skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this what people really are looking to stop:

"Tim just got a new phone. Tim needs his IT friend/family member to help him add wifi to his phone. However, by help, Tim hands the friend/family member the phone and now it works!"

Like others have said, the layman wants "computer science", but really wants "computer literacy". Phones, software, technology changes so fast that current teaching methods become outdated in years (I'm looking at you Intro to Computers classes). As computer literate users, we get you go to "Settings" and poke around til you see something like "Network" and then something like "Wireless" or "WiFi" and are set. However, would I do this same behavior with a car? Pop the hood and poke around?

Computer Science seems like the route to people because of the side benefit of "figuring it out on your own" comes naturally after 3 weeks of programming. Don't understand something? You have to pool every resource you have (instructor notes, slides, books, websites, etc.) to 'get' it. And even then its not an 'AHA' moment. Its a pray and 'whew' when whatever you did works.

But somewhere along the way, most programmers pick up that 'it', that computer savvy-ness that people are looking for. They want to stop being dependent on IT people because all we do is huff and puff about how simple a task is (regardless of program, if someone asked you how to bold text, how would you get them to bold the text WITHOUT pointing at the screen?).

Personally, it doesn't have to be "learn computer science", but it needs to be a complete redesign to the "Intro to Computers" style class.
Isn't that the problem, though? GitHub has one Issue tracker that is "good enough" for most projects I've worked on, and gets better over time because GitHub dog foods it (even if they don't always see some of the large open projects issues with it). Bitbucket has two Issue trackers, a "sort of useful" minimalist one that is worse than GitHub's and an upsell to Jira which is maximalist overkill for any project I've worked on. Atlassian doesn't have much incentive to make Bitbucket's issue tracker any better than it's current "almost decent" because it wants to upsell Jira. You can pretty much assume that Atlassian only works in Jira themselves.

(Similarly, VS Team Services has only one issue tracker and I'd rather use that than both of Atlassian's offerings, even though it's almost equally maximalist with Jira, mostly because they clearly dog food it and don't try to upsell into it from a worse system that nobody wants to use.)
Well, he is presuming that the increased performance of a typical desktop makes the performance difference smaller. Considering that Atom performs pretty well even on my five year old desktop, that seems like a reasonable assumption. Although I think this is discounting the fact that the performance difference between desktop and mobile platforms is shrinking every year.

I agree with you with regards to multithreading, though. It seems like that is actually important on both the desktop and mobile for compute intensive tasks.
I think (and have often said) there are too many software developers.

However, I also believe that way too few people are technologically literate, and if anything that number seems to be going further down. To live effectively in an information society, people should not only be aware of what computers do, but they should also be able to write small programs that help them in daily life, as opposed to relying on the umpteenth horrible web service to accomplish trivial data processing.

So, more people who know how to code basic stuff can only be a net-positive as our society is moving away from manual labor. At the same time though we need less people becoming actual programmers. Our profession is absolutely flooded with people who are less than competent.
Learn to code. Coding is a horrible profession from many perspectives. Many people have tried and failed to do it as a full time job. Many people who do it don't do it well.
I hear horror stories like this, and I have one of my own.

1. Absolutely no tests of any kind

2. Over 100 gem dependencies

Upgrade from 3.2.x to 4.2.x took one developer (me) three weeks of work. I don't know if that's a lot or not, given the major version upgrade and all of the gems (which were a huge pain). I've not had any problems in production reported via Honeybadger or by end users, so I think the upgrade was a success. I did end up writing about 200 unit and integration specs during the process.

I'm thinking back to my days in the .Net world at BigCorp. Unfortunately I have nothing to compare it to, because we never upgraded anything from one major version of ASP.NET MVC to another. Is that a better situation?
The design is nice enough, but the UX is awful, and pretty much for only one reason: search.

It seems to be a site listing charts, stats, data. Scrolling down or using the "Explore" nav item top-left works fine for browsing.

Search seems to be a secondary feature that is a simple keyword search on site content (the kind of site search that's usually subtle and off to one side), as opposed to a deliberately designed and targeted search on specific content facets. For some odd reason some designer has thought this should be front and centre despite being not a very good way to find anything specific. Adding the following CSS rule would massively improve the site:

.hero .search-container { display: none; }

Otherwise, it seems nicely put together
The parent is already experienced in Go and expressed interests in other languages, excuse me for indulging them :).
Using Electron with Haskell
I'm aware of the implications concerning the history, but sorry, the machine park is two machines. Setting up vault would just be total overkill. The people that have access to that repo change like once every few years. The repo will never go public. Let's keep the solution at least somewhat tailored to the problem.
Fedora 24 Beta released
Maybe I'm conflating several of my issues with webapps in the word "toy". One thing is ergonomics, bloat and lag issues. But the other thing is that webapps trying to fill in the role that originally belonged to desktop apps are more often than not pretty dumbed down. There are several reasons for that - one is performance, which makes you unable to add more complex features without making the entire webapp unbearably slow. Another is the business approach of sticking to MVPs and not really progressing beyond them.

Also, lag issues are not really limited to high-end graphics / video editing. Sure, lag/low performance makes those tasks basically not doable in the browser. But even "ordinary" webapps - like word processors or issue trackers - are annoyingly slow. Take Jira for example - I'm probably wasting a few (billable) hours every month just because it's not a desktop app. So are all of my co-workers. It's most likely also the reason people tend to batch time reporting and do it once a week or so (it's much less distracting then), which as a result precludes management from having access to up-to-date information about time spent on tasks.

Trivial inconveniences can have non-obvious impact.
It is hard to call prescient or insightful a model of the economy that doesn't take into account government actions.
Exactly this. I think the article misunderstands, and/or misinterprets, the Learn To Code "movement". It's not a call to enlist more people as software engineers, it's a desire to teach powerful problem solving techniques and tools to everyone.
> Query string and fragment are encoded using page encoding and then percent-escaped. For URLs entered to address bar it seems that UTF-8 is used, not page encoding.

Well, for links that appear in a page to be defined using page encoding doesn't sound so shocking. That doesn't explain why the path would use UTF-8 regardless of page encoding, though.

Are you sure URLs directly entered in the address bar use UTF-8 for query strings and fragments rather than system encoding? If my OS is set to use GB2312, how do URL fragments that I type into the browser get encoded?
I was wondering about whether this would happen. I am not enough of an expert to make a call on this either way of course, but if experts decided this was the right call would it even be possible to cancel/reschedule the Olympics? Imagine the financial impact on Rio.
I just rewatched the video, module the actual killing part. He's having a conversation and pretty animated, waving his arms Italian style, when the police grab him. Almost immediately he's put into a chokehold.

Clearly the personal attacks bolster your case.
Correction to my comment above: On taking out my Dictionary of British Sign Language, I find that there is indeed an intricate notation used throughout.
The learn to code movement created to get more H1B visas for Microsoft rather than fulfill an actual need:

http://www.slashdot.org/story/275175
Report to Congress on Trans-Pacific Partnership
Android Library – Integrate Mulitple Services with Just One API
Do you have an example of such a chart for the terminally lazy such as myself?
What kind of bad things will happen if people are able to see what you are doing?
One city’s solution to drinking water contamination? Get rid of every lead pipe
Designing a New Look for Instagram, Inspired by the Community
Python doesn't have large community support?
They did use electron. Confirmed by viewing `/Applications/WhatsApp.app/Contents/Frameworks/Electron*`
Why would that be a general rule. I track my personal passwords in git (using pass). I'm the only person with access to that repo. I just like to have a history - and the convenient way of moving files around and merging changes.
I don't understand the aversion to teaching people things specifically because it will help them on a job. Education should prepare people to lead fulfilling lives as part of a peaceful, cohesive society. Knowing how to solve other people's problems is a huge part of that in a society where not all work is done by robots.
No, his remarks have an obvious tone of urgency. If after 5 years nothing has happened (and actually the opposite has), then his credibility is damaged.
Just wanted to add that if you don't want to run GitLab yourself our GitLab.com is free with unlimited private repositories but it also has also unlimited private collaborators https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/
One doesn't need to be an economic historian to understand that the economy and market run in cycles.

There is always an "inevitable correction" somewhere in the future, but in this endeavor, it's timing that matters.

It’s probably not fair to pick on Icahn in particular, who is not really a perma-bear. There are far better examples (e.g. Marc Faber), who despite being demonstrably wrong year after year with their end of world predictions, are always welcome back on Bloomberg and CNBC explaining how the world markets are about to fall apart.
Late to this party, sorry. Just saw your blog post, commenting here.

I agree with you that the female in this story handled the situation optimally. I recently made a sexual harassment claim at a megacorp. It was handled much as you described. I was pleased by the whole process and outcome. Much improved, very different from how these things were handled in the 90s.

I agree with patio11's advice that the founder should lawyer up. Being a startup, they probably don't have mature processes. Lawyer + HR can instruct founder how to handle this situation legally, professionally.

I disagree that the new hire should be summarily fired for a first offense. But as a dude I predict this guy will eventually be fired; it's best to start that documentation now.
Hence a lot of people have problems with calling our field 'engineering,' when you compare the training and licensure of programmers with 'real' engineers. I personally like it, though I prefer programmer over engineer regardless.
TaxiLater Lets You Schedule an Uber for Later
This advice is as good as someone saying "please don't learn to play music".

Not only is is bad advice since there is obviously value in learning to play music even though you are never going to become a professional musician.

But saying don't learn to code it's like saying "please don't learn this category of language which will make you able to communicate with the very ecosystem that is increasingly dominating your life.

It's like saying. "Please be illiterate in the most important language you can learn besides your native one for the future"

In Denmark there is an expression "fagidiot" meaning idiot of their trade. I.e. people who are so puritan about what they do that any mistake is considered almost fatal.

It's like going to the movies with your friends from the army who can't enjoy a war movie because a gun doesn't really sound like that or you can't fire that many rounds of your M-16.

The probper advice is of course' "Please learn everything you consider interesting, and keep learning even if you suck at it and will never become a professional. Learning something means growing as a person."
Ah then you are a different category from mine. There is no way i could charge that money. Or at least i don't have ways to approach clients that pay as much. I don't know who it can potentially be and why any work i could do may worth as much.
> have little faith in people's capabilities.

2.2% of the US population has an IQ below 70.
8.9% of the US population has an IQ below 80.

Not all of these people are capable of being even minimally productive, but some are on the line where they are productive but only in a limited fashion. IQ is of course not the only limitation, intelligent people also often have issues.
If you want unlimited private repositories, just use bitbucket instead. It's free instead of $7 a month.
Thank you for sharing these articles. The first one from vox really feels like it underlines not only the smugness that's crept into liberalism, but also its tone is exasperated and at times even pleading.

It feels like a reflection of the mood of our general political discussion, where people are pissed off with the echo chamber and not getting the empathy that's needed from either direction to make livable decisions. This feels like one of those situations where human nature hasn't changed, but the internet has fundamentally altered social dynamics.
That's true. It's an enabler for some companies, which can only be applauded. I'm not sure I'm too happy with the "worse is better than nothing" mentality I guess, but that's a more general problem :)
Why not mandatory? Lots of other core, useful skills are.
A lot of programs are single-use throwaway scripts customized for a specific use case, or at best have a lifetime measured in months or years. Whereas with music there are centuries-old pieces that are still perfectly usable and probably better than what a composer would produce as a replacement. So no wonder our attitudes towards reading and writing are different.

> Composition-focused languages like python and go change that. Whitespace-orientation and named parameters help a lot. Also, you can write sophisticated python/go without complex type ontology.

This is backwards. Languages without (or with limited) type systems are very hard to read, because you have a lot less reliable information about what's going on.
Well, the same actually largely holds for me. Low responsiveness is something I despise in applications. However, the general principle obviously stands: if you have more hardware performance you can be more inefficient and still have good responsiveness.

Electron happens to cross the threshold for sensitive users like you and me, but for a large number of users it seems the step in performance from mobile to desktop is enough to buy you the "Electron/PhoneGap/Cordova abstraction" (seeing as how there are popular Electron apps but few for PhoneGap/Cordova).
"Most" people? Are you sure? There are over a billion and a quarter Chinese people for a start.
Your anecdotal evidence is much more valuable than a report put out by the world's top university. Thanks!
All the way agree. Parents should discuss a book after it's been read (yup, it means reading what your kids are reading, and teenagers don't always have great taste...) and go over anything controversial, leave the floor open for questions, encourage them to consider scenarios that are outside of their experiences, and so on.

Teenagers are perfectly capable of handling adult topics if they have the support of adults to help them grasp the entirety of it all. Keeping them insulated in a bubble, away from the real world, just means they'll get to experience it all at once, alone, without support, when they finally venture out of the house as young adults.
BTW. If you have a lot of HN tabs open and you try to reload a session after a restart, you get IP blocked for a short time - another good reason to use Firefox if you like keeping a few HN news tabs open, as it only loads 1 tab and keeps background tabs suspended.

Indeed; frequently I'll just disconnect my computer from the net for the startup period; crude, but it avoids this problem for sites like HN or others with with throttling.

Not that it happens very often to begin with, Chrome is quite stable, mostly I spaz with the keyboard and hit Ctl-Shift-Q when I meant Ctl-Q, something Chrome doesn't allow you to turn off.
I don't actually like Play (its routing in particular is very ad-hoc and doesn't make good use of Scala's capabilities). I use Spray for JSON APIs and Wicket for HTML UIs.
Come to Rio - watch the Olympians swim in the very dirty water they promised to clean but didn't! Catch zika, then fill out the police and insurance forms after you get robbed!
Seriously though, Rio is a very very dangerous place to visit even for brasileros, let alone tourists, and the zika and chinkungya virus outbreaks are not helping either.

Watch it on TV, from far away.
Large Force Exercise test and validate new software sets for the F/A-18 and EA-18G
This is just another reason to move to something like Gitlab or just self-host your Git repos. It takes literally seconds to set up your own Git server, so why not?
That contradiction doesn't exist in Europe, only Belarus has the death penalty.
You forgot "actually" after your "Well"
Well whatever he pushes for, the Republicans will oppose it, so he should have been pushing for more computer surveillance in schools.
Paid to Think: A Leader's Toolkit for Redefining Your Future, by David Goldsmith

Truly a thought provoking read that will give you ideas to create an immediate impact your business. Here's a podcdast interview with the author > http://www.blogtalkradio.com/waynehurlbert/2013/01/04/david-...
For all of my personal projects I use GitLab. It has about the same amount of features as GitHub (more in many areas, in fact) and it's free for most usage, even private.

GitLab and BitBucket are going to eat GitHub's lunch if they don't change this crazy pricing model.
What the hell? Are you defending a decision to keep keys unencrypted in a git repo?
Many people on a lot of professions provably don't do it as well as the superstars in each field. Are University of Oregon law school grads as 'good' as Stanford law grads?
Curious: why are rates in the UK frequently quoted as day rates (vs. hourly or monthly)?

The custom in the US seems to be hourly, but in the UK, it seems day rates are the norm. Curious as to whether this is just happenstance, or whether something else is involved.
Approval really is the wrong word. The (legal) action towards the doctor for assisting in an unnatural death are shelved, if and only if the requirements are met. Clearing someone of wrongdoing is not the same as approving ones actions.

It is an interesting subject, really close to ones personal belief system. A recent documentary, which showed several cases of euthanasia in NL based on 'indefinite and unbearable suffering' of the mind (f.e. one lady was tired of her life at 90+ years), probably confirms opinions on both sides of the debate the same way.

For me, having witnessed two deaths by euthanasia (AIDS) and one without (cancer), I would grant any human the chance to plan their moment of death, even if the suffering is mental.
I don't know if you noticed but she has a dedicated section in her site navigation labelled 'HN-related'.

Whether her blog post is exclusively for HN or not, her post is definitely for/about HN.
400 meter dash-DeLisa Davis
> Senior/Lead devs need to carefully curate what a projects foundation is. A strong, well designed foundation means you have something solid to build on. If you don't understand what's in your deps, haven't read their code, see how often it's updated and how many people actively use it, and can say you are using 80% or more of the code in it then don't use it.

Having to deal with my share of poorly supported components in Django/DjangoCMS, I can confirm your observation for Python. But betting on the wrong opensource component is often better from betting on the wrong proprietary technology. It comes with the territory.

> Writing your own code is often the best route since it fixes your exact use case, no matter the language, libraries or frameworks being used.

The problem is not you supporting your own code versus you supporting the code of a random dude from Internet, the problem is when you move on to the next job and some poor guy has to support and fix bugs in your code from 3 years ago. In my experience the average quality of community components and components developed in-house are not that different.

Personally I wish project managers starting caring more for life-cycle planing.
> For the 1st time in recorded history of democratic societies, the sons will live in worst conditions than their parents.

This lie needs to stop being told.

The Greatest Generation was born in the 1915 era, grew up in the "Roaring Twenties", the largest economic boom in the US to that date. When they became of age ~18 (1933), the USA was hit with twin economic disasters:

* The Great Dust Bowl eradicated entire farms across entire states. Forcing many farmers to move to the city to look for labor. When the farmers got to the cities, they found...

* The Great Depression. `nuff said

The "Greatest Generation" wandered around with 20%+ unemployment level for YEARS while "old money" sat comfortably enjoying the benefits of new-fangled technology like air conditioning and ice machines.

When the economy was finally doing well, the USA joins World War 2 and virtually every working male is drafted into the military. If you didn't die in the war period in the 1940s, you came back to 90% tax rates so that the US could pay off their debt. It wasn't until 1950 or so, when the post-war economic boom started to positively affect this generation, when they were well into the age of 35 or older.

-----------------

Yes, the "Greatest Generation" had a crappier life than their parents. And then the "Greatest Generation" set up huge amounts of programs (invented Social Security, Medicare, started paying incredibly for education) to ensure that their children would have better lives than they did.

Come on, basic history people. THINK when these politicians shout words to you. Don't just parrot out their lies.

I mean, cripes. Just look at the literature that was written in the 1930s by the Greatest Generation. "Of Mice and Men" is about vagabonds looking for farm-work. While "Their Eyes were Watching God" is about a woman who was beaten by multiple suitors before being forced to kill the man she loves because a hurricane wiped out a region and a rabid dog have him rabies.

Common in both stories? Hard, hands-on work, and vagabond living. "Casual Homelessness", as these people travel from town-to-town on foot looking for a way of life. Everyone is a nomad and homeless, and not a big deal is given to it.

In contrast, the "Great Gatsby", written one generation earlier in the 1920s is about rich people doing rich things, and is literally about a new rich person not being respected by older richer people. While the main character gets a new house "modestly" and watches across his Long Island lake property at the "actual rich people" and moral bankruptcy of the parties they hold.