skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
CS education is not useless, but less used. And it is also used-less by the same people who teach it. There are exceptions - but that number is way too small than it should be.

If someone wants to learn coding or programming - screw the CS degree, there are better options. I know CS degree holders who can't code more than a few lines or can't debug a large program. And there are better programmers who don't have a CS degree. YouTube will teach better programming than a CS degree class.

Apart from programming, if one "also" wants to learn the mathematical aspect of CS and want to work on core-stuff, go for a CS degree. And those skills do not come easy from some tutorials - a academic rigor is probably the best way to earn it. But if you use the O-notation at some jobs - you could become an outcast in the team.

When I got into a top college for a CS degree, I had high hopes from it. For the first 1.5 years, I wanted to quit, quit and just quit. It was hopeless - they were teaching few subjects that I was way better at. But for some reason they would not allow me to just give exams and get promoted. I already knew programming, patterns, electronics and even dealt with basic robotics before I joined college. For one example - when they started teaching operating-systems, my expectation was that they will at least give a hands-on on writing a pretty basic OS. No - they were just doing theories. Ultimately, I ended up writing a pretty simple version of a custom OS without any mentoring (and used Google) - because the professors had never even written a boot-loader to start with. I also ended up helping weaker students get upto the mark. In one of the semester assignment evaluations, I was told by a senior professor " you copied programs from the internet - how come they are so well written". I lost trust in them.

I did learn some stuff in the later years and came to peace. While I knew programming, I did not have a strong math background - stuff like probabilities, numerical methods, theoretical computer science and bit of advanced algorithms were the things I learnt and explored further. The most important thing was getting introduced to AI which turned out to be a huge area of interest for me.

However, all of that bad experience has turned me sour towards academia in general and I do not recommend spending a lot of money and more-important-time learning "used-less" things - unless you are expecting more than programming in CS. And when it comes to CS, the learning never stops.
Yeah, there was no mention of locking out other HMD:

> In return we ask that your device leveraging our technology works with our platform. And mostly that is it. We won't ask that it only works on our platform, we won't stop you from targeting other industries. This gives both you and your users freedom of choice and security that isn't dependant on either party's future decisions.

As long as the HMD supports the steamVR platform requirements, it can play steam/valve games.
That seems like a bit of a stretch. While many of the Half-Life games have involved teleportation as a plot element, the vast majority of their gameplay has used more traditional methods of movement -- either walking or driving small vehicles.
Even mobile cpus will be all 64 bit before long and it seemed to run great with 4gb others reported success on systems with 2gb. Meanwhile ram available in all sorts of devices is ever increasing.

What fs a laptop/workstation uses shouldn't be determined by whats suitable for a watch in 2016.
Not sure if you're saying that 2 months is ample incentive to leave a job you like, or not enough unless you really hate it. Those seem like opposite things.
A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale
I'm amazed that "trustno1" is one of the top 50 most popular passwords in some large datasets.
Hi Alan, the question that troubles me now and I want to ask you is:

Why do you think there is always a difference between:

A. the people who know best how something should be done, and

B. the people who end up doing it in a practical and economically-successful or popular way?

And should we educate our children or develop our businesses in ways that could encourage both practicality and invention? (do you think it's possible?). Or would the two tendencies cancel each other out and you'll end up with mediocre children and underperforming businesses, so the right thing to do is to pick one side and develop it at the expense of the other?

(The "two camps" are clearly obvious in the space of programming language design and UI design (imho it's the same thing: programming languages are just "UIs between programmers and machines"), as you well know and said, with one group of people (you among them) having the right ideas of what OOP and UIs should be like, and one people inventing the technologies with success in industry like C++ and Java. But the pattern is happening at all levels, even business: the people with the best business ideas are almost never the ones who end up doing things and so things get done in a "partially wrong" way most of the time, although we have the information to "do it right".)
Yeah... it's definitely a high price tag. I should've probably gone to a state school to save that money. But I still find it worth it because I see what I got from school as priceless, as silly and dramatic as that sounds.

As an aside, I am of the opinion that university should be free. But in the US, it's not. It's super expensive. That's a bummer, but like I said, it's worth it to me, money or not, job or not.
I totally agree, but the reality is that in order to write contracts that are sure to be correct, you need a level of expertise that involves much more work than just learning how to write programs. Knowing the syntax and usage of a rigorously-typed language like Agda is the easy part.
Yes. It was discovered to be used by terrorists in the past (esp. the 2008 Mumbai attacks).
China Still Successfully Hacking US, but Less
Light weight music player with lots of functionality
I meant reasoning about resource usage. Rust provides lifetimes which I think is based on linear logic (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7061876). In theory, this gas thing should act as the metric you mentioned but it doesn't seem like it is implemented properly when it comes to how the fundamental building blocks of Solidity act with respect to the gas metric. The termination stuff in total languages I think has a ways to go in terms of general accessibility. Dependent types aren't the easiest thing to pick up.
As long as you never convert into traditional currency, how will they know you participated in a transaction?
Seems like Uber has quite a bit of competition in the US market besides Lyft, namely:
1) Juno -- https://www.gojuno.com/
2) Gett -- http://gett.com/nyc/
3) Via -- http://ridewithvia.com/

Seem like all our starting out in NY, but it is just a matter of time before margins are squeezed to zero.
> If at all possible you shouldn't be storing passwords to begin with and instead relying on another service for authentication

This is wrong. Using another login service might introduce all sorts of new issues, a big one is privacy.
I think a comparison to slavery might be a little ambitious here. There are plenty of other things we presently do to human beings which our ancestors can be cross with us for that are probably higher on the badness scale than eating meat.
I think a good approach is to buy things if/when you need them, not in advance. Your example of a tig welder, wait until you have a specific project that requires it, and then look at your options. For fixing a toilet seal, only buy the parts you need, don't accumulate a 'spares' draw of parts you can pick up easily the day you need to work on something.

Maybe a friend buys a welder you could borrow, before you yourself need to use it. What if you need to unexpectedly fix a different problem? (roofing, tiling, etc...) Could you need another tool instead that you hadn't planned for?

I group tools with things like PC hardware, into "under $20", "~$50", "~$100", "~$250" and "~$500". I normally have $500(AUD) set aside for my next project (rather than a collection of tools of similar value), so its always there when I actually need something specific.

I've started working on a hardware MIDI controller with my little brother, so spent around $250(AUD) one afternoon on a soldering iron, arduino, book and a few bits and pieces (buttons, pots, LEDs). I avoided huge packs of LEDs, Resistors, etc... and just bought a few I knew I'd need (10k resistors for the buttons, etc...).

Anything left over, I'll donate or leave with him. If I don't have another HW project, I'll probably give him the soldering iron and multimeter too. Plus, I'll know who to ask first if I need to borrow one in the future ;)

I probably cost myself an additional $100 on this project, but I don't have to pay for a shed, or 'spare room' (like most of my friends have) to store various things, so it probably evens out over time.
The network effect of ride-sharing is considerably weaker than that of a social network. A social network’s effect is O(n²), as that is the number of meaningful connections.

Ride-sharing networks are O(n). They benefit from liquidity, but I derive only secondary benefit from being “connected” to others on the platform. It's not nothing, but it feels linear, not superlinear.

Ride-sharing apps are just apps, and the barrier for adopting a new one is low, for both sides of the market. Further, Uber’s political operations benefit the other apps equally.

Uber can defend its brand and its satisfied users. Size helps here. Think iTunes. But the “network” is replicable by others.
Passive aggressive.
As I understand it, the motion sickness is directly related to rendering lag. Outside of VR there isn't much of an incentive to reduce that lag - as the only people who really care much about it now are the most enthusiastic of PC gamers. There is a lot of buffering and synchronization between the software and our retinas right now, so the hardware advancement needed to enable motion sick free VR (low lag GPU and display) is going to have to come from a drive to specifically deliver motion sick free VR.
When you had to scroll through three pages to get what you want. They archived what they wanted.No?
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> ...probably higher on the badness scale than eating meat.

You're kinda making 'wyager's point for him.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as
This title is weak
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I honestly can't seem to care whether the things I'm eating have feelings or not. But I'm considering cutting down on meat (especially bovine) because of its carbon footprint.
The Valve publications page has a few slides and documents relating to Valve presentations regarding VR:

http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/publications.html

One of my favorite tidbits comes in the presentation, "Lessons learned porting Team Fortress 2 to Virtual Reality", on preventing VR motion sickness: http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/2013/Team_Fortress_...

> Don’t change the user’s horizon line, ever. You can see here how the camera follows the motion and rotation of the character’s head and so it rolls. Your actual head isn’t going to roll when you get killed by an Eyelander, so the mismatch will make you sick.

Here's the presentation's video, bookmarked at the aforementioned insight:

https://youtu.be/Gpr0FE2ATaY?t=19m36s

For those of you non-TF2 players, the "Eyelander" is the name of a player-wieldable sword, and when it connects, the victim's head flies off and rolls around the ground. Apparently simulating that effect (changing the user's "horizon line") will make people very sick.
ADITYA TAWATIA
There's a chrome extension called 'the great suspender' that does exactly that.
They essentially built an ad-hoc database complete with sequential keys and indexing. I'm curious to see what the resulting performance would be if they used a database that's appropriate for the type of data they have. I'm not familiar with non-relational databases but I suspect that a key-value or document store would work very well.
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ah, I knew they had said something about it. I guess much would also depend on your exact route.
You don't get the Java memory model, do you?
In imperative you don't ask questions but give instructions.

As long as the instructions are longer than the question (and they often are, even in your example ;)), you are bound to make more errors here.

Plus, it requires some understanding of how this damn machine works in the first place.

When turning questions into instruction is decidable it pays off to automate it.
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That is precisely why I quoted the example of medical diagnosis systems within restricted subfields.
Also, FWIW, the article really doesn’t explain much, and might be plain wrong. It’s far from a zero-sum game, the overall market has very little ceiling in the foreseeable future.
Pff, I didn't even _want_ those grapes.
G2A sold $450k worth of our game keys
Very good points in the talk, but is there really a way to fight this incivility? We tried to talk to the people involved, but it didn't really work: these old-timers are pretty efficient at smooth talk and making people believe they mean well for the company. But if you have 1:1 with almost any engineer, they tell you they are burned out and demoralized because of that widespread toxicity.
There is no "standard" compiler. There is a Fortran standard, and there are standard-conforming compilers and standard-conforming programs.

There are popular compilers, like gfortran and the Intel compiler.

My point had nothing to do with popularity. My point is that non-standard-conforming programs can have anything happen when they execute, including starting World War III (see https://www.google.com/search?q=fortran+"start+world+war"), and showing output from one compiler doesn't prove anything.
Not sure how Spotify ended up using GCE instead of any other providers. The downtime story was hilarious.
archive if it's down: http://web.archive.org/web/20160620202448/http://tinybuild.c...
And yet, people do switch browsers on the desktop, if slowly. Do you think that get-a-ride apps are stickier than browsers?
Elevated CO2 from fossil carbon stores (coal/oil etc) is evil. That isn't the same as C02 already in the biosphere.
I meant that the actual problem is the emotional attachment to the things you own, its not the things themselves. That beeing said, it does not matter, how much someone owns, just how attached he/she is to it. The lesser attached the happier, I guess.
Because VR is just another way to sell games. They want you to know you can play your steam games on everything and that is their primary priority, and since things like games from steam can run on your Oculus (or whatever) they can sell you on a thousand experiences instead of one original sale.
Also, in most cases the alternative is to hire equipment.

I could never justify owning even a cheap set of golf clubs, pool cue or bowling shoes, but I'll never turn down an invitation by friends or family. If I do something rarely, but still enjoy it, I'll treat it like planning and budgeting for any other night out or holiday.
Just note that in the end game the switching cost is much lower. You don't have to convince users and drivers, only users and buy a bunch of cars in one location.
You start with a subjective criteria? Ouch. It reminds me of the time I had to do some work for a factory... every department was telling me how theirs was the most important work - with arguments.

I can make an argument for even a "write to log" line as being extremely important when something goes wrong; I have no idea how I would pick three lines out of a hundred.
I think Rust is interested in doing more than the minimal amount, and has been discussing with maintainers already, but I'm not aware of the details. They probably can be found on threads on internals.rust-lang.org or users.rust-lang.org though.

rustup.rs already does check against Rust release signing keys, so that part is at least trivial to integrate.
Rare Newborn Planet May Be the Youngest Ever Detected
This debacle seems like the most obvious possible outcome for any system combining the concepts "Turing-completeness" and "cryptocurrency blockchain". What baffles me most about the whole mess is that any of it caught anyone by surprise. I guess I had vaguely (naively?) assumed that the people building Ethereum and TheDAO must have come up with some clever solution for this sort of problem, but so far I haven't heard of one.
Soon Your Doctor Will Check Your Tweets for Signs You're Depressed
> Trees can sequester a bounded amount of carbon from the air.

Biochar can be continuously applied on fields to improve degraded soils, and its production from woody biomass is energy positive and inexpensive.
Did you know cows can have best friends?

They also wouldn't exist as a species if they weren't tasty to humans.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The belief that a coercive monopoly is beneficial to society is a delusion of religious proportions.
Next up we'll find that in their own way we can't relate to, plants and even single cells are conscious too.

Nihilarianism is the only choice we can justify ethically.

Alternatively, what Raed667 said (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11943656)...
Ultimately we get the over-sanitised walled gardens we deserve. As with overly prudish advertisers pulling ads from comedy TV programmes, though, the power of (and need for!) voting with your feet can be quite hard to discern for most consumers.
Unfortunately none of the examples provided in the article (I haven't read the book) prove sentience or suffering as a result of pain. They demonstrate pain, but it can be argued that the pain that fish feel is nonconscious/nonsentient.

I'm only complaining that the proof here isn't watertight btw. As a former-meateater-turned-vegetarian (because of 'sentience' guilt) my intuition is that the pain they feel must be similar to the pain we feel.
have you eaten human yet? if you don't care about feelings, then this should be on your menu.
To be fair, being decapitated in such a way that your head bounces and rolls around will leave you feeling, at the least, very sick.
It may be a good time to revisit Kurosawa's Rashomon again. YMMV but it might explain a lot of contradictions we feel about how agenda drives the narrative.
The VR market right now feels kind of like the 3D accelerator market in the '90s, before Direct3D really came into its own, hardware manufacturers were still half-assing OpenGL support, and lots of games were programmed against vendor-proprietary APIs like Glide.

Would be nice if people had actually learned from that and rallied around a standard API/middleware for VR to start with, rather than trying to "console-ize" VR with hardware-specific exclusives. Maybe Valve/SteamVR will end up being that middleware?
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Finally a way to have real punishment in video game.
I stopped eating meat after stories last summer highlighted people eating dog at a festival in China.

I was very upset, and mad, but then I asked myself, why was eating dog so upsetting? The dogs eaten in China were much less abused than any animal eaten in the US. We have industrialized the slaughter of animals.

Either I am OK with dogs being eaten, or I am not OK with the industrialized slaughter of every other animal.

I still love the smell of meat. I remember the things I loved to eat, and it's a struggle, but we (many of us at least) live in a world where we don't need to imprison and eat animals to sustain our lives.

With all that said, I don't expect anyone else to feel the same way. We're slaughtering animals constantly, and I don't have any expectation that anyone stop eating animals.
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The linked blog post about the crazy hacks needed to lessen the impact of the gc on a server got me thinking. Is it possible to implement a non-gc language on top of the CLR? For example could it represent RAII with an imaginary destructor in C# reasonably well?
Not to sound like a jerk, but do you really think a recruiter is going to bother reading an FAQ about you before they contact you?

What result do you want? They're either going to contact you anyways, or not contact you at all. If you want no contact, then just reply with a picture of a kitten or something. If you want contact, then you might have to put up with the occasional inane question.
Turing completeness isn't so bad when you have a relatively low gas limit on a transaction that ensures you can halt at some point.

Maybe I spent too much time in functional languages and I've been doing too much React stuff lately but the way I see it, we have

Contract_method(state, parameters) => {new state, return value}

You could always run the program on a fake, mock state then test postconditions for sanity. So, if those postconditions pass and we haven't run out of gas, run the program for real, otherwise return an error.

Eg transferring 30 eth from contractA to contractB you would have one of the postconditions asserting that ContractA balance is the old balance minus 30.

The notion of gas implies a stack or effort limit, so it's guaranteed that any operation will eventually fail once it runs out of resources. Thus you can specify a theoretical upper limit on resources used in pre-verification, which (AFAIK)is paid by the client contract that requests to withdraw money from the other contract.

I guess one could avoid this by using a DSL that is formally verifiable, but it's still an interesting option
What is the most promising one?
Epistemic asymmetry. You can't even prove that the pain-behavior you observe me demonstrating reflects an internal experience that's anything like your experience of pain, so asking for "proof" that a fish's pain is actually painful isn't even an objectively meaningful question.
Do you have any arguments or just name calling?

Just because the parties agree on some issues doesn't mean the system is rigged.
Also, while people like to argue that it's possible to get programming jobs without a CS degree, it is guaranteed to be some value of harder to get those jobs. Especially if you dream of working in less common and more specialized areas, like (for example) working on compilers or doing HPC stuff, etc.

Yeah, in theory someone can get a job without a CS degree. But it'll be a lot harder, and it's very likely that doors will be closed to you that you would prefer be open. It might be unfair, it might be an injustice, but it's still part of the equation. You might overcome it, but it is still a thing to be overcome that was taken on as an additional burden in exchange for losing a different burden (college).

I have no problem with people with passion and talent skipping college and going straight into the workforce. And it's very clear up front what they get out of it- they get an additional 4 years of professional life, and they never rack up student loans. I just object to people claiming that there's no cost to it.

There is a cost: maybe a negligible one, maybe just a little, or maybe a lot if it means you don't get to do the things you really want to do. Or if you never even find out about the stuff that you would have been incredibly passionate about because you were never exposed to it.

By not going to school, there is guaranteed to be a cost in missed opportunities. Maybe those shut doors and lost opportunities are all for things that the person didn't want to do anyway. The part that bites people is that when they are making the decision to skip school, they're probably in the 18-20 age range and most likely do not have the capacity to evaluate what those lost opportunities even are, and whether or not each one is OK to discard as a long term life decision.
Security guard robots to solve patrolling staff shortage
I read the article.

The author is credulous, and clearly had a wordcount to fill.
Windows update via svchost.exe has been the problem on the machines I support. I randomly eats 100% of the CPU for minutes at a time.

http://www.wintips.org/how-to-fix-svchost-exe-netsvcs-memory...