skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Author here. Wow, fantastic feedback! Thank you for taking the time to read it and respond.

I have a few responses. As an undergrad, I won't assume my background is strong enough for direct opinions, so apologies in advance as my responses are mostly pointers to other people.

Professor Patrick Winston[0] at MIT would argue that the expert systems, the successes of the '80s also about making money. Obviously not as much present day, but that is due to the tech sector infiltrating more areas/markets simply because of the exponential growth processing power. It would be very interesting to compare AI's value-add to the world between 1980 and today when adjusted for the "inflation" of moore's law.

It's true I didn't consider the number of people in the field currently compared to the past, and that's an interesting point.

The instructor of the class that I wrote this paper for, Joscha Bach[1], would argue that real physical world results are not very significant, since the real world can be thought of as a simulation itself.

The idea of "what happens next? What could go wrong?" with self driving cars is interesting. A question arises, should you be able to ask the car, "why did you just stop short?" and receive an answer? This is a question Gerald Sussman has been discussing recently[2]. If we do want systems that can explain their behavior, then they must speak in human-language and therefore must be symbolic at some level. In general, the idea of "Common Sense" seems too much of (what Minksy would describe as) a suitcase word[3] -- because the definition is so abstract, it's not worthy of debate without defining the term.

Great call on Hillis, thanks! I completely mixed up Symbolics and Thinking Machines. Fixed!

[0]: http://people.csail.mit.edu/phw/
[1]: http://cognitive-ai.com/
[2]: https://vimeo.com/151465912
[3]: https://alexvermeer.com/unpacking-suitcase-words/
Yes, you have to choose the end goal but then you can use rationality.

I'm not sure how you choose a good endpoint. Maybe "life is good" and therefore "expand life". This could lead in many ways though - from fascism to reversing entropy to human experimentation.

It seems most morality for all humans comes down to "what is best for my in group" and then a selectively defined endgroup.

There may be an argument for objective morality being based on expanding knowledge of the universe to the point where we may discover morality? We have very little accurate data on the universe and life in the universe to draw on - maybe as we gain a more accurate and useful model of reality morals will come out of the"woodwork" like writing allowed us to begin pontification on them across generations.
Am I the only one that is has been coding for years and don't expect people to know regex off the top of their head?

There are so many variants and keeping them straight between languages is a nightmare. Grep, egrep, POSIX, perl, python, php, javascript. They all have their idiosyncracies.
Why are you choosing Cassandra every time? And what's your refutation for his desire to use MySQL over some other database, from his point of view as presented in the article (e.g. availability of support via Google/SO)?
> If you run your own homeserver, and your own bridge to Rhizome/wherever, you can think of the end result being a bit like bitlbee or a pidgin-in-the-cloud... but decentralised

Wouldn't this still be centralized to your home server?
there is a rather large amount of traffic generated from my machine for things like Sonos and Dropbox and the like, but eventually I tracked down what was being sent. Sure enough I could see all the text being sent, unencrypted, over HTTP

Another consequence of the "cloud everything" trend. I feel like it's almost a deliberate plan to make everyone's machines constantly send and receive data over dozens of active connections, so the odd one occasionally sending out something that shouldn't be will easily "get lost in the noise"... You could even say that at least this time they were nice enough to tell you and send data in cleartext so you can easily see what's going on. Imagine if it used HTTPS, added another layer of encryption/obfuscation on top of that, and the notice was buried deep in a long license agreement, how long would it take someone to discover it?

What astounds me is that 20K(!) Visual Studio users --- so presumably NOT the "average barely-computer-literate" user we often like to think of as being the ones to get fooled by schemes like this --- probably saw the notice, but didn't give a second thought to installing something like this? These are developers, the people writing today's and tomorrow's software. That makes me sad and scared for the future of privacy/security.

Then again, Microsoft's official Visual Studio privacy policy isn't all that much more reassuring:

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/dn948229

For pre-release and free versions of the software, users cannot opt out of usage data collection.

Bluntly stated, "You're the product."
If you're using it in daemon mode, it only shells out to boot a conversion server, and only if necessary.

From that point on it's sending very basic RESTful requests. I wouldn't recommend using latexml if you're interested in performance-critical math parsing.

Its best use case is converting entire LaTeX documents/fragments with arbitrarily complex package dependencies, macro definitions and any other power latex techniques.
EU mandates open access for all publicly funded research by 2020
> I'm not actually testing how well you write code on a whiteboard. I’m looking for something else

Even if you believe so, it's more likely than not you're not actually doing that. You WILL judge how well someone write code on a whiteboard. I've done that too, and it's surprisingly easy not to notice. You can't stop yourself from judging, maybe you can realize that your snap judgement mean jackshit and don't make decision based on that.

> While I don’t need a developer who can write code on a whiteboard, I do need a developer who can think on her feet, under pressure, in a room with others.

As someone who can't figure out if (9+1 === 10) is true or not under interview (true story, my mind just blanked out), I'd really love to have company who want "developer who think on her feet, under pressure" to put it on your job advertisement so we don't both waste our time.
Ouch, why did I say anything. Feel like a hater :-/
Chatbot for food recos on PH
Last time I made interview rounds, about 50% of places gave whiteboard questions, 25% gave essentially the same questions but had me do them on a computer or screenshare rather than a whiteboard, and the rest had some kind of take home component that was usually larger than the whiteboard question but also more practical and relevant to my skill set. Obviously I prefer the last option, but even if you prefer to give whiteboard-style questions, why not at the very least allow them to complete it on their laptop in front of you if they so choose?

It seems incredibly arrogant to me that interviewers assume there is only one way to solve a problem, and that is by brainstorming on a whiteboard first. I don't feel comfortable standing up in front of the class to present a solution. I feel far, far, far less comfortable if it's a coding-related solution. I did significantly better, like pretty much 100% success rate on coding components when I could hit keys rather than display my chicken scratches on a whiteboard.| I move code around a lot as I prototype and it takes quite a bit of training for me to adjust to not having the option of restructuring as I code because the medium is a whiteboard or piece of paper. And every time I erase something my level of anxiety and nervousness just grows.
Show HN: Double your customer feedback rate with simple one-click surveys
Poland? Czechoslovakia?
What the fuck is going on here at HN? Is this Bizarro World?
Spell checking is already "decentralized" and has been for the last three decades or so, in the form of a local dictionary file on each machine you want to run spellcheck on.
I agree with your assessment of the article, I just don't think taking the average of relative moralities makes for an objective morality, at least as the word is used in this context.
I couldn't agree more!
An OS is so much more than just the bash shell. There are countless annoyances on Windows that constantly get in the way.

Some flaws you have to witness to actually believe. As an example, I'd go as far as saying that Windows doesn't support high DPI (retina) displays. It does, but it's broken to a degree that I considered switching the hardware. If you're running a setup with both high DPI and regular DPI screens, be prepared to constantly manage your windows because Windows fucks them up all the time.
The bad support for multiple displays doesn't help there either.

In theory the OS might be able to support these setups well, but dozens of included programs fail to comply. Even major ones like the password prompt. For programs not included, I have yet to see any to scale properly.

This thing where the included programs serve as examples of how a decent program should look and feel like, I think this just never existed on Windows.

Any Mac user considering using Windows more I'd suggest to try it for some time. Even if it's just to appreciate Mac OS again. OS X is getting worse, but they're still worlds apart.
What is a top goal? Every goal is followed by things to do to achieve it.
I tried Nix on OS X after a recent HN topic suggested it. I hate Homebrew with a passion (it's fine initially but, over time, it's always created a hard-to-clean-up mess for me), so I was looking for something that could replace it for most unixy things I need to install.

I immediately ran into a showstopper bug that they've had for some time now. Apparently, they've focused on NixOS and the CA certificate configuration is borked on other platforms. This means Git, Curl and anything else that tries to use the standard OS certificate store will fail certificate validation. I know it's only one issue, but it was pernicious enough for me to nuke my Nix install and move onto something else.

At the moment, the best I can find for OS X is Rudix. The selection of available software is pathetic compared to Homebrew and Nix, but a lot of the core stuff is there and it's all packaged as a .pkg, which makes it really easy to cleanly erase installed software.
n++; // increment n
Why regexes combined with the pre-processing?

First, it's not so clear in what sense "efficient" is actually a real requirement if this is a model answer.

If the average input is very small then the cost of compiling/interpreting the regex is going to dominate any modest run-time improvement over even an extremely naive implementation.

And if the inputs are very large then the probability of contradiction in the first few characters even is extremely high, so all the upfront normalization is a huge waste.

I'm having trouble imagining the typical data set where this would be an efficient implementation and where there even exist non-ridiculous inefficient implementations.

Second, doesn't using regexes kind of defeat the whole point of the Palindrome exercise from an evaluation perspective? If someone asked if me if they could use regexes in a coding interview for this question my response would be "good instinct. If you have no other way then go for it. But I was really hoping to see you work through implementing/debugging/commenting/testing an implementation without regexes."
I do backend software in Java. I hate web dev.
Online spell checkers are better along many axis. For example they can spell check names in the news and slang that's likely not in an offline dictionary
It's probably worth pointing out that this is Visual Studio Code, rather than Visual Studio - the audience for the former is fairly small by comparison!
D3-ring-note: D3 plugin for placing circle and text annotation
Article wasn't written by a man. You assumed that it was.
Dee Dee pursued a solo career and failed. He had to keep writing Ramones songs, only without collecting any of the touring revenue.

IIRC, he was often somewhat in "debt" to the band, as they'd bail him out of jail with the requirement that he would provide songs for the next album, even though he was no longer a full member.

Career-wise, CBGB was a ticket to nothing. I've never bought a solo album by anyone who was in Blondie, Talking Heads, or the Ramones, but I do remember seeing that stuff in the used discount bins, unwanted.
CS-SYD: Be careful recruiters, you're being selected too
I retired from my job managing a group of software engineers in Silicon Valley a few years ago. I'd been quite frugal, mostly driving old beaters I bought outright. I owned a condo outright. I ate the free and discounted food at work. I was making $300K+ a year in base salary and equity compensation, and my expenses were only about $20K a year. (My biggest bill was my monthly homeowners’ association fee of about $400.) So, I was able to save a metric ton of money and invested it all in the stock market.

As a child, I loved computers. I taught myself 6502 and x86 assembly languages, as well as some other languages. When I got to the university and actually understood how digital circuits worked, I was so fascinated. When I finally landed in Silicon Valley, I felt like I was in a dream. I was good at what I did and I met awesome people who were good at what they did. Actually, the greatest pleasure was meeting and working with people who were much smarter than I was.

Eventually, the thrill wore off. I’d seen so many bugs and new projects that they started all feel the same, kind of like my personal version of the film Goundhog Day. I didn’t love it anymore. And then later, I didn’t even like it anymore.

At one point, I calculated my net worth at a few million dollars and realized that I could just quit my job and live off the investment interest. So I just did it. I’ve been retired for four years now.

I travel a lot, which was something I couldn’t do much when I had a job that only gave me three weeks of vacation. I can also travel in a different way: taking the time in a new place to see un-touristy things, meet locals and study the language a bit. I read a lot of books, none of which are about computers. I haven’t been back to the United States in over a year.

Thanks to my frugal habits and the runup in the stock market, my net worth is higher. My “burn” rate is under 2%, which means that I can do this indefinitely. I don’t miss Silicon Valley and will never live there again. In fact, I probably won’t ever live in the United States again. And I don’t miss my cubicle one bit.

What I did is unusual. But the thing I don’t understand is why it is unusual: most of the professionals I worked with could have made the same choices and had the same result. I guess they found more enjoyment in the cycle of work and consumption than I did. And like most people who lived in the Valley, I knew and had friendships with people who were far richer than I was: whose net worth was $10M or $30M or more, who could retire today and have a very comfortable life anywhere in the world. But they continued to work. I can only guess that they found more enjoyment in work than I did.
The occupying Red Army did not force anyone? People were DYING trying to get away from this shit and here you are, spouting this nonsense. Humans were shot trying to cross over a wall built in the middle of Europe.

The Red Army PURGED the Polish elite, starting in Katyn.

What the fuck.
I'm tired of companies asking me to code at their interviews.

I have 10 years experience with references.
I have code that I've built, deployed to production still running today.
I have cultivated my own clients, gathered requirements and built something that delivers business value.

Instead of a coding interview, I'll make a counter offer. Why not hire me on a 1 week contract to come and do some real world work. Work that is small enough to be done in 1 week and big enough to deliver some value.

At the end of the week, you pay me wages and if you're not happy, you can not extend another week.

Isn't this a much better way to evaluate a good candidate?
Switching to another language is often not very practical, especially if you're working as part of a large team, or need to leverage the ecosystem or community of that language.

If you're at a company who've standardized on Python, you can rarely just up and start writing your part of the project in Haskell (even if you know the language, much less if you don't and need to learn it first). And good luck convincing everyone else at your company or even just your team to switch from Python to Haskell (or whatever language you think is the right tool). People get used to their tools, get attached to them, and many won't part with them without a fight.

Then there are all the Python libraries that Python programmers have invested a significant amount of time and effort to learn and possibly even love, like numpy, pandas, scipy, etc. If you need the functionality from those libraries, now you not only have to switch languages yourself, convince everyone else on your team/company to use/learn it, but also learn whatever the equivalent libraries in Haskell are (if it has them).

Then there's all the Python code at your company that you often need to leverage or interact with. You generally aren't going to rewrite it all in Haskell, and you can't ditch it.

So if you're a one-man shop, or are a student with no commitments or demands from anyone else, sure, you can switch languages on a dime (assuming you already know the language you want to switch to). For everyone else, it's rarely that simple, unless those you work with are already fluent and comfortable with the other language and its libraries.
Exactly. I should know better and I got caught up in the excitement of "neurons editing their DNA". The Hopkins press release department was either clueless or trying to make this paper sexier than necessary. The Tet3 finding is cool; Wonder if that factor does the same thing in other cells besides neurons, or if really just responds to synaptic activity.
who gave the orders? who was in charge? was it the kremlin or the marsians?
Overall quite subjective. You're not going to 'win' the interview every time. Sometimes the cards are practically stacked against you.
You get asked a question no one had actually tested beforehand, you get an interviewer who's trying to prove how smart he is, you get someone who is too fixated on a particular skill you must have, you get someone having a bad day, etc... And when the process easily take 6 stages and unanimous thumbs up, one of these is likely to come up time to time no matter how prepared you were. Don't take it personally.
Sure, but some developers with a job already might prefer the interview.
A goal which isn't chosen to achieve some higher-level goal.

Taking a sports analogy, you can have the goal of winning a game, so that you get nearer the goal of winning the championship. "Winning the game" is a subgoal.

A top goal would be something that doesn't have an ulterior goal justifying it, you want to achieve it for itself.
and return the original value
Ask HN: Do you use FreeBSD as web server? Why or why not?
This article is useless to most people, most of the time. At the very best, the take-away is "know how to solve simple programming problems and have coding standards."
I can list many things that are 'needed', and not just in Europe. In this case, I disagree. With the assaults on individuals, christianity/religion, journalists and whistleblowers, freedom of speech, gun rights, the constitution, democratically elected presidents, etc, etc.... Just no.
There is far far too much corruption to say that the idjits who think they will lead, can. Really just that simple for me. Until we can properly govern ourselves there is no way in hell I can trust someone else to do that. Especially when speaking of religious, language, and cultural barriers that have existed for many centuries in Europe. The US is but a blink of the eyes as far as leadership is concerned, and that govt. is as corrupt as most if not moreso.
I think the self is "renewed" or "reconstructed" every moment. Life is a chain of these self-moments. There is nothing linking these self-moments other than shared past experience. No "personality" essence is preserved. Personality emerges every moment anew, based on the current factors, just like consciousness and other mental processes. We don't live for 80 years, we live for a few moments, but a chain of Self instances exists for 80 or so years. We die constantly throughout our lives.

I see the self like the emergence of a car wave on the highway. The wave appears spontaneously when the highway is crowded. It can disappear on its own when the density decreases a little. It exists moment by moment as a result of emerging processes and underlying conditions. It is in a constant state of flux. A great part of it is dependent on the external conditions, not just the cars.

Similarly, external factors are also part of the momentary self. The self is not separated from the external world, but the world plays a part in it. It selects the momentary self from a complex space of possible personalities. Basically, we are the resultant of the stream of experiences and conditions that existed around us all our life. We know that also from artificial neural networks, which are built by distilling their experiences.
as if Clinton had a chance against Trump.

It's like the opposite of McCain/Obama in 2008. Trump is the "Hope" candidate, and Clinton is the "dear god, don't let her in the office" candidate.

If anything, it would probably unite the liberal base, But Clinton is a "centrist"; She's trying to win over republicans with her pro-war agenda. She isn't confident in the liberal base being large enough to win an election.
(shameless plug) Some folks in the Ludum Dare community are hosting One Hour Game Jam, which is a weekly game jam to create a game within one (or possibly a few more) hours. A different theme is chosen for each week by voting. I would say most games are crappy (including mines) but that's a part of the charm. cf. http://onehourgamejam.com/

According to the host, this is mostly "a support group for those who have too much creativity in their hand."
The problem with this theory is programming in some databases (MS SQL Server) is extremely unpleasant.

For example, you can finally, in the year 2016, split strings natively in TSQL:

https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2016/03/splitting-strings-...

Compare that to this SO question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2647/how-do-i-split-a-str...

Note there are 32 answers on that question, many of which fail under various edge cases. Also notice that no one finds this situation absurd in the slightest (Stockholm Syndrome is alive and well in the MSSQL community apparently). This is just one example of the nonsense you have to put up with on SQL Server, there are many others.

And while PG is getting yet another new language capability, it appears Microsoft is pulling SQLCLR support (in Azure, so far):

https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2016/04/breaking-news-lite...

...which probably doesn't matter at the end of the day because almost no DBA would ever let you use it in production.

While it would cause harm to my personal career, nothing would make me happier than to see Postgres crush MSSQL, Microsoft has earned nothing less with their absolute disdain for their users.
If you are on OS X, buy and run Little Snitch. The connections for outbound requests are quite amazing.
The Path to Exit
Why? I can't see any way the protocol used to deliver the content would determine the amount of end users who click a link.
How is this any different than Gawker using the legal system as a defense strategy? They print whatever they want, and good luck suing them, they'll wear you out in long legal battles with their deep pockets.

The only difference this time is they picked on a bully with bigger pockets.
Why can't you just add those names and slangs to the dictionary?