skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"To add an example for clarity, think of the field of typography — until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. But with new programs like Microsoft Word coming into existence, typography (e.g. formatting a document, setting the margins, making sure the lettering is appealing, etc.) became something everyone could do easily without much thinking."

Without much thinking pretty much encapsulates what Word did to presentation standards, at least in my experience. Let us never forget WordArt.

Part of me always wants to make the argument that these things are difficult, not just because of an abstract syntax and arcane rules, but because these things are genuinely difficult to reason about - attempts to make difficult things easier by papering over the cracks results in a lot of pain for a lot of people. Bits ping off and people are left unable to even begin to solve the problem.

However the very, very, obvious flipside of this is that lowering barriers to entry is pretty much always a good thing. It invites unconventional perspectives and novel approaches - how could that be a bad thing? Sure, some people will make crappy things that shouldn't have ever existed but by the same token some people will make great things that never would have been without the lowered barriers.
A book that helped me in my life when I had similar questions is [Think on These Things by Jiddu Krishnamurti][1], warmly recommended.

From the first chapter, The Function of Education:

> I WONDER IF we have ever asked ourselves what education means. Why do we go to school, why do we learn various subjects, why do we pass examinations and compete with each other for better grades? What does this so-called education mean, and what is it all about? This is really a very important question, not only for the students, but also for the parents, for the teachers, and for everyone who loves this earth. Why do we go through the struggle to be educated? Is it merely in order to pass some examinations and get a job? Or is it the function of education to prepare us while we are young to understand the whole process of life? Having a job and earning one's livelihood is necessary - but is that all? Are we being educated only for that? Surely, life is not merely a job, an occupation; life is something extraordinarily wide and profound, it is a great mystery, a vast realm in which we function as human beings. If we merely prepare ourselves to earn a livelihood, we shall miss the whole point of life; and to understand life is much more important than merely to prepare for examinations and become very proficient in mathematics, physics, or what you will.

[1]: https://books.google.com/books?id=IsldnzHkxpsC&printsec=fron...
> For instance, to turn a button red, we shouldn’t have to write code. We should just be able to point to the button and select a shade of red.

Someone is going to have to right the code so that the end-user can just click buttons.
So if this future of programmatic interfaces is coming, it's going to require more people writing code to build it— not fewer!
You mean SES?
>It's not fun and games at this point. History will judge us. And your pro-Trump comments will be on record forever

Wow. Take a deep breath and tone down your hysteria a bit:

1. How does adding context to a comment taken out of context makes me "pro-Trump"?

2. How is properly vetting immigrants, in particular from high-risk countries, bigotry?
Like open(O_NOFOLLOW)?
> I've actually come to think that the best languages are general-purpose languages and you should just use one language (Scala) for everything.

I disagree very strongly with this. My original background is in scientific programming, which I learned primarily during my PhD. Since then I've been working in, and now leading, teams comprised of both data scientists (principally from a scientific or mathematics background) and data engineers (primarily from a software engineering background). I can tell you from experience that trying to do everything in one language works extremely poorly in practice.

Scala is a great example. People who focus primarily on scaling out relatively simple data processing systems, perhaps with some machine learning thrown in, are big fans of scala. Any scientific programmer that I know (note that machine learning, the most popular kind of scientific programming on HN, is only one very tiny part of the field), including the data scientists in my team, simply cannot do their jobs with scala.

The typical patterns scala encourages are fundamentally unsuited to advanced scientific programming, which is why almost nobody in academic science uses scala [insert obligatory indignation about the wonders of functional programming here]. The number of scientific libraries available for scala is absolutely dwarfed by the C++/Python ecosystem.

Note that I'm not saying that scala is a bad language; I'm saying that every language has advantages and disadvantages for different kinds of work, and different mindsets.

I won't presume to accuse you of this, because I don't know your position, but this kind of viewpoint is typically held by the kind of programmer who dramatically underestimates the complexity of scientific programming.
Nintendo just need to make a powerful system, powerful process lots or ram .. and a developer friendly sdk
If they want to remain in the console business

I don't why they don't see the obvious

If Nintendo NX is not as powerful as the next playstation and the next xbox, this could only mean, Nintendo is getting out of the console system .. and targeting a new market
Yeah but web developers still tend to do it the "hard way" but editing the CSS directly. Why do web developers still do it that way even though visual tools exist?

My guess is because with working with text is more efficient. The cognitive load of finding a setting in the UI, moving your mouse to it, and selecting the value is far greater than just typing.
What happened here is that there are third party porters (in this case Feral) who take all the hassle off the devs hands, so that it's likely a small chunk of free money for Squenix to have their games ported (this is their fourth so far, and a Linux Hitman is apparently in the workds).
Who will make/maintain/develop new robots?

I'm probably gonna stop after that. I don't have a degree in economics, but I always find these "everything will be free, everybody will be pretty and live 300 years" predictions kind of hard to buy.
in this situation you can do a stat on the file descriptor after you have opened the file to ensure that it is not a symlink. some of the races with the filesystem can be fixed using the file descriptor family of functions instead of the path family of functions.
I was hoping it would have been birds and bees talking to each other to outsmart humans.
Why this shop better than your
Hi friends!
I wanna show you the best internet-shop in your country!
We have 30 orders in a day ! And more 2000 customers.
y-look.com let`s go!
> However, I very strongly suspect that no matter what the level of racism on Facebook is, it would be far higher if people were able to post anonymously.

Counterexample HN and arstechnica.com

As I have previously hypothesised a lot of good users (me included) seems to be scared away by real names policies.

Pseudonyms allowed and linked to phone numbers or national ids combined with karma seems like a workable middle ground for me.
At 29 you're starting to see beyond the ladder you've been taught to climb. Is a new degree/job/relationship going to fill the void?

When I was in your shoes, I started to ask myself that question. I decided that the source of my happiness wasn't going to come from the outside world and that led to an ongoing curiosity about where it would come from. More here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/out-the-darkness/201503...
I know she's unpopular, but she's hardly the first one who tried righting that ship without success. I think she's stabilized it and made people believe there was a possibility in turning around, giving it breathing room more than the previous three. You have to remember that when she came on board, Y! was taking water fast.

No one, no one could have saved it and made it relevant. I think she did a pretty commendable job trying.
What I'd do? A few things, depending on whether you have any money left after finishing that 'business degree'. If you do, I'd find myself a small farm or even a plot of land to buy somewhere in the vicinity of, but not to close to a population centre. I'd divide my time between working on that farm - first (re)building a house, then - depending on the region you live in - growing some produce for your own consumption, for friends and neighbours, to brew beer, make bread, whatever. At the same time I'd try to find some work in my area of interest, something to keep (or bring) myself up to date within that field and to bring in some money. As living in this way is generally remarkably 'cheap' you don't need enormous amounts of money.

Do this for a few years, make sure to keep up to date within your field, keep connections within your field, don't become a hermit but also don't succumb to the urge to blindly follow the herd chasing degrees and money.

After a few years your outlook on what to do next will be a lot more developed. Maybe you'll decide to start out for yourself in your field? Maybe you'll move abroad? Maybe you'll become a full-time homesteader? A builder? You will be free to choose, not burdened with that loan (that is, not any more than you're already burdened with it). Plus, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing to be self-reliant, able to bake your own bread, brew your own beer, repair your own house. When things go bump in the night you won't crawl under the bed with a phone to call 911 and wait for the police which might - or might not - show up. You'll go outside to see what made that noise.

If you don't have any money to get that plot or small farm I'd find myself a job which pays enough to be able to buy it in a few years of hard work and frugal living.

The major takeaway is to become self-reliant, less dependent on what other people think of you. Be social when you want to, not when the situation dictates you should be. Be 'real'. Don't act. Use your head, speak your mind, cut the crap. It's your life, you get to decide how to live it.
I believe that:

> It is just silly to say that because tools that lower the barrier of entry are becoming more common, that the entire profession will soon be dead.

Is actually due to Labor Supply vs. Labor Demand. I can envision a world where majority of jobs are all replaced by machines (from Baristas to Accountants), and web/software development (among other fields, such as specialized medicine) are some of the last places for people to remain self-sufficient off their own labor. With this over-abundance of supply, employers are capable of being extremely discretionary over their hires, and are able to pay just enough for their human capital to sustain themselves.
"The future I imagine is a world in which programming is self-explanatory, where people talk to computers to build software. To get there, programming tools should first use our language."

But is:
"For every button on the page that is a "warning" button, replace the background color to red."

Necessarily better than?
$("button.warning").css("background-color", "red")
Amazon to begin delivery of new mystery product at midnight on July 31st
Why this shop better than your
Far stranger things have happened this year. Although, you're probably right - there will likely be big bucks involved in fighting over it. If a troll acquires those patents it would be dreadful news for everyone involved. I'd honestly rather see Microsoft or Google in charge of them.
It saddens me that laypeople equate software development to writing code, that's like saying an architect just knows how to draw.
Yet another article scrabbling for a conspiracy to explain how an SV icon could possibly have political ideas that go against the grain. Unsurprisingly, it's nothing but a bunch of mindless hypotheses about how Thiel must be a self-hating gay who is trying to destroy the political system from the inside.

Flagged.
I remember going to a mobile conference in the early 2000s and every single vendor there was saying that developing mobile apps using UML was the future. No code, just map out everything in a diagram.

Granted a smart phone was unheard of at this point so most mobile apps wouldn't even be called apps by today's standards.

A decade and a half later and mobile developer is a highly skilled _coding_ position.
Show HN: 1D Generative Adversarial Network Demo and Code
Don't touch Flickr as well
> Millennials like us

I think it's worth mentioning that almost none of what you've said is new to Millennials. People were expressing the same sentiments in the 80s and 90s. My parents and their hippie friends were expressing the same sentiments in the 1970s.
>fingerprints are 2D

>Fingerprints aren't 2D
>> "lost golden age and the opportunity that seemed available to his parents’ generation"

Anyone that believes there's less opportunity now than at any point in history clearly lacks an understanding of the current state of the world.
Spatial Pooling: Input Space and Connections (HTM Theory)
If you think your political opponents are short democracy, and only your political allies are long, you're not helping democracy function. The biggest advantage of democracy over alternatives is that when a decision is made, an entire nation can feel that it owns it (the extent to which nations are masters of their own fate under democracy is debatable, but the feeling surely prevents civil wars on all scales, the utility of which is hardly debatable.) Sore losers thinking of a massively popular opponent as being outside the system and of the majority's decision as non-binding on the grounds of it being outside the system definitely undermine democracy - the only question is whether they undermine it necessarily or unnecessarily.

Of course there exist politicians who demand that democracy is dismantled, and in that sense are outside the system. But claiming that your opponent is that politician should be done only when he really is that politician, because you're in effect claiming that the conflict with that politician is not resolvable within the system of democracy - effectively you say that democracy will not work to win this battle. So if you're wrong and the politician isn't as anti-democratic - for instance if he's the kind of guy who'll step down when voted out instead of attempting a coup - then you calling him hopelessly anti-democratic is the one demanding that democracy be dismantled.
So, I assume, that it would be good sense to remove this article, as this site is a welcome respite from politics.

But so long as this article remains, Peter Thiel:

> "I don’t pretend to agree with every plank in our party’s platform, but fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline"

He should talk to the people he is trying to get elected - they are the ones responsible for fake necessary voter ID laws, fake laws protected religious freedoms, fake laws attacking women's ability to control their reproductive rights, fake laws to control who gets into what bathrooms.

If he wants to convince me that his party is even remotely concerned about the economy and truly focusing on the right things, maybe the week should have focused on how to unleash entrepreneurship in the country like making it easier not harder to take risks etc...

It was a good speech, it just overlooked the basic facts on the ground.
They gave two months' notice of the change to having to have a paying Mailchimp accounts with Mandrill - do you regard that as sudden? They also sent quite regular reminders, too. (I will admit we ended up leaving it a bit until the last minute, but it wasn't particularly arduous, even under moderate pressure.)

We use AWS' SES on a few projects, and, while it seems to work effortlessly, I have absolutely no idea how to get any logs out of it (like, anything beyond the absolute number of emails sent), which is a fairly major limitation for me.
Is Parallelism Hard or Not?
I don't necessarily disagree, a balanced life is a good thing. But on the other hand it's just a slightly lesser conformist one. What you really want to do is to channel your energy and ambition in another direction. Unless you're rich you can't live on dreams. You have to pay your dues. But then instead of buying a house and waiting for that promotion you can do something different.
Health data should belong to patients
Is blockchain really necessary? Isn't http://voat.co trying to be the much more libertarian alternative to reddit?
Interesting - I can't really get down with that kind of chicken little speculation. That's a shame.
Text can be version controlled and diffed.
The last-ever Japanese VCRs will be made this month
> worst of all, they took a beloved franchise and essentially gutted it

I disagree. Nintendo is absolutely trying to reestablish itself and its many IPs. With this shift toward mobile/AR Pokemon stands to be the killer app that sells VR/AR in a few years time. I do agree that the execution of the release was a nightmare. It lacks features and is reliably unreliable. Niantic\Nintendo should not haved rushed the release to coincide with summer and simply waited a year.
I think the author is missing the forest for the trees, here. Schools often don't have much of a computing curriculum, and these classes are great for improving general programming literacy. And if one kid finds out he really enjoys it when he wouldn't normally have through school, that's a win. It's true that most of them won't become programmers, but we don't teach biology in high school assuming you won't become a biologist, either.
I don't like Thiel.

but lets keep political pieces off hn.
I agree, though I think there are improvements that could make things better even for existing languages. It just doesn't seem to be a main focus of our industry.

I found a lot of ideas in this article to be pretty interesting: http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming
Also, the simple subtraction ignores that the drag on Yahoo's value is debt. If Yahoo sold their stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan the cash would presumably be used to pay off that debt. It is incorrect to tie all of the debt only to the core business.
An external programmer would be connected to some black box though, right? I mean, how do you know the interface the programmer is writing through isn't compromised inside the CPU?

I'm not trying to be pedantic; I'm simply unsure that the original comment of "The best part of POWER8 is the ability to flash and verify the CPU firmware using a completely open toolchain." and "[For Intel and others] you can't ever be sure what is running on them internally."

How does one know that with POWER8 the same isn't true? Just because you think you can flash it "directly" doesn't seem good enough to warrant that statement.

(Disclaimer: I have connections to both processors; my opinion on which is "better" or "more open" or "less likely to be compromised" is not stated here, and should not be inferred from this discussion. I'm merely trying to point out that I don't think the original comment's assertion is backed up by the reasoning it presented)
I think it's a bit too late for that.
Alternative and Illegible Currency: Cash Is Worth Less Than You Think
Disclosure: this is from my employer

We released a whitepaper not too long ago about App Store Optimization. I'm not very involved in mobile/client -side development but I heard the paper was well received.

Summary infographic: https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Native-X-...
Whitepaper: http://nativex.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/NativeX_ASO_Wh...

EDIT/Clarification: I'm associated with the paper referenced in my comment--not the parent article.
Advertising does not require tracking or analytics.

Advertising networks usually require them, but if you are the one announcing, you can choose to (not) use whatever you want.
I think Thiel is crazy if he thinks Trump is going to change the government in a way Ron Paul would have, or would have tried to change.

I highly doubt Trump will even attempt to shutdown any of these agencies Thiel hates so much.
There is no disputing the financial model behind AWS Lambda is revolutionary. I know of a visitor NDA signing service that charges $5 per visitor. The backend runs entirely on AWS API Gateway and Lamdba and their cost per visitor transaction to AWS is $0.25. Think about how powerful this is! Now you can develop an app in your spare time and bring it to market for practically nothing. Once developed, your fix infrastructure costs are zero.

That said, there are financial benefits on premise too. Short lived processes that need 1 CPU and 512Mb memory are ideal candidates for oversubscription. If you had a server where CPU utilization never peaked beyond 60% and 15Gb memory was free then you could fit 20 Lambda functions in this 'slack capacity' without resource contention. Driving up utilization when the cost of the server is sunk is effectively capacity for free.
I was more responding to this:

> our personal computing devices are completely out of our basic control

I can't speak about the security of the latest iOS versus the latest custom ROMs. There may be a reason he didn't recommend these. Or maybe he knows some people are too attached to Apple to move away and is trying to do the best he can for them.
eng at concord here.

Really cool API, you should port this to concord! =)

i'd say major diff is dynamic topology. So during the pipeline execution you can add/remove workers for any stage.

Also each stage/operator can be written in any programming language.

Storm/Flink/SparkStreaming/etc... all have much higher level API's. We built the execution engine first, these great things (DSL, etc) should come soon. For example this API would be easy to support to execute on top (the pipe abstraction that is)

Here is an example of a DSL we prototyped in a couple hours.
Perhaps a less biased and sensational source: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2465582/china-is-lo...

It's not 100% clear that banning ad blockers was really the intention of this. As a reddit user said it:

>Reading the article, it appears what they were trying to do is ban programs that replace or "cover" existing ads with ads of their own, e.g. malware/adware, because they started regulating ads after some kid died by taking shady herbal supplements he found in an online ad when searching for a cure for his cancer. However the wording is so broad that it ends up banning ad blockers as well.
As I understand it, technically, in the United States patent infringement is patent infringement; no mitigating circumstance. In the UK or Europe there's an exception for personal use.
I'm not completely following the author... I guess he's saying that Thiel is pessimistic. Well, can you blame him?
err. missing link:

https://github.com/jjmalina/concord-python-dsl
I mean, she hasn't done any miracles, but it's not like any of us would have done any better in her position. I wouldn't call her a terrible CEO, just someone that took over a company that was very difficult to turn around to begin with.
Google makes major breakthrough in Quantum Computing