skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It really depends on the quality of the CC and it's faculty. I was a Physics major attending a branch university that merged with the local community college. The Phys dept was fantastic, though a single focus. The CS department was a joke.

I learned more about software on my own and by working with some of the physicists who specialized in data analysis that I did in any of my CS classes. Many of the CS junior/senior level CS students couldn't do anything real-world. Couldn't hand-optimize code. They also couldn't get anywhere without a fancy IDE that did everything for them.
A photo essay of SXSW 2016
You've pointed out a distinction without a difference.

On the back end C# properties are implemented as a pair of CLR methods named get_[PropertyName]() and set_[PropertyName](). The rest is syntactic sugar. So when you "simply modify the price getter", what you're doing is simply modifying the implementation of a method named get_Price().
Show HN: Changeforge – $150 handcrafted sites for nonprofits
Software development is not the same as Computer Science... Even then, it's a small part of STEM, and beyond that, how much shortage is there, really? In the end, I've seen far better results from self-starters that try than graduates with C.S. degrees that don't.

I think that there is a lot of arrogance in the software industry, and it tends to do far more harm than good. It bubbles certain mindsets and pushes out others. In the end, it does little for what's being worked on, and when good enough solutions that work are displaced by "best" solutions that come out months/years late and/or outright fail.

In the end, you can get a LONG way with pragmatic choices... you can go even further, with consistently simpler ones. The more complex something is, the more likely it is to fail when you need it to grow the most. Time and time again, people just don't see this. I've been guilty of it myself.

You don't need a C.S. degree, or a bootcamp, and honestly, if you do, you're probably not enough of a self starter to actually be productive, help and work with a team checking your ego at the door anyway. I'm guilty of this myself at times. But the debate is pretty silly. Nobody should go six figures into debt for a job that starts out at less than six figures. And nobody should expect to master anything in much less than a couple years.

What often bugs me more than anything is institutional resistance to anything new.

Okay, going to sign off this messy rant... I just find the whole debate the article makes irritating, as it's the people more than the process that determine success.
The comment "the division’s leader, Jonathan Rosenberg, said the company needed 'to have a debate on hydraulics.'" is significant. Google also owns Schaft, which has an all-electric humanoid with water-cooled motors that are heavily overdriven for brief periods using ultracapacitors to get a power boost. Boston Dynamics' robots are hydraulic, using proportional valves controlled by high speed servoloops. This works, but it has lots of disadvantages. The energy efficiency is poor when you don't need full power. There's no energy recovery. The system is bulky for a humanoid. For the pony-sized BigDog, it made sense. Early industrial robots were hydraulic, but that's now rarely seen except in very large robots. Electric motors and their controls have improved enormously in recent years.

I was expecting, after the Google acquisition, to see a new humanoid robot about now with Schaft's drive system, Boston Dynamics' balance system, and Google's image understanding system. That was the good outcome. Apparently Boston Dynamics does not play well with others, and that didn't happen.

Notice that Google isn't selling Schaft. I hope that they're doing OK. They're people from Tokyo University and from Honda's ASIMO project who felt things were moving too slowly. But they're in Tokyo, and Google may have problems managing remote teams.

As for "reality is hard", a good humanoid robot is mechanically at least as complicated as a car. Look how much engineering effort it took to develop good cars. Today, small teams can build a car, but that's because the problem and technology are well understood and you can buy many parts off the shelf.

Google has no track record in hardware with moving parts. Their autonomous vehicles have great software, but the hardware is purchased and bolted on. (Really bolted on; they do not bother to integrate the sensors into the vehicle shell, unlike every auto manufacturer that's done self-driving.) They're still using those rotating Velodyne scanners, which are a mechanical system that should have been replaced years ago. Flash LIDARs and MEMS LIDARs exist. Even the Google StreetView cars look clunky, and their backpack StreetView thing needs a redesign from GoPro.

I can see the cultural problems between Google, with no track record in mechanical engineering and a very young workforce, and Boston Dynamics, with good mechanical engineers and a 67 year old CEO. On the other hand, Google should not have bought all those robotics companies and expected them to make money Real Soon Now. Look at automatic driving. It's been 11 years since the DARPA Grand Challenge, when we first saw that it could really work. Nobody has a production vehicle on the road yet. It's a long haul with a big payoff. This isn't like the ad business.

If anybody from Google is reading this: you still have Schaft. Don't fuck that up. Thank you.
That wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. Nick Bostrom argues in Superintelligence that an arms race over AI between nation-states could provoke fears of the other side winning (with a "decisive strategic advantage" from a general AI), and force them to go "full steam ahead", throwing caution to the wind, and not put in adequate safeguards to ensure the AI acts in accordance with our values or respects the boundaries we give it.
Those could browse the web, but the iPhone had a full, non-neutered web browser, which I don't think the others really had. The intuitive/natural multi-touch interface certainly helped with browsing.

Not sure why I got downvoted for the above... the first iPhone was legitimately not good at phone calls. A big part of that was that the AT&T network wasn't up to snuff at the time, though, and AT&T was the only option.
Most web devs think they need websockets but they really don't.
That's a really good question. Surprisingly, I don't think there's just the one simple explanation - that it's regulatory capture based in the activities of lobbyists.

I think it's also a reaction to the fairly draconian anti-tobacco lobby from say, 1980 until the United States v. Phillip Morris decision. This is part of the Prohibtionist American anti-pattern.
I grew up near an Amish community in Chautauqua County, NY. My parents had a barn built by Amish.

I hadn't thought much about the Amish in many years until I spent significant time in Chautauqua this year. I was surprised. Much of the land that had been abandoned as worthless, has been bought by the Amish and made productive again.
Why would you want to run PHP over lambda? Lambda is best at taking an input, processing it, and returning an output (or triggering another function).
Inheritance is the first thing I learned when I started learning object oriented programming.
Good suggestion, I had thought of having a single field earlier (delimiting artist and title with a '-') but I thought that most users might find it cumbersome.

To generate the final graph, I started by more or less splitting the entire song into a list of words, then iteratively rejoining fragments in an order based on frequency of occurrence.
Search for jobs without falling asleep
Otto did an amazingly comprehensive webcast on how to dev in scala-js and how it fits into the big picture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPWDKEQLjpI
Ah, that makes sense and I definitely agree. The ability to write code in a decently maintainable fashion will certainly be necessary in fields that it wasn't and new fields entirely.

The upside for people that do this, as I alluded to, is that if you have these skills and want to do a new thing in a new field, it's an option. Things like SO will help you play with the new thing in the new field where you might otherwise not have any help.
I am also a true believer in bootstrapping, but we don't all have the advantages that Ryan had when he started qualtrics. You either need a very good idea or a very generous family to bootstrap.
Riyad Mahrez memberi mereka kemenangan
The U.S. has not invaded a neighbor and conquered its territory and people (at least not since the 19th century). There is no comparison. The borders with Mexico and Canada are undefended - Russia's neighbors, by contrast, are begging for NATO forces to protect them.
Right, but the article is arguing the inconvenience of having to make such methods across all classes that derive from a superclass. If this is inherently provided in the language then I would say that language doesn't suffer from the issue discussed in this article. And that language I'm speaking of is C#.
What is this new company - I am intrigued?
I used to feel the same way about Rust. But the more I started using it, the more I realised that it's fairly capable and I could use it much more than I had originally planned. While it's not as high level as, say, F#, some features are higher level than Go. For instance, error handling in Rust is nicer than Go. Rust's cost-free functional style is also pretty neat.
Hey everyone, founder of Changeforge here.

This is a follow up to this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11142402

We received such a positive reaction we decided to take it to the next level and setup a full blown organization. I want to give thanks to the Hackathon Hacker Facebook groups that have been an immense help in spreading the word, providing feedback, and encouraging hackers to volunteer for our organization.

I'm excited to hear everyones thoughts!
Fair point on the defamation.

Bringing up the Falwell vs. Flynt was more about protecting parody. Very few people would have taken seriously the idea that Falwell would run an ad in Hustler magazine, it was clearly satire. In this case, however, the information was recorded without the other's party's notice. I'd have to look up the laws in California, but I know in NYS, we have to inform the other party when we are recording are the conversation. In this case, it's the right to privacy vs. freedom of speech. The argument that since a person is a celebrity he does not have privscy rights never made sense. He is entitled to his privacy as much as the rest of us.
That's about right. Getting through the next few seconds in life is mostly about not falling over and not bumping into stuff. Once you have that, you can back-seat drive it with goal oriented systems.

On the other hand, using machine learning to tune your lower level control loops is extremely useful. (I used to think this was a path to AI, and went on a long detour through adaptive feedforward control and system identification. But in the end, machine learning did more for control theory than control theory did for machine learning.)
I agree with mjg59 that this sort of system does not provide true security. That said, I think it might be slightly more effective if the system verifies the whole /boot partition instead of just the files within, especially if free space is filled with random bytes.

edit: I also think it might be ever so slightly better to calculate signatures instead of plain hashes. That would make it bit more difficult for attacker to forge correct values.
Right, I'm definitely not the first person to make this argument. But I still see people making these mistakes; that's why I wrote the article.
My understanding is (I may be wrong) that this script protects from physical attacks when the attacker covertly modifies your /boot partition (where the kernel resides along with the initramfs) while your computer is turned off. The attacker can not modify the other partitions because they are encrypted.
Ok, so do you think you'd get more use out of those things now or later? (Maybe you're asking because you don't know, but I think it's useful to reframe it that way).
Triton, Worlds First Artificial Gills Re-Breather – Indiegogo
Does it look like it is portrayed in the media, or they modernized a bit?
Great work life balance. Mature people (rather than youthful exuberance per Se). Solid (but not top) pay.
Building commerce messaging apps in the real world
> Russia is not at war with Ukraine. Russia is just running a covert action in Ukraine in an attempt to destabilize it's democratically elected government.

Russian troops invaded Ukraine, killed thousands (more?) Ukrainians, conquered a large part of its territory and people, and organize, supply, train, and fight along side an open rebellion.

I'm not sure what else to call that but invasion and war. The Russian and Ukrainian goernments avoid that term right now because both want a cease fire.
It's not so much about that specific case, any other side effect will get you in trouble. it's more about how 'extends' introduces 2 tricky features. 1) you get a neat dispatch mechanism. if foo doesn't have a method check foo's superclass, and see what's available there, recursively until you run out of parents. 2) you can slip a different implementation in to some complex system, and they never need to know.

A nice example might be a DatabaseConnection, and a TestDatabaseConnection, that doesn't actually talk to a database, but logs what was requested. The thing that sucks about inheritance is, you never really have a DatabaseConnection, you wind up having a MYSQLDatabaseConnection or a PGSQLDatabaseConnection, that take slightly different syntax. It's not real clear if you should make a TestDatabaseConnection for each database permutation, or just make a logging connection.

Anyway, traits can fix this up a little nicer than interfaces and delegates can.

Inheritance is helpful, but it kind of sucks because you only get to use it once, and it mixes two different concepts together. "easy" API extension by tacking on more features, and the cuckoo's egg that lets you slip different implementations in without a recompile. IMHO #2 is really what people are after, and you can get that by just using interfaces for everything.
This just confirms my understanding that nobody really understands the cost of defects.
I agree. I was talking about a current war.
As well it should've been! If you're doing OO, you're kind of missing the reason for it if you aren't aware of inheritance, isolation of concerns, and polymorphism.

Granted, you could have a lot of copy/paste code and NOT use inheritance, but then why use OO in the first place?

EDIT: I mentioned in another comment, and a commenter to this correctly noted- it's probably because it's easier to understand, and a fundamental piece of OO. It's actual usefulness in the real world varies, but it is also how one would step into understanding interfaces, composition, and other aspects of OO that get used heavily in OO in the real world.
One of the most important benefits of functional programming is that the compiler can figure out which operations can run in parallel and which can't. In other scenarios, the programmer has to explicitly decide these things herself, so you end up with extra bugs (race conditions, for example).

The language doesn't matter, as long as its compiler can expect purely functional code and the compiler is written to take advantage of that code.

Rust kind of succeeds in having it both ways -- the programmer decides what runs in parallel, but the compiler won't allow race conditions.

I can't imagine any better scenario than just writing code that can be automatically parallelized, though.
A web server gets big, complicated, has lots of add-on parts, and has performance constraints. Small routers, DNS servers, and BGP servers are small, closed systems that should Just Work. You want to get them working, lock the code into read-only memory, and forget them.
"On the surface, this looks reasonable."

No, it actually doesn't.

class Item
def add_to_cart(cart)
cart.increase_total(this.price)

This is where the trouble is. It is not the inheritance, it is the add_to_cart method not being in the correct class. If this instead had been

class Cart
def add(item)
.. add item to some collection of stuffs implementing price().
def sum()
.. calculate total sum.

then the whole problem evaporates. If your code reads do_something_to_foo(foo), then very often usually it really ought to be foo.do_something()

Inheritance can be ok when used sparingly, but this example is not one of those.
Interesting, I've never ever shared my salary with another company, and been working two decades.
The interesting thing is...how long before you have 10M users?

I'm very much a fan of this sort of work--it's obviously useful for things like data collection from sensors--but I can't help but wonder if it has any practical business value for early-to-mid stage startups.
Ask HN: Career advice for someone attending a coding bootcamp
I graduate in about a month. It's been intense, a ton of fun too.

I don't know how "good" I am. There seems to be a lot of people smarter than me. Completing assignments faster than me. Particularly with OOP. OTOH I am average or faster speed with other aspects.

I'm hoping this probably doesn't mean a lot, especially since we're all new coders. But this has really gotten to me. I've had a job before (non-tech) where I was deemed incompetent and let go, so I want to try to engineer a smooth transition to the working world as soon as possible.

The bootcamp teaches Rails and javascript. I'm wondering - would a job in drupal have an easier learning curve? How would it be different? Obviously I'd have to self learn but it seems like a solid career path too.
Would be cool if you could upvote/downvote papers
Love it :) The share buttons actually use the current page you are on, but I can see how it would be much more useful to just update the URL based on the search pattern.

Until I fix that, here's an example of how to deep link to a particular search:

http://songbranch.com/?artistName=daft%20punk&songTitle=tech...
It is indeed a sad day when people, that is, students, are censored by their own. It's astounding that this would happen being that through disagreement and argument is how we find our better ways. My sentiment is that here is the one place where we should feel free to share our ideas no matter how immature or adolescent they are. This should be the place where we get to open up and explore. But, as they say, the left and the right have conspired to silence discussion and only received opinion is welcome.

Here's the relevant quote:
"In other words, and not for the first time in history, the far left is allied with the far right, and drags the soggy centre along whimpering behind it."
> 11. For many Americans, the term “Amish” has strong positive associations: honesty, simplicity, old-fashioned virtue.

I'm surprised by this. I associate "Amish" with inbred luddites who abuse their children. I'm not saying "inbred" as a cheap insult. From the Wikipedia article on the Amish:

> Since almost all Amish descend from about 200 18th-century founders, genetic disorders that come out due to inbreeding exist in more isolated districts (an example of the founder effect). Some of these disorders are quite rare, or unique, and are serious enough to increase the mortality rate among Amish children. The Amish are aware of the advantages of exogamy, but for religious reasons only marry within their communities. The majority of Amish accept these as "Gottes Wille" (God's will); they reject use of preventive genetic tests prior to marriage and genetic testing of unborn children to discover genetic disorders.

Also, the very last point:

> 12. Amish employees in Amish businesses are exempt from mainstream companies’ Social Security, health insurance and pension mandates. Though that keeps costs down, the impact is often exaggerated, Amish business owners say.

Talk about burying the lede! I had no idea Amish businesses had such huge tax breaks.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish#Health
I don't know how it is portrayed in the media, but I will say it is a pretty simple lifestyle in Chautauqua. It is not uncommon to see horse and buggy on the back roads. Modern amenities are definitely limited. There are exceptions, and I'm not sure how they are made, but overall it truly is a time warp.
Not saying you're wrong, but I think it probably also has a lot to do with the fact that engineers, by training and often by personality, tend toward being "rational" in their worldview, which basically means looking for "reasons" for things, and wanting "reason" to prevail. Such a person would tend to set the value of his own labor at some rationally-supportable level, and would have a hard time coming up with a rational reason why he (or anyone else) needs or deserves to be paid more than that.

Whereas other types of people who are quicker to embrace "irrational" ideas of what they're worth, are more likely to ask for and therefore receive irrationally high salaries.

The reason it's hard to come up with a rational reason for a particular pay rate, is because no such reason exists in the real world. You can talk in terms of being paid proportionately for value created, but that's just an attempt to apply reason where it doesn't actually govern. Plenty of people are underpaid compared to the value they create, for no good reason: teachers, women, manufacturing workers, foreign sweatshop workers, open-sourcers - though willingly in the latter case.

What governs in setting labor prices is not reason, but all the gloriously irrational behavior of any and every marketplace, where people we denigrate as stupid idiots are basically like "oh look, shiny things." Well guess what, those shiny things - objects of desire - are worth a lot, even if rationally speaking they are crap. Never underestimate the Shiny Factor.

That's how someone ends up paid more for the same work for example. Like when a person from outside gets hired on at a higher rate for the same job being done for less by someone already in-house. The "reason" is simply that the new guy happened to be an "object of desire" (not currently working for the firm) which enhanced his Shiny Factor. As opposed to someone already on the payroll, dependably doing exactly the same thing - that guy, by his very dependability, actually has a lower Shiny Factor. To raise it, he needs to create a real threat of his leaving, and/or actually leave for somewhere else, and maybe come back.
For clarity to others before clicking: this is NOT about Pilot Wave theory. It is about seafaring pilots, so don't expect theoretical physics being discussed in the comments.
Thanks for the compliment!

Yeah, I did not intend for my "this was funny" comment in a negative light, it was a genuinely fun thing to read.

I often wish that more people came up to me with proposal of developing domain specific formal systems, so when it actually happened in reality, I was a bit taken offguard by the unexpectedness of it :P