skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you and I also don't think that existence of intelligent life will necessarily lead to all stars being surrounded by Dyson spheres. Maybe there are other sources of energy that are easier to harvest for an advanced civilization.

However, in case there actually is a Dyson sphere around a star, it will probably emit energy in the form of infrared radiation and we should be able to detect it. Especially if there are billions of stars like that.
DOCKER: TAMING THE BEAST – PART II
Here's a list of large earthquakes in Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Japan

There have been several large M7+ earthquakes in populated areas since the Hanshin (Kobe) earthquake. Tohoku was obviously the biggest. Several of the Tohoku aftershocks were over M7. This spring there was a M7 earthquake in Kumamoto, which I think is the largest earthquake in a very populated area since 2011.

Japan get several very large earthquakes every year, but they are usually in less populated areas. It's quite common to get M6+ earthquakes in populated areas, though. As the GP notes, damage is usually amazingly limited. I experienced one and was very surprised that nothing was damaged in my house.

http://www.jma.go.jp/en/quake/ is super interesting to look at because you get a real sense of just how often Japan is hit with earthquakes (several a day!).
Most dev shops nowadays use Vagrant to manage and provision their dev environments, making sure that all developers are on the exact same setup.
Such a cool project. I would have considered cladding the walls in pine cladding to soften the look. It's a very 'practical' space.

The other thing I would have done is off grid my house and run a cable up to the "shoffice". I see having a reliable electricity source key to working productively and this setup would concern me in the winter.

One option would be to install a small wood burner (say the type used on narrow boats) to remove the need to use electricity to heat the shoffice.
Yes the presence and size of Jupiter and Saturn are another unlikely factor contributing to extreme stability of the Earth’s climate. Another one is earth seems to have escaped being exposed to a supernova going off very nearby [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst
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I used to feel this way. It was my top complaint about the language. But it, and, more importantly, the use requirement for variables, has saved me from bugs repeatedly; I more and more notice the bugs it's protecting me from as I keep coding in the language. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that this was very, very much the right call.

I get the sense that most Go programmers use "goimports" to work around the annoyance. I have my Emacs configured to use it automatically. I never even think about imports anymore.
What about just really obnoxious compiler warnings that can't be disabled?
What sucks about the Bay
Besides other points mentioned, I think HN crowd has a love/hate relationship with Go (the other one I noticed is Python), so it's natural to go up quite fast.
It's as if a community of programmers and engineers can't understand the various weights a ranking algorithm can take into account outside of plain "2 > 1".

Stunning.
Great follow up to this article - thanks!
I'm a little confused by the author's belief Go needs to be more pragmatic. All the points made in the "I Love Go" section (gofmt, the toolchain, interfaces) display strong qualities of pragmatism to me. The article literally describe interfaces as 'no-nonsense and pragmatic'. And, even if they do not personally like the opinionated nature, it is a prime example of solving questions in a practical way.

No language can be everything to everyone. One thing that encourages me to keep writing Go is the team has done a very good job at communicating their intentions for the language.

It's very clear to me when to write Go and when not to. That's a sign of strength to me, as it shows the language has the confidence to tell you "perhaps I'm not the best choice for this particular problem".
I don't like the word passion. When someone asks me the cliche question "What are you passionate about" I want to punch them in the nose.

The word passion to me implies an level of emotional obsession that borders on (or actually is) unhealthy.

I enjoy programming, and find it interesting. But I'm not passionate about it.
Hack News has changed its front-page style
It has added a thick black line at the top of the page. What are your thoughts?
So, not to be all "Herp, derp, Linux is better", but I started using Linux quite recently, and I never realized just how retarded a lot of these things probably have looked like to Linux users since the beginning of time.

I mean, man, while reading this article, the sentence "Just use a different desktop environment." has shot through my head multiple times.

Or also when the guy wrote that they had to have good touch functionality and good mouse functionality in the same DE, I immediately asked myself why, since obviously they could just create two different DEs, one for touch, one for mouse.

And I think, Microsoft could actually have two DEs now, as they've recently separated GUI from core for Windows Server, but obviously, they don't want to maintain two DEs. They wouldn't have done their UWP-stuff, if they wanted to.
Banks turning to voice recognition
I didn't notice it until you mentioned.
Please don't use these without fully understanding the impact of them. You may also be disabling parts of Windows Update at the same time.

From the open source one:

"Note: Windows Defender may report the EXE as a trojan (Win32/Pocyx.C!cl), and may therefore prevent you from extracting the EXE to anywhere on your computer. Set up an exclusion in Settings > Update & Security > Windows Defender > Exclusions by adding the folder you intend to extract the EXE to."

Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.
You can only detect a Dyson sphere in the infrared if the Dyson sphere is relative close into the star. If the outer sphere is at the orbit of Pluto then the emission would be close to the cosmic microwave background [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background
>It's very clear to me when to write Go and when not to.

Would you care to elaborate on this? :)
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Stockholm syndrome in action. There are two phases: active development and release engineering. -Wall for former, -Wextra -Werror for latter. If someone is not disciplined enough to throw out unused variables/imports/whatever from release, Go will not save him from hell.
There's several hundred Y Combinator companies, but I don't think I've seen a commensurate number of posts to HN. You'd know if it was open slather on Y Combinator companies posting self-promotion material to HN because this post would not be at the top, it would be some launch page for a company ending in 'ly'.

I typically only notice YC companies mentioned here when it is a Techcrunch (or similar) article about them.
Isn't 4 upvotes in 11 minutes a lot for Hackernews? I don't think there's anything untoward going on here but I may be naive.
Ah, very nice!
Default when someone prominent in the community dies. In this case: http://www.media.mit.edu/people/in-memory/papert
> Given an extensible editor and sufficient blood and sweat, you ought to be able to build anything.

Yeah, personally I prefer to do my integration in the shell, and then have thin hooks into my editor where applicable.

> Is anyone aware of refactoring tools that are not bundled with an IDE, yet still compare favorably with something like Resharper?

I'd also be very interested in this. I do most of my refactoring semi-manually (leaning heavily on my editor and compiler).
Thailand taps BlipTrack for live traffic info service
Teacher student task management system written in Django
Don't think hard cap. Think avail bandwidth/num of users.
I agree that it's a problem, one HN already has. I doubt we can solve it. We can maybe mitigate it, or at least not make it worse.

One tactic for not making it worse is to introduce changes slowly and with lots of time to assess the effect of each change. We're also willing to get procrustean, if we have to, about lopping off any changes that have bad effects. We've done that twice that I can think of.

Any new form of community moderation will come with a mechanism for overseeing it. For example, when we added vouching for users to rescue dead comments, we also added a review mechanism for moderators to catch vouching being abused—e.g. dead comments being rescued when they ought to stay dead because they violate the site guidelines. This combination, which was inspired by the flagging mechanism, turns out to work well. HN's userbase has vastly more capacity to sift through comments than moderators do, and makes good decisions most of the time. Meanwhile it's orders of magnitude less work for moderators to review vouches and flags than to read all the comments directly, and doing so lets us correct the community decisions that don't align with the site guidelines. Such an approach benefits from the strengths of both sides, users and moderators.

I joke that our goal is to turn HN into a pyramid scheme such that the community does all the work and we can just monitor things from time to time, but the real joke is that a 'pyramid scheme' in this case would amount to the holy grail of a self-regulating system. In my wildest dreams it would work à la the Tao Te Ching and simply run itself with the occasional tweak. But I don't expect to get off that easily.

The kind of community moderation we want has to do with protecting the values of the site—intellectual curiosity and civility—rather than particular content people post or views they hold. If you were to argue that those things can't completely be separated, I wouldn't disagree. But I do think we can influence it by how we design the software, and more importantly by how we clarify what the values of the site are. HN is getting to the point where we need a new round of specification about what the site is and what it is not. That's coming soon.
Judge voids VirnetX's $625.6M Apple verdict
Having used things like Facebook, however, I don't think a single upvote is a better system; a bad post from somewhere or someone with enough momentum gets enough upvotes to perhaps go viral — even if completely factually incorrect. You need the -1 to balance it out, sometimes.

I don't tend to downvote if I disagree (and I'd argue, I think, that one shouldn't — if you disagree, comment); I typically only downvote if the post is extremely factually incorrect, not adding to the discussion (for example, repeating an earlier point or asking a question that is answered in an ancestor comment — i.e., not reading), or is rude. (I reserve flag for extremely bad posts — and often HN has beaten me to it.)

Not saying a +1/-1 system like Reddit or HN is perfect, nor is it the only alternative to a just-+1 system. One could imagine, for example, giving experts in various topic areas more sway in their vote, if you knew the topic of a given article (they should know what they're talking about); but that could just as easily backfire if a newcomer has a completely valid — if unconventional — idea.
Mobile Phones May Help Airports Manage Security Lines
My is a Swedish name, not a Finnish one, as Monty is a Swedish-speaking Finn. It's pronounced similar to "Myeuh", so "Myeuh Ess Kuh Ell".
How to Stop Your OpenCart Store from Leaking Money
Absolutely. You might be more interested in solving real world problems and hence you learnt programming. You might not be passionate about programming, but he tools it provides to solve problems. It's like using Microsoft Excel, I am not passionate about it but use it extensively to solve problems I am passionate about.
Oftentimes when I write in Go, I'll produce an unused variable as a side effect of commenting out code as a debugging experiment. What would you think about Go issuing a warning instead of an error in this case?

Also, if goimports solves import issues, why isn't it just built into the compiler?
>>But it, and, more importantly, the use requirement for variables, has saved me from bugs repeatedly;

So how is it better than C where you get a warning (at least from GCC) that you have unused variables? You can quickly test things and you are coming back to fix all the warnings later anyway.
You need to be professional, keep learning, keep up to date and strive to improve your skills. Professionalism can't be faked, passion can.
Bikeshedding much? I can't see this being a real problem. There are a lot of other decision that the Go team made, for better or for worse that have much greater effects on real code. Unused imports is a joke.

var _ = unusedImport

Or use goimports. Then you don't even have to think about it.
You get warnings for lots of things in C. There's no getting around the use requirement in Go, at least not without crudding up your code.
I've heard this several times; I know there are viewpoints that HN tends to lean certain ways on (many of us are similar not only in profession, but that probably leads to similarities in views). Would you happen to have a link to a good comment thread that shows the alternate viewpoint not getting fair treatment or serially downvoted? (or, if not that, is there a particular topic area or debate, s.t. next time it comes up I might know to look?)

Perhaps the best I can come up with is the debate around good encryption, network communication, and the government's abuse of people's rights; but in this example, the counter-arguments I've heard have just not been convincing, which I find different from not getting fair treatment.
Maybe the buildings are not shifting but the world is shifting and the buildings are actually well built and staying in the same place? People, especially environmentalists, are quick to blame millennial developers. Mother Earth can take the blame here!
It doesn't work as a language feature, because it's not precise or perfect. Package references can be ambiguous, and need to be overridden. It works extremely well as a tool though.
It's a stupid expectation.

Passion doesn't even correlate with outside events OP lists.

Little point having a side project when your employer often asks you to sign a contract giving them ownership of all code inside or outside of work. I've walked away from job offers because they wouldn't strike this.

Where's the passion coming from in the 90 of 100 programming jobs that are programming payroll, fuel pump displays, stock systems and the 1,001 other not exciting, not full stack, not web dev role? OK, there's probably someone, somewhere, who can get passionate about fuel pump programming, but...

Also consider the employer's point of view. Unless junior code-monkey is needed, and even then, I would far rather see a well rounded individual with some non-IT to the fore. With at least a fighting chance of some social skills and some other interests than discover all free time is spent at the laptop working on other stuff. It can help when understanding client needs, or bring the idea from the model engineering or some other hobby to the task at hand.

As with almost everything, balance is the key. If, as a parent, you can't read one programming book a year, or spend a couple of weekends worth of time on a bit of tinkering there's something wrong. The reason a lot of parents end up no longer developers is they probably became senior enough that they're herding cats (staff) instead of bits.

So I'll stick with DHH and heavily favour work-life balance.
I hate to break it to you, but we have already dammed most of the rivers. Any beaver who thinks that there are no dams around is just one that hasn’t tried to swim far downstream :)

The argument is really more why is there only one technological species on the planet - the answer is the first one to arise will displace all the other potential competitors. This is exactly what has happened on Earth and why any other species that has a chance of creating a technological civilisation is not doing so well.

The same argument applies to the universe where the first civilisation that chooses to take over the universe will displace any competitors that choose not to. All it takes is one civilisation to spread and the whole universe goes dark.
I don't think coding side projects should be anything more than a hobby. Difference between coding for work and coding as a hobby is that with hobby you don't stress out yourself, but it relaxes you and makes you feel good.

If you take coding at home serious as you (presumably) do at work, like following deadlines, doing stuff you don't enjoy, stress yourself out, then it is a very unhealthy expectation.
My main two use cases so far have been services and command line tools where it's not worth taking the effort to manage memory. The former I would have previously written in Java or C# (yeah, tie me to the cross right now language hipsters, I don't care, I already said I'm a pragmatist), and the latter in Ruby or Python.

I actually enjoyed going from dynamic to static typing for command line tools, the compiler saves me a lot of time tracking down bone-headed errors, which are typos in variables 95% of the time.
I thought it was just me being a horrible father. I have noticed this in my own children too. They come back as different people from the neighbor's house where they watch TV they aren't allowed to watch at home. Using vocabulary, including in the past some swear words that I know they did not learn at home (bi-lingual household, I never swear in the local language). I just ask them, "why are talking that way? Where did you learn to say that?" and then tell them "Civilized people don't speak that way".

I really cannot stand the Cartoon Network and most TV aimed at children. The standards are very low. And quite a lot of seems to be adults testing to see how much adult humor they can slip into a "Kid's" show.
Personality Change Machine – Motu Patlu in Telugu
Run the python process on a different port and let Caddy act as a proxy, forwarding requests from the original port to it. As described in the second (proxy) link.
The article describes how PE works badly in a limited set on industries (monopolies), but uses expansive language and doesn't properly caveat it's argument that PE is bad in general. Parent uses restaurants as an example of a more ordinary competitive business, where academic research exists that shows the benefits of PE.
Come hack on Lyst on Bugcrowd
Sure, I remember one non-passionate developer got very upset when companies asked him for code samples. He said "f that, I have a life

Sounds like he was passionately non-passionate. (Also, a programmer who claims to not be a nerd is self-deceived lol)
I honestly believe that as long as you are always trying to improve and don't coast, you should be good. I do not do side projects after work, but do try to work on my coding skills, focus and discipline during the workday. 17 years and counting, and every single year I improve (some times only by a little bit, but it really adds up).
>Then you don't even have to think about it.

Can't agree with that. We once had an issue with our code because someone had made a copy of his code base and goimports was importing an older version of a library.

Yes definitely this is something the programmer could have prevented. BUT! "not think about it" is not really true.
I use a moon on my home planet to keep tides interesting and find it lends a pleasing glow to the night sky. Thumbs up.
of course I've heard of column store relational databases, but they're not nearly as efficient nor scalable as Cassandra which has been built from the ground up for this. Fact is, if you don't need referential integrity, there is absolutely no need to pay the massive complexity overhead and horizontal scalability penalties that the relational databases incur.

Separately it is absolutely correct that a comment that asserts that 4 relational databases are the only serious ones is completely misguided and deserves a robust rebuke.
> that might also be the moment in your life when you become a parent

> That is when things get tricky. Neither can you jump ship for the next cool and risky startup where you’ll do great things, nor can you find enough time moonlighting to improve your skills

I have opposite experience. Just before becoming parent, I quit my cubicle job. I started 'cool risky opensource startup', to be at home with a child.

9-5 had lot of overhead (socializing, commute, babysitter...). Now I can organize my time better, work longer and do more work, while spending more time with my kid.
Your points about garbage code are interesting, and I think there's much to be said for that strategy.

Regarding your first sentence, you should be frequently spinning off chunks of code, but you should be careful that you're not adding coupling where it doesn't exist in the domain.

Again, I like the knowledge formulation of DRY.

"This is the way we render a FOO" is one piece of knowledge, and shouldn't be repeated every time you try to render a FOO.

"There should be a FOO rendered here" is one piece of knowledge, and shouldn't be repeated at multiple layers in your stack.

Now... what if we've been good about the above, but there's some similar code in "how we render a FOO" and "how we render a BAR"?

If the code is similar because we want a consistent style across FOO and BAR, then "we want such-and-such a style" is a piece of knowledge, and it should be represented in one place!

If the code is similar, but only coincidentally, and either might change in any direction tomorrow, then there's a question: "Is it a coherent abstraction?" We want abstractions such that we can give them a clear name, such that when we make a change to how we render only FOO or BAR we'll be obviously moving to a new abstraction and won't be tempted to change the function, and such that we know to reach for this function when it's applicable in a new context.

Alternatively, is it just a gathering of a particular grab bag of functionality? If you're pulling that out, you're not improving your code - you're compressing it.
Now there is an issue, even with a first hint of a fix (not tried yet)

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16570
Enterprise development.

For an internal project over a certain size for a large enough organization you actually want people that will just do their thing, be happy, collect a pay check and carry on.

your über 10x coder won't make any difference in these environments.
You can get self-employment status in Germany for 26€ and about an hour of waiting. It's a single form to fill in, and doesn't have any tax implications until you actually start receiving income from it. Your full-time employer doesn't need to be notified or asked for permission. (your contract may require notification if you actually perform additional work, but getting the status itself is extremely low hassle)
When I saw it on the front page, it had only 4 votes. How can that count for anything?