skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"access to the world’s most important data problems"

I'm not sure how to put this, but I've used Palantir's products in a couple different warzones. I can't imagine they're not pointing those tools at everyday Americans. In fact I'm certain of it (just read FedBizOpps postings from the DHS and DoD). I'm sure most of the people working there have no idea, but I'm also sure there are some truly bad people working for that company. Man, we really need to regulate this a lot better.
Mapping the Human ‘Diseasome’
When I was in high school a friend and I bought a portable scanner from Radio Shack to do exactly this after reading an article about it in 2600.

After getting bored chatting with people on our BBS or hacking around in Turbo C, we'd cruise the suburbs and listen in on phone calls.

We never stopped the car, so it was just a leisurely drift over usually mundane conversations. When you got a handset instead of a base station (or maybe the other way around, I forget), you'd only hear one side of the conversation, and it was fun imagining what the other person was saying.

Magical times.
I found http://vim-adventures.com/ (no affiliation) to be the best way to finally learn vim in the sense of actually developing automatic muscle memory. It teaches you how to use vim using a 2d game. It's worlds better than the built in vim tutorial, to say the least. :)

For a really different take on editors+shells, check out acme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M
Mine at least correctly controls the furnace, but the one feature I bought it for -- a thermostat I can control from my iPhone -- barely works. Their app has gone downhill with every single release, and it's at least half the time that I get a message saying it can't connect.
Not to mention, the question sounds like this:

Is smartphone dying? You can use digital camera for photos, mp3 player for music, scientific calculator for math. Looks like a smartphone is being assaulted from all fronts.
> Twitter isn't a textbook though. It's goals as a communications platform are completely different

Twitter is a company. Its goals and the way it tries to achieve the are as subject to discussion and criticism as any other company.

As for the rest of your comment, you keep talking about “masking” when I never used that word. I conclude that you have a preconceived idea of what I am saying, and are arguing with that. Since it isn’t what I’m saying, I have no obligation to defend it, or even explain why when you put words in my mouth, the difference between your words and my words are.

When you begin an argument with “So what you’re saying, is...” I need go no further than to say “No."

> However the communications platform can provide the user tools to...

And now you are talking about how Twitter could change its offering to improve the lives of its users. Which is what I was talking about. Seems like a good place to break off.
capitalism sure does feel great when you're winning. but when someone shows up with more money, all of a sudden it starts feeling very unfair.

and nothing will be done about it because the powerful locals who make the laws are the ones getting rich (richer, really) selling all of the real estate to the foreigners.

and all of the anger will be misdirected at the chinese, allowing the process to continue indefinitely.
Perhaps a viable alternative to using cloud services would be roll-your-own OSS packages
> I still wake up with something like PTSD from getting yelled at and bullied by Tony Fadell.

This is so depressing. My gut tells me that absolutely no one should have to put up with this in an employment situation, but what are your options, other than to either "deal with it" or face the income and career insecurity that comes with quitting?
A great way to fix that is to add more managers to gain better control of your runaway teams. Microsoft Project might be a good solution to get them back on track too. Planning out every hour of the project at the beginning really helps developers focus and get things done. Oh, and you want to introduce daily status meetings, preferably in the morning. As a final step, it helps to let a few people go and put a hiring freeze on developers. You don't want to reward their departments' bad behavior by giving them more people. I've seen this done at several companies before and it always leads to spectacularly amazing results. </sarcasm>
steering away from web might do the trick. try developing and marketing your own products / services, where you are not forced to use the latest framework, rather valued and consequently paid for value your software brings and problems it solves. as of burn out, take a sabbatical if you can afford it
Absolutely, not only are those poor employees doing themselves a disservice, but they really are doing the rest of us a disservice too by perpetuating those kinds of environments. The employees are the fuel of any company, and when you keep fueling a company with an environment like that, it sends a signal. Not a good one.
In Germany it is mandatory (at least that's my experience) to identify oneself with one's ID or driver's license when taking a test at uni.

Is there no such procedure at US institutions?
> I would be curious to know the process for even modeling this sort of thing. How do they know they got it right?

It helps that the model creates the same outcomes as the actual observations (and the old model didn't). This isn't an ironclad guarantee that the model reflects reality, but it suggests that we're moving toward a more accurate reflection of nature.

> I've always wondered how modeling these types of complex systems works.

To explain I will use a simpler example -- weather forecasting. In weather forecasting, we need to model the atmosphere. It's not possible to model the entire atmosphere directly, instead we break the atmosphere into a bunch of cubes, each with an initial temperature and humidity and a few other things.

Then we process the cubes in a supercomputer consisting of many processors running in parallel -- one processor per cube. The actual computation consists of seeing what effect a cube's neighbor's pressures, temperatures, etc. have on the tested cube, for a brief interval of time. Then we repeat the process for another slice of time. Ad infinitum.

This is obviously a numerical process, with no overarching equation that explains it all, but with some basic first principles at work (a theme in modern physics). Such a process becomes more accurate if we can create more, smaller cubes, and for that we need more and faster processors. So most of modern supercomputer design involves thinking of ways to acquire more and faster parallel processors.

The kind of model that led to the discussed result follows the same basic pattern. The irony is that the most often cited reason for having supercomoputers -- to be able to say whether it will rain 72 hours from now -- is also the least likely to succeed, because of the role played by quantum mechanics (i.e. by chance processes) in earth's atmosphere.
Seems like the part she's pissed at is "I think mothers have more important things to do...be mothers".
> Different languages will allow you to have different points of view for problems solving.

You don't need to actually know different languages in order to get this benefit. For example, I know how to code in a functional style in Ruby and gain the benefits. I know how to use design patterns in Ruby.

A lot of times, I find concepts in other languages that amount to hacks. Haskell's monad concept, for instance, once I understood what was going on, I now feel is mostly used to hack state into a language that was designed to eschew it.

> 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).

I disagree. I want to use the tool I know like the back of my hand. I want to keep the number of things I have to learn for each new objective to a minimum. If you call on me to solve a new problem in a new language, I'm liable to ask you to just call a specialist. I am a professional, not someone you can just boss around.
Looks like this guy comes straight out of /r/iamverysmart
>The truth, however, is quite different. For example, Clemson’s engineering enrollment has reached almost 5,300 students – an 80 percent increase since 2008!

Enrollment numbers for engineering students are not really relevant. It is the graduation numbers. Engineering programs are notorious for "weeding out" large numbers of students. His salary statistics are scary though.
My impression is there are many types of hammer and chisels, but pneumatic drill was not yet invented. And adding workers is not going to fix the core problem.
So we've reached the point where you say the (presumably average) salary for programmers didn't go down between 2000 and 2004. And I am at least one data point that shows that it did (and I know of plenty others).

I wish someone actually had data for the time in question, as opposed to anecdote. I find the question quite interesting, and would like to know the answer.
It's not OK to discriminate against anyone. But here is at least one reason it is still done, even after almost everyone agrees that women can be great executives:

Hours per week spent on unpaid child care among dual-earner couples; respondent working full-time. Women: 49.8, Men: 27.2

Official Canadian Government data from 2013.

http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/rc-cr/stat/wic-fac-2012/sec4-eng.ht...

Women and men still behave very differently as populations. This is not cause for discrimination against individuals, but it does explain (but not morally justify) the existence of different priors on members of the two populations.
Pretty sure alan wouldn't have a name consisting of "no name," he sounds more like "TheGreatestAlan" kind of type.
I stand corrected, though I imagine if the parent moved in those circles, there'd be more than a few non-macbooks in sight.
Homebrew sucks on multi-user systems (especially if the Mac in question has previously been single-user) or after the Mac changes its owner/becomes a shared one (company laptop).

Macports handles this usecase far, far better. Give your users sudo rights and be done. Only thing it desperately lacks is allowing third-party additional repositories like Debian's apt does.
It is not uncommon for me to write long and complicated messages - as emails, texts, or even letters - just to delete them as they are wasteful of others time and fail to come to an identifiable point.

To finally have someone who would both read and reply to such an exploration would be amazing, to have that person reply in such a way that turns my masturbatory ranting into a real discussion would be bliss.
This is exactly the kind of mistake that a sandbox was designed for.

In a sandbox, by default your software can ONLY write to a specified place like the "/some-random-globally-unique-string/yourapp/yourcrap" folder. Then, guess what: the most that "rm -Rf /" can do is obliterate your own stupid app's files. And, if you further compartmentalize features, it may only damage a segment of your app.

Adobe's still stuck in the decades-ago software development model of "well, guess I need full root permission" with no thought invested beyond that. No wonder Apple further locked down root folders in El Capitán so that you now need to restart from a special partition and essentially invoke "sudo --act-from-god --yes-I-really-know-what-the-hell-I-am-doing --no-really-yes-I-do --yes-really" to remove the protections from most root folders.
Your comments are worrying, but match a disappointing number of other users.

When I was ready to switch to a programmable thermostat to save money, I really, really wanted to like the Nest. It was cool, whizzbang, etc., etc. But then I started reading the 1-star reviews on Amazon, and the support forums. And it worried me. People came home to apartments that were 90* because their heaters were stuck on full blast during the summer. All sorts of people bought $300 Nests, only to discover their 8-year-old equipment was apparently not compatible with it. People spoke of Nests being fried by voltage surges in "old" (a scant 4 years!) HVAC systems. EEs were comparing the Nest's voltage regulators to that of a generic $20 thermostat and finding the generic more reliable in every aspect.

Nervous that my 14-year-old system would annihilate a very expensive toy, and that my wife staying at home would make the thing pointless, regardless, I bought a $100 Wifi Honeywell with a traditional 7-day calendar. It's fantastic. I expected very little from Honeywell, who I regard as a quaint, old-skool company, but their Android and web apps are simply excellent. Easy to use, well-designed, and it just works. I saved about $120 in utility bills in the first 8 months I had it, living in the nebulous division of the continental climate and humid subtropical climate in the midwest.

When we moved to San Diego to a house with only central heat, no AC, I still dropped $70 on the same thermostat just to have access to the "what temperature is it in my house right now" feature.
> For some reason I get the feeling that adopting all of these "smart" devices actually makes me more vulnerable to risk and gives me less control over my life.

Oh, of course it does. Consider: when are you more in control, when you know the city you're in inside-out, or when you're depending on Google Maps?
Yours is anecdotal, too -- you just stated it as fact. Where are the data?
Shunning Israeli goods to become criminal offence in UK
This comment, and the parent comment, seem to be conflating "dynamic language" with "dynamically-typed language".
I apologize! It seemed like you did. Have a nice day.
They were described reasonably well in multiple sagas, listed on inventory sheets, and they actually found one in a shipwreck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstone_(medieval)

IMHO, I think is sufficient evidence to say that it is reasonably likely they were using these.
It's a strain on portability.

Instead of just having a C or C++ program you actually have MSVC++ program (this is actually really common) or GCC program or clang program.

Sure one can argue that the C standard is too lax. But these kind of errors come simply from the fact that people learn C by trial and error, which doesn't work with that language.

Personally as long as the compilers still allow one to enable the optimizations it's not that bad in the end. Portability issues for badly written programs remain however.
So you will upvote differing views that you find interesting. And they will be included in your "bubble". Tada.
Atleast in 10 they fixed it but ruined it again by adding all those ads for games on the Windows Store and still kept those silly live tiles
IME, they don't really follow company policy, they just do what they can to get you off the phone. They know that the company doesn't care, as long as they aren't liable. I've done CSR work before, and it's a BS game for sure.
Chicago, IL OR Milwaukee or Madison, WI: On-site with regional travel. DevOps Consultant. Full-time team member with a ton of variety on an established and growing DevOps team.

Contact a human who can answer your questions: amanda.daering@centare.com

Full description: http://centare.catsone.com/careers/index.php?m=portal&a=deta...
Why didn't you use JavaScript for that purpose (in a similar vein to how LuaJIT uses Lua for dynasm)?
I just found this list of sample databases -- https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Sample_Databases

I'm not sure how good they are though.
Ask HN: Why do people hate on the AWS developer console?
People talk about it as if it's disgusting and unusable, but to me it feels very simple and intuitive. What gives?
"too lazy" seems like an unfair characterization. If a service lets you do what you want faster, why not use it? I'm not familiar with Kimono, but if you can just rip it out and replace it with your own code later, why not?
Agree. His opening complaint is from the Front End saying "I need x, y, and z so make me an API that returns {x, y, z}" which he wouldn't need to do for them if they were using GraphQL.
The Nest thermostat is a dream compared to the smoke detector.

The smoke detector goes off all the time -- without rhyme or reason. With a normal detector, you can just pull the battery if it refuses to shut off. With Nest, you actually need a screw driver to open the battery compartment to turn it off.

So, when it decides to wake up the entire house at 3am (yes, the entire house, since they all go off in unison) you'll need to go find a screw driver to get it to shut up.

The one flippin' reason I bought a Nest Protect was so I could "wave to silence" an alarm. Well, every time it goes off, it tells me that "this alarm cannot be silenced" - even by pushing the power button. Not once have I been able to turn off an alarm without removing the batteries.

The worst feeling is when you get an alert on your iPhone while nobody (but your pet) is home. "Alert: your house is on fire." Then you rush home and realize it's a false alarm.

After our fourth or fifth false alarm we returned them all and replaced them with the old-fashioned alarms.

Watch this hilarious video if you're considering buying a Nest Protect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY (warning: loud alarms in video)
Not sure about legality of asking but woman statistically (80%+) are main caregivers to kids so asking this question only for females make sense.

It works both ways though - one well known company gives 4 month leave to primary caregiver and only 2 weeks to secondary on child birth. If you are female - you get it by default. If you are father and not single one at that - good luck. Every single person (from your boss down) will ask you why you are primary caregiver.
It's almost as if engineers should get together and advocate for themselves as a group.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui
# I'm the wrong person to ask
Nobody wants to discuss stress tests as part of that focus?

Under the assume the best case scenario situation, dude wanted to see how she responds to ridiculous stress. Well, we have an answer here. Hmm. Wonder what happens the next time something stressful happens. Some obscure legal thing or a reviewer makes fun of them or ...

The unfortunate part is being a woman she has an obvious stress test point of commenting on her gender. I suppose I'd get stress tested by asking how a non-ivy grad could ever play on a strictly ivy grad playing field. Or they'd make fun of my kids or ancestry or where I live. Ah I know, I suck because I should have been born to richer parents, that one is a classic. Anything to see how I respond to ridiculous stress levels seems like fair game.

Its a little further than your average HR drone would go when interviewing your average customer service rep, but, its kind of an important stressful job.
Heh, I thought this was going to be another post about JS frameworks, where the title could be just as applicable.

Or just as applicable to cybersecurity, where hiring is a total disaster and not even well known/liked multi-billion dollar companies can't find enough good people.

Everyone agrees that you want good people, but you just can't find them because there are so few of them.

The ones who are really feeling the pain are hiring more junior people and trying to train them on the job, but you don't manage to successfully train them all, so you either need to fire them or find them something else to do, or you buy tools that let them leverage the skills they do have to provide something useful, and maybe they get better over time.

Reminds me of when I was an application security consultant and I thought Web Application Firewalls were really dumb since I knew several generic ways to bypass all the firewalls on the market, but 7 years later WAFs have gotten better, and consultants still haven't gotten any cheaper.

So while I'm sure there is immaturity in the big data tools space, there is probably an 80/20 solution there that lifts much of the load off your skilled data science professionals.
impressive even though the guy had a solid engineering background, what obviously helped quite a bit
> it would be great if there was a way for men to be more of a part of that

I for one am too scared that I might blurt out something offensive inadvertently and get labeled a 'misogynist' which can pretty damning to one's career and something you cannot defend yourself against. All it takes is one person with an agenda to tarnish your reputation forever. I don't want someone tweeting at my employer with "are you ok with this .."

thanks but No thanks. I am going stay far far away from "women in tech" business .
Especially considering his proposed solutions looks an awfully lot like not-very-fleshed-out remakes of React and Redux.
Part of the problem is this whole thing of use "STEM" as though it identifies a cohesive / unified group of employment positions. It's too much of a catch-all and there's room for TONS of variance within the overall "STEM" rubric. For example, you could have raging demand for software engineers at the same time you're having massive layoffs among, say, chemical engineers. So what can you say about "STEM" as a whole in that case? Very little.

IOW, precision matters and we should be leery of over-generalizing.
> I thought we already knew that current tokamak designs were very poor in containing plasma due to unpredictable turbulence ...

Yes, and this result suggests that we now have a model that's better at making such a prediction -- more finely tuned to agree with nature.
It always bugs me when people don't wipe laptops before handing them off.
You know, Thinstall (later VMware ThinApp) has existed since 2001. I'm surprised its particular breed of containerization (effectively an LD_PRELOAD shim that defines virtualized versions of libc calls) never took off. It was perfect for providing this kind of "isolation": the kind where you want the app to "not make a mess of things"—but aren't aiming for container-like isolation-based security, because the apps you're running are known quantities (if stupid ones.)

It's interesting, also, that Windows' WoW16, and then WoW64, both provide their own levels of filesystem virtualization for "messy" apps... but those same constraints aren't pushed on "native" apps.

I still don't really understand why no OS just virtualizes every app's filesystem, without having to opt into something like sandboxing. It'd actually be able to provide a much nicer programming model, a lot like Plan9: just spew all your program's files into the virtualized equivalents of system directories, because they're directories that are really just for you. No subdirectories; you just put configuration right in /etc, manuals right in /usr/share/doc, etc.

That could then be combined really well with a database-filesystem: going in the file manager to /usr/share/doc would display a "virtual library directory" with virtual subdirectories for each app-container that had made use of the directory. (Or you could skip the virtual subdirectories and get a merged view. Good for e.g. a Fonts directory.)
Algorithm lets planning systems generate backup plans efficiently
But isn't it true that some of the things you ended up doing would make sense for LLVM, or would most of them be invalidated by the kinds of optimization passes that are common in LLVM?

E.g. stuff like making the in-memory IR representation better cacheable certainly sounds like it's all-upside, and LLVM should just learn from your project.
It seems we are actually in agreement then! I apologize for misreading.

I think it's the "which media to promote" bit which may have thrown me off.

Cheers!
I'm reminded of the recent interview where Freeman Dyson calls fusion projects 'welfare for engineers'

http://m.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/11/freeman_dyson_intervie...
Rails 5 does not halt callback chain when false is returned
Please feel free to let me know if there other wordpress hacks you have used to speed up the wordpress sites.