skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could it be that the future will value the ability to read code highly, where where writing it will be a specialisation?

Consider the discipline of western music. Many accomplished people learn to read music, but fewer to write it. Particularly to write at sophistication. Code is written to be read: when you compose choral music you need to be mindful of an individual chorister's ability to pitch intervals, and to find notes within the scale. (Handel and Haydn and Mozart are far easier to sightread than Bach and Beethoven.)

Strangely, our education system around computer code focuses on ability to write code first, and read code either as an afterthought, or not at all.

Our traditions come from programming languages which were very difficult to read. Unless you understood the tools for composition purposes, you probably couldn't read them. Even the early scripting languages were impenetrable.

Composition-focused languages like python and golang change that. Whitespace-orientation and named parameters/purpose-build-arg-structures help a lot. Also, you can write sophisticated python/go without understanding complex type systems. Compare to the mental checklist you run when you need to work out where a Java or C++ method call is being dispatched to.

Note that western musical system is far from general-purpose when it comes to the building blocks of sound waves. It has no mechanism for the rich world we call subtones, and it's not fantastic at rhythmic sophistication. Its strength is in the power you get within the tradeoffs between the notation and standardised instruments.
I agree that Rails' strong opinions are still a strength. I like Clojure a lot, but for someone new to the language trying to get a Clojure web app started is like pulling teeth. Elixir and Phoenix, with their connections to the Ruby community, really get this, and I think they provide a much better introductory experience.
Try this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alpha...
Governement research centers, such as Inria (in France), require researchers to publish their article for free (on HAL): http://www.inria.fr/en/news/news-from-inria/inria-champions-.... And I think that in this US, governement research must be published as public domain. More generally, the ones who give grants (NSF and so on) could require the research to be published in openaccess as one of the conditions to get the grant.
I've reached out to him personally with a question about something he wrote. He was quite polite and gave me far more time than I could expect as a random person from the internet.

Obviously I don't have any details about this interaction (and he's declined to share), but I'm not especially persuaded by the dark allusions here.
Also Perl CGI :)
Upwork alternative: Upwork will soon charge higher fees
Great comment. Regarding the possibility of charging for the work, I'll add that there's also concern about keeping volunteers on. You're spot on that people volunteer for the company and access to fun equipment, but for many there's also the element of being a 'heroic volunteer'. Once you start charging for escorting tourists who stubbed their toes, some of that glitz is gone.

Additionally, I've heard concerns from volunteers that if it's a paid service, the expectations change. Now, the volunteers can say 'no' if asked to do something they don't want to do. If it's a service that's charged for (even if it's the government putting in direct funding), the dynamics of the relationship change.

If adding government money to the mix results in fewer volunteers, it's likely that the cost of the operation would go up instead of down, as they'd need to add paid rescuers.

As an aside, this is similar to the issues the Tor Project has been discussing for a while. There are proposals to economically incentivize people to run exit relays. But right now, most exit relays are run at a loss to volunteers, and it's unlikely that such a scheme could actually pay for the entire cost of the infrastructure required. So what happens if you start paying, but less than the cost? It stops being altruistic, and becomes an economic calculation that does not make sense. It's likely that you'd lose a lot of the idealistic relay operators, which are exactly the ones you want to keep.
All keys are tracked in git's history, so it's a possible attack vector for hackers. You could use https://github.com/sobolevn/git-secret. But beware, anytime you revoke someone's access, you should regenerate all secrets stored in there.
In any case you should always regenerate the keys whenever someone's access is revoked
An internet comment is a great example of a use case the browser is good for because it's low effort, low in specialized skills, and disposable.

Now we're talking about writing applications with web technologies for high specialized skill and high effort tasks, e.g., code editors, photoshop clones, etc... Which is what a lot of us are skeptical of. These "professional" applications are designed to reward a huge investment in muscle memory, if you are putting so much effort into learning an application, you don't want the return on that investment to be stunted by limitations in the technology the tool is built with.
Ask HN: Do you send links to yourself?
I'm wondering, are there more people like me who is sending links to themself to open those links on other devices or to keep it?
> "I would no more urge everyone to learn to program than I would urge everyone to learn to plumb."

Agreed, but I would expect everyone to know how to flush a toilet. I think computer literacy is essential, not for your kid's career, but for your kid's life.
GitHub Add Unlimited Private Repos for Paid Plans – Lee Mason
Simple neural networks
This is a contender for the dumbest thread on HN of 2016. What doesn't it have? Drama? Gender parity arguments? Relitigating old threads? It's like an extravaganza of stupid.
anybody who thinks human beings are copy&paste robots and we should treat them only as numbers in balance sheet shouldn't be allowed to drive. or post here for that matter.

there you go. i just lowered myself to your level. ugly.
> Second you completely ignored millions of people who can't be significantly educated or handle significant responsibility, but can hold down low skill repetitive jobs

You seem to, at the core of your argument, have little faith in people's capabilities.

> Put down your blinders and try looking at the real world

I've done just that. We have an evolving economy, and we need to put things in place to enable a successful transition. Handing people money for nothing is not part of a successful transition; it only postpones the proper solution. That's wrong.
I disagree. I believe art should be whatever it wants to be. If someone wants to write a book glorifying "bad things", I say go for it. It might even be an interesting read.

Exploring the two sides of an issue (or three or four) should be done "away" from the book. We should confront those ideas with the real world and everything else we know. The author has no obligation to present those ideas fairly or truthfully. [1]

Parents should tech their kids to think critically, to accept that anything can be wrong or misleading. They should always evaluate what they learned and gather their own conclusions.

[1] And writing about X doesn't mean the author subscribes to X.
I built a website to post links to.
It's like you can gain a lot from just the first basic knowledge how to do things outside your main profession. In the same way as everyone should know how to sew a button or replace a fuse or power plug and save themselves a lot of money, knowing how to script your excel might save you countless hours. That doesn't mean that everyone should be professional tailors or electrical engineers, or developers.
It disappoints me as well.

Electron apps don't appear to play nice with the underlying API.

Take Spotify and Slack, for example. It makes sense that it should expose its API via AppleScript (on Mac), COM (on Windows), and DBUS (on Linux). These let you do neat things like, for example, use a PowerShell (or bash or AppleScript) script to update your Slack status to the name of the track that's playing.

Whether you'd WANT that specific functionality or not is beside the point, the fact that the functionality exists means that people will do cool things with it. More importantly, it means that people will do things the developer never thought of.
Actually, most 'injection' issues happen because of poor programming practices (not sanitizing input, not escaping SQL parameters, etc.) and not because databases don't support Unicode characters. It's not the OP or the grandparent's fault for not having a "nice-to-shitty-programs" name.
TypeScript?
As your neighbour to the north you make it sound like the Republican party has fractured into two groups. Those that are conservative (the Buckley Republicans in your example), and those ignorant masses that respond to jingoist and politico-entertainment rather than well thought out political debate. (I'm shocked that anyone would label them self a dittohead, implying that they have no independent thought, rather in my mind's eye that is a hurtful label that I'd reserve only for my worst enemy).

From what I've observed in this election cycle I can't disagree with your assessment, though I am deeply saddened at this realization.
"Learning to code" is a lifelong endeavor. You don't pick a laptop and set aside a few hours. You can't do that if you wanted to learn how to write poetry in French while only knowing English.
Scala + Play Framework, which incidentally was inspired by Rails, however in my opinion is much more consistent amongst other things.
I can't speak for the person you're replying to, but I think he's stating that there's lines in the sand that once you cross, sitting with HR and watching some dumb training videos and reading some policy documents is no longer sufficient recourse.

> Over the weekend... He asked to take the conversation off Slack (moved to Whatsapp) and asked if they could hang out (she said, "sure as friends in work context"), referred to her as a milf (ugh...), and asked if he could tell her a secret (she refused)[0]

In the context of the original post, I believe this is one of those cases. To tie this into the analogy to which you're responding, if one of my employees asked another to move off work-chat so he/she could assail him/her and was acting genuinely sleazy, I'd pack up the offending employee's desk, lock down accounts and access on Sunday night, and make sure I was there first on Monday to escort him/her out of the building.

The language that my team uses would make a drunk sailor blush, but I think this is a pretty clear case of justified firing. It's damn hard to hire a great team and nothing will destroy it faster than interpersonal issues.

0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11666857
Show HN: App install ad-network CPI Based, close to £0.01p/per install
That sounds like it's most equivalent to "squadered": http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/squander
The culture of a startup is a reflection of its economic context: A startup receives VC funding, has few employees to start with and must optimize growth in order to be successful. It's also a reflection of the power relationship of the founders and the other employees: the culture of a startup optimizes the values and preferred organizational structure of the founders. Startup culture does not cause these things, it is the reification of these relationships. It is symbolic.

It is an important characteristic of ideology that it is symbolic: it means that multiple people can interpret it in different ways. Which interpretations are "correct"? The ones that conform to the underlying power structure. The power structure punishes "misinterpretations" and rewards "correct" interpretations.

Just as different start-ups have different ideologies because they have different power structures and economic relations, Islam in the Middle East is not a coherent political ideology. The Islam of Iran reflects the organization of its government, not the other way around. The Islam of Saudi Arabia reflects the organization of its government, not the other way around.

The Islam of Da'esh, which is considered heterodox by literally every other sect of Islam, is a reflection of its power structures.

The same signs and ideas reflect different physical realities. What drives the development of signs and ideas? The physical reality. Only the material can propagate ideology, and only the material that propagates itself succeeds in the long-run.

What use is it to say that "Islam is a political religious ideology for most of the Middle East"? What analytic and predictive power does this statement have?
I used https://pragmaticstudio.com/elm to get me started.
Nice. How does it works?
Harvard and the University of California already have done this. I am not sure how widespread it is.

"In 2008, Harvard's Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted unanimously to give the University a nonexclusive, irrevocable right to distribute their scholarly articles for any non-commercial purpose. In the years since, the remaining eight Harvard schools voted similar open-access (OA) policies; as of late 2015, three research centers have joined their number." [1]

"The University of California is committed to disseminating its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In particular, as a public university system, the University of California is dedicated to making its scholarship available to the people of California. Furthermore, the University of California recognizes the benefits that accrue to its authors as individual scholars and to the scholarly enterprise from such wide dissemination, including greater recognition, more thorough review, consideration, and critique, and a general increase in scientific, scholarly, and critical knowledge. The University of California further recognizes that by such policies, authors of scholarly articles can more easily and collectively reserve rights that might otherwise be signed away, often unnecessarily, in agreements with publishers. To accomplish this, authors take advantage of US copyright law to grant to the University a non-exclusive license (limited to the purpose of making the work openly available) for each scholarly article authored while employed by UC." [2]

[1] https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/policies/

[2] http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-policy/pol...
Well, IMO the biggest thing is the economy -- people feel like they were sold a bill of goods with the experts coming in and telling them that free trade would be great and make them more prosperous and now they live in towns that are shadows of their past selves and suffer under- and unemployment.
I hate to be so negative and come down hard here, but no, no it doesn't. Life does not revolve around computers any more than it revolves around movies, cars, or food. Life is about experiences and relationships, happiness...(and love too with a bunch of mushy other crap). The sooner we all realize this, the better.
Regarding 2 - Do you mean the destination repo has uncommitted changes? There is no need to nuke them, as pushing to this repo will have no influence on the working set: it will just add new changesets in the history!
I like to compile and install my own OS images on the hardware I purchase. Of course the smartphone industry does not make that easy, if at all possible.

Hence I am forced to choose other form factors.

It would be nice to flash my own choice of BIOS. As far as I can tell this is still not too common. That is a project to which I am willing to devote large amounts of time should the information needed ever become public.

It seems the newer the hardware the more complicated and difficult this becomes. By my estimation, there is certain value in older hardware because it is not as complicated and can be easier to control.

Here is an idea that stays with me year after year: another open source OS project that chooses a single item of hardware and supports only that item.

Silly fantasy: Perhaps a deal is struck with one or more factories that can produce it. Perhaps the terms could be public. Maybe user-developers become faithful and loyal buyers of the hardware, because they like the control. Perhaps they directly pay the costs of production through donations. I have no idea what would happen. That's the point of trying it.

Building this sort of symbiotic relationship between open source user-developers and a single hardware manufacturer based on a single item, one could reason it is in the best interest of the manufacturer to open the specs to the developers, if not the public.

I leave it to you to list all the many reasons this is not worth doing. Then sit back and enjoy the status quo.

But for those of you who are avid users of an open source OS, I ask you to consider:

Do you ever get tired of watching the project trying to keep pace with new hardware? How do you feel about when the manufacturers will not disclose the specs? Are you OK with binary blobs in your "open" system? How about not knowing whether your OS of choice is going to work with your new hardware? What if there was one item of hardware that you could be absolutely sure was always going to work with your preferred open source OS, and to its maximum capacity?

OK, you may now return to chasing the new (locked-down) hardware. Thank you for your time.
> often I find unused gems they are afraid to remove them in case it actually is being used,

I've worked on code-bases of small to medium size where people were afraid to remove self-written code because nobody knew if the code is actually called somewhere. It's not actually the gem that's the problem - it's being diligent. If you need a gem's function add it as top level dependency, don't rely on some other gem depending on it. require the code explicitly everywhere you use it. That way you can at least search your code base for it. Be equally diligent when removing code: Remove all code that only this code depended on. Other than that: Don't be afraid to break stuff.
Look at it from the other side. They're debugging your shitty code, too.
By calling her a MILF he just said he wanted to have sex with her.

That's obscene and thats's harrassment.
Gaining some product traction
Hello all,

I have a couple of projects that I've built (I'm a full stack developer) and I'm trying to come up with a strategy on how to take it to the next step. I have 0 marketing and business knowledge or experience so I'm interested in hearing about how others have approached going from 0 to anything basically.

One product I have is an interactive text messaging service that businesses can use to reach out to customers. I would like to sell it as subscription service. Is the answer really to just go door to door and try to get meetings with relevant individuals and pitch the idea to them? Do i throw up a website and send out a bunch of links and try to get clients that way?

Thanks for any advice. I'm always looking to learn how to improve.
Yup.

"With no credentials I was able to work hard on my own for a year and then landed an entry level position with very good future prospects."

What other lucrative professional industry is this easy to break into?
Actually when I see that stream of events, it makes me really wonder what's the next step...
> Elizabeth Parrish, CEO of the biotech company BioViva, claims that her body's cells are 20 years younger after testing her company’s age-reversing gene therapy on herself.

> The 45-year-old Seattle-area woman, who has no scientific or medical training, underwent the experimental treatment last September in an undisclosed clinic in Colombia. The unorthodox, overseas trial, which was designed to skirt US federal regulations, prompted the resignation of one of the company’s scientific advisors. George Martin, of the University of Washington, quit after telling MIT Technology Review, "This is a big problem. I am very upset by what is happening. I would urge lots of preclinical studies.”[0]

She'll be raising a series A in no time.

0: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/ceo-tests-crazy-genet...
A git repo is usually shared over multiple machines/developers. So the chance of someone publicating it is larger. As well as the entire history is usually copied everywhere
It seems to me that a version of the Innovator's Dilemma might apply to software frameworks as well.

By the time a project gets large enough it starts optimizing for its major stakeholders. New use cases or new ways of rethinking common use cases come along, and the small libraries that approach it from scratch have a narrowly-defined advantage. If the advantage is significant enough (e. g. virtual dom for browser UI), then new frameworks start being written around them, bringing back some but not all of the features of the older frameworks.

At some point (different for each user/use case) the newer frameworks have enough functionality that people start considering them over the older ones for new projects. When enough of that happens, the older frameworks start looking like yesterday's software.
It may have been su3su2u1 on tumblr. Their blog is now deleted, but google serves up some reblogs of the two posts in question:

http://thathopeyetlives.tumblr.com/post/128372419510/is-ther...

http://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/129387704618/conversation...

I should note that they deleted their account over a controversy over false claims they made about their credentials (massive oversimplification), so take the posts with a grain of salt.

Also, IIRC the startup in question wasn't uBeam.
Equivalent of printing "Welcome Master" ;-)
Sigh. Yes, boring is the right word.

For some reason you assume people are implausibly stupid, and not just in this thread but as a general approach. It does make for very boring discussions where I have to explain things like this: I know when germs, bacteria, viruses etc were understood...I also know that the macro evidence of diseases were observed and understood at some level much, much earlier.

I made it clear from the outset that I was discussing the merely plausible, but you decided to trudge down that path anyway...I'm not sure why you are trying to saddle me with that decision that you made nor how your boredom is my responsibility.

Please feel free to ignore any comments of mine that you find boring in the future and keep out of that portion of the thread...I will be sure to do the same in regards to you.
Brazil’s Democracy to Suffer Grievous Blow Today
"Nuke em from orbit" is a quote from the movie Aliens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCbfMkh940Q

I think (hope) it's being used in that playful way.