skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The point for me is recognizing that yes, I have been fortunate in my circumstances (solely by being born in a first world country in this century I was ahead of the majority of people born ever).

Even this concept bothers me. Why do we in the "first world" (God, even the term sounds pretentious) assume we are living the height of human existence? If you live in the US, you're likely working longer hours than you would in almost any other country, and your fulfillment in life likely comes from acquiring, storing, and maintaining stuff. Contrast that with, say, rural Mongolians, who live off the land, have much tighter communities, and are largely oblivious to the problems we in high society have. Assuming that the rest of the world wants to live this insane existence we do is more offensive than not recognizing one's privilege, IMO.

> If I could extend that same privilege to others I would in a heartbeat because I think it would be both morally right and for the greater good.

Again, one man's privilege is another man's hell. I would, for instance, not want to be a trust fund baby, living a life where nothing is a challenge, where I can never truly know if someone's just being my friend or love interest because of my money, and where the rest of society stereotypes me because of a situation I had no choice about being born into. I'd rather be a rural Mongolian, TBH.

I also think it's complete folly to assume that working in tech is the height of society. It's not, which is why a lot of people don't pursue it. It's fucking tedious most of the time, you sit with your neck craned over a computer for 8+ hours a day and develop bizarre RSS conditions and nothing you build is actually material. It's not like the trades where you move your body during the day and can actually step back and see what you built or helped build.

I am definitely not one of these people that things we should teach everyone how to code. Programming is lucrative right now because not many people have a passion or a tolerance for it but the need for it is increasing. It's that simple. It's not about privilege, or race, or sex, or anything. It's just another tedious, painful thing that needs to be done that some people have a higher tolerance for than others (usually white, nerdy, socially-awkward people).
You don't have to have enemies. Criminals don't care where the money comes from.

Moreover, lots of people dropping PayPal gives a strong signal that PayPal is not a suitable payment provider. It makes room for a payment provider that does this better and discourages others from feeling forced into the PayPal trap.

(For the record: I closed my PayPal account many years ago, because of abundant evidence of PayPal's unreliability.)
CMock vs. FFF – A Comparison of C Mocking Frameworks
same here man, same here...
Libsoup is nice too: https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Projects/libsoup
At least 1920x1080 please.
C++: PIMPL, Rule of Zero and Scott Meyers
OK.

I almost stopped reading when I got to "VBA, 2012" and presumably a few more years of work experience before that.

But OK. If you are actually saying: "Hey - it seems to be a bit complex, maybe we should ask a professional before writing our own excel-based maintenance hell for our internal processes." Then I'm with you.

But don't outsource important stuff! m'kay?
It helped to have a purpose or something to accompany it, e.g making a game as that would require a bit more math than CRUD apps.
This helped me brush up on some (embarrassingly simple) vector math http://natureofcode.com
They could also intelligently and transparently implement planned obsolescence, which would be really nice.

I am not annoyed when my bottle of laundry detergent empties. Even complaining the manufacturer only put 58 oz in the bottle knowing I'd have to buy more bottles doesn't impress me, I can see its not full and read right on the label. This isn't a serious problem at all for me because I see the exact amount thats in a bottle and purchasing more detergent transparently fits into my lifestyle as needed. It might be an environmental disaster to pollute the country with 10% more partially full detergent bottles, but for me personally, eh, whatever.

What does annoy me is someone intentionally puts no heat sink on transistors or intentionally installs low temp rated capacitors such that randomly at some totally inconvenient time the appliance suddenly catastrophically fails, then I need to shop, be home for an entire day to coordinate delivery, figure out the new appliance on its schedule, its a huge PITA on the personal level. If it were scheduled and predictable, well, no problem then.

I'd welcome a planned obsolescence clothes washer, for example, that had a five digit counter on the panel and when it reached zero I had to buy another. I could organize my life around that very conveniently.
Don't let past death marches and shit-projects affect new projects mentally. It's harder than you think.
What the Hell Does Console.error.bind(console) Do?
Modern Ofis Mobilyaları
If you think you build it, it is actually half finished, and left to everyone to finish- who is able to just use git clone on your mind. Cause there is no documentation.

And no- its not snappy to remark upon this after investing a day on fixing your broken code-garbage can, just because its "free" - cause it was not. Time is money, and if you ask people to work for you for free, you are expensive.
Solution: Just do not claim with your project to be what you are not.
You're software is not free.
You're software is not easy to use.
You're software is not plug and play in any way.
Do not claim that. Say, that it is a bolted together prototype and warn people who don't have experience with this, that they might be in for a investment of weeks.
Everyone stays happy.
What are the odds this change was made in error? i.e. someone pruning a database, only to have the website logic interpret that as "free" ?
Same - I think it's because OK: I rote memorized how these equations work, but what now? What do I use them in? If I used them in my day to day, I would probably enjoy it more and probably stick to it.
I went in agreeing with the headline, and the article just didn't follow through on it (also, thank god for readability view. 2560 pixels wide lines with no margin are not any more readable than blogs full of ads).

So it posits that there's messed up practices considered normal, then it talks about companies that are clearly abnormal? Even in one of the very first paragraphs, "the company whose culture is so odd that ...". And since when is marking flaky tests is "completely messed up practice"?

Ok so a lot of this is about coding practices and such but... like the guy said, those problems sort themselves out. Bad security gets broken into, the companies eventually get hit and either die out or fix themselves. Etc...

There's a lot of completely messed up practices in tech. Oh lord, especially as a european looking in to the SV world. Some of those messed up practices I can't even mention on HN because people think they are so normal, I get mass downvoted and have to engage 5 people telling me how normal this is (in fact I might even have to engage in it by just mentioning this).

1. The issues highlighted tend to be problems specific to people. Programmers that don't know how to do some aspect of security properly, that's a problem specific to those guys. You put me next to them, I'll do that bit properly but will be clueless about a different bit. It's all fixable.

2. The actual programming & design is the least problematic, mostly because it's the one that's most easily changed. Trying to change culture gets you fired. Fixing a pipeline with noticeable improvements gets you promoted. The one bit I did agree with was that it is hard to show improvement when you prevent a fire. I also think that's fixable and I also think that's a people problem, except at the manager level.

You want messed up practices? Look at the game dev industry and its mandated crunched and burnouts. "Everybody's crunching for the next 6 months because we really want to see the game released on time".
It's a bit like learning a language, you'd need some almost immediate application to make it past the first steps of a book or course (and/or make that gained knowledge stick). And while it's easy enough to travel to some country where they speak a language you just learned, that's often harder when it comes to mathematics and IT.

3D maths and game development worked out somewhat in the past (I forgot most of it though, and as that was the DOS days it wasn't really more than high school level geometry). But I doubt that I could find enough real noticeable application for e.g. category theory.

(Just being the basis for something often isn't enough. You don't need to know much about physics to hop on a trampoline.)
If you're going to abandon a project why not just add collaborators? Add anyone that submits a PR. Let them take over the future vision of the project if you're no longer interested in it. I think that's good policy anyways, anyone who takes the time to submit a PR (and I deal with so many people who submit a million issues but never will make even the slightest change) has an investment in the project that you may no longer have. Let them own it.
I would put stay healthy and invest in your health (chair, standing desk, exercise, food) as the #1 for any programmer for next year, and the years after. It's all too easy for us to forget about the long lasting effects of sitting in front of a computer that are hard to later undo.
Science News That Stuck with Us in 2015
Show HN: Tic Tac Toe Using GTK+ 3, Mac OS X and Python 3.5
#8.

I'm currently waiting to see what comes back from fsck on a 4TB drive connected to a Raspberry Pi (don't ask). Drive is 390 days old according to SMART and reporting unrecoverable read errors.

Most of the stuff was in other locations but I know there was one repo I was waiting to push... waited too long, I guess.
Show HN: When a non-techie wants to look like a hacker
And it's particularly effective because some banks apparently do exactly this. This would be reason to move to a different bank. These banks encourage behaviour that rewards phishing.
The Letter
Indeed. I really just need to relearn most of the mathematics I took in college. Of course, without a job (or project) that demands things like calculus, I'd just forget it all again anyway.

My current job has me messing around with linear algebra and statistical analysis on occasion, though I've found the cobwebs in that part of my brain are rather thick :)
I agree with all of the above.

Another detail is the 'loser pays' principle[1], which (barely) exist in the US, but is prevalent in almost all other civilized countries.

It's solve purpose is to dampen the effect of frivolous lawsuits, by making the instigator pay for the whole carouse (wasting other peoples time and wasting the legal system's time).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_f...
Meticulous Maids in Atlanta GA
Come to Guangzhou! Rents are sub-Boston/Portland/Denver, and the air quality, weather, and food are better! Plus easy access to Shenzhen and HK.

Agree on the perspective issue. Even crappy US tech companies know more about China than Chinese companies will ever know about the US. I mean, look in the hallways of any US tech company and there are more people from abroad than in a Chinese tech company. People here have a pretty sheltered, ethno-centric outlook which is only an obstacle if you really are trying to launch something international.
The general, fuzzy, "I don't like it" sentiment will keep you from trying many new things. I once had the same aversion towards Rails, but forced myself to try it. I learned a lot in the process.

Give it a shot and see how you feel. Install VS Code on Linux and play around with ASP.NET MVC or WebAPI to see what it offers.
AVA: Concurrent Node.js test runner
Except it (mostly) doesn't exist in the US, but does in almost all other democracies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_f...
Sounds promising, thank you for working on this!
Here's How Your Smartwatch Can Reveal What You're Typing
What I mean by OOP is representing domain concepts as objects with state. The objects merge interfaces (methods) with state. The objects and their relationships are the primary focus and the code is structured around them.

FP takes a data-first approach, making program flow the primary focus. State is, as much as possible, turned into data and otherwise squeezed out of the picture.

FP programmers go to lengths to eliminate state that I would consider excessive, only to recreate that state later when they have to start reasoning about the whole system.

As a diehard Rubyist, I find Ruby's semantics to be perfectly suited for any task of abstraction you want to throw at it. Just throw the errant code into a module. Turn it into a class when you start to need state.

I'll take an example from my current side project. I'm integrating the Pocket API into my app. I don't have time to rigorously implement a Pocket API consumer, but what I can do is implement the one API call that I need right now.

Instead of taking the time to do everything right the first time, I can simply make a single file with a module and call methods off of that module. As I implement more calls, I'll have a better idea of what kinds of state I'm managing, so I can refactor the code appropriately when the time is due.

It starts off procedural, code that just does things one after the other. It might acquire functional flavors as I work out the data pipeline. But eventually it will turn into proper objects with classes that can be passed around to whatever needs them. Things that would look like major architectural changes from the data pipeline point of view, are simple when you think about them as objects. Just implement the required interface and pass the instances to who needs them.
TBH I only clicked on the link because of the name (as the blog post mentions, "Charrúa" is used as a nickname for us Uruguayan nationals).

I had no idea MirageOS existed ("MirageOS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels for secure, high-performance network applications").

Fortunately the university of Cambridge has a decent explanation of what it is and why should I care:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/ocamllabs/tasks/mirage.html

"The cloud has so far mostly been used to consolidate existing operating systems and manage them more conveniently. The interface between guest kernels, applications and VMs are all managed very differently, leading to serious inefficiencies, unreliability and insecurity. Mirage OS revisits the library OS concept (built here as Nemesis in the late '90s), and narrows the gap between safe, high-level programming, and low-level systems construction.

Applications are written in high-level OCaml and compiled directly into microkernels that run on the Xen hypervisor. By treating the hypervisor as a stable hardware platform, we can focus on high-performance protocol implementations without worrying about having to support the thousands of device drivers found in a traditional OS. "
> mwsherman's original question was "Why would municipalities offer free wifi rather than free 4G?"

This isn't quite how I read the comment, but here are some pretty good answers, I think:

1. They would have to either purchase suitable licensed spectrum (literally hundreds of millions of dollars in NYC) or find an existing carrier with which to form an MVNO relationship with generous enough terms that the city could afford to "resell" the service for free.

2. 4G would probably require NYC to deal with distributing phones or SIM cards, and then users would have to figure out how to unlock their devices.
Also, it's fairly reasonable to assume that IQ doesn't scale nearly linearly with brain mass (data on male/female differences clearly shows that a 10% size difference doesn't translate to much of anything on average).

But let's pretend mass difference does simplistically affect neurological computational throughput. Even then, physically larger brain will need longer, more expensive signalling pathways, which can't be entirely free. Also, the larger the animal, the lower the metabolic rate - and translated to a brain with lots of dead weight, that may mean that mass gained via density is at least partially offset by a lower metabolic rate of the tissue (i.e. such a damaged brain may be burning more calories per gram of brain matter left, and that might even be less efficient overal - but in todays society, I think it's safe to say that some hypothetical extra calorie needs wouldn't need to be a problem...)

If you look at it computationally, it's reasonable to assume that many of the "algorithms" the brain uses scale supra-linearly. If you had twice the computing power, the accuracy of the resulting solutions wouldn't be twice as good or arrived at twice as quickly, but some amount much lower than that. To take the classic example of chess; twice the computing power only lets you look ahead a fraction of a move more, not twice as many moves. Furthermore, the brain is a ridiculously parallel computation device. At that scale, it's conceivable that even considerably fewer neurons that operate slightly more quickly (due to a higher metabolic rate and shorter signaling pathways) might perform just as well or even better on certain tasks.

All in all, it doesn't surprise me that a considerable difference in brain mass don't necessarily translate to an easily measurable IQ difference. There's going to be some effect surely, but how large would the mass difference need to be before it's noticeable? I have no idea. And those dramatic images seem to be from http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67..., that describe a patient with IQ 75 - perhaps still impressive, but also clearly below average.
If you exchange credentials in plain text, your gonna have a bad time.
Some thoughts about React, Redux and JavaScript in 2016
Too bad the bulk of the article is behind a paywall.

One of my friends who got offers from Palantir turned it down, as she wasn't convinced that the stock that was part of the pacakge would be worth anything, while the recruiter insisted it was worth as much as her Facebook offer's stock.

In light of this she made the right choice.
Fabiola Gianotti to lead CERN
Steph Curry is the revolution
"Switch to Dvorak" .. ha :(
It was great when I was working aeronautics as the modeling and simulation required a thorough review of theories and concepts. These days, I'm lucky to do more math than built in excel functions... Again, /sad.
Microsoft may have your encryption key; here’s how to take it back
In a sense, yes. I would argue that the cabled infrastructure is not a natural monopoly at this stage of technology development, but the pre-existing regulatory framework and the local municipalities treated it as such. The effect was a market where local monopolies were bought and sold. Which leads to no free market for buying and selling last mile Internet access.

To build a parallel tax-funded infrastructure like the fine article says, would be just silly in those monopoly markets (instead of enabling commercial competition first; not sure if New York in particular has any meaningful competition, so this may not apply there).
You seem to be spamming us with adverts for office furniture. Please don't do that.

Flagged.

Again.

If this is not spam then perhaps you could take a few moments to explain why your posts are relevant to this specific forum. Thank you.
Sounds incredibly weird. Why does defendant has to pay anything?

Or do you mean attorney fees, because going in a court without one would be practically a suicide?
nor·mal - adjective 1. conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected. "it's quite normal for puppies to bolt their food"

All the things that he writes about are normal - they happen. People (myself included) with an engineering background are surprised when things don't "make sense" or people don't do things the "right way." The trick is to get to the point where these things are not surprising, where you see them as part of the systems you are trying to understand and consequences of forces that aren't mysterious, they are just part of human social dynamics. From that vantage point you can get a better sense of what you can change to influence outcomes and whether you can or can't in a particular context.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story - let's just omit all the scary warnings about invalid SSL certificates (with even an explicit warning about an attack in progress) that the user had to click through. Is this a story from 2005?
“Soft Kitty” Copyright Lawsuit Hits Big Bang Theory
Tango is definitely an awesome dance (though, as a Uruguayan, I must object about it being called "Argentine").

It is very demanding, and I never advanced past the basics, but yes, it will improve your coordination and posture.

Among the ton of other side effects, the main one is you get to meet some cool people :)

To be honest, I don't like the music that much :P, and many tango enthusiasts become fanatics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango
Curious, as a European, what do you find wrong with some of the practices in SV? Genuinely interested in hearing your perspective (perhaps if you elaborate and keep it objective as possible you'll avoid some of the mass downvotes).
well said indeed!

unfortunately, this kind of understanding can only be obtained through failures.
Not all frameworks are bloated though. Mithril, for example, is pretty small[1].

[1]http://tobyzerner.com/mithril/#front-end-performance
De-anonymizing programmers from executable binaries
Twitter hires new head of diversity from Apple
I think GP is thinking further back to ol' Ma Bell. If Bell hadn't been broken up, and competition-promoting regulations put in place, there would have been no need for municipal exclusivity agreements--Bell would have been the only carrier out there in the first place.

It's possible that Cable could eventually have grown to compete technologically, but in a world where Bell was still a single unregulated entity, it strikes me as unlikely that cable could have survived independently.
Even with spoofed DNS, the HTTPS certificates would not match (J. Random Hacker is unlikely to lug around a compromised, trusted root CA certificate, much less show it off to a passerby).
There is an old experiment which support the idea that our consciousness is more of a history writer than an actual commander.

The Libet experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet

Although it's been meeting some criticism it's still IMO an important experiment with some important findings.
I was going to say, if these are in priority order, move #8 to the top if you're not already doing it! That way you get the benefits of it moving forward :)
Apple to pay Italy 318 mn euros to settle tax fraud probe
Save by not investing in standing desk.
Wouldn't good faith be to remove it from their catalog until they could properly purchase it?
True. But the day I find myself in a company where that's the case. I'll quit.
There has to be room for personal inspiration and activities and management has to know that they are not always right and acknowledge when personal initiative (even if it goes counter to their plan) is doing the right thing.
If my boss couldn't accept me ignoring him once in a while and just doing my own thing because it makes sense, I'd be looking for a new one..
Simple Java utility providing exhaustive list of User agents
Please, stop. I always cringe over how embarrassingly poor my math is compared to most that I don't even dare to venture out of 2d unless it's for simple UI transforms even then I struggle because of no firm grasp over some of the concepts.
I was going to say, a lot of the Math I learned in High School and then never applied to anything I re-learned more recently when I started mucking around with computer graphics and game dev (especially trig, matrices, vector math, etc.)

I'd love it if people had suggestions for other engaging ways to apply math while programming!