skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From my system of morality...

Why do you follow that system of morality and not another one?

For example, people adopt and use Gauss's law, because they think it's objectively true. Is that the case with your moral system? Is that moral system objectively true or is it a matter of your opinion?

...idea that we all have a right to life, dignity, and knowledge.

The question is whether this is actually true or not. Theory of evolution is an idea, but we ask whether it's true. We don't call it an idea and expect people to take it seriously. You have to provide some arguments that humans actually have right to life and that others have the obligation to help those in need.

...rather we would end up arguing opinions.

Wait, so morality for you is a difference of opinions? Kinda like: 'I like chocolate ice cream, you like vanilla ice cream'.
This library is actually very HTML specific - look at the code here: https://github.com/asvd/microlight/blob/master/microlight.js... - it assumes what the language looks like.
Except it's not a robot. It's a robot per body. Sure some components are common but you still have to build and grease each bugger yourself and adjust them whenever you change the spell in any meaningful way because enemies will drop differently. I'm too lazy for that. I'll just walk with the people I should get through the room and kill the enemies that are meaningfully not dead. Besisdes, after this room, there's another and who has the time.

From time to time some of the people I lead will die due to my sloppiness but such is life. It's not like I'm leading royal family through this dungeon.
This is actually the only truly rational defense I can come up with for my preference of spaces vs tabs. (The generic argument is that the code will look the way I want it to even when rendered by a tool where I can't control the tab width, but Github is the only real example these days.)
The place to start really depends on what you are interested in. If you already know you want to do a bunch of web programming just start out with javascript.

If you think you might go on to do lots of types of programming then learning python is a great place to start

Check out reddit.com/r/dailyprogrammer if you want interesting things to work on them. A lot of those tasks are not so simple that they can be done in a couple of hours, but not so long as to be crazy hard.

I was a big fan or this one

https://www.reddit.com/r/dailyprogrammer/comments/3fva66/201...
blue, as I mentioned, they are iMessages.
Securing a BitTorrent Sync EC2 Instance
Programmers aren't commodities as they aren't interchangeable, there are vast differences in outcome between different programmers.

To a good programmer most jobs offerings are commodities, they are interchangeable and their offerings/rewards/challenges are very similar.

Thus the developer you are interviewing is also interviewing you.
Also depends what you mean by "programmer".

- A programmer with one year of experience writing CRUD applications is fairly easy to replace.

- A programmer with many years of experience designing and building large, scalable, maintainable, secure and reliable systems is much harder to replace.

- A programmer who knows your legacy code inside out is very hard to replace.
If we reduce wastage, drug prices won't go down
Not really. The existence of a large market doesn't suffice to classify something as a commodity. The acid test is this:

Two companies that each go out to the market and try to buy a thousand tons of wheat or a thousand barrels of crude oil, can reliably get the same result.

Two companies that each go out to the market and try to hire a thousand programmers, even for the same job descriptions and salaries, will get substantially different results, because they will have different errors and irrational biases in their hiring processes.
Andrew Chen's 5 Best Resources on Growth, Metrics and Marketing
All the larger projects I've worked with were designed initially so you add/remove "programming resources" as needed.
"Simple" languages such as Java SE and JUnit were heavily used to enable that.
Over time some people still found ways to make themselves indispensible. When such people left, it was much harder to replace a single component that they maintained, but in the end it was possible either by refactoring, virtualizing or even copy-pasta.
For better or worse all successful software projects that I worked with did better where no one was irreplaceable.
No one truly is, but when they put themselves in that 'hero' position, it means they can't take the weekend off when it's deployment time or they need to deal with support cases personally and they burn out. And then it hurts the project more compared to an average contributor burning out.
To sum up - project managers will tend to organise software so it's more of a commodity, programmers will try to do the inverse.
Software being more of a commodity is usually better for the project and worse for the programmer and vice versa, at least in the short and medium term.
But _of course_ nothing like that ever happens in the United States or any of our close allies. Because this country is the exception to everything bad that has happened in _other_ countries and nothing that bad could ever be done by our government. We don't have dissidents in the US. We just have freedom and truth all the way through that we sometimes need to carefully spread to other countries.
I would say it is the other way around: People who are poor at social interaction avoid it, some of those discover programming, and because they spend less time socializing they have more time to practice programming. So in my opinion it is not “Has structured thinking which causes poor social interactions” but “Has poor social interactions, retreats and learns structured thinking”.
The use of "rewrite" is a bit misleading- what's being altered in this mechanism is an epigenetic tag that sits "on top" of one of the standard DNA bases; that an individual's epigenetics are altered as they go through life is well known. But since the underlying cytosine is (as far as we know) irrevocably bound to this tag, it has to be replaced by a different (but identical) cytosine. Its more like going over your handwriting to hide an errant punctuation mark than "rewriting."
Ask HN: How to improve technical writing skills?
I'm nearly always involved in some form of writing process; sometimes code, sometimes not.

I've been writing technical blog posts on my company website for the past year and a couple of them even made the HN front page. Usually, they get ignored even after several re-submission attempts, so I just give up.

When I ask my peers (who are mostly fellow cryptography/security geeks) for feedback, they almost always respond with phrase and/or a quick fix, e.g. "Hey, you messed a sentence up 70% down the page."

If you're interested in what I've written: https://paragonie.com/blog/all

Specific concerns:

* I'm worried that my headlines are too boring to catch anyone's attention. I've always erred against clickbait titles even if the content delivers, mostly because I find them annoying.

* Are there not enough graphical aids? Should I spend more time learning how to use Photoshop?

* Are there any resources you know about for improving the quality of the writing past the headline?
And when what's being said doesn't fit the media narrative, they just edit it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1SUQ1qtdb0
Has anyone tried slapping a magnet on these migratory animals and testing whether or not they get hopelessly lost?
There was an HN story months ago about a study touting the benefits of a 5 day low cal fast every X months and a startup formed by the researchers is now shipping products based on it http://aboutprolon.com/
When you try to help others understand technology better it does not demean your work. Quite the opposite, people see the work and understand the dedication that the people who write the tools they use put in.

I mean if you understand art that you recognize that it's a lot of work even if you aren't an artist. Those that don't know just assume it's as simple as flicking paint on a canvas and charging a fortune.

The same people will assume you can build a website for $100 because they have no knowledge on what the work requires.
>Are those options really more likely that some journalists simple have different opinions than you?

Obviously not. But if those journalists have different opinions than executive management on important issues, like Phil Donahue opposing invading Iraq on MSNBC, then they'll be fired.
Not really talking about economic class or money. Some of the most hateful examples came from perfectly comfortable homes.
This is so complicated, why not just Markdown or straight up authoring in HTML?
Depends on the level of specialization.

A highly skilled engineer working on compression, cryptography, data stores, operating systems, compilers, etc... (the building blocks for other systems), cannot be treated as commodities today.

Highly productive engineers with regular skills, might not be easily replaceable either, it might just not make financial sense for your company.

Engineers with regular skills and regular productivity can be replaced. But abusing this might have effects on the culture.
The whole point of this was to show that Scala's types preserve the structure of the computation.

It might not be very interesting in the Option[Option[String]] case but imagine Try[Either[String, Int]] or List[Future[Double]].

It's a very important distinction.

Collapsing cases is one of the primary thing why exceptions sometimes get a bad rap, and Kotlin (and Ceylon) do the same with ? (and |, &) at the value level.
Java is only necessary for the "compilation" of the query. The resulting bash script uses only standard unix tools and runs without java.
I've started looking at this. Part of the problem is that nix wants (reasonably) to do "everything itself", including (for example) bundling the OS X SDKs itself.

At the moment that's broken (the 10.9 SDK is installed in 10.11, then links against some 10.11 libraries, which is blocking mplayer). I don't have the knowledge to fix it.

homebrew and fink have had the same problem (deciding when to link against system libraries and when to try to rebuild) -- hopefully nix will get over this hurdle.
But if I don't trust you then your program and limit can only be verified by my execution of it. This might be incredibly or even in feasibly expensive and unless you've also got a resource bound proof then I might be sunk.

On the other hand, code which verified a fully expanded proof may be very simple and easy to check/trust/believe.
In today's environment - yes absolutely ! I mean they're treated like a commodity. Managers like to view them as pieces of in industrial machinery pipeline that can be plugged in interchangeably on any project. Sadly, this is the state of things.
Sure, you could clone, or you could bring the ideas on Game Toilet [https://gametoilet.wordpress.com/] to life instead.
It is quite a coincidence that this topic popped up on HN. On my way into work this morning, I was listening to This American Life, in particular act 2 of this episode [0]. It basically follows the awkwardness of two dads trying to form a friendship in Austin.

I was thinking why is it so hard for one man to form a friendship with another. Personally, I have found it difficult to form a friendship with other men outside of work or of school. Now that I am about to turn 46yrs old, I can count on one hand the number of guys I can consider a good friend. The rest are either workmates or schoolmates.

Social contact is not the silver bullet to depression, but I believe that it helps a lot.

[0] - http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/587/t...
You didn't answer my question. I think you may have misread it.
While this learning style certainly suits more people than others, it is definitely a skill that can be improved.

For a lack of a better term, I'd call it researching. Expressed in another way, it is the ability to state (and constantly restate in new ways) a problem you are facing. The rest comes from pure grit in refusing to give up.

A few things I noticed from my own journey...

1. Jargon matters:
Learning the "nomenclature" (see, the jargon term for jargon) makes your life so much easier when researching. I recall reading a paper which sought to bridge the gap between biology and computer science, the author's first task was to instruct the reader on the "language of the space" and it was assumed the reader should otherwise be able to learn the concepts quite quickly. Being able to phrase your problem in the language of the field will give you much better leads when looking things up. When you encounter a new term, try to appreciate that term for what it is, avoid trying to constantly translate it back into your own terms, though this is definitely useful for gaining an understanding to begin with. A parallel to learning languages it to "learn like a baby" and to avoid translating a new term back to your mother tongue.

2. All learning is good, no time is wasted. From experience learning and teaching others, there is a mental trap that time spent "looking for a solution" is time wasted - you're not learning your solution and you're not progressing through whatever learning materials you're trying to work through.
This is not a constructive mental feedback loop as it breeds frustration. As mentioned above, research is a skill and time spent researching is practising that skill. You could even argue its more useful as its a far more general than knowing how to solve specific problem X in front of you.

Everyone has been in that stage where you were lost because you had no idea what a "mutable object" was or you read your first null pointer exception and had no idea where to start. Or worse, reading the poorly explained and formatted docs of some unfamiliar software, in an unfamiliar programming language trying to do something for the first time.

My advice to the people who are still struggling in this phase: stick with it, don't be disheartened if other people are seemingly picking it up faster or easier than you, everyone goes at their own pace and as long as you're learning, you're moving forward. Sometimes finding your way to the answer is the bigger lesson than knowing the answer itself.
used to have a few Xserves when they were a thing, never a million users though.
I found the following libnoise (C++ Perlin noise lib) tutorial very helpful:

http://libnoise.sourceforge.net/tutorials/index.html
I believe that's the concept of "free speech" in a nutshell.
Years ago I started coding qbasic with a photocopy of a book given to me by a friend of the family.

I progressed from there to medicore competency in PHP, rails, and c++. Then I went to university to study comp Sci...but almost immediately switched to aerospace engineering, and my coding skills plateaued.

By that I mean I can write basic stuff in all sorts of languages, but I'm miles away from writing a compete program or anything user friendly. Most of my code these days revolves around automating various things in the most sensible language. Where sensible often means something the next non-coding engineer to come along can understand.

I guess I stopped because I knew enough to do what I currently need to do. I'm content that, given time, I could learn to be a better coder. But at the same time I avoid jobs in my industry that are suited to decent coders because I know there are more suitable people for the role.

Every so often try to pick up some "hobby coding" but find that I don't really enjoy it like I did as a teenager.
This is a feature. Nix is completely isolated from the host system. It manages its own dependency tree. Using libs and other things from the host system would be both brittle and nondeterministic, negating the reason why Nix is so novel in the first place.
Couldn't it be more advantageous for them to pardon him rather than taking him to trial and risking exposure of the details?
You mean why write LaTeX?

I write latex because most of my work eventually ends up as PDFs in journals, and there nothing comes close to comparing to LaTeX's quality. When I use markdown I end up using LaTeX extensions to write the maths anyway.

However, it would be nice I could get better html output, as PDFs aren't nice to view online.
Note that the only book specific to computer language on there is McCarthy's Lisp manual.
A year later, there is dumb-init[1].

Released as statically linked binary, it is simple ADD + chmod +x to get running simple init without any dependencies.

^1: https://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2016/01/dumb-init-an-init-f...
FYI, if you go to a [dead] comment's permalink (click on the timestamp) you should see a "vouch" link which allows you to make it visible.
Sorry, was meant to be a light-hearted response.
This looks to be node only. Does this do anything AWS lambda doesn't?
What do people do about packages being old? Many of their front facing server packages are not being updated. Presumably, they have quite a few security issues in them
From the article:

In the early nineteen-sixties, a German graduate student named Wolfgang Wiltschko began conducting experiments with European robins, which he thought might find their way by picking up radio waves that emanated from the stars. Instead, Wiltschko discovered that if he put the robins in cages equipped with a Helmholtz coil—a device for creating a uniform magnetic field—the birds would change their orientation when he switched the direction of north.
You are painting with pretty broad strokes there huh? Not everyone is a stereotype in a tv show.
How did NYC drive IRT and BMT into bankruptcy? It's my understanding mass transit isn't profitable in the modern era.
I am obviously biased for following(founder) and password mgmt is just one part of it, but do check out Device42 for a low cost password vault: http://www.device42.com/features/enterprise-password-managem...

There is no limit on # of passwords or # of users with the base license and has full Rest API support.
What a confusing remark. He says that both it is a "public service" "but still must pay a penalty." I don't understand what that means, why should one pay a penalty for a public service?

I also think this line "America's interest" is thrown around a lot. Are we talking the interest of Americans? Or interests of the American government? It seems more and more now the two are at odds with each other...
I attended a presentation by Travis Kalanick recently, where he told he got the idea for Uber when he could not get a Cab while visiting Paris.

I thought that was quite funny: Paris has this awesome ridesharing service, that is even mostly driverless, called the Subway. Everyone there uses it; only a US tourist would use a taxi there. Still that poor idea led to a great company.

On a more serious note, this made me think: private companies and startups doing self driving cars and other transport innovations gain nothing when public transport gets more popular. They compete with it. I now wonder if that has something to do with the decrease in rides in US cities outside NY.
Ask HN: Why “database as a service” didn't succeed?
Even the database services from cloud providers, like Amazon RDS or GCE, are effectively thin wrappers over traditional database components. "Instances", "nodes", "hosts" are still present and not abstracted.

It looks like a database as a black-boxed CRUD API, with abstracted node/replication/failover handling, should be the obvious solution. I think there were tries to do it (Amazon SimpleDB, Google AppEngine's datastore?) but they are not widely used. Why?
Wow that's almost exactly what I had in mind.

I might take a look at this later and see if incorporating this or something like it has any kind of meaningful impact.
This is cool, but I prefer code highlighting without requiring visitors to run JavaScript. It seems unnecessary when tools like Pygments [1] do the highlighting once and output html/css.

[1]: http://pygments.org/
Updating packages is generally easy and takes 10 minutes of your time (including sending a pull request) once you've figured out how it works. Please do so if you're a NixOS user - NixOS has far, far fewer people working on it than, say, Debian.
I don't understand what this contributes to the discussion. The other side did something like it too, therefore it was completely justified?
I assumed my prior posting was correct and that you had somehow missed critical context.

Edit: many in this thread appear to be missing critical context, as the secure enclave is not in play.
If it means drastically reducing government-provided welfare programs and letting people "vote with their wallets", then I think minimum income can be a great solution to the social safety net issue. Certainly better than a minimum wage, which is really just good for us people working in robotics and AI...

There's a questionable point they brought up though.

> The ever growing gap between the wealthy and the poor in Canada will lead to social unrest, increased crime rates and violence. Research indicates that a guaranteed basic income can reduce this gap

I agree that a "mincome" can lead to less social unrest, but not from reducing the income gap. The mechanism will more likely be economic sedation, whereby having some minimum amount to survive will remove the incentive of many to work, or work as hard as they might otherwise. But this will also mean less incentive to steal, so there's that.

Here's the secret though. The top 1% will never stop working and competing and earning. Your gap will never shrink. The producers will just come up with more lucrative and efficient ways of earning money from the consumers. Like Paul Graham says, the only way to really reduce income inequality (not counting rent-seeking behavior, of which every reasonable person is opposed) is to stop the top.

http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html
Amen.

I'm one of those. I understand the intent of this article. It's however unfortunate that the author has not come across enough success stories. Here is mine, which is arguably very small, but came out of exactly the same situation of an employee branching out:

* I saved, I was clear about not only what I like to do, but also what I'm good at.

* I couldn't get to it in my 20s, but I did get to it in my 30s.

* Yes, there was privilege, but not any more than so many of my friends and acquaintances have. I didn't come from money either.

* Yes, there was luck, but not any more than what I'd have needed to survive as an employee.

* Yes, there was agony of survival, still is, will continue to be, and only increase. But I expected that going in, and I carefully created a support system for it, which comes in handy in those tough times.

* Yes, there were unexpected events, including existential threats, but not any more than what I'd have had while working as an employee.

* It has only been a year and a half, and I'm in no position to sermonize, lecture and draw conclusions. But I know that I'm having a blast. I am answerable to nobody but reason, I have flexibility with my time like I never had, and I have immense satisfaction of being the first one to introduce a new useful thing to this planet and make an impact in lives of several of my customers.

But most importantly, it has afforded me life lessons which I'd have never had otherwise and I can accelerate my kids into. Yes, I'm making more than I'd have made in my job, but who is even looking at that?

[For the curious, I run this: http://InterviewKickstart.com]
You're correct in that Apple doesn't manufacture server hardware like the Xserve anymore, but OS X, Server edition is still available and it will manage Apache for you (albeit in a terrible way, I don't like the excessive configuration they apply)

Many of Apple's own web sites run Apple hardware for outward facing, large scale serving (I used to work there).

At the end of the day, Unix is Unix.

I run nginx on OS X on a number of Mac Minis without issue and long uptimes.