skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just code a lot and do it daily. If there is nothing to code on your day job or just old legacy cruft to maintain then try code golfing.

Code Golf is about programming as short as possible and it's also a section on StackExchange [1] where you find daily tasks and many people solving them in many languages. You learn so much because...

- You code really every day and you code new stuff

- Motivation is at its max and you want to be faster than the others and have the shortest piece of code; so you still keep coding after your submission to shave every byte away

- And you learn tons of stuff; reason: you spent thinking hours about your solution, how to tweak it etc and suddenly, you see somebody popping in the answers who did it way better than you, so you analyze and study their implementation for hours like you would never read others' source code, adapt their algorithm and learn; especially when it's about array or bit manipulation StackExchange's Code Golf has a vast selection of tasks and some many awesome programmers there; it's just insane, some guys deliver 10 byte long solutions within minutes while I need 2 hours and 150 bytes

- I want to stress–and this might be the most important topic—writing code is one part of coding but there at Code Golf, you learn that the approach, the core algorithm is more important, and can vary so much, so coding is not just writing commands in a text editor, no it's thinking about the right approach and second about writing it down.

- And you see and learn how same problems are solved in different languages

- One thing which you need to get used to are all these golfing languages which are indeed esoteric but every task is solved in all the mainstream languages as well; at the beginning I didn't like all these golfing languages like Jelly, Pyth, MATL but they grew on me and now I understand them better but find them still a bit awkward; so I like more the JS, Java, C, Python solutions; but again you find everything there, lots of solutions in Haskell, Brainf*, PowerShell, TIBasic, x86 assembler, Vimsrcipt, Mathematica and so on

Compared to standard day routine coding where you glue one API to another Code Golf is ultra refreshing and I'd never had so much fun when programming and learned that much at the same time.

I think there are other code golf communities but I think the one on StackExchange is the biggest.

[1] http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/
How to Keep Calm and Mitigate a 470 Gbps DDoS Attack
I wonder if there is any example of a large corporation taking action after a flaw is submitted via an online email form? I think those forms are sent to people who's job it is to disregard their content as much as possible.
Nate Silver's 2016 Election Forecast Microsite
As someone extremely familiar with the current state of VR tech, this is simply a non starter right now. The level of resolution, pixel density, and comfort of current gen HMDs is nowhere near what it will need to be to be an actual useful productivity tool. It's great for gaming, but we're just not there yet for every day use.
Hey, Blake from Layer here: We were not at all trying to finger-point our issues at Google, only provide our customers with up to the minute transparency on where we were with the availability issue. We have received direct feedback from our customers that they do value detailed responses even when the news isn't great.

I take full responsibility for the issues here and the team is working to remediate the exposure as quickly as possible.
I like this approach, and I use it a lot in my Objective-C to swift conversions. For new code (or legacy apps without testing infrastructure) I tend to approach testing first from the top down with Functional tests (uix button pressing) and defer the majority of unit testing until something is broke. If I find a bug in a subsystem than I almost always but a unit test around it. I hate the idea of fixing something twice.

The mocking component is a critical component in this. My networking constructors dependency inject the network config ( PRODUCTION, STAGE, MOCK ). Over the past few months I have been trying different strategies on the mocking. I have done it with local embedded JSON files for the mock network endpoint and also localhost swift server, serving the JSON mocking file overt the network. I like testing across the wire instead of responding with mock data from inside the app because ( as was pointed out in the article ) the functional user experience is often in response to the network response error and response duration.

In the past I have rolled my own swift mocking server, but I will give Embassy a try over the next week. Its always nice to have this type of thing in your developer "tool belt" for future projects.

Thanks for the contribution envoy.
You're assuming that there's a very wide range of people that visit HN, you can't get viewpoints from people that don't visit the site. I'd be surprised if a highly tech focused site called "hacker news" didn't have a strong bias towards certain demographics and viewpoints.
True enough; I had that in mind when I said mid-level, but even at that point I imagine individual training is largely over.

Perhaps a better example would be a teacher identifying the most promising school/college-age musicians?
And tied into this, job changes are frequently said to be one of the best ways to get a raise.
I don't see how that addresses the dynamic I described, beyond re-asserting the conclusion I was questioning.
A notable difference is that Azure file shares have a 5 TB limit for the whole share, and a 1 TB limit on the size of any given file [1], while EFS has no limit on the size of the file system, and a 52 TB limit on the size of any given file. [2]

Disclosure, work for AWS.

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/sto...

[2] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/efs/latest/ug/limits.html
The delicious irony of a person that has outperformed the market betting that it's impossible to outperform the market... and (probably) winning. :-)
Why does it matter that it's not on github? There's an open repo - https://swiftshader.googlesource.com/SwiftShader - along with clear contribution instructions.

The insistence that all projects use git/github annoys me to no end.
Portfolio tracking made easy
The USA has a huge empire, probably the largest ever seen, but it's not an empire of government expansion it's an empire built by companies and culture.
I remember when facebook & google were talking about personalization & knowing what you liked in order to show you more.

People talked about it beforehand that it would create insular thinking - that people would only receive articles that already confirmed their biases.

Seems that's happened :-/
For anymore interested in a slightly lighter version of the paper, it was presented at Black-Hat Asia 2016:

Slides: https://www.blackhat.com/docs/asia-16/materials/asia-16-Siva...

Notes: https://www.blackhat.com/docs/asia-16/materials/asia-16-Siva...

Source: https://www.blackhat.com/asia-16/briefings.html
Show HN: Better diffs for sketch design files
While advertisers could maybe possibly sum up a silly damages claim against the professors, this isn't really what it's about. The researchers aren't asking to be indemnified against damages claims -- they don't fear the ad networks/advertisers. Their fear is that the government would prosecute them with a crime for their research.

Personally I think it's a little unlikely, but criminal prosecution can all be very capricious and dependent on local and regional priorities. And so much the better that their suit against the US might bring about limits of CFAA via precedent.
What to Make of Finnegans Wake? (2012)
> Is he still in the race or is he just trying to steer the Democratic party policy?

Both. There's a chance Clinton will still be indicted.
It sounds like this has some parallels to Mesa's Gallium llvmpipe. (Both projects aim to render some version of OpenGL on the CPU.) Does anyone more familiar with either project know how much those goals overlap and if opportunities for code sharing exist?
Google Understood My Breakup Better Than I Did
‘Star Trek’ Is Right About Almost Everything
Couldn't recommend a concept like this more..

There's an annual trip I attend early June with about 250 other men. It's on an island for three days with full cooking staff and open bar the entire time. Golf tournament, Saturday morning hike, bocce ball tournament and boat activity. One of my favorite trips of the year.
that is actually a good idea
Point 6. freaks me out, because I am not sure if I am one of them.

Also, your first three points puts Ruby pretty much out of the picture.

EDIT: Mentioned Ruby because that's what I am working on right now, after Java and Scala
"Hollywood hasn’t and definitely won’t stop making attempts to get money from pirates who download their films and that’s fine. They have a right to protect their property"

Do they? I'm not convinced. Why must we tolerate the behavior of corporations which has proven to be harmful to our society? Their litigious actions also do not improve our society or offer any benefits to the human race. I think a strong argument can be made that they do not actually have a right to dictate who sees their products or what they should pay for it.
Sorry, I didn't mean you specifically. You're right, we don't know each other at all. I was trying to make a general observation about the community.

One thing that I didn't remember earlier, is that there is an exceptionally high percentage of deep, introspective people here. That's pretty cool.
Besides Red Hat?

Edit: misread post, disregard
3.6 million software engineers? That seems really high - do you have a source?

WolframAlpha reports that in May 2016 there were 144.6 million workers in the USA and 87.2 male workers. That'd mean that 2.5% of all workers are software engineers. If you figure that 75% of software engineers are male (some quick searching suggests this is a conservative number), then >3% of all employed males are software engineers. My instinct is that's high, but if you have a source I'll happily become informed.
That's because you aren't as steeped in medical culture as you are in tech culture and don't hear about it. It is brought up all the time.

Source: my wife just finished her medical residency.
I was curious and found this article - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2011/aug/1...
To the contrary, advertisers complain about it constantly. But they're only one piece of the ad industry, and everyone else in the industry is okay with it, if only because its another methods of auditing the advertisers.
Remember also that even in 'C', there are strong and static typing ... aspects to most compilers lurking under the surface.

And for 4) - don't be afraid to build instrumentation into the code base to support decisions about correct operation.
Brotli compression is fully streamable, as is mentioned several times in the article.
The point is virtual selectors and using Javascript for styling both have very poor performance characteristics, and both are A. ubiquitous and B. hacky kludges driven by the excessively limited nature of CSS as originally designed.

I'm probably out of my depth here, but what do you mean by the style sharing cache? I mean, any kind of file can be cached by the browser, including Javascript. And presumably browsers could've implemented optimizations (with or without the aid of hinting annotations) to identify those DSSSL functions that need only be evaluated once.

(BTW, like the author of the article seems to, I actually think that PSL looks like the best of the CSS alternatives he lists).
You'd be amazed how many browser users have broken unusable drivers, especially on Windows XP. Even if newer drivers are available, trying to instruct those users how to upgrade is a nonstarter. It's sad, but that's the world we live in.
To what are you referring? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_the_U... ends in 1970.
"Unrelated third party" is presumably a party that is not being paid by the beneficiary of ad revenue.
Chrome maintains a GPU blacklist of drivers and GPUs that it will not run WebGL on. According to [0], even hybrid Nvidia/Intel setups are excluded. So I wouldn't be surprised if there are many people with GPUs that "support" OpenGL ES but are buggy enough to be blacklisted.

[0] https://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/BlacklistsAndWhitelists
I remember when Linode was all the rage. And then they got hacked + AWS reduced their prices a couple of times.

Reading the last reviews of Linode, they seem to be one of the better platforms to be using. Pricing is very competitive too.
If gender bias is the issue, focus on bias detect and mitigation; not masking gender, which to me sends the wrong message.
HN doesn't "hellban" (or ban at all) people over opinions. Moreover, the two positions Dan singles out as uniformly against the prevailing sentiment on HN (anti-Snowden, pro-CFAA) happen to be positions I'm not too far from holding, and while I get downvotes for earnest comments about those topics, things generally level out pretty quickly.

If you have a belief that can't survive HN downvotes, to the point where you'll hide it simply to avoid those votes, you should consider how sincerely you hold those beliefs.
I'm not saying it isn't worth trying, but for every additional disruption built into this offering the probability of success plunges dramatically.

Do we really need a new everything? What problems do these new things solve that couldn't be addressed through other mature technologies used in new and novel ways?

Maybe we do, but if that's the case they've done a terrible job of articulating why.

Most importantly: How can you possibly secure all these things given the complex nature of interactions between all of them?
I can see that this is useful for reading books only avaialable in the browser. For example for

safaribooksonline.com
I moved my all of my UK pension to non-UK bonds (mainly US) one day before the referendum result. It was a mission and a half using my pension fund's online system, truly awful UX, I almost gave up.

I don't normally change the holdings or attempt active investing, but it just seemed like a very asymmetric bet - nearly 50/50 polls, very large potential downside if not diversifying outside the UK/sterling.
We disagree on a number of topics: SJW/feminism, middle East politics, abortion, 2. amendment etc comes to mind.

We respect dang to close those discussions though and we try to be civil even before he closes them ;-)

That said I'd ask you to reconsider the part about "We consistently don't respect Trump supporters..."

I for one at least manage to dislike Trump while still understanding those who support him.

Oh: and reddit: yes, some subreddits are quite different from others. I have been surprised to see the difference between what people say about certain subreddits and what it actually looks like.
This is a good point. There are often differences in how people of different genders (and nationalities, interest groups, classes, educational levels, etc) express themselves regardless of the format, and modulating their voice doesn't really hide that.

For example, I've run quite a few forums before, and I'm pretty confident I (and quite a lot of other forum admins/moderators) could reliably judge someone's gender through their manner of writing and the (non gender related) info in their profiles.

So if you wanted to really remove possible gender 'bias' from the occasion, you'd have to go much, much further. You'd have to give people a way to communicate which reduces their responses to preset answers, that's entirely conducted through text on a screen and make sure all personal information is filtered out as well.

There's always going to be a trade off here. On the one hand, I'm sure the system used in the Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon Scarescraper would completely eliminate any potential gender bias, but that's only because it limits chat to 'over here', 'good job', 'thank you very much', 'help' and 'hey'. On the other hand, an interview in person would give you a lot of information about how well they could do the job (and let you test it), but then you've got psychological biases to deal with.

It's a tough one really.
Unfortunately for this guy, 5 years earlier Apple Computer held a contest at a number of American universities to "Design the Computer of the Year 2000". The judges included Steve Wozniak and Alan Kay.

The winning entry, called Tablet, was from the University of Illinois. One of the team members? Stephen Wolfram.

http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/tablet-p...
Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program Reaches Record Numbers
So this is some kind of art project? I was trying to figure out why someone would actually want to use it, but maybe it is meant to be looked at and discussed instead of being used?
Hey, Blake from Layer here: we regularly undergo architecture and deployment reviews with our customers. We are fully transparent with the current deployment configuration and timelines for revisions.

Last night we lost a race to evolve our architecture and deployment ahead of a zone level issue that affected our total operations. We are working on it in earnest but there is very real complexity in operating a widely distributed real-time system.
I've found most studies to be paywalled in general aside from the free abstract. Not really sure what to do about that.
We don't moderate articles because of silly gossip about pg or anyone else.
Reverse Engineering Quadcopter Protocols
The file's sha256sum can be verified before the file is sent to any users, so there's no chance of RCE there, even with a hypothetical C brotli-- but a reproducible decompression is key.

Additionally, if you want to do the decompression on client-side, facilities like SECCOMP simply may not be available on that platform. And in that case, having a language like Rust to guard against RCE is an excellent idea. Also it is easiest to maintain the same code running on all platforms rather than C code where SECCOMP is available and Rust code where it is not.
Most of the time analysis paralysis is a signal that you lack sufficient understanding of the needs to actually write the right code. There are two ways to break out of it: (1) understand the problem better, and (2) build something, anything, see why it wouldn't work, and then go back to the drawing board.
Many jobs will use mostly written communication, then it doesn't matter much how you perform verbally, and a text-based interview would probably work well, or even better.

If you're expected to cooperate closely and communicate verbally with colleagues, you would want to know how the candidate handles that before hiring them.
Seems similar to Uzbl (a minimalist browser that was receiving a lot of attention a few years back): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbl
I'm the author of this piece. why is mentioning Gawker grounds for 'flagging/banning' this?
ACLU challenges hacking law hampering research into online discrimination
Users flagged it, perhaps because they felt it wasn't substantive, added no new information to an already-discussed topic, or was sensational.
I like this a lot.

I thought that in the primaries their models and forecasts left a little bit to be desired (in comparison to other news sites), and this more than makes up for it.
Just consider that when a computer simulation looks incredibly good, it just looks great for us, human observers. The simulation itself doesn't recognize anything that is generated by computer screens (even when there is some level of AI involved), it is our brain that perceives everything as real. So, my point is that the simulations we create don't live in a separate universe where they "experience" another reality. Just the opposite, they only simulate our own reality. So, it really doesn't matter how good they look, it doesn't make any difference if there is no subtract for this simulated reality to exist independently.
Similarly, educators talk a great deal about gender imbalances in teaching (K-8 is female-dominated, physics and economics skew, biology female, and so on).

What I think is interesting is that there are a handful of fields - primarily technology and corporate leadership - where the gender imbalance is a national topic. I'm sure it's largely down to the visibility of those fields, but there are a lot of people discussing sexism in tech whose backgrounds are neither research nor technology. That seems much less true for something like radiology.

It also seems to muddy the waters a great deal. With inside-baseball discussions like medicine, I assume(?) things like roughly when the gender imbalances form are common knowledge. In tech, we seem to be constantly rehashing those matters (see: corporate diversity reports constantly stressing "our applicant pool is lower-diversity than our staff, so please stop reducing this issue to discriminatory hiring").
BinaryIdiot — thanks for a great feedback! I'll answer in several posts.

# What's Wallarm Cloud?

A very good question! We can't run machine-learning stuff on the Nodes as it is performance consuming thing. But we can get all the metrics from all the node (some of our customers have 300+ of them) and craft blocking rules in our cloud. We don't get data; we analyze only statistics. So, we don't have sensitive data. Also, it's possible to deploy a standalone version of Wallarm Cloud.

Here's how it works:
1. All web traffic is proxied through Wallarm Nodes which instantly block any malicious/abnormal request preventing it reaching the application.
2. To get rid of false positives and for better protection, Wallarm Nodes like New Relic agents share application metrics in exchange for an updated blocking ruleset. Wallarm Cloud crafts application profile, its structure, normal user behaviour—and updates corresponding blocking rules every 15 minutes using machine learning. Updated blocking rules are distributed among all the Wallarm Nodes.
3. A built-in vulnerability scanner discovers security flaws in an application and checks the actual severity of each payload detected in attacks (is it targeting existing vulnerability?) allowing to prioritize company defensive efforts.

The only case when we're receiving the data from the request when we detect a malicious request. We need this request to show analytics in the user interface and get a payload to check if it's targeting vulnerability. To avoid situations when we get sensitive data with attacks details, it's possible to configure Wallarm Node to cut all the data from sensitive fields (cookies, password, SSNs, etc.). We have companies with HIPAA certificates.

Look at: https://wallarm.com/how-it-works.html
Not writing code until it was _absolutely_ needed would have saved literally months of my working life, and I haven't been working all that long. Business requirements change constantly, so what you think will be needed probably won't be by the time you ship the code.

Continuously refactor your code to remove duplication (See Don't Repeat Yourself / DRY). If you find yourself copying and pasting boilerplate code over and over, it's probably time to refactor, otherwise you find one bug and have to fix it 20 times. Good testing helps you to refactor fearlessly because the tests will tell you if you screw up.

Whatever happens you'll always cringe reading old code - but see the positive, it just shows that learning is a continuous process and that you are now older and hopefully wiser than you once were.

One thing that's been on my mind lately is an old article by Joel Spolsky [1] about accurate estimating. I'm absolutely terrible at estimating but I'm using Joel's method to improve that. Better estimates mean better code. Why? Because if you estimate 1 day for a task that really takes 2 days, you'll be rushing, stressed and tempted to cut corners by the start of day 2. If you've planned 2 days for it, you can use the time more effectively.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html