skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting discussion and I wanted to call out a particular part: The CEO's willingness and constancy in responding to employees.

I worked at Global Crossing during the entire time that John Legere (of T-Mobile fame) was CEO and he had a very similar policy, though I can't say for sure he didn't fire folks for writing him things he didn't like[0]. He swore up and down that he reads every message sent to him and that employees are always welcome to write him. I did so in the later evening on Christmas Eve (I'll admit I had a few beers in me) about some finishing touches I was putting on an application we were deploying to production the following week. I received a reply just after midnight on Christmas, clearly sent from a Blackberry. I can't remember the contents (it was something along the lines of "nice work") but I remember feeling quite good that the CEO was willing to take some time to reply to me on a holiday at a very odd hour.

As "employee engagement" goes, this certainly improved mine.

[0] I honestly don't know. Global Crossing had a total of "zero" good years in that every six months or so another 10% of the staff would be let go. Did some of that originate from a bad message sent to the CEO? No idea, but they were looking for reasons to get rid of anyone they could throughout my tenure. Though I'd written him a few times, I'd written him a few times but never in a manner that would have had cause to get me fired.
I think the better way to avoid our replacement is to think about our non-coding contributions to our companies.

I'm a full-time software engineer, but I spend maybe 50% of my day implementing code. I spend a lot of time figuring out trade-offs, exploring edge cases, and verifying that the business/marketing people know what the side-effects of a given feature will be. There's also a lot of flag-waving to make sure that small problems don't become big problems.

I've run into the "that should be able to be automated" hand-wave of a thought before. I think it's always done by people who haven't actually spent time thinking about the edge-cases and all the little decisions that are put into a final software project. Sure, you can hand-wave and get a CMS, but you're going to be unpleasantly surprised when the defaults don't match your subconscious expectations.

Here's how software engineers could retain their position in a world where our code is automatically generated:

- Understand and communicate the trade-offs of different solutions

- Embrace product design-- a lot of us unwittingly become novice visual designers and product designers during our work, and we should embrace that domain knowledge that we learn, rather than being frustrated that we're being taken away from our primary task, coding.

- Explore edge cases, and explore new ways of doing things

- Understand and get involved in the business process!
I am curious; what would one actually do with this device once it is working?

This is a really neat sounding project.
handmade hero[0]! Casey Muratori records many hour long sessions where he goes through the steps of making a video game from scratch in C. Practical, hands on experience from a guy who knows his stuff.

[0]: https://handmadehero.org/
My feeling is well. If standard CRUD coding gets automated nicely, my feeling is that many (at least some?) CRUD type coders could simply move into a sort of AI business analyst type role. To be honest, business analysis is already a fair bit of the CRUD coder type job. Current AI requires training data in order to learn what the rules are, which means that most likely they will need a team to formulate the rules in a manner that the AI understands.

If AI gets to that level where the programmer is completely replaced, well, regarding "the top" that "wants us gone"... many of them would also be gone. There's no reason a general AI of that power could not automate (to give typical "the top" occupations) much of finance, law, health care, or even management / executive work.
Humans can't solve the halting problem either.

Here's a nice simple one for you:

def collatz(n):
while n > 1:
n = n/2 if n%2==0 else 3*n+1

Is the above program guaranteed to halt for all integer inputs?

In practice, programming doesn't require solving halting problems. We write programs that are on average easy to analyze, especially if you're calibrating the scale with busy beavers. There's no fundamental reason that a computer program can't collect requirements, collect clarifications, and translate those specs into executable code. Clearly it's hard (How do you do the translation? Optimizing Prolog isn't easy! And how do you avoid asking for millions of things that humans take for granted as obvious?), but I don't see anything that makes it impossible.
Sure, but in doing so, you're accepting that readers will be looking at what you present within the frame of certain parameters. I agree with the title change. (ctrl-f for 'suck' on this page of comments.)
That's pretty much my first impression.

After going to the "Features" page and reading through it, pretty much every feature highlighted is something that almost every other blogging platform has as well.

I commend the author for the design, though. It certainly looks nice.
But I'm not whitewashing away the negative effects of the individual. We'd all be personally very screwed if programming was automated. But I've never seen anyone on HN ever stand up and defend truck drivers, lawyers, taxi drivers, hotel workers, factory workers etc all who currently have their job threatened to various degrees. The double standard is what I'm complaining about. You can't have it both ways.
My grandfather is 89. He can't walk very far, he gets tired very easily, and he has arrhythmia - yet he is still very strong, and very active. Most days, he gets up at 5, works in the garden, or the woodworking shop, or on property maintenance, finishes up by noon, and watches television until evening. This has been more or less his routine for the past 13 years.

If you remain active through your life, I think you're much more likely to stay active as you're older. I intend to retire by 40, but I don't intend to be idle.
It starts visually glitching out after 10 seconds or so, for me. Doesn't really ruin the experience, but as it appears to get more pronounced with time, I don't think we'll reach infinity. :)
I started coding using IDEs some years ago, but after the quick Emacs tutorial, I never went back to GUIs for programming. I like the simplicity of working with text (a terminal) to create text (code). I feel like I can automate anything in the world in Emacs.
The Peter van Linden book: _Expert C Programming_ is old but nice:

https://www.google.com/search?q=expert+c+programming+deep+c+...

...you may also enjoy:

http://www.gowrikumar.com/c/index.php

http://blog.regehr.org/archives/213

...and learn to use a memory error debugging tool like:

http://elinux.org/Electric_Fence

http://valgrind.org/

...Besides C, other ways of expanding your horizons would be to learn things like: Prolog, Lisp, Haskell, and/or Verilog.
Are you saying you don't think Uber, Amazon, etc should exist? Why? Because they are disruptive and potentially taking away jobs?
Exploring Alternative Futures
My bad. In the first place, what I meant is that you can't give up copyright - you can't say "this work is in the public domain". (Or rather, you can, but there's nothing legally preventing you from saying a year later "I changed my mind".) See http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj16.htm

However, "inalienable" was incorrect - you can most definitely sell your copyright.

Second, apparently I was wrong even then: see https://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html

Face, meet egg.
Seconded. I also recommend C Traps and Pitfalls and The C Puzzle Book to improve your understanding of this subtly complex language.
>Please, do NOT spread FUD that The OpenBSD Foundation is not a non-profit. It absolutely is.

I have added an edit and tried to reword that bit slightly, I hope that you find it a little better. It was an honest terminology flub I guess, when I used "legal non-profit" I was aiming for the more colloquial sense it's often used in America when discussing "donations", which is the subtopic at hand here, wherein it tends to be taken for granted that the entity provides receipts for tax deduction. However, I can see how it'd be confusing and could be taken the wrong way, or feel like a slur. FUD was the very farthest thing from my mind.

I stand by the thrust of the post however. The quality of code produced and its foundational status for much of the development world is not in question, but I don't think the (often celebrated) "roughness" of Theo et al in small ways is either (again, mostly in small ways like not listing anything but huge donors or that Comic Sans initial LibreSSL site [1]). This is not a value judgement; I think there are good arguments for both sides about the pros and cons of "public friendliness" and the resources that takes up vs the return for any given project. But it's not fair to pretend that abrasiveness is or should be cost free either. When you launch a project like LibreSSL in the midst of a relatively huge (and as always temporary) amount of temporary news coverage over the subject and the first general impression of the project to the general public is [1]

>"This page scientifically designed to annoy web hipsters," the site says. "Donate now to stop the Comic Sans and Blink Tags."

well, that may or may not result in a lot of people "donating now" right? Like it or not webs of trust, proxies, and authorities are the methods people have to use to evaluate most of the information input they deal with in life, at least as a first pass filter.

I want OpenBSD to make as much money as they need, but I don't think they're immune to basic forces of competition that everyone else faces either. I'm honestly not sure if they're actually even facing any money issues they care about beyond a basic "more is certainly helpful and would allow for more hardware testing and the like". There are other models beyond soliciting individual small donations, and I see significant corp ones (and pressuring other large companies to toss in $10-50k a year might be effective, why isn't Apple in Gold/Platinum?). But in the restricted context of the post I was replying too arguing that the lack of tons more coming in from smaller distributed sources, small businesses and so on, and then slamming all involved, well I don't think that's entirely fair. OpenBSD could do better there, if they need/want to. And I've repeated that because if they're happy with how things are now then there is certainly no need for them to change. Not everything is about getting as much as possible, if they're satisfied with what they have as "enough" then good for them.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/opens...
Where would they move to next? Austin?
My droplet's getting slammed. Don't knock it until you try it. I'm not expecting much money from donations — it's there for those who ask for it, which is my experience for other open source projects I maintain. :)
The question that immediately jumped into my head after reading this article: what does the Great Red Spot sound like?
Affordable Housing Developers Hope to Build Tall in Mission District
You aren't thinking at the right scale. If a computer program can do any complex task humans can do, worrying about unemployment is the least of our problems. Such a world would be so different than our own. It may have an entirely different economy, and it may not have people at all. I don't know, but I think it's equivalent to a caveman predicting what the effects of steam power would be.
The people on top desperately want us gone

This is a cynical view of the world. Maybe the people "on top" simply want to improve their company's efficiency in order to return value to investors, etc. My point being its economics, not some evil intent.

Software engineers need to recognize this common threat and organize (labor) sooner than later

And the point of that would be what? To protect our jobs by demanding that industry ignore and no longer pursue innovation? That seems like heresy for anyone in Tech.

If the day does come that AI starts writing code, the lost of our fat salaries and stock options will likely be the least of our problems; or perhaps the world will be void of problems altogether.
Odoo, formerly known as OpenERP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odoo
Most humans aren't rational though. Even those of us that try to be more often can still be sabotaged by our emotions working against us, instead of for us. I suspect 'gut' emotional feelings are an good side channel for reaching desirable outcomes usually more quickly or in more cases than logic; which would explain why we evolved to have them.
Very few people on this forum spend alot of time looking into the leadership of the myriad of ineptly run companies. Mayer is deliberately high profile, and the company she runs is a household name. Criticism of her is the low hanging fruit; its precisely because most of us can't be assed to get interested in inept CEOs that the ones we do criticize are already the most (in)famous.
Yes, it's an uphill battle. I'm not trying to chase WordPress, though — just provide a good alternative for those who want to get back to blogging. No categories, only tags. I think having both is redundant for the scope of this project.
Operator Algebra
The type constructor that's being assumed injective in the section “Deriving `absurd` with type families” is `R`.
Copyrights are transferrable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#Transfer_and_licensi...

Are you maybe thinking of Moral Rights? Those are inalienable and not transferrable in many countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

Copyrights are also assigned automatically to the creator by the act of creating something, that might also be what you were thinking of.
If the argument is really that bad, it should lose on its own merit. Censoring ideas is the antithesis of the american way. America was conceived out of treasonous ideas after all.
Scientists illustrate how the climate is spiraling ‘out of control'
Mayer reportedly has the gene that lets you get by on 4 hours of sleep a night:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150706-the-woman-who-barel...

http://www.businessinsider.com/successful-people-who-barely-...
Fair enough, sorry to cross the gray line with the title!
React Native – Discussion on how to make a Select-like component
SDR has a lot of applications in infosec, amateur astronomy, and other signal processing science applications. Check out Balint Seeber's talk at DEF CON 21.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bgC3AjCnA4

another talk:
http://www.rtl-sdr.com/new-talk-by-balint-seeber-hacking-the...
That's only nine stories, and they're calling that tall?

When beautiful skyscrapers stretch to 70+ stories, nine is anything but tall.
> If you want to be fancy, you can make the on-disk VM-image format a database (SQLite, LevelDB, whatever) so as to avoid writing it all out every time.

I took this approach in a game engine I developed at one point. Common Lisp has a very general meta-object protocol that allows you do things like this transparently (see e.g. [1]). I believe I used Berkeley DB as the backing store, which supports in-memory caching of objects. With this approach, I didn't need an explicit save-file format, everything was just "there" on disk, automatically. As far as that was concerned, it was pretty cool.

Unfortunately, it was not fast. At one point, I did an experiment where I ripped out the DB and replaced it with a in-memory hash-map implementation. This was about 10x faster, (despite the supposed in-memory caching at the DB layer). I got an additional similar speedup when I ripped out the meta-classes for the objects.

Turns out, these abstractions are expensive. Writing nice sequential code on compact in-memory data structures has substantial benefits (if you want performance).

[1]: https://common-lisp.net/project/elephant/
"If you can't run it for some reason, a recorded gif of the demo can be found here"

WebGL in a nutshell.
I’ve never had a goal – Signal v. Noise
Transmit or receive analog or digital information on just about any frequency : audio/voice (including multichannel), video, GPS, telecommunications, data transmission, synchronization, module configuration, etc. etc. etc.

Sky's the limit.
"Postleaf requires a web server running PHP 5.5+, MySQL 5.5.3+, and Apache."

...nope, sorry. Web server agnostic or I won't even consider you these days.
Yep, understandable^
Amazon Posts Another Blockbuster Profit
Which Cars Cost the Most (and Least) to Maintain as They Get Old?
Will Jack Dorsey and whoever interviewed him even remember this interview in 6 months? 2 years? 10 years?

What's the point of a Q&A that asks generic questions?

How about aiming for content that is insightful and valuable for 1+ years? Surely themacro publishing tonnes of shallow content just dilutes the brand? Then why bother?

Makes me miss the pg days.
Hayyyyyyyyyyy. Just found this & created a realname account to say hello...

I don't know who you are from the 1024core username but if you were a d-r'er I certainly trust your corrections! I'll place a note in the article.
That one politician's words is receiving more attention in the media than another politician's deeds is quite telling.
Google Profits Surge on Strong Ad Demand
All the features you want, without the bloat, along with an immersive inline editing experience.
Indeed, NP-hard (edited it now). Can you expand on "we know a lot about what to do about them" ? Thanks.
It's funny to see grown adults in tech taking the simulation idea seriously just because Elon Musk said it. I was interested in science fiction in high school and thought about these things, but I concluded they were worthless.

Why? It is ontologically no different from 1) solipsism, a philosophical idea that even most philosophers considered worthless centuries ago, or more loosely 2) belief in a higher deity who created the world.

It's completely unfalsifiable. The answer to the question clarifies nothing about our understanding of the world [1] and furthermore has absolutely no impact whatsoever on how you ought to live your life.

[1] Even if you conclude we live in a simulation, we will never know for sure anything about the nature of the simulation or the nature of the world outside the simulation.
AKA spam.
How much more expensive would it be if they made each unit have a nicer ceiling height? A decent room needs to be taller than eight feet. Old buildings often have ceilings that are 10-12 feet from the floor.

Once a basic structural feature like this is built into a building, it's basically impossible to fix it without tearing the structure down. If and when people get richer in the future, and want something better, they are going to be stuck with this thing, which is a shame.
Discussed last month on HN (data was presented by YourMechanic, not sure if Priceonomics is using the same data-set).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11879869
the OP says "My objective is to better understand how computers work, how ruby works, and generally to be a better software engineer." I just gave him options.
The capital holders in all industries would love expensive human labor to be replaced by cheap automated labor. If programming AI is created, no labor organization could save software engineers, just as it would be ridiculous to think horse and buggy drivers or telegraph operators could have stopped the march of progress.

The bigger issue is what has we've already started to witness: automation leads to accelerated accumulation of wealth and resources among those who already have the most capital. Historically, corporate profit and labor demand went up or down together. Now they're diverging: corporate profit grows while demand for labor shrinks. The spoils of corporate success goes to those who own the tools of automation, and others lose their job and income.

In any case, OpenAI's vision here is much bigger than making software developers obsolete: they want to study (or create) AI that can improve itself (i.e., a singularity scenario).
dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12160709
Screwed up on the initial post and it wouldn't let me resubmit. Noob moment.

Handlebars because PHP isn't great for webpage templates. There are many alternatives, but handlebars has implementations on many, many platforms. It makes the project easier to port to other platforms in the future.
Alphabet quarterly revenue up 21.3%
>I'll retrain with whatever skill is highly valued then.

Software development has been invaded by mouth-breathers who don't give a shit about what they're doing, and I don't see a way to switch careers as an adult chasing money without becoming one of those.
> 1 successful unicorn in a portfolio of 100 would be worth it, and you could have 15+ years to think without any pressure to publish

I am totally convinced this is the way to go. If you look into successful people and organisations like Alfred Sanger, Cold Spring Harbor or Bell Labs they operated like this. There's no other way to implement Hamming's You and Your Research advice. Small groups, no middle management, no short-term goals, no paper optimization!

I do research at a world class university. Previously I was in pretty decent ones ranking in the bottom top #100. They all have the same issues. It is very frustrating. If YC/Thiel/Musk decided to fund OpenX (for X in Bio, Renewables and a few others) the world would be a much better place in 50 years time. I have lost my faith in universities as an applied research place.
Elon Musk Says Darpa A.I. Hacking Challenge Will Lead to Skynet – Inverse
The .js file is over 10,000 lines of code. How did it get so bloated from your 450 lines of code?
Just the other day I interviewed someone with ~15 years of experience who struggled quite a bit with FizzBuzz. We ultimately decided to pass.

Last week, I interviewed someone about to complete a master's degree from Georgia Tech who also could barely do FizzBuzz.

What should we be doing to identify people who fail FizzBuzz but we should actually be hiring? Honestly the bar for our initial phone screens is very low, and yet experienced and well-educated people still manage to fail, sometimes spectacularly. FizzBuzz is one of the most important questions we ask because of this phenomenon.
Exactly. Another example of this was that debate a while ago between Ken Ham and Bill Nye the science guy, about evolution vs. creationism. No one actually "won" the debate; both sides claimed their guy won, because they were both speaking different languages. Nye spoke the language of science and everyone who has a scientific viewpoint of the world thought he won, whereas Ham spoke the language of fundamentalist religion and everyone who has that viewpoint thought he won.
Darpa | Cyber Grand Challenge
Frankly, Yahoo had a lot of dead weight that should have been cut years before she got there. It was a dying company for a reason.
And as a counterpoint, every time I hit a link to a Mailman archive, I would jump to gmane and try to find the thread there.
You will help if you volunteer to help test beta-version of PVS-Studio for Linux
A version of NNTP where groups were automatically moderated and strong controls were in place to weed out spammers and trolls could work. The moderation would have to be baked into the core of the protocol and not some weird half measure bolted onto the side however. Once a community is large enough you either moderate it or you get another /b/.
This reminds me of an excellent two post series by Tim Urban about the upcoming AI revolution: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...
Royal Collection published Leonardo da Vinci's drawings
Very nice work. You're going to be faced with some interesting questions over the next few years, such as "WTF am I doing wasting time in this classroom?"
Yeah but: how are you going to turn your labor into "food" and "shelter".