skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish I stuck to things I really love (programming and data analytics). After 10 years of switching goals to the most trendy careers of the day, I unfortunately realize that my start was actually the most suited for my interests, personality and skills and in retrospect had the maximum potential of a very financially rewarding payoff profile
I'm a self-taught programmer with around 15 years of experience. (I studied physics)

The one thing I really miss from not studying computer science is a network of programmer friends. It's a lot harder to meet new people after university. I'm currently trying to hire my first employee, and the advise I usually get is "hire your friends from university" -- but that doesn't work if non of them are programmers.

You can meet new people at meetups etc, but it takes a lot of effort.
Apparently you haven't seen this comic: https://xkcd.com/927/

Got a question? Ask Stack Overflow.

Want a reference? Get a real book.

Want to learn programming? Go practice.
What are you doing now you're no longer a partner at YC?
Sparkpost does template management through their website and the API.
In a past life I founded/operated a conversion rate optimization company.

One of our all time most successful tests was related to this story and happened almost by accident.

The client had just rolled out new packaging and wanted help validating the change statistically, very similar to this situation.

Their metric was measuring upsells to a premium product after a purchase, and like Candy Japan, found statistically insignificant results.

But the new packaging was beautiful and we wanted to test it on their landing page.

We tried just replacing the old product image on landing page. Meh results, no real bump.

We tried increasing the size of the image + circling with "Improved" (no joke). 10% bump. Interesting.

We hired a professional model to hold the product and smile. 15% bump. !?

We hired a group of professional models to hold the product and smile. 40% bump in sales. !@%K$!?

We re-hired the same group of people to hold product, look SUPER excited (jumping up and down like their team just won the superbowl). 50%+ bump in sales.

No joke.

If Candy Japan is reading and you'd like some help recreating I would not be shocked to see something similarly group oriented, visceral, and beautiful bump yeh.
When code is suspiciously fast: adventures in dead code elimination
Having fun with my 9 mo old son, and working on some new stuff I can hopefully talk about soon!
What's the market like for a software engineer in Wellington? Was in town a few weeks ago and loved every minute. Raglan Roast has got to be one of my top 5 coffee joints of all time!
10 years quant/trader

1. Make more friends.
2. Have more sex.
15 years as a web dev here.

1. Learn to sell. The single biggest hindrance to my career to date has been not learning how to sell myself and my work to management. My entire life I was always told that if I did good work I would be recognized for it. That's a big fat lie, especially in a field where your manager doesn't necessarily understand what it is you do. Sales is also applicable to everything from finding a new job to freelance to consulting to selling side projects. It's probably your most important skill, bar none, even programming.

2. Pick an industry to specialize in, not a technology. Basically, be an X who can program instead of yet another JS programmer.

3. Stay away from the video game industry.

4. Always take care of your mental and physical health first. Burning out blows.
Wrong depiction of India's map can land you in jail up to 7 years
The Illumos Syscall Handler
Best TED Talk ever
15 years as a Software Developer. Mostly freelance, with 5 years at a relatively successful [acquired] startup, and now back to freelance.

I would have managed my money better. Not that I spent every dime on B.S., as I'm naturally frugal. But I would like to have had enough put away so I could spend more time working on personal projects, and maybe have more stretches of time to dedicate to hobbies.

Otherwise, I've had a very long string of luck and opportunity that allowed me to work on fascinating projects with consistently talented and interesting people, so I'm not sure I would have changed much else.
I have increasingly been noticing such writing from the Guardian.

Witness this:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/05/republican-no...

It is so damn clear that this guy is the nominee that even his most obstinate, pig-headed and ESTABLISHMENT funded opponent has withdrawn -- and yet the Guardian says he faces a "difficult" path.
Well, that looks rather unpleasant.
the parent comment might have been worded better, but it has a point, i.e. removing published code generally has to be supported in some way to handle special situations, e.g.

* people publish stuff inadvertently (i.e. private information/keys)
* people publish stuff they are not allowed to (i.e. copyright and trademark violations)
* people publish stuff you do not want to see published (i.e. stuff related to breaking legal or ethical laws)

It can be argued that users must not do that or that cargo.io doesn't have to oblige, but if they, for example, get a DMCA notice they'll still have to.
"Rapey"? Are you serious? I'm just really having trouble wrapping my head around this. How does that picture convey anything close to "rapey"?
12“ MacBook: A Laptop for Writers (Review)
The original Super Wild Card can actually play DSP games if you have a DSP cart inserted. It's the only enhancement chip that will work with pass-through on the SWC. Of course the sd2snes is a superior solution but we didn't have that 20 odd years ago when the SNES was still in its prime. ;) I've contemplated getting an sd2snes but my 32Mb SWC (original model, pre DX) is still working great after all these years and runs probably over 95% of available games. sd2snes doesn't actually support that many enhancement chips yet so I don't it's worth the investment over what I've already got. I'll probably end up getting one when more chips are supported.

I must say that your SNES<>PC interface sounds great. Do you have a website with more information?
to build authority in the fields that interest me, and use it as a marketing channel for launching side projects. Long term blogging is career insurance
Those are great points. I'm actually hoping to be convinced that I should stop using the new box, because it costs more.

Maybe I should start calling this the plain vs. rapey test.
Millennials and the Working Class Are Leaving America's Expensive Cities
Async I/O pull request for hyper
How did the dingo get to Australia?
We agree. I think there was a bit of misunderstanding. I don't think transitive unsafe is appropriate.

Only crates which use `unsafe` explicitly should need to be whitelisted.

Fun Example: I need to depend on Iron. Iron boasts in its README that it doesn't use `unsafe`. Cool.

However, Iron depends on Hyper. Hyper is complicated, it needs to use `unsafe`, I can understand that. Hyper is also used by a lot of people, I trust it, and whitelist Hyper. My build passes, I know only `std` and Hyper use `unsafe`.

Why is this helpful?

Hasn't happened yet but @reem, being human, adds an `unsafe`[0] and lets Iron's README go out of date. It happens. However, as a user, I don't like to trust documentation, and I don't like to trust other developers[1]. When I update to this version of Iron, I'd rather my builds now failed. Then I can decide if this escalation of responsibility is appropriate.

This is especially true in an enterprise context where teams of new hires do whatever it takes to push features, and "accidentally" push some really unsafe code to a deep dependency[2].

[0] Lets pretend this `unsafe` was actually used in production code: https://github.com/iron/iron/commit/ba4d197030067d4347134c2e...

[1] Hence my other preferences for type checking, core reviews, and tests.

[2] Not everything is manually catchable in code reviews. Sometimes its 3am. Sometimes whoever it was, was really new and the CR is 14 pages long and needs to be deployed Thursday! Sometimes a reviewer is just having an off-day. It happens.
Joel Spolsky: How to build, manage and scale effective engineering organization
I can see how that might be the case. Current subscribers might know me personally or through my blog. That would then mean that as I start to reach out to people who don't know me personally, these results could change.
The Man Who Invented Modern Probability
> - The picture itself is kind of creepy, someone walking past my desk once even described it as 'rapey'.

This person may have some deeper issues than just the innocent picture on this box.
But why would you ever intentionally use (or vigorously defend) demonstrably bad tools? Just because you could do well with a bad tool doesn't mean you should or that you couldn't do better with easy-to-get other, better tools.

If you are forced to use an inferior tool like Agile, then sure, you want to make the best of it and be a craftsman who can still succeed.

That is an endorsement of being adaptable and self-reliant as an engineer, not an endorsement of Agile.

And if a tool is bad like Agile, it's useful to point it out and slowly steer the bureaucracy that feeds it into bastardizing whatever the next tool is, but hopefully inching forward to a better global state as well.
One thing is always clear -- a big Co's interest is not always your interest.

Which is why I love what Sindre is doing -- letting us to customise our experience with products that ignore it by themselves. I wish there were more projects doing that. Demand is definitely there.
My last lump sum was $21,000 for three weeks of consulting (my own practice).

I'm not sure if this counts however, as it's a case of my salary being paid out every three or four weeks (depending on the pipeline) instead of every two weeks.

I've never received a lump sum of more than 20 or maybe 30 thousand at once. I have received a five figure bonus before though.
I never knew that.. thanks, that is very interesting..
I signed up for CandyJapan several years ago when they were just getting things started. I canceled after probably 3 shipments. Each shipment I was only hoping that the next would contain better products and actually be worth the value in which I was paying. Unfortunately that never happened. While a cool concept and very eye catching, that's all it is. Importing candy is expensive no matter how you go about it. Most people just want a poke to see how it is, and then move on to something else.
The NI stuff, in my opinion, is an over engineered mess, designed to force you into using LabView and really don't work with anything except their proprietary windows driver architecture.
The Cleveland kidnapper kept 3 women forcibly imprisoned in his house for 10 years before someone noticed. It's definitely possible to "hide in plain sight."
Package persistence is not really a dependency manager feature though, it's a package repository feature. npm didn't fail; npmjs.com did.

I'm just waiting for this to happen to bower next. AFAIK they're just a registry pointing to github. All it's going to take is someone doing a force push without thinking and we're in this same situation again.
Seems like a prime opportunity for specialist and heavily (quality) moderated marketplaces to take market share.
Why does this need to be an active project? If software works as described, what else does one need?
maybe, but maybe not.

It's a differentiator, all other things equal. But it's not "insurance."
Yes, about double the value.
Recent large-scale research suggests dose-risk relationship holds at small doses for leukemia:

http://www.nature.com/news/researchers-pin-down-risks-of-low...
Value is just like a variable, it is a place holder for what matters. And the value of the value can vary depending on the person or the situation. It could be a positive or a negative value, a value of high importance or minimal importance. Assigning something a value just basically means you're not entirely disinterested in it.
Criticisms of FB notwithstanding (and it's interesting how that dominates this discussion), time-on-site is a horrible measure of "value added" to me.

I've found highly-directed, highly-filtered, low-noise, low-distraction envrionments are what give me return.

Interfaces and services like ... Books. A notebook. Index cards for noting thoughts and ideas. Tangibles which I can hold, flip through, sort, take outside, read in sunlight, and don't offer me the option of clicking over to see my feed or who's responded to me.

(And no, I don't have a FB account either, never have.)
ICML2015 Deep Learning Workshop Videos
I don't really think A/B testing something like this, with this size of a sample, on a subscription based niche-product can give you any real insights.

Why not poll your subscribers or (assuming you can get the costs to work out) have an option for anime art. Personally I wouldn't want the anime style box, something custom and simpler would be fine.. but thats my personal opinion.
It was not expanded. i think you're referring to the FASTR bill that has not yet (but hopefully will soon be) passed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Access_to_Science_and_T...
The most surprising thing to me is how I feel about math and academic subjects.

First decade in the workforce I thought math and academic CS were kind of a waste of time - it was so easy to be productive and respected as a programmer without it, just by using logic and thinking.

But... as you get more senior and start dealing with concurrency and distributed systems, surprise! Mathy stuff is valuable. Big-O stuff, but also just recognizing what different scales feel like. It's weird to realize that things like e and ln are all of a sudden directly relevant to life.

It's disappointing that a lot of math classes in college never seemed to focus on the intuitions of what those concepts feel like. Anyway, I would have spent more time earlier on getting facile with mathematical thinking - critical thinking, bayesian reasoning, advanced math, etc.
That works under the assumption that humans are purely rational beings, which we are not. Though I don't necessarily think the design chosen was a great choice based on other comments here. Maybe something a bit more generic, yet still colourful (like the candies in games like candy crush) would have been a better choice.
That's precisely what makes this article brilliant on multiple levels. I'm a hard core lefty who thinks the Dems are too conservative and I'm laughing with the paper and at myself.
One of the bigger arguments is also "it only works on Linux, what about BSDs, OS X, etc.?"
Thanks. Yes it costs much more to send candy in individual boxes from here, so if you want more candy per dollar it is definitely better to visit a Japanese market if there is one near you.
I'm not suggesting that at all. I am suggesting that women won't elect someone that will give their husbands an additional, legal avenue to cheat on them.
No, that was under a communist dictatorship.

That was 100% government employment to the exclusion of the private purpose.

It was a centrally planned economy where the government determined what everyone should do at all times.

A Job Guarantee, on the other hand (which I'll explain because you obviously didn't look at any of the links I posted in my initial comment, but rather went off your pre-existing opinions) is a guarantee by the government that if the private sector will not or can not employ someone, they will be given a good job by the government.

I won't bother providing additional links, you're obviously only interested in dealing with straw men.
It's also worth noting that the Pakistani military/ISI are not under the control of the democratic government, even today (and much more so in the mid-to-late 90's)
View Amir Najam Professional and Educational Info at Mendeley
The quantum age of computing is here
mention it to him next time you see him in person and see what happens. be prepared @balladeer, -- he might deny it!
notice that some of the really old ones (perl, tex) have had package managers for a really, really long time.

I think linux (*nix?) vs non-linux heritage might have something to do with it.
18 years in Director of Engineering for the last 8, various engineer titles before that, mostly in small to mid sized startup web shops.

The thing I wouldn't change: working for organizations in transition. I have learned to love the words "migration" and "re-platform", I love the (growing) pain(s), I love change.

The thing I would do differently: Taking the "next job" rather than waiting for a job I know I will love.
So instant coffee should be regulated by FDA? What about table salt? Also sold in deadly amounts everywhere. Vinegar?

I am not even talking about toxic common household chemicals - just the food items, directly intended for consumption.

I have no doubt FDA would love to regulate all of the above but it's specifically prevented from this. AFAIK it cannot regulate substances, which were in use when FDA was established. I hope somebody takes them to court since nicotine had been in use long before FDA.
Writing code for 20y. "Official" workforce something like 10y. MS and PhD in Comp Sci. Software Dev as a part of research project during that time, so 6y there. Day-jobbing as a developer now for ~3y. Freelancing for the past 6-7 years part time.

Knowing what I know now, I'd have started freelancing earlier in grad school, I missed out for most of the MS. Once I started that finances got easier and lets face it I had plenty of free time before I had kids (even with all the research).

I'd probably still do the PhD, I enjoy the intellectual stimulation that comes from science + programming. It's a nice change of pace from the apps and enterprise software I work on while freelancing
You can meet new people at meetups etc, but it takes a lot of effort.

I'm running up against the same walls, too, when I go to local user group meetings. Then I also find out my interests are mostly different from theirs.
I'm not "building argumentative trenches" - you made a relatively strong statement that things happened a particular way and gave nothing in the way of explanation, evidence, or elaboration. As any of those would have been interesting, I asked for some. I didn't intend to say you were wrong.

I'm not sure what definition I can give that would clarify matters, but an example of "a recognition of danger with incorrect attribution of cause" would be something like "a community was affected by a particularly visible STI; someone noticed that it was afflicting those who were more promiscuous; decided promiscuity was being punished and therefore bad." I don't see any reason to treat this as less likely than any other specific story, without evidence given in either direction. That doesn't mean it's likely - any specific story is unlikely, a priori.
Did you create an account just to post this ;)?
I'd still do crazy stuff (I've done about 5 individual things which were relatively risky -- running away from home/dropping out to go to college early w/o any money or financial aid, offshore ecash, datahaven, 3 separate warzone projects, a startup (lowest risk thing BY FAR)).

I got trapped in some of these and couldn't leave/do something new once it was clear the thing should end, because I didn't have the resources to do that (i.e had no real money whatsoever). Figuring out a way to get around that would be high on my list -- bailing on HavenCo in 2001 to join Google would have been a great choice; bailing on the warzone stuff in 2006-2007 once I'd learned everything I'd wanted to learn, to go back to doing a startup, would have been the right choice.
I have 10+ Slack teams associated with my one email address
Be a lot more critical of "expert" opinions. Including legal and medical.

I have some smart friends who got stoned now and then. They seem to have ended up happier.

Even the one who was nearly lost to it, wholesale. (And who's still struggling, but hopefully on the upside...)

At least she lived her life.

Me? Too scared by the rhetoric. Too anxious from the bullying. Ultimately, a mountain of regrets.

As they say, better to have really lived, briefly, than to have suffered long.

Go out and live. And, those who seek to scare you -- if you look closely and eventually gain some perspective, it turns out to be for their benefit. Fuck them.

Yeah, and do what you fucking want. Just realize that it's not always how you make a living. Sometimes, you find a way to make a living, so that you can then do what you want in your free time.

P.S. Yes, this is career advice. As in, make sure it's your career. And then, make the most of it. Whether it's one thing, or a dozen.

Cheers
The Science magazine article seemed to me scarce on a number of critical details which are made clear in the abstract: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...

Of particular interest is the fact that the study tries to account for the effects of activity, which is obviously widely variable across human societies and individuals (e.g. French professional cyclist versus Khomani San tracker versus Japanese Sumo wrestler). The abstract specifies that they found an elevated basal metabolic rate, which is activity independent. There is the important and interesting issue of variance. A closer look at Figure 1 one might help in this regard (alas, a paywall...).
We've banned this account for egregiously violating the HN guidelines. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11639435 and marked it off-topic.
I came here to say this, but you put it perfectly. It's amazing how I got through so many years before truly respecting and wanting to learn more math. It's been a huge focus now that I've worked the trenches long enough to see the real value.
"Extreme Programming" always made me giggle. I mean, during that era, I was rarely seen without a can of mountain dew by my desk, but still.
This. My recent encounter in this space was a Nordic NRF51822 BLE chip bought as a 3$ breakout board from Aliexpress, wiring it via STM32 and compiling it using GCC and MBED ...and skipping over the expensive official compiler.

The future is mobile!
minor factual adjustment: "go get" doesn't update a package once it's been downloaded. you need to force it.

"there is no guarantee that a build will be the same from day to day" is simply not true.
To really scale a complex architecture, certainly there are other things you need to do, like setting up database replication and/or sharding, caching, and other scaling strategies.

That can typically be done from Node by simply adding the "use pooling" option in your database library (or sometimes by switching to the NPM for that database that enables pooling), and when you have additional slave databases, adding those to the database init call.

As far as Node is concerned, it really is that easy. Scaling PHP, though, pretty much requires that you add more threads, which means (after a point) you need a lot of RAM, or just adding more instances and load balancing between them.

Node won't prevent database scaling issues, but it will keep the part that it does handle a lot easier to maintain.
I think the key is that crates.io (and rubygems.org, nuget.org, etc.) as repo owners have to own the removal operation themselves and not delegate that to the package owner/maintainer. The repo owner is better positioned to take package consumers' needs into account and make good decisions about when and how to remove a package.

As far as satisfying support requests: obviously exceptional stuff like DMCA gets handled, but package owners publishing keys, etc. is still their responsibility and shouldn't accelerate or even guarantee removal IMO. If you publish secrets, it's not crates.io's responsibility to help you hide that mistake, and you need to be changing those secrets anyway.
( .) ( .)

>... "The Pakistani equivalent of a McMansion in Falls Church"
'Silicon Valley’ Is Secretly Teaching You About the Real Tech Industry