skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having recently been homeless, and then having achieved a high-paying tech job, I can say that the clothes you wear affect not only you, but also your surroundings, to a great extent.

Before I achieved a good wardrobe, I could literally feel the tension in a room as a result of wearing poor clothing. It is experienced as a vulnerability to social attacks... think the experience you get when your boss frowns at you, but this experience occurring in every room you go into. Without dress comparable to my coworkers, I had to adopt social behaviors which patched the vulnerabilities. (This occurs in the animal kingdom as well, for example, with behaviors such as stotting.) When I had achieved better clothing, I no longer had to worry about such behaviors, and could devote more time, and mind "power", to focusing on my own pursuits.

I am reminded of Virginia Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own": without some basic necessities one must adopt characteristics to appease the social dynamics around oneself. (I believe Machiavelli writes about this as well, regarding man's relationship to weather, but that's a looser connection.) Now imagine what it must be like to have food, shelter, no problems, good health, and $500,000 in the bank, versus a child in Sy ria. The psychological impact can't be measured.

We must keep in mind that we are all ships at sea, and even the smallest decision can be, and for the majority of individuals on earth is, fundamental to our survival.

tl:dr: When identity in relation to a group matters, unique behaviors sometimes occur to make up for weaknesses in other areas.
the site does not work.
Defending Privacy at the U.S. Border – for Travelers with Digital Devices (2011)
It's not about confidence, it's about being careful. If you don't give a crap about your software you test less, have less code reviews, don't ask for second opinion.

If I'm writing a tool for the dev team, I'm not going to scrutinize the code as much as something that will be deployed and will cost $$ if there's downtime. Also withing the software itself, some components will be scrutinized more than other, because their failure have larger impact.

Throughout the whole process I'm the same confident developer, I'm just more careful and place more scrutiny where appropriate.
The Case for the American Mall
So we've been disagreeing the whole time on what it means to be a 'qualified engineer'.

The employers don't consider someone who can't pass an AmaGoogTwitBook interview (with some practice, of course) to be a 'qualified engineer', and there is indeed a shortage of such people.
Social Gaming in VR Begins to Grow Up
It's not about being the best, it's just about comparing offerings.
And these moralizing comments make HN dull and dreary. Compared to 7-10 years ago sometimes I feel that suddenly we're in some sort of new Victorian era.
Was this 3rd party code that you bought or stuff you found on github? In the latter case, basically, you're saying that you didn't know and didn't care about compliance because no one could have found out?
Isn't the cause of rapidly rising real estate prices also caused by devaluations of currencies, so people with a lot of money are looking for relatively safe places to park it? In the USA real inflation is much higher than our government admits.
> what's so honourable about building a future for your country?

FTFY
Clinton is most certainly not against TPP.
I strongly disagree. Every programmer must be confident about their code. I code and I can explain how each and every line work, and I organise it to be simple and side effect free. This helped me produce literally maintenance free software for so long. This only comes from the confidence of saying "I know exactly what my code does!".

People who doubt their code or design usually end up bad programmers as they are not sure what their code does and it's side effects and they constantly seek other's opinion in the name of 'better implementations' - but there is no right design in reality, all one can do is produce small, concise, to-the-point side effect free functions that does solve one and only one problem at a time.
I learned that lesson early as a graduate student - the Prof (UK sense) I worked for was one of the brightest people I've ever met and he was also one of the first people to say when he didn't understand something.

Of course, there is the "play the daft laddie" tactic that I do all too well! :-)
Whoops. My email address should read "ian dot terrell at willowtreeapps dot com". :)
Signal was originally TextSecure, there was no problem with its message security. Plenty of meta data problems though. If you still need to send secure SMS there is a fork at https://silence.im.
They explain their methodology:

http://council.vancouver.ca/20160308/documents/rr1presentati...

Does not look easily gameable, and the authors don't strike me as being disingenuous.
What's the point of innovation if you're not building a better society?

It may be that the inherent American modes of self-reliance, personal responsibility and individual liberty create natural frissons with innovators trying to implement the betterment of society via "liberation technologies."

Whereas Asia, with a deeper cultural affinity for familial duty over individual desire, and an inherent necessity to rapidly raise standards for the millions that still live in agrarian lands, would provide more fertile ground for "sharing economies."

In the near term, it may seem like all the excitement is occurring across the Pacific. But if we can recall the original mission of the PC Revolution: to empower and enhance our natural capabilities, that humans with machines are substantially better equipped at survival and the optimal pursuit of life than either alone can ever be. We may ultimately stumble into that New Jerusalem here in the West.

Where "Man is his own star; and the soul that can render an honest and a perfect man, commands all light, all influence, all fate!"
Don't be ridiculous. If it were actually the same, then Bill Gates could have used his influence to get Netscape's site blocked from the internet or depending on the depth of his connections with Bill Clinton at the time, get Marc Andreessen thrown in prison.

For those who do manage to become billionaires, the game often becomes even rougher:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/raykwong/2011/07/25/friends-dont...
I think that's missing the point. And, as an aside, so are all the comments in this thread that are essentially "flossing works for me, so I'm going to keep doing it." The point of this article is not that people should stop flossing, or that it's bad for some reason. The point is that an entire industry of medical professionals were saying "floss because it reduces you risk of tooth decay and gum disease," when in fact there is little evidence that it does either. It is a huge detriment to the credibility of dentists in my opinion.
It is a common misconception that bank transfers can easily be rolled back. In the main if it was fraudulent then the bank compensates you, they take the hit. Some times however they will say it was user fault and you take the hit. I was amazed when I found out that after perhaps 2 transfers it is impossible to get back, larger sums may be more easily (or the bank more motivated to) traced but returning the funds is not always possible.
The design and fabrication team who built AdWords years ago are rich. The engineers they're hiring today at 150-200k are akin to the mechanics hired to keep it running.
RIP

There is a short bio of Ahmed Zewail from Nobel Foundation's site: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1...
React Native at SoundCloud
Wouldn't it make more sense to build React Native on top of already cross platform frameworks such as wxWidgets/Qt? So it's cross-platform right off the bat.
It seems unlikely that they would operate it on roads with significant truck traffic. I guess it might be hard to avoid roads that are used by delivery trucks, but they would be less likely to follow it for long distances (and in cities those roads would anyway tend to have speed limits closer to 40 mph).
Not a startup; different interests.
My FiOS internet has been good to me. It's always able to achieve the BW specified by them, and there is no throttling/cap. I've even been running a web server for years without any issues (you aren't supposed to do that with a residential connection).

Comcast, on the other hand, has bandwidth caps at 250 GB, but I think they recently raised them to 1 TB. However, even 1 TB isn't huge by today's standards, especially with everything migrating towards the "cloud".

However, The FiOS TV service isn’t that great. The standard definition boxes are so slow that they are unusable and tend to simply break every year or so (gets stuck in a boot loop and flashes “FPGA” on the front display, which is kind of interesting). The HD boxes are much better, but I don’t want to spend the money. Also, it’s expensive, but I doubt Comcast is any better. They probably compete very tightly with each other in areas where both are available.
Probably about as many parents who are fighting to get their kids in French Immersion in the rest of Canada. I can't speak about anywhere other than Toronto but here it's quite sought after, second language for children.

Especially amongst first generation immigrants like myself.
Or alternatively (esprit de l'escalier):

"Sorry, I do not negotiate with terrorists."
Offtopic, just a nitpick: Is there a convention in the Ubuntu eco-system to use .ubuntu as an extension? Otherwise it would be nice to change the name of this file to something like README-ubuntu.md so that GitHub displays it as prettily as other markdown files.
How the DNA Revolution Is Changing Us
Who the hell asks for those things in an interview?

Considering how much salary negotiation advice talks about how revealing your current salary puts you at a disadvantage this doesn't seem like an awful thing to try.
I like the writing style and assume this piece is well-intentioned.
However, speaking as someone who had confidence problems all his life I think what he describes as (over-)confidence was actually confidence mixed with arrogance.
I think confident people can not really be generalized, as confidence can be based upon many things. They might even be perfectionists. (no mutual exclusion here)
But when arrogance and superiority feelings, and "I have done this for so long, I can do it in my sleep"-feelings kick in, it's where it gets dangerous.
This is accurate.

The company I work for had to put French stickers on every key of every keyboard. They had to put stickers on the microwave oven as well...
> Tech companies always pretend it's impossible to find employees. That's not reality, though. That's a political strategy.

Genuinely interested to hear an expansion of this. How would pretending that technical employees are hard to recruit, benefit a company politically?
> In the USA real inflation is much higher than our government admits

Care to explain?
>Was this 3rd party code that you bought or stuff you found on github? In the latter case, basically, you're saying that you didn't know and didn't care about compliance because no one could have found out?

That's a rather uncharitable interpretation.

I think it's more likely that they don't know if they're licensed to publish the code in question.
One word: Waterpik. It's the only thing that has a major influence on my oral hygiene. Here's the one I use: http://amzn.to/2ahIghr
"The difference between an average support person and a really great one can be millions of dollars of revenue. But they are paid peanuts because it's women's work, not like the manly engineering which obviously creates more value... nevermind that novice engineers often create negative value by creating liabilities that can cost the company millions, while still getting paid more than the highest paid customer support people."

Spent a few years doing community management / customer support. This is _100% correct_. Oh, the stories I could tell. The role is critically important, and terribly, horribly underpaid. I went back to web development because, even with a 3-year gap in my resume and taking a non-senior role, I was still able to make 50% more.
I never learned flossing, and then in my early twenties I kind of ignored the dentist for around 7-8 years. I still brushed my teeth throughly two times a day, every day.

Got me paradentosis and almost lost me my teeth.

It's completely anecdotal, but I recomend flossing.
This cuts both ways.

You need a lack of fear to delve into the unknown to fix the root causes of things, to follow a thread all the way through an application and not make the minimal local change that invariably hurts the overall design of the software. This is how maintained software rots: lots of local changes without regard for the global design. Making the bigger change (usually not actually bigger, just more global) is required to keep the architecture supple.

But you need to be concerned about breaking stuff. Everything you touch, you need to look at what relies on it. If testing is insufficient, it should be beefed up beforehand. Often testing is at the wrong level and is too closely linked to implementation changes, preventing the more global change required. It's less fear, though: more like paranoia combined with obsessive, iterated list-making + list-checking.

The worst thing is when you find yourself hours or days into a task only to hit a blocker - finding out that doing the right thing will be a lot harder than expected, while doing the hacky short-term thing will be unreliable or fragile or otherwise difficult to maintain.

So you need to start out with a research phase. Think through the code changes required for a local change, look at the component parts, consider how they could change to make a more global fix, then look at their dependencies, test coverage, etc. until you're confident the task can be accomplished. Think before acting.

Acting without enough thought and planning is the biggest problem I've found with junior devs. I've found it at both extremes of the "fear" discussed here: some devs that had no fear and made big global changes without considering the knock-on effects, who broke all sorts of other bits and pieces along the way that weren't central to their task so they never even checked them (these devs generally don't last long); and other devs who hyperactively make local changes, use a lot of copy and paste (including tests - the code turns out functionally correct), and generally seem really productive, but are actually generating technical debt.
No sources on this nor am I a developer on any of this, so take with the appropriate truck-load of salt.
But, from what I remember from when the OOXML debacle was news, is that the OOXML that Microsoft published in the spec is not the OOXML they use for their format. For obvious, (old?) Microsoft interoperability hindrance reasons.

---Alex
> React is in no way a layer over Javascript.

I was thinking about JSX here. It is translated to Javascript, so a layer, imho.

Layers are not a bad thing. What is bad is that React tries to lump together many layers into a single framework.
I think this misses the point. React Native is not a replacement for the web in any meaningful sense. I think React Native can be a really useful platform to develop on, but it was developed precisely because iPhone and Android made it so difficult to build robust mobile applications with web technologies. The proliferation of apps that you have to download just to use it "once in a lifetime", as you say, is a consequence of trying to convert what can be done just as well on a free and open web into an isolated application. The web has plenty of problems - every open, standardized system does, and aging ones tend to have far more problems. But abandoning the web would be a complete disaster. I'm glad to see better options for building apps than what exists today. I think being able to use JavaScript to build the client side of native applications can be a tremendous boost to productivity, and I think native applications have and will always have their place. I love electron and I applaud the efforts of the React Native team for making otherwise unnecessarily isolated proprietary development platforms easier to integrate with and more accessible. But rooting for the end of the web is like rooting for the downfall of a free and democratic society - I'm pretty sure it's not something any of us actually want.
Wings Specification Series #0: An Overview
OP is pointing towards being self-critical of your own work makes you a better programmer in general. Well, lack of confidence makes you more likely to be self-critical but in my opinion, self-criticism is a step for being confident of your work.
There was an HN entry on building a C# bittorrent client from scratch that was very nice to read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12035568
Also the attackers have plenty of time to snoop, wait and watch for an opening. If you were breaking into a real bank then hanging around drilling or whatever is very noticeable and limits your options. I assume they are always scanning for unauthorised access but it only takes one chink and they are very attractive prospects for hackers so the motivation is there.
I don't disagree, but that doesn't necessarily mean this is a bad idea. The difficult part is enforcement, of course.
More than merely way behind, AOO is nearly stopped. The few commits it has seem to be almost all trying to fix build issues.
Except even when we have researched something, it turns out we were wrong half of the time. We've only had a couple centuries since the Age of Enlightenment - we know practically nothing for sure (ie: well enough to take for granted). Unfortunately human nature seems to be vastly overconfident, so that's not a popular opinion.
I've bumped into books (and other writing) where there's simply far too much chewing to get to a bloody point. Every passage has some lengthy aside about irrelevent matters. Often personal bit. The late 1990s / early 2000s highly padded tech texts were the worst for this. Que is an imprint that comes to mind, and many of the "24 hours" type books. O'Reilly and No Starch were usually (though not always) better. The old AT&T Unix classics are the opposite: concise, clear, and highly useful.

Vendor docs are often the wworst -- simply repeating descriptions already apparent from interfaces or systems whilst providing no insight whatsoever to how the tool is used as a system.

The problems this causes are at least threefold:

1. The documentation is ineffective. It doesn't convey useful information.

2. If you're trying to find useful passages, yo've got to chew through far too much crud.

3. The books are huge and heavy. Carrying one means foregoing two or three other (useful) books. And they simply weigh too damned much.

I suspect crowding out other books for shelf space was part of the strategy.
Considering IQ is measured as a population statistic with 100 set as the average 104-106 looks "interesting. And no you cant compare populations so easily since most tests are not invariant across populations.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasch_model#Invariant_comparis...
Basically if you do not have a test in which harder and easier items are also harder and easier in both populations you have nothing to compare.
Dentists and dental hygienists look into tens of thousands of mouths over the courses of their careers. It's not difficult for them to see that patients who floss have far healthier smiles, in general.

That said, they should get more studies done.

You could also be a bad flosser, so even the study could be flawed.
"Pay for average or above-average tech support."

Yes!

"Those you can train in less than a month."

Can you train a senior developer in a month? Can you train a true full-stack developer in a month? Can you train a "10X" developer in a month?
I think you missed the point.
And Dropbox is just an FTP with SVN.
Very enthusiastic and passionate writing but I can't help the feeling that Beijing is viewed with a measure of rose coloured glasses.

I'm not saying it's not what the author considers it to be it may well be a great place for him but is it really as great for everyone there?

I've never been there so I can't say but from what I have heard from various source including a very sarcastic you-tube new show[1] I'm not a fan China regardless of how welcoming it may be.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/NTDChinaUncensored/videos
Hey Siri Commands
Spellbinding VR Studio Opens at London's National Theatre
Australia deliberately ignores refugee abuse: report
I can whole heartedly agree. I really gave OpenOffice a fair chance, but Office is just so much nicer to look at. The untidy interface only adds to the intimidation of the blank page. Sure, the ribbon obfuscates the location of functions - but that's far better than toolbar clutter (of which more was added in this patch).
I suffer from confidence problems. But there is one thing I am confident about: Sooner or later, the application, whether it's one I wrote or not, WILL break. So I have an almost compulsive need to understand how EVERYTHING works before I do ANYTHING. This is both a blessing and a curse...
Just so you know, SF isn't "Silicon Valley". It's SF. The peninsula is the valley, and although lots of people live in SF and commute down, lots of people also live up the east bay and even further south (Morgan Hill, Gilroy, Santa Cruz, ...). You absolutely don't need to live in SF to work at an SV company, and in fact, the commute from SF to anywhere south bay is really unpleasant.
I do think that you need to learn how to use in the best way the technologies you have chosen or that are present in your current setup. No matter if it is a MySQL, Postgres or any other DB, it requires as a part of a job, learn how to use at it's best. The points on the article are good, however it's true that Postgres had problems with scalability not so long ago. That's changing, however I think that other data stores have addressed the problem of availability and scalability earlier and gained maturity during the last years.

Also, there is something that caused some noise to me:

This point is correct; PostgreSQL indexes currently use a
direct pointer between the index entry and the heap tuple
version. InnoDB secondary indexes are “indirect indexes”
in that they do not refer to the heap tuple version
directly, they contain the value of the Primary Key (PK)
of the tuple.

That's true, but the article doesn't make explicit that the PK on InnoDB is a clustered index and, that there are other optimizations like adaptive hashing to make read queries faster.
Do you have any supporting evidence to your claim that real inflation is much higher?

I'm not trying to prove you wrong, I'm genuinely curious. My impression has been that inflation has been relatively low, with the exception of housing. Though housing has gone up much faster in large metros than the rest of the country
Again, there's the comparison of people who sell ice cream and see that when they sell more, there will be more drownings. Correlation does not imply causation.

I think it is quite obvious that people who floss also brush their teeth more regularly, and that is enough to give them healthier smiles.

(Regarding the benefits of flossing, I'm agnostic.)
> The article also cites people returning home and better city experience (bigger city/better climate ?)

Boston is small, the public transportation system kind of sucks, and everything closes early. And trying to change those things raises a lot of neighborhood groups' hackles. The rents are high and a lot of the housing stock is old. All stuff that drives young people away, I'm guessing.
This is one of the most important points.

And an issue for it has been open since Jan 2015:

https://github.com/node-forward/discussions/issues/29

It's, imo, negligent.
I agree. It's about being careful, methodical, and anal. But I also think that if you are nailing it on the head all the time and confidence is riding high, you may slip.