compiler is written in Oberon however, which is also the source language (actually the source language is Oberon-0, a subset) but, Oberon is super simple and can be learned on the go.

[1] https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/CompilerConstruction/...
Most C compilers have a flag to turn this mode on. It's usually called -O0 and is actually the default.