skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Non-programmers make this mistake all the time: thinking that the syntax is the hard part of programming.

No, the hard part of programming is understanding in very specific and rigid details how to accomplish a task. What the author doesn't realize is the enormous amount of processing power, shared culture and empathy that goes into human interaction.

Even mighty Google doesn't have the compute power or the architecture to replicate this. Until computers can understand humans at a human-level this will not be possible. Several breakthroughs will be necessary, and even still I expect decades/centuries before it happens if it even happens. Essentially we're talking about the Singularity.
the opposite of what, i don't get it
I read _Peopleware_ when it first came out, and I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment. I've actually bought it three times, because I "loaned" it to someone and never got the book back.

I haven't encountered _Moral Mazes_ before; I'm going to look for it now!
Ask HN: Why is censorship rampant on HN?
Dear HN Users -

I've found certain stories getting censored more than other on HN.

1> Anything that's critical of the GPL gets flagged
2> Ongoing terror attacks get censored (For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12145106 )

As practitioners of evidence based science, censorship simply doesn't hold a place in HN - where logic should trump any divisiveness.

I implore HN to be more receptive to these kind of topics, while not turning this into a reddit kind of non-evidence based banter.

More power to the scientific method - less mind control.

Cheers
Guessing he's asking 8k a month because...

8k/mo is roughly 100k/yr

So he's asking if the project's pulling six figures.
There is an upper bound limit for how abstract a general purpose programming language can become. Programming languages mainly exist because of their ability to remove ambiguity. Our natural language on the other hand is very vague. Many people might read the same exact article and interpret it differently. This is natural language's great feature. This feature is why a kid, without fully formed thoughts, can learn and use a natural language. Hence I don't see a day programming languages will completely fade away. Programs are result of a careful thought process that cristalizes a concept into a process and that process is only complete when you can describe it in an unambiguous language. One may argue that natural languages are capable of being not ambiguous. A subset of a natural language can be used without ambiguity but that is just definition of a programming language. Arguing programming languages will fade away is the same as saying math one day will not be necessary because we can explain all concepts in physics or other sciences in natural language.
On the other hand, a daily (smallish) earthquake could easily replace your alarm clock.

"Sorry I'm late... I slept through the tremor this morning."
Perhaps the crunchiness is related to a sense of safety? If you were being hunted, you'd hog down your food and wouldn't really get a chance to savor the sound it makes when you eat it.

(I'm completely riffing though)
A little digging suggests that mail.local appeared in Version 7 Unix from 1979, so it is not a surprise that it doesn't include a syscall invented 9 years later.

Still, that syscall is 28 years old now. It's kind of embarrassing that nobody has gone though and checked for ancient and obvious privilege escalation issues like this. Or I guess they have, but on different OSes. This is one big downside to fragmentation, getting fixes distributed to all of the fragments.
Perhaps I was particularly sensitive to it because it matched my internal models. Here's the way I break it down:

In classical/antiquated grammar, most sentences can be divided into a subject and a predicate. The predicate indicates what the subject does/is. While there are issues with agreement and semantics, on a broad syntactic level, the subject is arbitrary and can be replaced with another valid subject:

The angry dog // jumped over the fence.
My grandmother // jumped over the fence.
Twelve apples // jumped over the fence.

Since the predicate encodes the action, to me it makes sense to think of this relationship as a predicate function taking a subject argument. Even if the subject is plural or conceptual it is still just a single subject object, hence unary.

Then, in the OP's js context of Object.map we have a situation like this:

import map from 'just-map-object';
function jumpedOverTheFence(subj) { \\ impl };
var things = ['The angry dog', 'My grandmother', 'Twelve apples'];

map(things, jumpedOverTheFence);

Obviously I'm doing some weird things for brevity like conflating strings and objects there, but hopefully gets the point across.

IMO the analogy actually extends fairly well too. Agreement is a good match for typing (A singular typed predicate "walks" can't take a plural typed subject "Some dogs" => "Some dogs walks" fails at the syntax level), and semantics match internal expectations of functions (The "12 apples jumped..." breaks internal, but untyped expectation that the subject would have agency or control over its actions, like a "chooseTo" method or a "consciousness" property.)
Chicago and Manhattan have lots of high-rises and are not monocultures. Portland is super weird (they take pride in it) and has some high-rises. Why would none of those models work?
I would really prefer to avoid a 4-year object lesson of that sort. Not saying Hillary will be a good president, but she won't be as bad as him. At least it buys us 4 more years of (roughly) status quo and maybe the disintegration of the Republican party. Which, IMO, would be an objective good thing (same with the Democratic party). Restructured, in 4-8 years with 2-3 viable future parties forming we may have some that exhibit saner political stances.
Computer Vision and Adversarial Images
New Snowden revelation shows Skype may be privacy's biggest enemy (2013)
How to build a 1,000mph car (by the scientists behind it)
Perhaps, but I have to say the view of San Francisco from Alcatraz makes it look like one good shake could send the whole thing tumbling into the bay.

I'm not a seismologist, but the city really doesn't look like it should be built the way it is in an area prone to earthquakes.
They also consume a lot of olive oil, tomatoes, seafood and coffee. They are super chill and spend a lot of time with friends outside.

Also, people in the Mediterranean pretty much only drink wine. They are quite moderate drinkers too, never really getting wasted either.

Anyhow, that is what I saw when I was there.
Chinese Scientists Plan First Human Test with Gene Editing Tool
I tend to try to get the big picture. What is the overall structure of the program?

If it's a game, for example, then what layers are there between the user and the display driver? Where does it set the screen mode? What is the progression of the drawing functions, etc.

Sometimes you need only to figure out one thing. I.e. how do Bitcoin encrypt it's keys? Trace the user input into the bowels of the client and out into OpenSSL. In the process you would get an idea of how the onion is layered.

If it's something truly massive like ReactOS or Linux kernel, then... No idea. In my case i just dived in and kept crashing it until i stopped crashing it.

The best way to do it is to get ahold of a developer who knows the code, of course.
Show HN: ChopShop (iPhone) – mobile image editor for chopping images
> - less language barrier. I find it really hard to understand non-native speakers over a bad skype connection (high quality headsets would fix this I believe)

> The language barrier thin is very real. I'm not a native English speaker and have very hard time understanding people with heavier accents. It's especially bad over phone/web conference.

Solution: Hire only people who speak good English (yes, you should test them / interview them before hiring them!)
This is a tangent... but I haven't run across such tools recently. I wonder whether they weren't good at what they purported to do, or whether companies quit paying such careful attention to where workers spent their time.
I don't think this should really come as a great surprise. One would have to expect the initial sales numbers were partly due to the "something new" effect, and Apple clearly has a devoted following in that regard.

That said, I think the smart-watch market (especially apple) is still missing it's killer app. I thought for me it'd be the full-time fitness tracker, but in practice the experience has been inferior to dedicated fitness trackers I already own (but devices I wouldn't want to wear or have limited utility outside of the activity, for example).

The OS update does look promising, and seems like a much better move that pushing out new hardware with the same old software like many were speculating.
PSA: PayPal.com is rejecting all connections from IE10 and below
It's easy to dismiss or generalize millennials as lazy or entitled, and maybe some are, but we're on the same boat together - liberal and conservative, 'alt right' and 'rationalist-left'. To the girl with the Tumblr page and Instagram pictures, to the Trump supporter that reads Roosh V, it's authenticity and shared narratives - whether it's about social isolation and awkwardness, anxieties about growing up in a difficult economy, or how society neglects its smartest - that forge common ground among differing ideological tribes and people that otherwise would have nothing to do with each other.
I'm sick of the "storage is insanely cheap" refrain from FLAC proponents.

CDs are 1400 Kbit/s and FLAC might be half that at 700 Kbit/s. I have 50 GB or so of music at 260 Kbit/s AAC. If I were to use FLAC instead, I would need 140 GB of storage. Practically speaking, for a MacBook this means going to the 512 GB storage model instead of the 256 GB storage model, which is an extra $300. For my desktop, this means either dropping $200 on another SSD or going with rotational storage for my music library. For my phone, this means downsizing my library by an additional 60%, and I have already had to trim a lot of music out. Or I could buy another phone and spend $200 to get a model with enough storage for me. (Streaming to the phone is not always an option. I spend time in areas without reception.)

However, since the difference between FLAC and 260 Kbit/s AAC is imperceptible to us mere mortals, I can spend my $500-700 on something more interesting than "insanely cheap storage", and I get to enjoy my music.

Yes, let's not have people transcode music needlessly. But stop saying that "storage is insanely cheap" because cheap storage isn't portable.

FLAC is great for archiving music but that's not something that I do. I don't archive music. I listen to it.
Happiness, money, and love are great as a byproduct of effort, but destructive as the main goal.

Do you want to feel fulfilled or do you want to be happy? My money is on the former; for me this fulfillment comes from continually improving.

Focus on the process. The process of learning, of working, of talking, of exercising, of being... everything you do, do it just 2% better than last time. Try and be more of yourself and less of the someone you've thought (or were told) you should be.

Practical advice:

1. Don't go back to school; it's not a career advantage for most people anymore. You can learn more in practice than in study.

2. Find or create an active job—I mean physically active. Something hands-on.

3. Get enough sleep, enough exercise, and enough sun/Vitamin D (in order of importance); these plus a renewed focus on incremental improvements go hand-in-hand.

4. Don't be afraid to work less. Our culture is toxic with the obsession of "what do you do" and "how much do you make" questions upon meeting someone. The most fulfilled people I know start with "what do you enjoy most" or "what's your story?" Working less makes your answer to those questions more interesting.

5. Exercise gratitude. By this, I mean find something every day you are grateful for—this forces you to think creatively and to observe the small things. It's simple, but this has larger implications for seeing the 'big picture' and seizing opportunities you may otherwise miss.
I've said this before, the reason code and CLI and texting and messaging all these text based modes of communicating and controlling computers are still popular is that they mirror one of the most intuitive and fundamental inventions humans have ever created: language, specifically, written language. Even speech doesn't rival written word in some contexts; for example, laws and organization rules, policies, are still written.

You can't beat written word. Corps are not lining up to rewrite their bylaws in a bunch of connected drag-and-droppable blocks. I really don't think it's just inertia, the preciseness, versatility,and ease of examination and editing, and permanence of written language is hard to beat. Same with source code.
Most literature until modern times was written by, about and for the wealthy. Diogenes Laertius was no where near a common person. Nor was any philosopher for that matter. I'm kind of shocked that you consider antique philosophy a window into how the vast majority of people lived in the past.

Again, show me the data.
If a Trump presidency resulted in any changes to the rights of any of the groups you mention, we'd also have congress to blame. The president does not have the power to make laws.

We've seen an ostensibly moderate president (Obama) uphold and extend the Bush Doctrine on foreign policy, killing, mutilating, and devastating all sorts of innocent people throughout the middle east.

The lesson we'd learn from a Trump presidence is that we need to be more picky about the sort of people we vote into office. The first step in this is not holding our nose and voting for the major party candidate who offends us slightly less.

This election, we get to choose between a democrat who is actually a moderate conservative (and could easily run the same platform as a republican) and a populist Republican, who has borrowed Democratic Party rhetoric on rust belt issues and combined it with some elements of paleo-conservatism. They are both hybrids that defy the party conventions.
That is exactly one of the pet peeves I have with C++ and although I like the language I am happy to earn my money using other languages.

In the enterprise context you can hardly count on proper documentation, specially in projects with high attrition of consultants where each one comes, implements something and departures to the next gig.

Not to count the commercial libraries distributed in binary only form.

So one never knows if the code is exception safe, don't work with exceptions or is exception happy.
Special sections in Linux binaries
The linked article by Jeannette Wing is more interesting than the techcrunch article. She wrote really interesting stuff on subtyping in the 90s so her name jumped out right away.
Yeah, along these lines, I also hate how most of the examples/tutorials online assume your server is Node.js. I'd love to find some official documentation on the best ways to use it with Asp.net and Rails, for example.
This is great and I will be moving my React projects in this direction. At very least this project represents a de-facto standard and guidance about how to work with React.

However I do wish the React team would pick between ES6 classes and `React.createClass`. I think I remember the main React tutorial was rewritten in ES6 at one point, but then switched back. I've read arguments both ways, but I suspect they ES6 is still too much of a barrier to entry.

People who aren't up to speed with ES6 will still be shaving a lot of yaks before actually jumping into React.
JavaScript is part of the HTML standard so I'm ok with that. What I'm not OK with is the expectation that I'm going to run 20 tools between editing a file and refreshing my browser.

They are saying that they aren't going to make the CLI a requirement and I hope that's the case, but my concern is that "use the CLI" is going to become the quick answer.
Looks like it was noticed without one.
Sadly Bush didn't offer a lesson. Obama took office and continued and expanded the Bush Doctrine on foreign policy, greatly increasing extrajudicial actions and drone stuff.
The problem is that people who make less than dis figures live there too and probably wouldn't like that very much. The people who do make six or seven figures and live there also wouldn't like that too much. Plenty of tech people are involved in the rent control activism stuff.
Decreasing attack vectors means supporting less solutions and organizations that do this shit, not more of them.
Ongoing terror attacks get flagged, not censored because they are 'normal news'. I personally don't flag those and don't agree with those that do the flagging because there are lots of other 'local news' stories such as stories about BART (the public transport) that only appeal to a small portiton of HN (it is essentially local news) that do make it to the homepage but strictly following the guidelines neither of those belongs on HN.

As for anything critical of the gpl, do you have an example of what you mean?

> while not turning this into a reddit kind of non-evidence based banter.

Indeed.

> Ask HN: Why is censorship rampant on HN?

That title also presumes that censorship is rampant on HN, it isn't. It may be in your view but that's just your opinion.
That is assuming that you don't want your music available offline and you have enough data allowance. Which is not true for many people.
I have a $3k espresso machine but I also love gas station coffee -- there's something about it sitting on a bunn burner for probably 6 hours that adds something to the flavor, or maybe I just associate that flavor with super-early-morning travel, getting up to pick up a friend at 4am, having the blearyness stripped back by the caffeine.

Nice things -- like fancy coffee makers -- are nice, but so are other things.
You can't really complain about political discussions occurring in this context. We're commenting on a link to an article about Peter Thiel speaking at the Republican convention. If you don't want political discussions on the site (which is fine), you should just remove this topic altogether.

When someone says something that's flatly untrue on HN, I think it's appropriate to correct that. There is no reason why Trump or his supporters should get a free pass to rewrite history without being challenged on it. If, however, it is your view that there are certain political ideologies or candidates which have a special "protected status" on HN, then I will moderate my comments in future accordingly. I did not think that there was any such policy, though.
Is "computational thinking" really something that isn't already being taught in schools? There's a link to an article that spends three pages defining it:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15110-s13/Wing06-ct.pdf

It alludes to computer science, but really it just boils down to solving problems by breaking them into parts. In other words, problem solving skills. It doesn't sound like anything special to me.
One man's censorship is another man's spam filter.
I thought "work queue".
Honestly, i feel like your answer highlights the problem.

Compromising to the degree at which you can accept that you only get 1hr a day to yourself, is (to me) crazy. I am crazy too because I do the same thing.

It's hard to buy into the notion of working 8hrs and only getting 1hr for yourself, and then being ookay with that. It's a tough pill to swallow.
Ask HN: Best monitoring system?
At my company I'm considering switching us from Nagios to another monitoring system and starting to do some research. What's the best monitoring solution out there today? I'm pretty impressed by Prometheus, but just like to get some more opinions.
Well, glad you asked.

The part that goes wrong is that you don't have to view a Privacy Policy behind a tiny poorly colored hyperlink before clicking "I Agree".
I strongly recommend The Little Schemer to any programmer.
> for us to go from writing with only consonants to using vowels for the first time

Speaking as someone who has studied cuneiform and Akkadian, I would say that this claim isn't true. Here's a vowel that predates the period that you mentioned[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_(cuneiform)
Because...uh...NATO.
Dude I feel like you completely didn't read the guy's comment. He just highlighted exactly why having 'butts in seats' as you say, is a good thing
> Non-programmers make this mistake all the time: thinking that the syntax is the hard part of programming.

Programmers make it all the time too, or at least something very similar. See all those people who are on the endless quest for the "perfect" language, which usually means one which allows for writing the shortest code, sometimes at a very high cognitive cost for very little payoff. No, I really don't want to do a massive amount of mental backflips just to save a few characters, thanks.
A big problem with Reddit is the first-come, first-serve nature of claiming subreddit names. In theory anyone can start a new subreddit to provide different moderation, but in practice /r/news, /r/bitcoin, /r/programming, /r/haskell etc have a leg-up in being seen as the canonical subreddit for their topics (these are just the first examples of canonical subreddits that came to mind, i'm not taking a position on whether they are well-moderated).

Perhaps subreddits should be required to have numbers after their name, eg /r/news2 (numbers 0 and 1 would be forbidden, eg no /r/news0 or /r/news1).
How about RF hardware?

I make user-friendly RF analog electronics:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/iseeabluewhale/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1...

http://gpio.com
Fantastic initiative. My wife works in knitwear and I've been cooking up a disruptor for what is frankly a lagging industry. Current best-in-class software can be seen at e.g. http://www.stoll.com/stoll_software_solutions_en_4/pattern_s...
> 3) civil service jobs are not supposed to involve discrimination based on religious preferences and attempts to exploit bigotry by national political organizations is deeply unethical.

Are you talking about political agents being unethical (to which I say, "duh"), or are we talking about what you previously stated, "conspiring to commit a civil rights violation, or exploit one" ? Those are very different things.

People have a right to vote for a candidate as they see fit, based on all the information they have at their disposal. That's a core tenet of democracy. While I would prefer people not use religious views of candidates in most cases, there are cases where I would definitely like to know (for example, if the candidate believes the world will end within the year, I think that's probably the most relevant information in a presidential candidate you can know). While self serving, I can't see the action as purely negative, as it would be increasing true information to the public (as opposed to attack ads that insinuate unverified information).
Starwars Theme with Floppy/Disk Drives and Scanners
A Deep Dive into WeWork's user base shows spiking churn and a shrinking moat
I think that as bad as it is now, it could get a LOT worse before it gets better.
People hate it when the US doesn't, too. I don't think a world without NATO is likely to make many in the West all that happy.
Genome sequencing should allow for better drug discovery?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eroom's_Law

The opposite is occurring.