skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This, to me, is a lesson in just how destructive narcissistic self-importance can be for the culture of creative technology.

I've met and engaged both Jake and Nick at various times during their visits to Europe, and I've been left, each time, with the sense that - in both cases - there is a huge desire to create a cult of personality. In Nicks' case, it seems relative benign and harmless - he is a loud, funny guy, very boisterous and entertaining. Jake, also: loud and boisterous, but not so entertaining. Jake seems to travel with a laugh track everywhere he goes (fawning sycophants whose job it is to fill in the gaps between Jake's sentences with laughter)..

The point is, these are the kinds of characters that our scene attracts. It should come as no surprise that they are locking horns .. imagine if we were somehow able to harness all the power which either personality cults' provide and somehow channel it for the good of the hacker scene. Jake could do whatever it takes to set himself up as the Hacker Messiah, and Nick could keep the Circus from burning down/feeding itself to the lions.

Alas, this won't be the end of it, I'm quite sure. This sort of public dissing is precisely the sort of thing few are really capable of dealing with sanely .. perhaps the mob will just eat itself.
I dont care about that guy, he was never a favorite of mine. But the way the people around Tor publicised this with reusing the phrase rape again and again really disappointed me.

They know exactly how easy it is to shout rape and destroy someones life, still they did exactly that, even thought all we know is that he is a sexist asshole. What does not particular make him to a rapist.
Yes but not a billion time more. The relative resistance of human cells to cancer compared to mice is more than just about metabolism.
H2O 2.0.0: A major update to the lightweight HTTP/2 server
'obviously'?

The code looks fine to me, c.f.:

$ node
> undefined || undefined || 4
4
> undefined || 9 || 4
9

The || operator evaluates to the first of its two operands if it is truthy, or its second operand otherwise

> undefined || false
false
> false || undefined
undefined

So:

> e = {keyCode:9}
> e.which || e.charCode || e.keyCode
9
The Technomancer System Requirements
DevOps and Culture: The Evolution of DevOps in the Tech Industry
Spending tax affects mostly poor as they spend all their income. Rich spend more in absolute terms but still very little compare to overall income.
I've seen this pattern of behaviour with him a number of times. I think he sort of has a patter to how he approaches the weeding of his flock. I've named the folks who follow him around at these events the "Applebaum Laugh Track" and have seen a few of those bad apples fall from the tree for not laughing hard enough/having the gumption to question Dear Leader in some critical way.

Essentially, what I think we all have to understand, is that "cult'ing" is habit-forming and when you are the Hacker Messiah, nothing stands in your way of adoration from the filthy masses. Nothing.
so true. the estimation game can work well on time scales of up to a few months (like 2 or 3)... maybe

anything beyond that scale becomes the educated guessing game. no amount of analysis can flesh out every blocker that will be encountered. the deeper you go analyzing each task, the more the work just becomes doing that task.
Your first point is IMO too often understated. The fact that our executive branch comes from most parties in the parliament, instead of a barely-reaching 50% coalition like in most countries is a huge factor.

It has nothing to do with the direct democracy thing, but the most surprising is this so-called "magic formula" is only a tradition and there is nothing in the law that prevents a parliamentary coalition from voting an executive branch representing only 50% of the parliament.
> "Figures like this show that cancer is not only extremely pervasive, but also becoming more and more common. But why will so many people develop the disease at some point in their lives?"

You're right, the article did a bit of trickery here conflating general human evolution, with the main point of the article about cancer's isolated evolution within the host. The line that attempts to support this follows:

"Large and complicated animals like humans [aka lots of 'evolution'] are vulnerable to cancer precisely because they are large and complicated".

This claim is not supported by the article, and not the main point - but it's also just part of the intro and doesn't take away much either, chalk it up to journalistic creativity.

> "The fact that tumours are constantly changing their genetic makeup is one of the reasons why cancers are so hard to "kill"

That's what tfa is all about. In summary:

- cancers reproduce/evolve within a host optimizing against the body's defenses as well as the treatments we provide

- our treatments are effective at first, but since the cancer keeps evolving, they are all eventually rendered useless

- if the evolution is the problem, what if we try stopping that?

And that's what they're studying:

- find the specific meds that stop a particular cancer by giving them to the patient and seeing if it kills it

- as soon as u find them, stop giving them, so that the cancer doesn't go into hyper evolution against them

- let the cancer grow fat and lazy suffocating itself with a high-proportion of easily killable cells

- re-apply the medicine in full force to kill the whole thing
Mailchimp Pulled the Plug on Mandrill
One area in which Flow may be "technically" sound but it feels illogical is how in how it infers certain types. TypeScript requires that a variable has one type that doesn't change, but Flow will infer multiple types for a variable at different points in the code depending on how it is used. Also because Flow infers types based on how they are used, there are some interesting situations where you would expect the type checker to complain but it doesn't. E.g. if you have an object with a field that is never used, Flow won't complain about the field even if it is not defined in the type of the object. Overall I feel like TypeScript enforces logical, opinionated defaults, while Flow is happier to go with the illogical structure of your own usage (while enforcing opinionated defaults in other areas like null-checking).
"Flex" has been a very popular label for computer systems. I was referring to an early desktop computer done by Ed Cheadle and myself in the late 60s for a company owned by LTV (Ling Tempco Vought -- an aerospace conglomerate).

The one you are referring to was done in the 80s in the UK (I think). I recall that there were many good things about this system, and it did use microcode in a rather similar way to Parc in the 70s. Wasn't one of the machines they used a PERQ (which was an Alto spinoff by some CMU folks)?

I think I recall -- as with the Intel 432 -- they bit off more than they could chew, and tried to optimize too many things.
Updated Debian 8: 8.5 released
It works exactly that way. Walmart employees get paid less because supply (everyone is qualified to do this job) outstrips demand and walmart can then just pick the cheapest applicants.

In the tech industry the opposite happens. Demand is higher than supply so you're forced to hire somebody who already has a job. The only way to convince them to switch is by paying them more than they already make.
Some people think that employees should be paid somewhat proportionally to the amount of value they provide to their employer. If you accept that, then a good engineer should always get about the same amount of money, regardless of the cost of living, because they always produce a similar amount of value for the company.
Show HN: An Open Source Hotspot Solution
This does not prove that true crime rates are equal. That is an extremely strong claim to make. I agree the point about being more likely to be arrested, but that hardly leads us to believe therefore that the true rates are equal.
> How does that prove milk is good for us? Or for them?

Such proof was neither requested nor attempted. The challenge I responded to was, "Name one mammal besides humans who drink milk as adults?"

Clever cats have domesticated their humans (who then domesticate cows) to provide milk on a regular basis. ;-)
Then you happened to avoid the places in those cities where people defecate. Trust me, it's a thing. Though it surprises me that even SF has this problem
I was under the impression that it is not the gamma rays that would get you but the destruction of the ozone layer [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_supernova
I find it fascinating that they never once mention instant messaging. As a boy, I found it very difficult to make friends. I was insecure and emotionally guarded. This was only made worse by being bullied by most other kids.

I did have a few very good friends, but was still lonely. This changed drastically when I found a few friends online (via an online game, Dungeon Siege) and we played and chatted every day. I was taken aback by the way I was able to bond with people and how easily they accepted me for who I was, when they didn't see my nervous physical form.

During this period I entered into a long-distance relationship with a girl I'd never met. She helped me overcome a lot of my social awkwardness and issues with self-confidence. We ended up meeting a year later and spent seven years in a long-distance relationship. We spent time together each major holiday, though plane tickets were expensive. In-between these visits we chatted on various IM services. This was great, but I still often felt lonely, being apart.

We're now married and have been living together for six years. Being together for real each day is an incredible improvement. Still, our time together but apart was invaluable. I also recently realised that the majority of my close friends are people I met online.
I am the only one who is happy to code without static typing? Enjoying fast compilation, small, fast editors, flexibility.

I don't really make stuff like marry(a, b) and then call it with a banana and an apple by accident. Sure I make plenty of mistakes when I am coding but only very few could have been caught by a static type check.

Take one of the examples in the slides:

let obj: string;
obj = 'yo';
// Error: Type 'number' is not assignable to type 'string'.
obj = 10;

I simply don't write code like that. The crucial difference is that I would pick a variable name that made it obvious what goes in it:

let text = 'yo';
// This line here - I would not in practice write as 10 obviously does not belong in text:
text = 10;

(similarly I would never use the variable name 'what')
Earlier this year, I retired (voluntarily) from a large company after 32 years. Now that I have time to breath/think/sleep, I actually 'audit' many of the on-line courses I find mentioned here. Great fun. Thanks!
You're implying this isn't done already at universities. In literally every single class in university, the professor would spend lecture time talking about cheating, and it was always spelled out in the syllabus.
Ya I was talking specifically about for high-net worth individuals, though. If you are worth 100 million, you're paying ~50 million in tax when you die. That's certainly worth sheltering.
I've never heard about that, and I graduated from a top college fairly recently, which leads me to believe this is not true of most schools.
> to think about self-imposed limits in art via tools or physical handicaps.

Oh, I'm also not denying the value of self-imposed limits:

(0) In a library I'm writing, I'm enforcing these rules: no unreachable code paths, no exceptions (or any other form of sneaky control flow), no asserts. Programming under these constraints is difficult, but the result is very satisfying: my functions now have more precise argument types, because I'm not allowed to throw an exception if they're passed the wrong argument!

(1) When I write music (which admittedly I don't do very well), I find it useful to come up with, say, 10 potential leitmotifs, reject all but 2 or 3 of them, and force myself to write the rest of the song or tune around the selected motifs. The other motifs are completely forbidden, though they may be reused when writing another song or tune.

> I am an experimenter, and although I fancy myself reading about logic and computing

I think anyone who's doing something new, not done before, has to be an experimenter to some extent. Which is a good thing! That's how cool stuff happens: try various approaches, until you find one that works. Even logic was developed that way. First-order jails limit what you can try, though.

---

As for the rest of your post, I have read it, but I can't intelligently comment. I'm a visually challenged person - I'm not blind, but I'm the kind of person who needs a ruler and a compass to draw stickmen.
I was trying to do something exactly like this a few months ago, but I found that browsers' extension APIs have no way to access files after download. You'd have to intercept a download and manage it entirely in the extension, which will likely break so many JS-driven downloads as to be very bothersome.

Alternatively you would have to install a local helper process outside the browser, and at that point, you're basically an antivirus. In fact, I think AVs are the ones better placed to add this as a feature, as well as already having the significant resources needed to maintain a secure archive of hashes for files (although I had thought up a signature-based scheme that software vendors/distributors could adopt for a small fee).
Baby White Noise Machine Reviewed and Compared
Lactrosound baby sleeping machines
The point is, if you tax spending and not income, people will do more with less. If you tax income, and not spending, people just do less. Income tax is how poor people are made, and kept poor. Spending tax encourages the poor to become more wealthy by saving - Income tax encourages people to be (and stay poor) by removing the incentive to work.
You do not need to store vertices with equal value. Simplex is basically a greedy iterative algorithm - you keep moving forwards.
Really wondering: who is developing Node/JS on Windows nowadays? Not that I don't like Windows (I like W10 + the new Ubuntu within efforts a lot), but the ecosystem around Node is so much tailored around Linux. Even with OSX where we have an excellent support, there's still some slight friction when deploying to Ubuntu.

Or is Windows 10 a viable alternative for Node devs?
Things change when you're working on a 1-10M LOC codebase , with 1-10K other engineers, like big companies do. Eg. Flow was written at Facebook (where I work).
> moral cost

do you honestly think, not even big corporations but your mom and pop businesses, will put morality over profit if they know they can squeeze more profit?
HPE’s OpenSwitch project gets Linux Foundation backing
You're going to have to deal with lower pay, combined with the higher cost of living -- it's a double-whammy that not many are prepared for when working in Hawaii.

'Not many jobs announced in public, except for Entry-Level stuff. The few higher-level jobs that ARE announced are usually environments with shameful turnover rates.

My recommendation: Unless you've got something lined up, it's not worth staying in the islands to hunt for a great tech job -- you could spend months trying to find something worthy of a solid skillset; or you will be deeply dissatisfied working in a less-challenging job just to get by.

Having said that, I'm always on the lookout for great talent for my own shop. .NET or Java backend (WebServices), or top-notch front-end Angular2 against Node or Rails. I can be Googled for contact info.
what service provider do you use?
This has to be linked with what you grew up with.

I've spent my teens and beyond on text/voice chat with friends and it feels exactly the same as being with them in person. Maybe slightly less with text.

Or could it be because we play games instead of just talking?
I once started a HN meets 4chan (anonynews). Never finished it, haha.

It was almost like this, but without the votes, because I think they are bad.

If someone wants to vote something up they should write a comment, if it's too easy to vote, the opinions get obscured. Also topics/comments were just hide-able if you don't wanted to see them.
Interesting last line in that presentation:

"Flow written in OCaml, Typescript in Typescript"
To put it in perspective Michael Jordan is one of the pioneers of the modern approach to statical machine learning. It's very cool to see his course notes from 12 years ago when many schools didn't even offer basic machine learning courses.

Learning theory is a math-heavy (proof-heavy) subfield of machine learning that studies what's possible and why some of the methods work as well as they do. Unless you have a strong math background and are already fairly well-versed in machine learning, I'd first take practical classes. Learning theory is the last class I took in grad school and I really enjoyed it.
Viruses are mechanically simple enough that the conceptual toolkit of chemistry is enough to understand them. But the conceptual toolkit of biology, while not necessary, can still be fruitfully applied to them. (Biological understanding is also necessary for explaining why viruses might do what they do.)

There is no "not alive" category; that is the long-discredited philosophy of vitalism. It's purely a question of how you choose to do your analysis.

But I'll leave you with a selection from the wikipedia article "Virus":

Opinions differ on whether viruses are a form of life, or organic structures that interact with living organisms. They have been described as "organisms at the edge of life", since they resemble organisms in that they possess genes, evolve by natural selection, and reproduce by creating multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly. Although they have genes, they do not have a cellular structure, which is often seen as the basic unit of life. Viruses do not have their own metabolism, and require a host cell to make new products. They therefore cannot naturally reproduce outside a host cell – although bacterial species such as rickettsia and chlamydia are considered living organisms despite the same limitation. Accepted forms of life use cell division to reproduce, whereas viruses spontaneously assemble within cells. They differ from autonomous growth of crystals as they inherit genetic mutations while being subject to natural selection.
I think a candidate needs to have both algorithmic and software design skills. Companies put a lot of emphasis on the former skill, ignoring the latter, which imo should equally be tested.
Like the presentation said, if you have a small project then don't use type checking. If you work in a big project with a lot of code that you didn't write then it could help a lot.

Also you don't have to use it everywhere with Flow.
How big are the projects you are working on though? For instance I work an a 2 year old Angular project and static typing is something we are trying to introduce because the codebase is large and challenging to work with, mostly because Javascript. There's only so much you can do with best practices and code organisation.
It seems that other professions have solved this. Nobody is asking lawyers to run a trial on a whiteboard or solve a whodunit mystery in 2 hours. And I don't think that licensing process for lawyers guarantees anything other than the right to practice law (there are pretty bad licensed lawyers out there). Do construction workers draw diagrams of installing drywall in their hiring process? Do plumbers get challenged with the back of cereal box trace-the-pipe puzzle?

There are jobs, which have a similar hiring process. Performance artists actually need to perform to get hired but they do perform their actual work. I.e. they are not playing the anthem of Cambodia on a toy recorder in order to be hired as a death metal band drummer.
You are conflating 'evolution is directionless' with 'no stages'. Stages can only be seen when looking back at the evolutionary history.

For example:

Study reveals human body has gone through four stages of evolution (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-08/bu-srh083115....)

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/37/11524.abstract
Well, if you don't go on /b/, /r9k/, /k/ or /pol/ it's rather nice.
See What’s New in Cinnamon 3.0
There's assessment centers for most decent entry level management jobs which usually involve grouping tasks by importance and team oriented tasks. They can last a day, sometimes two. Typical consulting gigs have case studies and market size guesstimating (the dreaded how many lawnmowers in NYC etc.)

Typical office secretary jobs here require a work sample so you'll get a typical task for the job and have to do it on the spot (write a letter to someone, translate a text).
My current job (academia) required a somewhat simple test to see if I have a decent understanding of method/statistics and the programming test was answering a couple of questions :P

In logistics you usually have to reason through a couple of typical work situations.

After entry level...it's usually just an interview and references.
Yes, but talking about "toy languages" when literally millions of people on the world make a living out of this is just mean :(
"I had to revisit Calculus & Linear Algebra too" - what resource would you recommend for this? after being a web developer for a couple of years i find myself rusty and unable to find good resources for this.
Trying to get into machine learning but i've forgotten most of the math
Jacob Appelbaum’s response to accusations by the Tor community
Ulterior States – future of cryptocurrencies
Types are invaluable when refactoring your code. I have found Typescript to be invaluable when doing exploratory programming as it allows me to refactor heavily as I learn more about the structure of the problem. The compiler points all the affected code sites and I have reasonable confidence in the correctness of the code after the refactor.
When I hear linear programming I always remember this method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsoid_method. It is nice example of algorithm which is not useful for programming only for mathematicians (I believe it was used as proof that linear programming is in P). I think that most of the programmers will have really hard time to implement it and also it is on average slower than simplex method despite a fact that simplex is not in P and this algorithm is.
You could even keep copies of the version of the file that had your fn definition.

If nothing else, it's a pretty interesting idea.
"Do you have a link supporting the DNA damage and alcohol relationship? That's interesting."

Not the op but alcoholics are likelier to develop e.g. pancreatic cancer. I believe the direct mechanism, though, is not explained. "About 7 out of 10 cases of chronic pancreatitis are due to long term heavy drinking":

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/type/pancreatic...
Ah. So basically this[1]?

[1]: https://gist.github.com/djspiewak/3a6ff436865d9e5794e4

I mean, I guess you're technically correct: If nothing else, the impact of his views on the project is that it results in the exclusion of people who choose to exclude themselves from projects created by "the wrong people".

But of course that's trivially true of all projects, so why do you think it's such a problem in this particular case? If you answer "because his views are really bad" while acknowledging that they otherwise have no direct bearing on the technology, you're basically saying "because he's really unpopular".

I have no love of Yarvin's politics, but that sort of cure is worse than the disease.
Mark Zuckerberg's multi-account password was 'dadada'
I work on a new Ruby interpreter, and our solution to this problem has been to interpret the C code of extensions. That way we can give it one API, but really implement another.
4-Minute Miracle? Burn Fat and Build Muscle with Tabata
Multi-interpretter is another possibility that is currently explorer. Still need to load 1 interpretter by core, but no more serialization to share objects.