skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you, igk. AI is a threat right now and has to be countered. Now the problem is: is there an organization dedicated to countering current AI trends through government regulations to slow down AI research and prevent AI misuse? Or are we just going to talk about it on Hacker News and German hacker meetups?

Because at least OpenAI and other "AI Safety" people are attempting to try to stop this 'risk'. They may fail, but at least they can say they tried to deal with "strong AI". How about those worried about current "weak AI"? If the cargo cult spreads and we do nothing...should we get some of the blame for letting the robots proliferate?

Then again. Maybe it is impossible to stop or slow down these future trends. Maybe AI is destined to eat the world, and our goal should be to save as many people as we can from the calamity.
I didn't see university as a occupational training facility, and I was torn between majoring in CS or history.

What I got out of my CS program was... discovering that figuring out how systems and things worked was interesting to me. I also found the prospect of something closer to engineering was a better path to me than academia, teaching, law or some other path.

In terms of the relevance of specific coursework, I can't say that I spend a lot of time with advanced math or some of the other topics, but I learned my way around a UNIX system, got my first taste of large scale networking, and a bunch of other things.

What I learned most about in school was me.
As for testing a prospective programmer, what I consider an ideal test would be something like this:

1. Pick the three most important lines out of this 100 lines of code.

2. Explain why they're important to those who're not familiar with the problem at all.

3. Rename its functions and variables to achieve maximum consistency to you.

4. Optimize the code for maximum efficiency.

5. Optimize the same code for maximum maintainability. (assuming the code will be used for 30 years)
>the author provides plenty of reasons for why Wright might not want to sign a message even if he could, and they're interesting and layered reasons that require going into detail into the warped psychology of a man who appears just crazy enough to be Satoshi and refuse to prove it

The author provides no believable reason why the scammer won't prove it. They're not interesting/layered reasons. He simply regurgitates the delusions of the scammer.
While it's clear many university institutes and projects have benefited the wider public, I think he was specifically referring to the value of university to an individual, for most people (excepting those who are studying sciences to enter a specific niche field where they wouldn't be able to pick up the necessary skills anywhere else) university is indeed a waste of time and money. I'm a 22 year old developer based in Australia, I've been working in the web industry full time since I was 18 and been earning money all along. Yet I have multiple friends who did CS etc. at uni and despite having the formal qualifications I lack, they're earning less than me and have a good 10 years of paying off their education debt before they can actually use their earnings beyond getting by.
To me, (colloquially and ignoring subtleties):

university = college = tertiary education = higher education = postsecondary education = school = uni
Good for you for being lucky enough to be able to follow your dreams.

But you have to understand that other people mostly just care about being able to put food on the table, pay rent, and being able to save up enough to be able to support a family and buy a house.
Solidity contracts do contain functions and some state. But that's at a fairly different level than Java's classes. Internals are not exported. The contract's structs belong to contracts. There's no need for namespaces within code because addresses provides namespacing already - all your code is normally visible to you already and you'll not get unexpected names shadowing anything in your code.

I'm not saying namespacing is bad, just that namespacing as defined in Java is likely not necessary in ethereum world, as I understand it. It would likely just confuse what's immutable vs what's referenced by name.
I am also not impressed by a lot of CS majors I interview. I often ask them to come up with a simple sort algorithm where performance doesn't matter or to reverse an array. A lot of them have problems with that. I am very tempted to try fizz-buzz...
Those are pretty cool, I wish the self funded passenger rail was feasible in California.
And to think they tried to hire me.

I guess in some multiverse you're simultaneously trying to advocate and discredit me at the same time.

Since I'm the author of the article and you seem passionate about the subject if you have any specific criticisms. Like a fact I got wrong or something please share! Unlike Vice, I'm open to corrections.
>> "Uber says it is profitable in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Australia — if you factor out taxes and interest payments."

There's a level of immaturity in the current definitions of profitability that the Valley is pushing. Being privately held ensures that no sensible accounting system will be anywhere near their books.
Once again, you've completely missed the point. I am trying to say that the value of university has nothing to do with your ability to get a job. I'm trying to plead with people to stop trying to compare university with a job or measure the value of a university in terms of a job.

If you can't see the value in university, good for you; nobody's forcing you to go.
It is not illegal to be racist.
Trying to get a full days use out of my laptop I did some tests last week, Edge with adblock beats Opera with battery saver + adblock.
Hello! and welcome to Moviefone!... (2016)
I have very mixed feelings about this article. For one thing, there are a couple of different kinds of CS programs. The basic division is, or used to be, whether it was more Math or Engineering heavy. In fact, some schools attach the program to a BS in the Math department and others in the engineering with more exposure to EE and Computer Engineering. Neither of these are necessarily helpful for becoming a programmer in today's market, but they do generate very different experiences.

The biggest benefit for me was the complete understanding and model you get of the entire computer. How it works, what theories it is based on, why things are the way they are (in terms of the Turing model, the way microprocessors work, etc).

I don't believe this knowledge is helpful from a software engineering point, and I may have been a better programmer if I had spent those years learning more about how to work as a team and how to solve real-world problems. However, I do feel that it has allowed me to switch between different fields of programming without completely being thrown for a loop. It has allowed me to understand the issues that crop up when something goes wrong on a much deeper level, or why problems crop up on one part of "the stack" that I may not have understood had I focused merely on learning how to program. These are personally valuable to me, whether or not they may have been more valuable to my career.
I see complaints about big-O notation being a useless interview torture device all the time, and yet I'd be hard-pressed to find something else in my very theoretical CS education that (a) was easier to learn (it's the most hand-wavy math I've ever encountered), (b) I retained as well, or (c) is as useful to me as a full-stack web developer.

I can't speak for others, but knowing when to use an array vs. when to use a set feels pretty fundamental to me being able to do my job well.
Except most colleges outside the elite (and probably a lot of students at those too) expend more like 30% of effort growing intellectually. There is also significant social growth, generally, but a lot of time at college (probably most) isn't spent on intellectual endeavors.
abstract:

http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v8/n6/abs/100981a.html
It seems like a major drawback to this approach is that the address for nearby locations have nothing in common. That makes it harder to get a sense of where something is based on the address alone.
Is that something lawyers do? I've never met a lawyer like that. Next we'll hear that physicians or architects stand behind their work...
Sorry, but this is bullshit. You sound like Ethereum or SlockIt employee. No one in their sane mind would trust their money a company which can't guarantee security of your funds, let alone good coding practice (the DAO code is shit, sorry -- there are no tests, no comments, no spec, no clear upgrade story etc.). Good attempt, and I can feel for Ethereum folks, but something this important should be rock solid, not "experiment" when you're fucking with people's money. This is not a hacker's playground.
Wondershare TunesGo 8 Registration Code / Crack FREE
The late Carl Sagan had a great sequence in the original Cosmos where he made a similar point about how many books one could read in a lifetime:

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand
books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the
contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick
is to know which books to read.
Of all the gaming companies, Valve makes the most sense to be this heavily invested in VR--given their stake in the PC-industry.

Or maybe too many devs thought VR was the coolist project to work on and moved to it. (Valve is known for their flat structure http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...)
It could be environmental regulations are what finally push economic activity out into space. At the Recode conference a few weeks back, Jeff Bezos (Amazon, Blue Origin) stated his wish to see heavy industries and manufacturing moved into the celestial realm, beyond our precious atmosphere and land, leaving the earth pristine and less-polluted.
They didn't have this book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_the_Fuck_to_Sleep when my kids were young.

Even better than the book is Samuel L Jackson narrating it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDGKK6y8OtQ

It probably would have been my favorite! Just kidding. Maybe?
You are describing Bitcoin script.
Despite those benefits you list, you still don't think that knowledge makes you a better software engineer?

I definitely think that understanding the lower levels helps me write better software, largely for the reasons you list.
This is what I tell people about the + notation in their email addresses. Spammers know what it's for, and can easily strip it out if they wish to conceal their address source.
I would agree, in broad strokes. One of my gifts has always been a near-photographic visual memory (I can remember images of certain pages of books I read decades ago), and my brain's propensity for collection and efficient indexing of random bits of trivia. Mention some historical subject, and I almost instantly pull up everything I've ever read about that subject, as well as secondary and tertiary subjects that are related...
Companies that don't take creative liberties in the way you are suggesting:

New York Times, Reuters, Washington Post, NPR, PBS Frontline, BBC, CBC Radio, ProPublica, Associated Press, The Guardian.

Their code of ethics can be found here:
http://www.nytco.com/who-we-are/culture/standards-and-ethics...
http://handbook.reuters.com/?title=A_Brief_Guide_to_Standard...
http://asne.org/content.asp?pl=236&sl=19&contentid=335
http://ethics.npr.org/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/about-us/journalisti...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/
http://www.cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/reporting-to-canadians/act...
https://www.propublica.org/about/code-of-ethics/
http://www.apme.com/?page=EthicsStatement
http://www.theguardian.com/guardian/article/0,5814,642387,00...

Vice has editorials for sale if you happen to have $27,850: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cj_1xHMVAAE9FUs.jpg:large
My wife also used SimpleCitizen, you can pay for a lawyer to green-light your paperwork before you file it. That's what we did.
So one third of Valve is working on VR... absolutely definitely not working on Half Life 3 or Portal 3. Which pushes their possible/probable/hypothetical release dates even further into the future. :-(
Skyrocketing costs prompt exodus of California residents
@igorgue - it definitely works. Me & my spouse are very happy with the results of the service thus far :)
I actually think something better is happening: it's possible to write backends in a lot more languages. Go, Swift, Rust, and Elixir come to mind as becoming usable for web backends in the last 5 years or so. People just seem to write their backend in the language they like the best.

Then you have BaaS and things like Postgraphql that mean that writing a backend by hand is becoming a thing of the past. Lots of good developments, but not necessarily a "new PHP" that's replacing PHP.
Excellent github != good programmer
"It's a people problem: there is a couple of old-timers who essentially have CEO's ear and behave like small children. Yelling and swearing at meetings, forcing certain people to be fired, that kind of stuff."*

Toxic.

I was watching/listening to Christine Porath talking about this dynamic yesterday. Watch "How incivility shuts down our brains at work" [0] to understand how incivility destroys your performance, motivation in startups and robs your cognitive resources.

[0] 8.24min, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoT-nmSdAOs
I suspect this could also benefit path planning for autonomous ground vehicles (e.g. self-driving cars).
A Korean startup hopes to replace QWERTY in Arabic-scripted languages
This is the second[0] post I've read this weekend where someone preferred a file-based database system to MySQL. In the other, they explain why MySQL wouldn't be preferable to SQLite in their use case. Here, moving to flat files was faster and easier to work with, at 1/5 the total size, and being much more granular.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11934826
Sorry. Got side tracked. Will reply as long as the thread stays open.
I hope this kicks google into improving the battery and other resource consumption in chrome. I feel most of the chrome developers probably use top of the line computers with 32gb ram etc so don't get how bloated chrome is getting.
CO2 is not evil and by mass most of life on earth needs it to breathe.
bought for 10, sold for 30, lost 12, profit 8. So, fuck eBay for only enabling you get 8 profit instead of 0?
Not quite escrow, but there's 'Fulfillment By Amazon', which takes care of distribution and shipping for you (albeit for additional fulfillment fees), and can be safer for both the buyer and seller since goods pass through inventory checks at a warehouse. (Disclaimer: work with Fulfillment By Amazon)
I still think it's worth talking about this though, as so many people DO think its the only way to go and take on a tremendous financial risk thinking they do it for the job.

I wouldn't contest it's useful, but I'd definitely feel that for most it's probably not worth the price of a US university.
How to modernize legacy Java applications with HTML5 [video]
Organized crime syndicates linked to mass ATM thefts
In what world do we live in that a university education has nothing to do with employment? Not all of us are lucky enough to spend 180,000 on an education and not care about its impact on our job prospects.
You're right. Which is why I have been pushing to entirely separate the concepts of university education and of a job in the minds of Hacker News readers.

If you want a job, go to dev bootcamp. Or online school. Or watch YouTube videos. Or just get a job. Or go to school then get a job.

If you want to go to school, go to school.

Let's all get along and stop trying to dismiss the other path as invalid, worthless, or dumb. It's everyone's prerogative to go to school or not. Stop comparing the two or drawing associations.
People are so entitled. They want free guaranteed secure transactions without putting any effort into security. It's "Fuck Ebay" every time something goes wrong, and entitled complacency every time they get an awesome deal.
ok that's what I thought you meant. thank you, sir! I began to realize after I hit return it was probably a redundant question, I apologize. I get starstruck a little when dealing with people whose work I've admired for so long. each time, boom, my effective IQ probably just drops right through the floor. :-)

one of your influences on me as a software engineer has been to strive for solutions which make certain things easier, all things possible, because of architecture choices, while still allowing best-of-both-worlds modalities. eg. that which is to UI's as DSL's are to a general purpose programming language.
> The sheer absurdity of anyone actually doing that is what works in the favor of scammers on both sides (buyers and sellers).

Request shipping to post office, open package in post office while filling with smartphone. If you don't want to pay for a trusted retailed, you have to put in some work yourself.
Yeah, I was about to say "so, what.cd for auctions?" I'd use it.
Ask HN: Quitting a job with a YC company after less than a year, mistake?
(Keeping details to a minimum for obvious reasons)

The idea is great, there is some traction, but it is built on an incredibly shaky foundation. I don't have faith in the leadership team- they don't know how to allocate or focus resources, don't know what a good metric is, hire senior people then don't let them do their jobs. Micromanagement, morale and a complete lack of company culture are also major issues. I'm tired of fighting the founders, I used to be motivated, now I don't want to get out of bed in the morning.

I want to leave (I'm not the only one), but I'm concerned that this may burn bridges with other YC companies. Am I correct to have this fear? I'm not going to do anything unprofessional to leave on bad terms, going to give plenty of notice, wrap up my projects and get out.
> If you don't actually need files, design around database instead

That is fine if your target is eg AWS - but if you want all your infrastructure in docker, the db needs persistent storage...
Ding! Ding! Ding! It's a bit sad that most 'CS degrees are worthless' detractors don't realize this.
Please read http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/17/thoughts-on-the-dao....

Solidity language makes very hard to write safe code:

Is Ethereum/Solidity Suitable for Secure Smart Contracts?
It's clear that writing a robust, secure smart contract requires extreme amounts of diligence. It's more similar to writing code for a nuclear power reactor, than to writing loose web code.

Yet the current Solidity language and underlying EVM seems designed more for the latter. Some misfeatures are:

A good language for writing state machines would ensure that there are no states from which it is impossible to recover.
A good language for writing state machines would make it painfully clear when state transitions can and cannot happen.
A good language for maintaining state machines would provide features for upgrading the security of a live contract.
A good language for writing secure code would make it clear that there are no implicit actions, that code executes plainly, as read.
The current language does not fulfill any of these commandments, and in fact, the last one, involving implicit recursive calls, is what did The Dao in.

The SlockIt team even had the designer and implementor of Solidity perform a review of their code. If he cannot get something like The DAO to be secure, no one can.
Many indie documentary companies are edgy. Just look at what plays at festivals like 'hotdocs'.

Speaking more generally about journalism you can try The Intercept.

But if you want more established sources where you have to dig for edgy content you can try New York Times, Reuters, Washington Post, NPR, PBS Frontline, BBC, CBC Radio, ProPublica, Associated Press and The Guardian.
Interesting. I was with you until this post--I'm curious if you haven't wondered, even a bit, if 180k was too steep of a price tag? I'm a fan of university in general, but find the sky-high prices of private institutions hard to stomach compared to similarly-good in-state options.
Or... they could be working on Half Life 3 in VR?
I'm not going risk wasting a day of my life for $100 or get my life more entwined with an avowed criminal.
Samsung acquires Joyent
Acer’s Webstore Hacked, Names, Mailing Addresses and Credit Cards Leaked
Ask HN: Developer FAQ for recruiters
I'm considering creating a FAQ for recruiters, to handle the bog standard questions, the inane BS, and the questions that I find uncomfortable like where they try to pin me down on expected salary before they assess my worth or I know a thing about the job.

Does anybody else do this? Any thoughts, from the recruiter or from the dev side?
I unpacked an old book on it this year. Basically you hang your head down a lot. That's it. If you have CCI, or CSF leaks or Chiari, you'll get a little relief, true - but what you really need if that works for you is a neurosurgeon (not neurologist) and an upright MRI. In the seventies, there were no upright MRIs and nobody took chiari or CCI etc seriously so the Alexander Technique was all there was.