skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Specialist vs. All-Rounder?
In your opinion which is preferable?

I've worked for a mid-size company for several years and as time has gone on, I've become more and more siloed into a specialised role. The role is half technical/half commercial (Sales Engineer). I did a bachelor degree in CS but have never been a full-time SW developer, I graduated in 2008.

I have been working on my, relatively successful, own project in my spare time for the last 5 years and have built up a pretty solid marketing and UX knowledge. I have done all technical work on the site (CRUD application, 3rd party API integration and own API, personalisation algorithms, marketing automation)

I'm taking a few months out to do some travelling but after that, I'm looking to work at a much smaller company/startup.

My worry is that I have become too specialised in my professional role, and will find it hard to break out into any other role in the future as my experience in marketing/UX is not 'official' experience, and I've never been a professional developer.
I disagree, I think it is a human tendency because it is often the path of least resistance (short term, but long term can accumulate and be not worth the alternative).

So while culturally it might have higher numbers in women, the numbers in men are high enough to sell books like "No More Mr. Nice Guy.". Good book by the way.
I see that you have faithfully replicated at least some of IDA's insane graph view glitches.

Do you have the one where a line goes to one side by more than a screen's width, goes down a tad, and then goes back sideways to nearly where it started?
The difference is that "keep height, speed and direction" is a pretty safe way to operate an airplane at altitude: there are no sudden obstacles, and there is a lot of infrastructure to make sure traffic stays nicely separated. A human reaction time of a few seconds is fine.

It's not for a ground vehicle in normal environments.
In-Storage Compute [pdf]
> If you're sitting there wanting the car to react to something and it hasn't yet and you're waiting to see if it will, you're doing it all wrong.

Okay, but what if you're the sort of prematurely-conscientious person who holds a door for someone who's still 30 seconds away from the door? You'll always be doing things before the autopilot gets to them, because you're doing them before you're "supposed" to do them (which in normal human driving is almost never a problem, so there's nothing discouraging people from this.) Thus, the autopilot will never get to do anything, so there's no point to turning it on.
What Convolution Neural Nets Look Like
One pilot, singular, did not know how to recover. The other two did. The one who was at the controls attempted to perform a correct recovery. He was thwarted by the unbelievably idiotic design of the Airbus control system, in which conflicting inputs are simply averaged, and the only indication that something strange is happening is a warning light.

Edit: regarding the pilot who did the wrong thing, I don't think it's fair to say that he didn't know how to recover, either. He almost certainly knew how to recognize and recover from a stall. He was a glider pilot, where stalls are a matter of course. It seems that he panicked, which prevented him from thinking clearly and taking the proper actions. People do that sometimes, and a big reason you have two pilots is so the other one can step in when one of them gets stupid. The fatal flaw with the Airbus was the system which failed to adequately inform the other pilot of the first pilot's stupid actions. (In any sensibly designed aircraft, the two sets of controls will move together, providing physical feedback of each pilot's inputs to the other pilot.)
How sad is it that people invest this amount of effort into things that essentially nobody will use?
A car that only requires the effort displayed in "They Call Me Trinity" would be fine by me.
Alcohol? We seem pretty okay with allowing some degree of risk.
This week's Kurzgesagt episode covered CRISPR in an easy to understand fashion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAhjPd4uNFY.
That kind of policy didn't work out so well for Ladar Levison at Lavabit when they wanted to subvert the entire userbase's security just to get access to Snowden's email account...

If you piss off important enough people - law enforcement won't just go away when you say "the system isn't capable of doing that", they'll say "so re-write the system so it is, and if you tell anybody we'll put you in jail forever".

The FBI have seized and continued to run a child porn website before to gather evidence - do you _really_ think they'd hesitate before taking over your encrypted chat servers if they thought it'd get them a career-advancing prosecution? Do you think you'd fight as hard as Ladar did when the guys with guns come knocking at your door? (I have no doubt I'd cave pretty quickly - I've got a lot of respect for Ladar's resistance to selling out his users...)
Forgetting for a while the non-linear costs of distraction in cognitively intensive jobs, I wonder if Facebooking at work is really costing us anything at all? I'm having a hard time imagining that office workers of 20+ years ago were that more job-focused than they're now.

But then again, the problem may be Internet in general - I can't imagine people being able to do so many non-work errands while in the office if it weren't for e-mail in particular.
Are you implying that the aviation industry has been using this term incorrectly for a century and counting, and that we should believe a layman's dictionary over actual common usage?
That's a great way to visualize it. I think there is much truth to what you said.
The former is extremely common in medical students:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_students%27_disease
I just diagnosed myself with diabetes/pre-diabetes. I'm going to invest into that sugar monitor thingy to check myself.
Do you think animals have a "nature"? If so, why are humans any different? Sure, we can reflect on our behavior and try and change it, but it's undeniable there are innate drivers that can be hard to overcome.
1) more people means more demand for stuff, means more incentive to produce stuff, more competition to sell them stuff and higher economic growth
2) if people want to come here, it's because they think they are not being as productive as they could be where they are now.
Oh yeah, I've linked to original and ESR's interpretation of UNIX Hater Handbook. Like I said, great analysis minus that one aspect of my posts here. :)

Far as recommendations, putting my name and those terms into Google gives me six hits on HN where I recommend them both. In several, I push alternatives like microkernels, SPARK, and Rust plus those if person stays with C. In reply to ZeroTier developer, I reference Code-Pointer Integrity too while pointing out he's less safe with C++ because he can't use these C features. Ironic.

"Although I do wonder why Cyclone, the project that inspired Rust, wasn't on your list for memory-safe C."

I get 47 hits on that as I give Morissett et al's work plenty credit. Often when someone says Rust did the dynamic safety first where I counter they got it from Cyclone. Reason I don't push Cyclone so much is it isn't actively developed any more like most safer C's. C people just ignore them. Others included Safe-C, Clay, and Vault languages although I don't think all of them were OSS'd. Many non-C languages also compiled to C to get portability and performance benefits while app gets type-checked or other checks (eg bounds). Hardly any take-up there either. At this point, I just recommend them putting work into compiler extensions that make C safer with reasonable performance hits. SAFEcode already in LLVM, too.
We're not talking about what to do right now, we're talking about how to solve the problem for all time where the technology asymptotically approaches perfection but, obviously, never actually gets there (just like human drivers never get there.) Telling people to just not use Tesla's v0.8 autopilot might make sense; but what should be the policy in 2050 when cars are driving better than people, but still miss something (like human drivers sometimes do) such that it would be good to get a human's attention?
Indeed. If you're that way the system will probably not be useful to you. That's OK: most people aren't like that, and it doesn't have to be useful to 100% of the population.
Completely agreed on Deida. I want to do a re-read some time soon.

Getting "Models" and "Slight edge" samples on Kindle now. Thanks for the recommendations!
Suppose you're right about that type of person and autopilot never getting to do anything. I think it's still worth having it on. People make errors. The one time that person misjudges something and is about to hit something on the road, there's a good chance autopilot will see it and brake. It only needs to happen once to be worth it.
Since the discussion is about criminality, and it was suggested that this arises due to some religious notions rather than eg (a) people being defective or (b) social-economic disadvantage, it thought that out to be challenged. From an evolutionary perspective you could say that there must be an advantage in such behavior to the individual, even if the society suffers.

Also, thanks for the unjustified rudeness, you've made a great contribution today.
Which is why what we really care about is changes in GDP not levels of GDP
1) No need to carry wallet when I was out in the field.
2) Stores do not get my card number and name. I always hated when something like even a restaurant would get my name.
3) If the card is reported lost and bank issues a new one, Apple Pay automatically updates before the card reaches me by mail.
4) It is additional security, as it asks for thumb verification before the payment.

There are no 3-4 extra steps involved at all. It is just taking phone out, as you normally do with card, and just tapping the thumb on home button.
People collectively sabotage themselves all the time. It's called the tragedy of the commons.
I thought of that, the project will be FOSS and I'm going to encourage people to run their own servers. The primary server will mostly be a reference implementation and for casual chatting.
Yahoo's 10-Q signals the end of Marissa Mayer's spending spree
Great post! Just curious, why didn't you include emscripten (C/C++) in your comparisons?
I wish I could get a similar utility for Python and Javascript as this seems to show off some cool FP auto complete.

I'm basically looking for a way to remove my dependency on my 5-7 IDEs and I don't know how. I wish someone could show me a very good, simple, alternative to all of them. I work in C, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, and C# and I'd like to be able to use a single IDE solution for all of them. Sadly I cant find anything with good auto completion and nice features (like things offered by Eclipse).

This has some really promising features, I've got to say I'm amazed.
I take issue with the way "human nature" is used, not the idea that we have a nature. It is almost always unproductive. Even so, most who make an argument from human nature always convince me that they know nothing about other human beings within a sentence or two.
Which resources (books/tutorials) do you recommend for learning Scala.js for someone who does not know Scala or Java or any JVM language, but knows a decent amount of Python, Julia, Go, Javascript, Dart etc. I should add that I am not interested in JVM (at least, now). I want to know what are good resources if one intends to use Scala only for the JS side of things.
OpenSSL's crypto code isn't all that bad as long as you're not worried about side channel attacks. Most of their remote code execution bugs have been in protocol code.
If a pin is used with stolen card, bank will refuse to credit the charges. It is not covered under fraud.
Beyond allocations for government and emergency services, there's no such thing as a public interest. Different people have different interests.
> Especially when breaking. The will it break or won't it (spoiler: it does) is nerve wracking.

I would like to think that you intentionally spelled "braking" as "breaking" in a deliciously punny word play on the robustness of the technology itself, as well as its ability to stop a hurtling vehicle from 'breaking' itself against a stationary object.
BrightWork Day One
Well I guess they use it, why does it matter what anyone else does?
> Are marketing cost and G&A (general and administrative) increasing as a fraction of cost of goods/services sold? Perhaps it's the overhead of capitalism.

Marketing has a special feature - in a competitive market, it becomes a zero-sum game. You're putting an ever-increasing amount of money into it, but getting only marginal gains out of it. It's a coordination problem. As the industry grows, you end up with chains - ad companies selling tools and services to other ad companies, that bundle those tools and sell services to other companies, which sell their services to companies that use those services to offset each other's use of those services... I think that's why the ad industry is growing so much. There's a lot of space for bullshit jobs there. One would say, almost unlimited.
MLlib: Machine Learning in Apache Spark
Oh I got it. Fair point. It doesn't add much to a complex conversation.
So far one person has faced lethal consequences. As the article states, that person was fully aware of how autopilot worked. Do you honestly think that if that feature was called something else that person would still be alive?
It's social media.
In some ways, it could be useful to have people still driving even when a car is fully autonomous. The human input could function like a copilot, and the autonomous system might be able to learn from the actions of human drivers. It also helps people feel like they're in control.
s/people/management. As someone whose job is to produce things, I absolutely hate meetings. And probably so does most of people here on HN.
And they'll continue to evolve and improve, but that takes thousands of generations.
The reason for this is deflation. Deflation in our economy is massive and far under-reported. Deflation is especially great in areas where productivity is rising.

The way economists measure productivity is by the monetary value of the thing produced. Thus, productivity gets tied in with inflation and deflation. Suppose you make widgets, and can make 10 of them per hour. Suppose you sell each of them for $10 bucks. Now suppose inflation hits and the price of the same widgets is all of a sudden $20 per hour. You still only make 10 widgets per hour. But all of a sudden you are twice as productive according to the way the government and economists measure productivity.

The opposite happens when deflation occurs. If your widgets all of a sudden start selling for $5 per hour instead of $10, you will be considered by the official economic analysis to be twice as lazy even if you work just as hard and make just as many widgets per hour.

And there you have your problem. Deflation is hitting everything, but it is hitting industries that benefit from productivity of new technology the hardest. Take a serer cpu made today that can perform 100 times as much work as a server cpu made about 10-15 years ago. Is intel considered a hundred times more productive when they make this cpu that does 100 times more work? Of course not. Their productivity is based on how much the cpu sells for and since per cpu prices have held stable to slightly decreasing over that time, intel's productivity for that particular cpu is deemed to have decreased as well.

Or take pictures. Twenty to thirty years ago there were probably over a hundred thousand people working in photo development shops making pictures for people. Now about a 100-200 programmers (estimated) among Google, Apple, Facebook and yahoo probably provide the vast majority of picture viewing services in America. Is that a great increase of productivity? It should be, because a hundred people are doing the same stuff a hundred thousand were doing twenty years ago. But officially it isn't because picture viewing is considered to be free, so no revenue is assigned to it.

So productivity growth is happening, but unfortunately it is accompanied by large drops in pricing, which make the official measure of productivity look bad.

Why are prices dropping? This has to do with something journalists do not like to talk about -- wage stagnation, income inequality, etc.
The main lesson I've learned from this is that a spec is far more likely to be successful if it's paired with at least one working implementation and more than trivial test data. Writing a validator is both important for adoption and perhaps more so for flushing out parts of the spec which are too hard to implement or annoying to work with.
I want to thank everyone for those links. I am learning R at the moment and I am finding them immensely helpful
I use <xmp> for debugging purposes all the time.
Bingo.

If you search for my previous comments in this thread, you can see my concerns about the general state of IHE's.

In one of the comments I mentioned about Blue Button, which allows patient's to pull their data. (To be fair, I haven't really seen the button in too many places out in the wild).

I guess ultimately in order to be able to get your charts from where ever you move, all those smaller IHE's need to feed into one repository and then have those scale up from county to county and even statewide.

The problem with that of course is how all the partner systems are queried or what profiles that have decided to use. i.e. will a data source being pushing documents to the repository every time there is a new patient or update, or will that network go out and ping every data source for their most up-to-date record.

If PatientBank is just dealing with Fax primarily and working with FHIR, I am curious how long they will work with Fax until there is a high adoption rate of FHIR for them to be able to get properly clinical items, that one of their clients could then pull their data and then push their data to their new provider.
Not sad at all.

I confess I have similar thoughts when I look at things that are getting reinvented all over the place. I have come to feel this is actually a counterproductive thought. Exploring in obscure tools is the definition of tinkering exploration. Which is often a big driver in pushing progress. (Same for reinvention.)
A bit from Libreboot that is relevant:
https://libreboot.org/faq/#firmware-hddssd

> HDDs and SSDs are quite complex, and these days contain quite complex hardware which is even capable of running an entire operating system (by this, we mean that the drive itself is capable of running its own embedded OS), even GNU/Linux or BusyBox/Linux. Some proof of concepts have been demonstrated.

> For HDDs: https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1

> For SSDs: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554
Looking forward to the algorithm that selects which of these algorithms to use
What's your read on increasing the retirement age, then?
I think that if the bribe has a contract attached, written or verbal, (which seems to be the current supreme court test for corruption here in America), then the valuation would be the fair market value, or, conversely, be a pre-payment for services not yet delivered so the income wouldn't be realized on the politician's end until time passes in their term of office. From the briber's perspective, they'd have the asset of debt on unrealized income for services not yet rendered, and like all debt, that has a simple value (and if the politician becomes honest, then the debt is written off like all other debts you'll be unlikely to collect).
I wonder to what extent the Tesla not seeing the SUV was due to it being gold colored. There must also be colors of cars that humans are less likely to see, too. I wonder if certain vehicle colors might be phased out to aid road safety in the near future.
Interesting that this story made the front page and the story today of the Tesla autopilot crash in China that was posted several times did not.
Are Outdoorsy People Nicer Than Indoorsy People?
Pardon my ignorance, is there a reason we couldn't theoretically just build out a state owned network, then lease back access to the operators? I would it would cut down significantly on infrastructure required, and create better competition.
And massive reddit thread about it @ https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4x1s2k/genetic_engi...
Now imagine a whole bunch of drivers who are not very familiar with autopilot limitations, especially if the autopilot works great 99.99% of the time.
That was pretty funny. Gets better with the Snowden slides where mighty NSA basically says they can't break it in basic, use case. At Princeton, Snowden even said analysts got failure notices even for requests to decrypt GPG w/ 1,024-bit RSA at a time when paranoids wondered how long 4,096-bit might last. Haha.

Next I'm going to hear that using TAIL's increases your risk of damning evidence found during a disk audit by a forensics team.
I agree with everything you just said. Some items should only be in person, but the majority actually work better in some written form. Having an instant log is great for basically any work conversation. JIRA ticket comments and Slack come to mind.

I also find conversations more of a lazy way to communicate. Most just talk and never really think. Forcing someone to validate their idea(s) to the point where they are writing them down helps everyone involved.

Finally, written down helps avoid the circular conversations and keeps others who were not present up to speed. Being able to go off and think and come back to exactly where the written conversation left off is a big win. Contrast this with the often endless meetings where the same things are discussed for a majority of the start of the meeting and at the end 1 extra decision is made.
One thing is that talking about "restrategizing our value proposition to better synergize our resource allocation" doesn't look so impressive or meaningful when it's written down. You can get away with a lot more of bullshit when you're talking face-to-face. It's one of the reason why I prefer text.

To drop a data point - as a developer, there's very little in my job that would be done better by personal meeting that isn't handled better via asynchronous communication. Be it IM or e-mail, or whatever. E-mail preferably, because IMs seem to give people the impression they don't have to think before writing. As for things that do require personal meetings - I'd say some initial architectural discussions, when you really want to be together in front of a large whiteboard. That however could be moved to software too, if someone someday writes a non-utterly-shitty collaboration program.
Looks interesting I am looking for a new private file sync application. Any plans for Arch Linux (Can build it myself but find AUR easier) and android?
You may sometimes be able to work around this by using `expect` which creates a pseudoterminal attached to the program's stdout instead of a pipe. For example, say the program you want to run is `ls --color=auto`. This produces color when stdout is a terminal but no color when stdout is a pipe. If we just did:

ls --color=auto | less -R

we'd see no color. Instead we can run ls under expect:

expect -c "spawn -noecho ls --color=auto; expect" | less -R

and color abounds.

There may be an easier way to accomplish this. If anybody has ideas, chime in.
For what it's worth, I've had trouble with macros as well. Sometimes they run at a glacial pace. Very strange.
Totally hear what you're saying on all counts :)
You're confusing unwinding mechanisms. The whole point of using unwind tables is to avoid the need to preserve frame pointers. There zero cost in pure C code and minimal cost in C++ code just for preserving the ability to unwind. You absolutely do not need to have extra prologue and epilogue code or to burn a register for a frame pointer.
Show HN: A Blog and Portfolio CMS Built with React, Redux, CSS Modules, Rails
Something like this?

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fi.stack.img...