skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm actually confused why you seem to be attempting to argue my point, when I was stating it's a situation that is unique to an individual. Do you really objectively think a degree is a yes/no answer that applies universally? What if someone wants to work on deep sea exploration robotics? Yes/No is an oversimplification and your post actually helps to point that out in two ways.

The second way is easier so I'll get it out of the way. More education earlier is an argument that formal programming education can be helpful. That wouldn't undermine the idea that a CS degree has importance on a individual basis; not as a general yes/no rule. We've agree that formal programming education CAN help.

The second point is big for me, and it really bothers me to be honest (not about your post, I appreciate your post). It's this idea that the CS degree is this static cement thing; like we order it from Amazon. A degree is what you make it!

Your point about remedial classes, etc is spot on. It's exactly an argument that each person has to weigh the benefits they can get from the degree with the benefits from going right into the industry. If the person shows up at college and picks programming for the reasons you described; then you are probably correct in that it is not "better". However, college is a four year chance to build a competitive advantage. Statistics. Economics. Linguistics. Physics. Accounting. Art. Etc.

If someone chooses to make their degree a worthless money sink, that does not cancel out the person who spends four years learning to code, analyze speech, and working hard on the OpenROV team. Those are two completely different people and neither needs to put their degree on their resume. But only one can put speech analysis and OpenROV there; which they got as part of that degree. They also now have those contacts and team building experiences. Another example might be someone who spends the four years working part time as a contractor. "Got a degree while building industry experience" trounces "got a degree" AND "industry experience" (imho).

A degree is something you pay for, it's an investment and should be treated as such (in the scope of our discussion). While the underlying argument may be if an employer cares; I think that honestly employers are looking at it as a signal that there might be something more to you than some Java/JavaScript syntax.
Why is Microsoft being so awesome today?
They don't give me malware, but they're still poorly targeted and not vetted by the content creator.
I absolutely agree with the general sentiment in this thread that we're all self-taught. I've had quite a few friends ask me to help them become programmers, and my first response is that (to paraphrase) "it's not just a job to learn and then work towards retirement. It's a constant learning experience where you have to wake up every day and realize you're ignorant, slow, and unimaginative compared to your peers and if that's not the case, then you're probably going to fall into obscurity. If you're ok with that, then let's get started."

One avenue I haven't seen yet approached here is that schooling was far behind the times at least through the mid-90s. I was set to graduate from a highly regarded prep school in 1996, and in the "advanced computer class", we were learning Pascal. My queries about the internet weren't answered well enough to keep me interested in the conversation.

By then I'd built a couple silly websites for myself, met hundreds of people from around the world, and had my own little secret educational source - a step up from my peers in school, which I needed because they were all Definitely smarter than me. I was hooked and had zero interest in plain old desktop applications, which was the end-game to what was being taught in every school I looked at (from my 17-year-old perspective).

A book on Perl understood what I was after. It wasn't even necessarily a very good book on Perl. It had an open source web-store on a CD in the cover and it told me step-by-step how to find a web host and then set up the web-store on a server. I set up a web store for my mom's retail business, which then stayed afloat for a little while longer (she now sells online full-time).

I proceeded to drop out of college and haven't stopped learning since.
I tend to dismiss these sorts of overtly negative articles out of hand. While it's true that Apple could probably follow Intel's roadmap more closely, it's been years since they have promoted their platform using "speeds and feeds." Windows OEMs have no choice but to differentiate that way.

As a user, I care less about having the most recent hardware (which will be outdated in 6 months anyway); my focus is on purchasing something reliable, and as many others have mentioned, these days most laptops are "fast enough."
In a few years down the road I hope that the JS folks take a very very close look at Rule engines. These kind of errors can be easily avoided with them.

I agree up to a point, but I think off-the-shelf rule engines will only ever get us so far.

Front-end web development in recent years has been going through its “Visual Basic phase”. We’ve been developing tools to help automate basic UI interactions and communications between front- and back-end. Those often get the job done better than the more manual techniques we used to use, but mostly they work best with simple presentation like forms or charts, and with simple data models and limited relationships — in other words, the kind of thing you need for a simple CRUD app UI where the tricky issues like scalability are handled on the back-end, like a lot of the web apps being developed today.

However, you didn’t see a many people trying to build more demanding UIs in Visual Basic, things like CAD applications or DTP software or flight simulator games or tools for visualising and exploring tricky data sets. I agree that to build more sophisticated web apps, the front-end world is going to need to broaden its horizons. Tools that let you systematically represent large numbers of rules without hand-crafting a custom function for every one of them will surely be necessary in some cases. As with so much of web development, lot of lessons learned some time ago in other programming fields will be relearned by a new group of developers.

However, that’s all still relatively easy. The hard part is how you reconcile the effects of those rules when they conflict, and there aren’t any universal right answers to that one. In fact, often there aren’t any good answers at all that can be fully automated. That can create a whole new world of nasty, awkward interactions where users have to actively deal with those conflicts. Maybe even that isn’t going to be scalable or efficient enough, and you have to design the entire system to operate with only incomplete or potentially incorrect information and still have acceptable if not always ideal behaviour. There are lots of interesting problems at this level, but a basic rule engine is never going to solve them alone.
WW3 THOUSANDS OF WHITES FLEEING EUROPE,MEDIA Not REPORTING,5M MUSLIMS ON WAY
Some analysis:

- Having an open source alternative like this will be a blow to Phonegap's/Apache Cordova's use for new apps.

- The change in Mono's licensing means Unity may finally upgrade to a newer version of Mono.

- Let's not forget Microsoft now owns RoboVM. I wonder what this event implies for it.
>>this is the heart of civil forfeiture, and without it there isn't any

Good, there should not be.

> It's a case of police discretion being warped into something it wasn't intended to be.

Actually it is not, this is exactly what was intended when they passed the laws, I do not know where you get the idea this was about "taking a beer from a 16 year old"
1. Are you planning to support other languages?

2. Are you going to support Amazon API Gateway style Swagger API routing?

3. How monitoring and tracing is done?
Which is one of the reasons the charges were dismissed.
Like I said, the JS engine is likely not the main factor. But it does make a difference. I don't have a detailed breakdown to share but we do measure these things. :-) The prior poster was wrong to imply it's all down to the JS engine, but swapping WebKit for Blink would very likely hurt our battery life.

Windows itself has worse battery life than OS X on identical hardware, so it's hard to compare Mac browsers to Windows browsers. Safari on OS X is the best laptop browsing power efficiency you can get, and likely the best battery life barring laptops with super huge batteries.
Grafana 3.0.0-beta1 released
The Apache License helps in this regards as far as it is used, doesn't it?
It's easier and cheaper for a large company to just find a big plot of cheap land and put the stuff up there. Same basic reason that nobody's offering to pay you to grow vegetables in your yard, even though growing vegetables is a profitable activity in general.
Facebook Messenger Adds Airlines Information Bot
Literally visualizing the JavaScript event queue :)

http://latentflip.com/loupe
I could feel inclined to take up iOS/Android app development if I could use Visual Studio. Last time I considered moving into mobile development, I had a "life is too short" reaction.

Why would I still need an OS X machine for iOS development though? If MS could eliminate whatever that last link in the chain is, I'd have to give going into mobile development some serious reconsideration.
I remember sometime in the early 90s I was working at my first really huge contract -- hundreds of programmers.

One day after lunch I get off the elevator and take a look around the huge room. I could probably see 100 folks or so.

There were a dozen different nationalities, people of all ages and genders. There were extremely smart guys who didn't have a degree. There were extremely smart guys who had PhDs in things like particle physics. Here I was, a self-taught guy, leading a team of 30. I had 3 PhDs working for me. I knew more than one person with double degrees in a foreign country who came here for a better life.

And it didn't matter. All that mattered was whether you got along with people, what kind of attitude you had, and whether or not you could push through and solve problems for folks.

I think this was the moment that I decided that I love this industry.
Civil forfeiture is terrifying. I haven't even done anything wrong and I'm terrified that someone might accuse me, and then the police come in and take and/or smash all of my stuff and/or confiscate my bank accounts and investments.
With all these MS open sourcing stuff stuff - any plans for Visual FoxPro? :)
Chunk.io – File upload for hackers
As the saying goes: "Despite the increasing cost of living, do you notice how popular the option remains?"
> unlike so many people attempting next-generation forms in architecture, her work actually got built.

Not for a while: people used that same criticism against her for a decade. From the other thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11397904
Pre-Ordering mine tonight!
Cayzu Help desk any good?
There is so much about this case that is so fucked up I don't even know where to begin, but I believe there is one simple reform we could all agree on:

Police have an obligation to fully return, restore, and compensate citizens who have been inconvenienced, had their assets seized, and their property damaged, by the investigation and cleared of wrongdoing by the PD, had charges dropped, or found not guilty by a jury of their peers.

No more asset forfeiture to line cops' pockets, no more Baghdad raids for families that pose no immediate risk to anyone, no more citizens and families financially ruined to pay for the costs of the PDs mistakes.

When my brother was in middle school someone stole his phone. The right kid was arrested and the cops took the phone into evidence. My brother is 19 now. We could never get the phone back.
"You can't regulate machine instructions, dude."

It's already done in a number of countries with people serving time for using it or not handing over keys. Many of those countries are implementing dragnet surveillance to get more control and detect more crypto. Or are you also myopically focused on just the math and numbers getting into the computer or pencil/paper part? Models and math don't mean crap without considering real-world requirements and implementation. In real world, those ciphertexts will go over a wire, radio, or couriered object. Two are easily detected by surveillance with randomness checks while one is harder but has human and technical means available.

So, yes, you can regulate the use of a specific configuration of math on computers and/or the Internet. You can hack those systems then bypass the math using implementation bugs. You can bypass the math using its electrical properties (a la side channels). The "math" won't save you if it doesn't reflect reality and can be banned in implementation while other math stays legal. Has which you all keep ignoring.

EDIT: Privacy isn't a math problem. It requires political action by citizens, math constructs, correct design of systems, mitigation of electrical issues, and tamper-resistant tech. It's a hard problem. Political part is most important as mandated backdoors or jailtime for unbreakable crypto counters all the rest easily.
Wow! I tried, but with minimal .NET knowledge I ran into roadblocks everywhere due to lack of documentation. Do you know of any standard/idiomatic ways of defining viewmodels in F#? What about HTTP calls and JSON parsing?
The problem I see with this whole conversation about ad blocking is that focuses so much on the blocking part and less so on how it could affect content per se. I’m of the opinion that ad blocking in the long term could work in benefit of quality content. I mean look at how the landscape is right now. Everyone and their dog can build a crappy site, steal content from major venues, change a title here and a sentence there, apply for AdSense and start monetizing. Why should I give a flying fuck for the sustainability of this model? Content should be original. If that means that 95% of sites out there would disappear I’m fine by that. If it also means that I’d end up paying for content I’m fine by that too. I still pay for paper magazines, I have half a dozen subscriptions to some of them.

What will the advertising industry do? For starters they have to be held accountable if they serve malware. There need to be some strict ruling that will have significant implications. Once we get past that we need to talk about profiling. It’s immoral, period. We don’t like it and I seriously doubt if it’s even working. Once the industry addresses those two issues then we can talk. In the meantime sites could start serving ads from their domains. That could render current ad blocking technology obsolete. It could also make them relevant again, like they used to be before Google took over the industry. In either way they need to start innovating fast, or sit back and whine like spoiled brats while adoption of ad blocking keeps climbing.
"HEY! We can do AWS Lambda too! Please use us... we're lonely."
For those interested, the proof for the Turing-complete and nearly-TC (as in total functional programming) cases is the same as the proof of the time hierarchy theorems[1], and for finite-state-machines the proof is based on results showing that verification of a (concise program expressing) finite state machine is PSPACE-complete. Those results are not surprising, as it is easy to see how any problem in computer science can be reduced (efficiently) to verification, so being able to efficiently prove correctness of a language capable of describing algorithms with super-polynomial complexity (this, BTW, only requires the ability to loop/recurse to depth 2) would mean contradiction.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_hierarchy_theorem
Today specifically? It's Microsoft build conference. It's when they release all their stuff.
I know this is rhetorical and I share the sentiment you're expressing, but the answer is evidently "yes" for the majority of people I've ever met
Ah, that's good. Cordova is so horribly, horribly awful I am glad to see this happen.
That isn't unique to Computer Science or Programming. I've worked with engineers, accountants, project managers, and many trades people that never touch their area of expertise outside of the classroom or the office. No venturing outside the curriculum or the self improvement on personal time. For most of them their job is just a job and that is enough for them.

I think what is amazing about programming is that so many people are able to get jobs without degrees. There is a general consensus that self taught developers can be as good or better than formally taught ones. I haven't seen this in other fields until you get to senior leadership. Sure, areas like law and accounting require a formalized foundation that are hard to get outside of degrees but trades is an area with a lot of room for self-development yet there is little respect for those without certificates. Sure you can make the argument of insurance needs but that just raises the question of why contracted developers don't need to be bonded.
The Fear of Automation
I am currently trialing them, and they seem to work really well. Just wondering if anybody out here has used them and what they think.
I can second that. One thing about every PC of say a comparable price to a MacBook Pro out there I notice is shoddy workmanship, the cut-corners approach they take. Say you went for a $1500 price point. For that, a PC will get you a bigger screen, more memory, more storage but w/o fail, poor quality in every instance. Take battery life, my biggest issue with any Windows laptop. My 2012 MacBook Pro's battery is still going strong. My 2014 Zbook's battery life is less than that of my Macbook. Earlier I had a Dell whose battery fizzled out in 6 months. Ditto the replacement battery. Then there is the Magsafe adapter. The Zbook's adapter's insulation frayed and I discarded it as unsafe. I honestly still see my Macbook in operation for at leats 2 years, I may replace the hard drive with a solidstate to improve performance but that is it.
Another Alastair Reynolds short story in the same vein is "A Murmuration" that I read (on my Kindle) in Interzone #257. In the story a flock of birds exhibits intelligence independently from the individual birds.
getBytes is poorly designed. In a safety-oriented language like Haskell or Rust, the set of encodings would be represented as an ADT (which forms a closed set) or s Typeclass (open set). All possible type-correct encoding arguments would be safe.
Query Composer Gem
Glucosio helps diabetics track blood sugar
Huge fan of Zaha Hadid. Really sad to read about her passing, brilliant brilliant and inspirational woman. Huge contributions to the art of architecture and landscape architecture. Rest well.
You deploy it on your own database, so I suppose your information security depends on you (or the DB-as-a-service provider you choose).
Try dealing with any of these "mandatory XYZ" crimes. In Colorado, for instance, when couples fight and the police are called, someone goes to jail, a mandatory order of protection is issued, you lose the ability to collect anything that you own in person (you must go through "mutual friends"), and if you live with your girlfriend/wife/fiance, you've also just lost the right to go to your own house.

So, having a fight that triggers a call to the police (even a verbal one, or slamming a door) will result in the XY going to jail for the night, paying for it, losing their house and most of their belongings, losing their job, being arrested (which is never expunged, even if innocent), and being homeless while you get a new job, house, clothes, etc.

Even if you're acquitted (I was completely acquitted of the lowest charge possible, which is a 3rd degree misdemeanor), it's not like your things magically show up, you still went to jail and lost your job, and the state doesn't care at all. The records should be expunged, the money that I paid to stay in jail ($35) should be refunded, and I should be given a police escort to force her to relinquish my things (thousands of dollars of things, photos, etc).

The system in CO is just a race to call the cops. Whoever goes first, wins. Slamming a door will immediately tag you as a "Domestic Abuser" and any guns (and ammo) must be kept at a friend's for the duration of the trial (which takes 6 months).

I won, and it certainly doesn't feel like "winning". :(
"Note that the total installed costs include the federal investment tax credit and any local rebates and tax incentives."

$3.50/W is WAY higher than I paid per watt last year after the federal tax rebate. I had 3.125kW installed on my roof for $2.16/W. Looking at the map, Denver gets grid parity between $2.00 and $2.50 and that has exactly been my experience with the panels.
Wow. Very, very nice!

If anyone from MS is listening:

All you need to do to potentially convert me from a Mac user is to address some of the privacy/security and "user exploitation" concerns around Windows 10.

When I heard that Windows 10 would serve ads to users, just hearing that blacklisted it for me. Anything that serves ads is a low-end bargain-basement crap product, period. You are pegging your entire ecosystem as discount bin trash with those moves. I don't mind paying for good stuff, but I won't even use that kind of crap for free. Apple would never serve me ads on my login screen.

I'm also very concerned about the total lack of user control over telemetry and phone-home features in Windows. Mac also has this problem, but less. You could leapfrog Mac by making this stuff visible and configurable to the user in an easy way via some kind of control panel. There is an opportunity to do better than Apple here.

It's not that I would turn it all off. I'm not a total paranoid in that respect. But I want to see what it is, what it is doing, and have the ability to control my privacy/security "envelope." Obviously if I am doing anything security critical like... oh... I dunno... developing software to be distributed to millions of endpoint devices... then I care a lot about security. Security is not just for huge "enterprise" customers.

(Privacy equals security equals privacy, since privacy invasion exposes information that can be used to violate security.)

Honestly, the fact of the matter is that Microsoft has a significantly weaker reputation for security and privacy than Apple. That makes me more concerned about MS software phoning home than Apple software. This is a major problem and you have to do something about it, and in the 21st century that means actually fixing the problem rather than relying on PR to con people into thinking you've fixed the problem.

The sorts of power users you are trying to convert with all this dev outreach stuff are not morons and they will see through any shallow commitment to security or privacy instantly. Pure PR plays in these areas will make you look worse, not better.

That is all.
UK-AL is right, today is the day to be awesome. My personal answer is that the people working at Microsoft are awesome. We built this product in less than 90 days based on existing platforms; we were given the freedom and resources to do that. Awesome things are going to happen when we have that kind of environment.
Hey Ian. Never intended for this to be posted so early (as it's clearly not ready). I'm getting some bugfixes out today that should address your problems.

The README on the master branch is the most current set of instructions.
3 Foundations of a Successful Data Integration Job -
Does self taught simply mean "doesn't have a CS degree?" I don't have a CS degree but I don't consider myself self taught because I didn't learn in a vacuum. I would say that 75% or more of what I know, I learned from great colleagues.