skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'd prefer to see them rejected outright, and have more hard-working Americans take their places at college institutions

Even if these lazy Chinese kids' rich parents are subsidizing the hard-working Americans' education? (You can bet a Chinese billionaire's paying the full tuition without financial aid.)
Ask HN: Modern software development is killing my passion. What do I do?
In the first years of my career, I worked on packaged software. We wrote it, tested it, then put it up on a website. Life was good. I worked mostly with C/C++ at that time.

My career was stellar during those years. I was young and getting promoted super fast. With a limited scope of tech, I could dive into it and learn a lot quickly. Whenever I joined a company or switched teams, I became a "go to" person that people sought for help. I felt motivated to learn and deepen my knowledge.

Then everything started moving to the web. Any piece of software was written in at least a dozen languages and frameworks. Then came package managers, and package managers within package managers. Dependency hell.

I just can't keep up with things anymore. I learn the basics and do my job, but I feel I can never get a good grasp on things. Years ago I felt like I knew what I was doing. I had a mental model of things and I could reason about them down to assembly level. But now, applications are spread over different languages, tools, frameworks, plus everything is distributed, in a way I can't build those mental models anymore.

Whenever I look at the mess of technologies that seem part of every app today, all I can see is complexity. Things seem to optimize for "coolness" instead of maintainability, simplicity and stability. People love frameworks built atop layers of complex and often flaky software, but don't realize that all that abstraction makes it hard to debug an app when something goes wrong.

I estimate I spend 80% of my time dealing with:

- Broken dependencies

- Figuring out how to integrate components A and B, which weren't written to be compatible with each other

- Waiting for some remote server to come back up so things will work again

- Rewriting code because some new X framework is supposedly better

I'm getting burned out by this. I feel like I churn, churn and churn, but don't add value.

Is anyone else here suffering from the same issues?
The amazing part is that their system seems to be adaptable to any language with
a minimum of human effort.

> One of the reasons deep learning has been so valuable is that it has converted
> researcher time spent on hand engineering features to computer time spent on
> training networks.

[...]

> We can now train a model on 10,000 hours of speech in around 100 hours on a
> single 8 GPU node. That much data seems to be sufficient to push the state of the
> art on other languages. There are currently about 13 languages with more than one
> hundred million speakers. Therefore we could produce a near state-of-the-art
> speech recognition system for every language with greater than one hundred
> million users in about 60 days on a single node.
The 'r' in 'esr' is Raymond, not Roberts. Roberts is a dread pirate, not an open source movement founder.
This entire comment is an ad hominem argument. This sort of thing hurts the quality of discussion here.
This is spot-on analysis. Both that the Uber/Zenefits situations are different. And that is supportable to "bend" the rules under such a framework as is outlined.
Saw this in BC. Everyone knew TOEFL tests were know if to be faked/cheated. Lots of $$ pressure keeping people looking the other way.
Not exactly what you're asking for, but `lovely-forks` [1] shows you "notable forks of Github repositories under their names", where "notable" is defined by comparing the number of stars.

[1] https://github.com/musically-ut/lovely-forks
I remember when Nest hired a VP of security after I reported 768-bit DHE on one of their servers to Google security.
Different languages will allow you to have different points of view for problems solving. It's better to know about different but right tools for each job, than know how to use one tool everywhere (often with hacks and limitations).
Yeah, those are examples of opinions that are politically incorrect today, but so are more sophisticated and plausible opinions, like "genetics may be expressed in behavioral ways that predict criminality", "the distribution of cognitive and personality traits differs between sexes and races", "Islamic immigrants to Europe are disproportionately responsible for cases of sexual assault", "some women falsely accuse men of rape", or even "it's not realistic to expect people to coexist in society together when they hold entirely different social mores and norms". You may agree or disagree with any of these statements, but the notion of political correctness is that we are not even allowed to discuss whether or not these propositions are factually correct, because they are already politically incorrect.

But the real risk of political correctness isn't just the possibility that some politically incorrect proposition turns out to be true. It's that reality is always more complicated than we think it is. Two opposing propositions might be true in different contexts. For instance, the NBA slam dunk competition was this weekend; I don't think it's a stretch to say that in that particular context, women are, in fact, less capable than men. What if that's true about things other than dunking basketballs? We're not even comfortable contemplating that notion. That discomfort is a bias on our picture of the world.
I recently finished my undergrad and I am an international. This may not be the most helpful comment, but hopefully it will make you consider other options.

I know there is a certain appeal to starting a startup in Silicon Valley and going through the motions of being an entrepreneur, but you don't have to be based in the US to be a successful tech entrepreneur. Virtually any big VC that invests in the US also has an international investment arm. You can hire remote talent to work on your product, or even talent in countries other than the US. In fact, I hypothesize that you may be able to find better talent elsewhere because job hopping isn't as common in other parts of the world.

Canada has an excellent startup visa program and it is the closest thing you will find to actually doing a startup in the US.

Why do you want to start your company in the US?
There is a corollary to First amendment (Freedom of Speech), it is Freedom to not listen. I think people should exercise it more than trying to shutting others.
Here's some other ports of Scientist I've come across as well:

PHP

https://github.com/LartTyler/Analyst

Javascript

https://github.com/trello/scientist

https://github.com/Runnable/scientist

https://github.com/jirwin/labrat
It is rational in the head of executives who see developers as code monkeys toying with a keyboard in between 2 games of Magic The Gathering.

Senior people are more expensive, companies see programmers as a utility and don't want to pay 5x for a senior code monkey while they can pay 0.5x for a junior code monkey, period.
How could it possibly not be an appropriate question?

If you go ask someone to give you their money, you have absolutely no right to complain about how they do their due diligence.
Equating "women" with "mothers" is the first prejudice (she asked about the former, not the latter):

"According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, in 2014, 47.6 percent of women between age 15 and 44 had never had children"
The SI Swimsuit issue is now in virtual reality
Actually, both.

Firstly, I don't think that coercive funding is ever moral. This means that the only moral way of funding Government is voluntary taxation. This is my primary objection - even if you kept all the current State apparatus intact, it would be a tremendous improvement to simply stop coercing people into funding it.

Secondly, I think the current level of taxation is outrageous, and that State socialiam (as separate from charitable safety nets) is a monstrous moral evil. Ditto the massive military expenditure in most countries - it has precious little to do with legitimate national defence in most cases.

Thirdly, restricting the scope of Government vastly reduces the scope for corruption. We most certainly have voting with money now, and the votes of the rich and "connected" are counted for a lot more than those of the plebs.

It's not so much a case of wanting to pay for what I think is worth paying for, as it's a case of wanting Government to be limited to a very particular set of functions, and to be funded in a way that doesn't involve threatening or practising violence against people.

There's more information about the Objectivist position on Government funding here:

http://atlassociety.org/commentary/commentary-blog/4314-gove...

Thanks for discussing this, by the way. My original comment is attracting the usual flurry of down votes, which I've observed is the normal response on HN for criticising compulsory taxation, Apple, or socialism. Not necessarily in that order ;-)
Bork Bork Bork
I bought a Nest thermostat and I've been extremely unimpressed with it. It's not just the bugs that will have you wake up in the middle of the night in a freezing home. Even when it works as intended, the product is poorly thought out.

- Instead of trying to learn when to apply heat and when not to, which depends on many contextual factors, it seems to be targeting learning a calendar. A calendar does not fully capture the knowledge about your schedule that a thermostat could gain.

- It would be trivial for the thermostat to figure out if your phone is connected to your home network, indicating that you might be home and don't want to be cold. AFAIK, it doesn't bother doing that. I live on a different floor from my thermostat, and thus it often concludes that I'm away.

I don't get it... Google clearly has more than enough in house talent to get those things right. Why aren't they? Why don't they seem to care?
The past few days when I walk by my nest thermostat in the morning I've seen an error saying that it isn't connected to my wireless network. When in fact it is connected, and can be reached through the nest app on my phone.
China’s latest trade data are much worse than anyone expected
Rich kids cheating in college is maybe old news, is maybe why the downvotes for saying "it's these rich kids over here that created this problem".
I read it. She's ranting about something else - a VC suggesting he has no female-founded companies in his portfolio because very few apply - and somehow this offends her.

But along the way, she claims that "the extent to which she is founding a company is the extent to which I have something in common with her", which pretty much contradicts the entire pro-diversity narrative.
Is Humanity Getting Better?
Moderation isn't the problem. Moderation won't make contentious issues non-contentious. The problem is us. HN readers need to step up and provide a counterbalance to idiocy.
Got an entire empty wall to furnish with these.
Maybe a less hyperbolic, over the top, subtly smug article for the discussion to revolve around?

If you, as a writer, want someone to focus on a particular topic, you should generally avoid distracting your readers with ridiculous statements such as "entrepeneurs are an entirely different breed of human beings".
I is not wrong optimization. The guy is explicitly breaking the C specification by doing that.

The correct way of accessing a variable like that is trough an union. Here is an example http://pastebin.com/8V3whcL3

Alternatively one can make both of them as volatile. That will basically force the compiler do all the loads and stores.

I really hate it when people write code that breaks the spec and then complains to the compiler maker. And now they actually changed the compiler to work with the code that is simply wrong.

Just as what happened with glibc memcpy (works like memmove due to people not knowing what they are doing and then crying for the libraries to change their behaviour to match their own incompetence).
poor Delphi. It's being ridiculed[0] since the start of the millennium (possibly longer)

https://thequickword.wordpress.com/2014/02/23/delphi-program...
Cupid is now on Twitter
You can try Postgres "zero install" with Postgres.app for OSX, otherwise docker. http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2016/02/databases-in-containe...
LOL! It is expressive though. It's got really powerful first-class functions. It's got classes. It's got prototypes. It's got generators. It's got other things that I don't even remember (but will probably have to learn, to implement them, make them fast, and then fix the bugs).

I actually think that the reason why JS is so odd is that it is so expressive. That tends to happen with kitchen sink languages like C++.

Relevant: "There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses."
A lot of the article to me is expanding of people who administer the tools. At some point the people (statisticians) who make sense of this data are kings.
1. Duude, I'm all along with you except your hate of the "PC crowd". Stop complaining, start working. Not helpful to the conversation.

2. I used to be uhh a foreign national in the U.S (as I still am), and assumed it was a known fact that Chinese nationals often buy their way through college. Somewhat related: Northeastern and their special- Chinese-student program that gives 4-year US degrees with 0 knowledge of
English.

3. It is not necessarily something to complain about, as long as it doesn't COMPLETE dilute the value of the degrees concerned. AFAIK, Chinese students (NOT Chinese American, mind) are the only students who will often pay 100% of the feels, with no request for scholarships. So to look at it the other way, you're subsidizing smarter students by taking in slightly less smart students (tbh, most Chinese students are extremely competitive, so we shouldn't be generalizing.)
Many people use much of their retirement savings at the moment of retirement to buy a special retirement-income product. This can have tax benefits over normal investments. So you try to maximize the probability of having a large fund at that moment.
I guess what I'm talking about is not something to identify the reader. It is just identifying the global subscription so the content-holding site can know that it will get credit for the impression. The point is that the content site doesn't have to know who you are and just that they are going to get paid so they can show you the content.

Think of it like google/fb login. I can ask for the bare minimum on my site and basically just get a token. It doesn't tell me who you are, but just that you have an ID in the google/fb system.
I don't think that your friend considered his remark to be a joke worthy of a laugh, but it sounds like "good natured ribbing" over something entirely benign.

It's a social technique employed by many people on a day to day basis as a bonding method where no offense is usually intended and no offense is usually taken. Where your friend failed, in my opinion, is that he should recognize that not everyone is receptive to or appreciates this kind of teasing. It's up to him to identify the "line" that should not be crossed with some people and then not cross it.
Trump Logic: A Donald Trump Brain Simulator
You're reading it too politically. It says right up in the first paragraph:

> While LLVM is an excellent optimizer, it isn’t specifically designed for the optimization challenges of dynamic languages like JavaScript.

LLVM was, more-or-less, designed around C++ semantics. B3 is not going to be a better C++ compiler than LLVM. LLVM is not going to be a better JS compiler than B3. They're taking different evolutionary paths.
curious. What was the classical problem?
I know a lot of people who set their taskbar to the side (specifically the left side). I like it on top myself, but I rarely use the start menu for clicking about. I just use WIN+S and start typing to search for stuff.
I know specifically of one community that tracks these metrics internally (Stack Overflow) and from which there is also a specific term for someone that mostly only downvotes things ("Vampire").
If he is a single father he will get asked questions about his kids I suppose.
We need the opposite. The collision of economic incentives to self-promote online under one's real name with the way the Web works has been a disaster, in many ways. We need a no real names policy.
> Stress (and being a founder is a very stressful time) is a very big no-no during pregnancy and can influence the gene expression of the baby.

[citation needed]

"Systematic reviews have generally concluded that standard working conditions present little hazard to maternal or child health. A woman with an uncomplicated pregnancy who is employed where there are no greater potential hazards than those encountered in routine daily life may continue to work without interruption until the onset of labor."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23472500

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22355087

"Psychosocial work stress (high demands and low control) was not associated with an increased risk of congenital malformations in a population-based cohort study"

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24593253
Downvoted for the ad hominem dismissal of the OP, but also... "Eric Smith Roberts"? Really? If you're going to appeal to authority, at least get the authority's name right.
How is “drop-down” an anti-pattern as opposed to drop-up?
Our prime minister had the same problem, often signing off his text messages "LOL, DC". As a country, we collectively lol'd
This is like me having a billion dollars explaining that i believe rockets are not funded as easily as dating apps because I am old school and i think all physicists are nerdy introverts and they'll never be good at running a business...

A direct translation of the VC's theory would be that "that's [nerd hypothesis] why I think there are less nerd founders...which translates to less funded companies by nerds". Fewer apply so fewer are accepted.
I live on Vancouver Island (short boat ride from Vancouver). This year I will graduate with a degree in computer science and already have a decent job working as a web developer. My wife has a well paying job with the government. We both have lots of family and friends in Vancouver but will likely never live there as we can't afford $700,000 for a starter home. Even here on Vancouver Island it seems the possibility of owning our own home is becoming unattainable as prices sky rocket. Something needs to be done about foreign investment.

I guess this happens all over the world. The rich get to live in the nicest cities and everyone else gets pushed out. I've lived here my whole life but soon I won't be able to call it home. I can't read many of the street signs in Richmond (Cantonese and Mandarin). I take the bus to University while some of my Chinese classmates drive their Maserati/Lambo/Mercedes. It feels like my home is being sold out from underneath me to the Chinese. I don't know how to solve this or even approach talking about it without offending people. Maybe I need to open my mind and not view this as a problem. But it makes me very sad to feel like I don't belong in the place where I grew up.
We banned this account for trolling. One bad thing about HN's open policy about accounts is that people can, and do, create account after account that they get banned with. Surprisingly much of the worst behavior on Hacker News is the work of a small set of these.

But the other side is that users who are inspired to create new accounts to comment often make some of the best contributions to a thread. That's true of this thread too. The benefit of being open exceeds the cost.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11104337 and marked it off-topic.
I read it as saying skills trumps software. That's very true. Certainly in the "big data" space everyone was looking for the product they could buy to do everything. That doesn't exist. You need good data scientists or you're just going to waste a ton of money implementing more enterprise tools that go nowhere. That I certainly agree with.
You can do this with any Javascript-on-the-backend solution today. Not saying it's better, but we're doing it. Node is the obvious one, but we're running V8 in Java on the backend so we can use Spring-boot and a bunch of other Java stuff we get "for free" at the company.
I gave up years ago on hoping for anyone to come up with a sane UX. Everyone's been experimenting with it for years, but no device I've ever used seems more easy and intuitive than any other. They all have weird quirks that you have to just sort of figure out by trial and error and then memorize. So whatever. As long as I can eventually figure out how to use the thing to get the job done, then I don't care. But I've been using Emacs for work every day (along with CIDER for Clojure) and found myself more productive in it than other IDEs/editors, so I'm probably in the minority.
interesting, first it appears people really love emojis here, my original post lost me some karma...

second there was a massive gap in my friend group between MSN emoticons dieing out and emojis seeping in.

Perhaps my experiences are abnormal....
Rational arguments seldom make their way into this discussion, if it can be called that.
On the one side we have the empathetic liberals...

It's a common misconception among conservatives that progressive policies are driven solely by emotion, out of compassion and empathy. In fact, progressive policies are pragmatic, driven by sound economics based on long experience. Policies like the minimum wage aren't in place solely to give poor working families more money; they are in place to prevent just the sort of economically destructive race to the bottom that you use as a rationale for limiting immigration. With a strongly enforced minimum wage, workers compete to deliver better service, not to get lower wages. This prevents the decline that you speculate accompanies permissive immigration. Progressive taxation policies are similarly pragmatic and economically sound---despite the knee-jerk emotional reaction conservatives have to taxation, no substantial correlation has ever been found between tax rates and economic growth.
I believe the comment that was replied to contains an appropriate response:

"Seemingly irreconcilable differences are created by the narratives we're fed & let fester. Sure, narratives are elusive and sticky, but they're just narratives."

and

"Change the narrative, maybe starting with your own. Whoever the "other side" are; humanise them, don't demonise them. Be the bigger person. "
Why are these threads extremely rough to read?

Is it perhaps because the blog reads like as if it was written by a some freshman in sociology class?
> ELI5 is not for actual 5 year olds.

True in general, but it would be nice to meet the five-year-olds for whom it's the right forum.
Thank you. I believe that bidirectional replication will solve the ETL problem, if it can be configured to stream from a replica in the source/oltp cluster (to minimize network IO on the source cluster master db) to the master of the destination/olap cluster. The olap master can mirror the oltp data, but also use triggers to denormalize oltp tables.

One thing I'd like to see is the ability to sanitize/munge data from the source cluster before it is sent to the destination cluster, for masking sensitive data in the source cluster (PCI, HIPAA, etc).
It is not a critic, apparently it was understood as such.

The remark is tailored to those that think compiled languages can only be slow as C and C++ compilers, since they never used anything else, and then jump of joy when they use Go.

Yet if it wasn't for the VM detour of the last 20 years, that experience would probably be a current one, instead of being re-discovered.
My humble contribution to the hipster-stack-starter-pack: https://github.com/herval/gradle-kotlin-docker-multiproject-... :-)