skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started programming when I was 7, I'm 45 next month :)

The one thing in the programming world that is almost 100% applicable to almost every article like this ( and many other topics ) is..... it depends.

I'm fortunate in that for most all my career I have spanned many technologies from embedded systems to the latest crazes on the web. Mostly what becomes redundant is language syntax and framework. If your programming career is largely centered around these then you become redundant pretty quick (or super valuable when critical systems are built with them then need maintenance forever ).

Frameworks come and go so if you spend a lot of time creating solutions that shuffle data from a DB to a screen then shuffle data back into a DB.... then a majority of your programming skills will become redundant relatively quickly. ( maybe a half life of 4 years? ). But often when you are doing this, the real skill is translating what people want into software solutions, which is a timeless skill that has to be built over a number of projects.

If you work in highly algorithmic areas, then not a lot of your skills become redundant. Though you may find libraries evolve that solve problems that you had to painfully do from scratch. However that deep knowledge is important.

Design, the more complex a system is to engineer (that isn't provided to you via a framework), the more likely you will have skills that won't go redundant. Design knowledge is semi timeless. My books on cgi programming circa the mid nineties are next to useless, but my GOF Design Patterns book is still full of knowledge that anyone should still know. OOSC by Betrand Meyer is still full of relevant good ideas. My books on functional programming from the 80s are great. The Actor model which has its history in the 70s is getting appreciated by the cool kids using elixir/erlang

Skills in debugging are often timeless, not sure there's any technique I'd not use anymore. ( though putting logic probes on all the data and address lines of a CPU to find that the CPU has a bug in it's interrupt handling is not often needed now )
This is the third time OVH has been just about to build a US datacenter in the past five years.
Well, at least for some populations [0][1] women do have fewer teeth than man, and this difference increases with age. So Aristotle could've been onto something.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17917610

[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00784-010-0445-3
Google suffers blow as age-discrimination suit clears first hurdle
I am thinking of Yishan Wong, formerly of Reddit.
woah... this is really impressive
> it assumes

True, UNIX was designed, in part, to make the processing of textual data as easy as possible. It was never intended to be running inside a photo camera or a drawing pad.

On the other hand, from the very beginning UNIX was just as capable of processing binary data as well as controlling various devices, such as typesetters and graphical displays as any other reasonably powerful OS of the time.
Just a thought: I wonder if using one of these networks without being a club member or ticketed in first class could get you in trouble via the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act? With all of the stories you hear of the CFAA being stretched, it makes me think.
That's about as effective as saying that Americans should stop working so they won't support US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lybia and Syria with their taxes.

In other words, it won't work until you give people a reasonable alternative (lab-grown meat, anyone?).
posts like this are why I love HN. Intercooler looks cool and simple, and simple enough I can just re-write it. Angular is big enough that my eyes glaze over thinking about reading into it.
Can someone with access to google please search gwern.net please find the page where Gwern shows there's no documentary trace of this actually happening and link it please? I'd find it myself but bing isn't up to the task and Google is blocked in China.
I'm not qualified to adjudicate this, but I would point out that painting yourself as revealing a conspiracy doesn't do you any favors IMO.

Edit: downvote me all you like, but at least be accurate. I'm referring to the title of the tech talk video linked several times in this thread: "The Quantum Conspiracy: What Popularizers of QM Don't Want You to Know"
I thought this is another acme post. Oh NO~~~, you don't even use a mouse?!
This doesn't directly to the statement you're refuting, but he explicitly mentioned half-life.

The author does basically ignore the core knowledge aspects of a programmers career, and he bases his entire argument on the half-life of usefulness of detailed knowledge about specific technologies.
35 here. I completely understand why you are on defensive about something you are passionate about.
Try to see our perspective though; web dev, we've been there. In my case, you name it, I've done it, nobody gave me a T-shirt thought they all asked for unpaid overtime.

At some point you realize that it's a race to write more lines of code with every iteration, and that employers will gladly abuse your passion in many ways go get cheaper output from you.

If I may take the liberty to give you an advice here, go for the lower level/more specialized stuff as your career progresses. Not only they change at a slower pace but they are paid way 2-4 times more here in Toronto.
If you care that you studied and make a living off of it, try to focus after technologies where your hard work will be relevant longer.

As for me, I love what I'm doing. Currently it's a mashup of crosplatform c++14, .net core rest api, elastic search, postgre and bunch of connecting glue. Our resident js expert is busy for the next few weeks so I'll probably learn typescript and go up my stack to provide an interface.

Smaller shops are tons of fun.
Interesting. Does it have text objects?
There really needs to be a standard interface that all compiler toolchains can deal with for emitting program structure. All implementations deal with this problem their own way.

For C# there is OmniSharp based on NRefactory, and also Microsoft's Roslyn. For C++ there are tools based on libclang. Rust has Racer. It would be nice if there were an interface an editor could implement which gave access to all of these languages.
Sure, if you like 3-month contracts.
"Preacher, don't the Bible have some pretty specific things to say about killin'?"

"Quite specific. It is, however, somewhat fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps."
I don't think per capita is the right way to calculate this. We're talking about infrastructure spending, and if poor countries have less infrastructure, then they also have less that needs to be upgraded.

They also produce fewer green house gasses... and it would make sense that more money would need to be spent where those gasses are emitted (ie: not in poor countries).

And they use less energy, which means fewer plants that need to be replaced.

In the summary [0], it says they think spending needs to increase from 3.4T/yr to 6T/yr... a 70% increase.

I think a more accurate estimate would be to take current spending in India, and increase it by 70%.

That would mean the US would shoulder a much larger portion of this increase.. Which makes sense, since we're one of the largest emitters of green house gasses.

0. http://newclimateeconomy.report/2016/executive-summary/
I think http://www.ribbonfarm.com/ and http://slatestarcodex.com/ are sites that are fairly well know among this crowd, but have consistently thought provoking content. If you enjoy meta-thinking or reading about complex societal dynamics, you're in for a treat.
How about climate change? Producing staggering quantities of meat is responsible for an awful lot of greenhouse gas emissions and uses a ton of fossil fuels.
That seems like a meaningless semantic difference to me. There is no practical difference between these two sentences:

If you wish to use GPL-licensed code, your code must be open source.

If your code is open source, you may use GPL-licensed code.
This comment in combination with your username made me laugh way too hard.
Watch how easy it is to start an anonymous shell company for your cat
Preferably with walls around it.
Although the trick here in LA is we actually have these super rich mega water users, they have a lot of clout, they should be required to use desal to water their lawns but they won't do it, only the best for their mansions. If we made the super rich pay their fair share for taxes we would actually see some relief for northern california from the massive suckage from the south. If you look at the stats the water consumed by ordinary working people in LA is dwarfed by the amount consumed by just a handful of mega consumers who got a free pass from Governor Brown to keep sucking out that water for their massive gardens and trees and lawns.
Well, if people thought I was looking out of shape or overweight I wouldn't mind someone saying so.

However wouldn't you agree that what I would like, and what is considered generally polite in our culture are probably not always equal?
> That's the "understanding which language you're in" part comes in.

... which standard unix utilities can't do. grep and awk can't reliably determine if a symbol is in a comment, and I can't tell it "rename symbol Foo, but only if it's used as a type identifier in my project".

The question isn't if unix could theoretically work as well as an IDE if you added a few thousand custom userland programs that understood language context. The question is if unix, out of the box right now, is competitive with a high end IDE. It's not, because it can't possibly understand your code.

Whether you like IDE's or not, the entire point of an IDE is that it's more than a dumb text editor because it understand what you're typing into it. If all your IDE offers is text editing functionality unix can do, then it's a bad IDE.
Honestly when I see what my friends who design airplanes and particle accelerators are doing, I feel like we're all kind of fucking around in software engineering, frontend or not.
I have no evidence, but I imagine it's a solid "no" at any of the largest well-known companies. No way in hell is live production data available to every developer. But it's certainly typical (rather, completely standard operating procedure) at most small and also mid-sized companies. It's even worse than "everyone has access to the production database" - it's "the production database is copied to staging and individual developers' VMs".

Smaller companies never invest the time to set up proper staging and developer environments that operate on purely fictional data. It always starts as a copy of production; and the majority of companies don't even take the most basic step of swapping out sensitive info. The numbers of times I've seen users' plaintext account passwords (another problem entirely) synced to every developer's machine is honestly astounding.
interestingly not tracking 184 'End-TO-END ERROR', considered by couple of smart tools to be a failure of the drive.
Though I am only an electronics hobbyist I don't think this is possible. Most of the battery charging chips that you are talking about don't have firmware, that would require them to be I would guess 10x more expensive.
I feel like that's just going to get them to retract their offer in a lot of cases.
So then why are you worrying about how it could have actually happened.
Only on a superficial level. How often do you really find yourself looking up your friends' five year old Facebook posts? On Twitter, the UI actively fights back even when you want to look at old tweets. Anything that drops off of the front page of the timeline is as good as gone, Snapchat just formalizes it.

And for what it's worth, TV is becoming less and less TV-like every day, now that we have Netflix and on-demand everything.
The Problem with Tech Leads – teach them how to lead
Yup! Qardio is one of the interesting ecg I discovered online. Many more out there and I was wondering what kind of sensors are used.
hahaha !
Ok, then backend folks just do API integrations and
database guys just make tables, no real technical challenges anywhere. Anybody getting stuff done is pasting together libraries.
I don't think super highly of it in an objective sense, but I do think that they have the resources (and probably the know-how) to do a better job at it than the vast majority of hiring situations (smaller companies, etc). And I do have a high opinion of the engineering talent at Google, who are involved in the phone interview process (which I guess I was lumping together with actual HR first-line resume screening).
I believe in an objective reality too, I just don't think it's a scientific concept. Perhaps we can say that the existence of an objective reality is what makes science worth doing even if science cannot directly access it. I think I can agree with that.

P.S. you might find our different points of view well described as the difference between substance metaphysics and process metaphysics (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/).
Falling in Love
how new york programmers are different ? maybe
Yes, lets just make a framework to put an end to... well... all that mess of frameworks... ugh... :)
and their lives
Kumbha Rashifal 2017 in Hindi II Aquarius Kumbha Horoscope 2017 कुंभ राशिफल 2017
Thanks for the feedback! I agree that the recognition of location entities is not accurate in some cases.
For example if a text like
"Blockai | San Francisco, CA | CV/ML and Front-end Engineers - https://blockai.com"(from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12631335)
is passed to Google Natural Language API: then it returns the following "locations":
San Francisco,
CA,
ML,
CV.
https://github.com/sAbakumoff/hn-sort-out/blob/master/LangAn...
However, ML stands for "Machine Learning" and CV is "Computer Vision". Perhaps the algorithm concludes that CV/ML is the location because it's close to other locations(San Francisco, CA).
I will try to work it out for the next "Who's hiring" event :)
> The doctor at 40 doesn't seem to be worried about discovering that all his knowledge of the vascular system is about to evaporate in favor of some new organizing theory. The same goes for the lawyer, the plumber, the accountant, or the english teacher.

And the same is true of programming. There are still variables, arrays, syntax errors, IDEs and so forth - the underlying algorithms don't change that much. Lawyers and accountants have to keep up to date to keep their credentials, and doctors almost always do (but not actually always - just like some programmers don't update their skills). Fads come and go in teaching as well.

I know less about plumbers, but there are few white-collar professionals where you don't have to keep on top of things throughout your career. From architects to engineers to social workers to pilots to biologists to meteorologists to managers, things change in your profession and you need to adapt. It's just that usually those changes don't have the ridiculous levels of hype and fanfare that they have in our bubble (management being an exception here as well, lest I draw the wrath of a six-sigma black belt!)
I have no idea about it
I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. The people I was talking to found my posts intelligible and interesting. I doubt you want to ask me to clarify my points or point out in particular where I'm difficult to understand. I think you've just assumed I am communicating in bad faith instead of trying to communicate a complex idea but I shouldn't jump to conclusions like that :^)
This looks like a van gogh painting if you zoom all the way out. Regardless, great work! This is really important.
A double with integral value in 127..127 already takes 2 bytes to store in rethinkdb (the first being a tag distinguishing between array, object, string, etc), compared to some random double's 9 bytes. The type safety advantages of distinguishing doubles from integers are pretty minimal in a database, because you'd need a schema for that anyway, and the benefits of that far outweighs the add-on benefits of having type checked query logic.
I always go with the "J" pronunciation. It maintains the expectation that the talk makes a joke out of by breaking. I would rather give everyone that first time experience of hearing the "Y" pronunciation than do Gary an injustice.
Here's a link to the videos from FXQi's Setting Time Aright conference, where there are lots of talks addressing the relationships between cosmology, QM and entropy with regards to time, with David Albert, Sean Carroll, Max Tegmark, Tim Maudlin, etc etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR9reQrumS0&list=PL1FA30AE29...

Spolier alert: they don't really know whats going on, and they disagree pretty strongly. Decoherence seems related to the thermodynamic arrow of time: you can't un-measure something, but famously we don't know how to interpret that, many worlds blah blah.
Hurricane Matthew closes in on Florida as Haiti death toll rises
That's what I mean, just because the question is abstracted to be pure numbers doesn't mean that it's mathematician computational type stuff. This is a basic enough task (data structures, iteration) that someone who can't do it wouldn't meet any reasonable definition of "knowing how to code".

By the way, I don't think that group includes you: I'm quite sure you'd be able to pass it in an interview context. You'd probably be paying more attention to the details of the question in an interview and I usually give sample input/output to reduce the chance of a candidate accidentally overlooking a word in the question.
I'm a little confused by the swirling pattern. It doesn't represent the eye, it seems to merely by a pattern to denote the highest wind speeds, not the spiral of a hurricane.

The reason I say this is in the lower right there are three models in the lower right and the center of the pattern moves around when you select each one. Also, with one of the options, it puts the center on the coast at Fort Pierce as I write this, however it's off the coast of Palm Beach and hasn't made landfall anywhere.
> Yes, someone's going to come in here and say, "well it's a professional tool for professionals therefore it's ok that it's difficult to use and hostile and not accessibility to people who can't use a CLI due to physical limitations because it's a professional tool for professionals.

Oh that's nonsense. First of all, because git is a CLI application you can easily build a GUI for it, and there are a lot of them for you to choose. You can't do the reverse, and good luck integrating your tightly coupled WinForms application with other tools.

Second, what "physical limitations" put people into a position where they can code but they can't use a CLI?

> Sony Vegas is a professional tool for professionals, and somehow it doesn't have even remotely the amount of usability problems Git does. So is Adobe Photoshop. So I don't buy that argument.

Multimedia artists are among the people who are most resistant to ever switch tools due to how much they have mentally invested into the complexities of their go-to application. Your example is far from good.
Tried Netguard; doesn't work. Apparently Translate does not check the network, it checks if the network is on. While it it is on, it will try to reach Google for the translation. Meaning I need a separate offline device just for translate I guess.
I wouldn't say there aren't "any" such jobs. And there are a lot of languages I never look at ads for, so I can't say I have any sense of what their market is like. And of course there are whole domains (like C++) where the ecosystem is just intrinsically older.

But by and large (and this gets back to the original article), once your core "keyword set" has gotten long enough in the tooth (which I'm pegging at an age of 5 year or so), the number of ballpark-open offerings (as in: you have enough XYZ that they're consider talking to you) does seem to drop quite precipitously. And the more "skinny pants" your domain is (like web stuff), the more this rule seems to hold.

So the JS ecosystem would seem to be a bellweather example -- nearly every role seems to require either AngularJS or React (5 and 3 years out, respectively), or something similarly recent; pretty much no one is interested in jQuery or any of the older frameworks, these days (except, as the other commenter stated, for small maintenance projects).
There is Old Persian but not Persian?
Nowadays, you cannot even create an email account on gmail or outlook without giving away your phone number.

Do you plan on staying in one location, using the same IP address, for the rest of your life?

If not, then gmail will occasionally force you to use your phone number to "verify" that it's you. Of course, in fact what they really want to confirm is the association between your email and your phone.

This just happened to me a few days ago. I flew out of town. I logged in from a different city, Google forced me to verify by sending an SMS to my phone.
So what do you run on Epiphany if there is no Linux?
Exactly, I call the AGPL anxiety license. It create so much problem in the mindset that is VERY commercial unfriendly.
I don't buy it.

Cheney wanted to "finish the job", and was able to use the post-911 chaos to push it through.

Chemical weapons are available in a variety of "bad" or potentially "bad" places. Yet the United States hasn't invaded any of those places.
Agreed, that type of cultural change takes time, and is particularly difficult if you're a newcomer.

In the mean time, get some nice headphones. I second the recommendation of the HD-280s; they're great. Note that over-the-ear headphones come in both open-ear and closed-ear varieties; the former don't provide any isolation (they're designed to let you keep your situational awareness, which is often desirable).
True Managerial Intentions: Why the Boss wants you to build software in-house?
So if these are just states turning on and off, can we turn the state to on in multiple places at the same time?
Interesting stuff.

I wish you could change the color map, though; jet is Considered Harmful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU
"Travel to Mars"

Ha.

Is that the trend now?
When you purchase a nexus device, it's IMEI, effectively a serial number, can be linked to a Google Account so that the first boot experience can prefill stuff - I think this is optional but it's been a while.
North Korean Defectors to Create Government in Exile, Paper Says
To pay for the infrastructure, they will probably need to sell the tomatoes for $100 a pound for twenty years.
No it isn't. In fact, almost all of the "diverse" teams I see are a monoculture of opinion. They are all people who buy the standard SJW nonsense fully and hate anyone who doesn't. They actively try to stamp out diversity of opinion.
A high school graduate would not be considered "educated" in a Chinese context. Since I am talking about "educated Chinese", whatever western idea of "educated" does not really apply.

For example, someone has just gone through the motion of schools and learned nothing, he may even be functionally illiterate (as 19% high school graduates in the US do, http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/32-million-us-adults...) by your assumed Western definition, that person is "educated". However, any Chinese would disagree with that.

So it's just a matter of opinion. Mine just has more commonsense: "If you really learned what schools taught you, you can call yourself educated, otherwise, you are not."
If animals are raised responsibly (free-range, good food) and killed unconscious, there's no suffering, no?
Not disagreeing with you (because it's definitely not just a simple webcam), but there's been progress in this area:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgKkEnaaSDc
> And I need to edit over SSH a lot.

Try sshfs :) Surprising that someone who has tried Plan 9 hasn't come to love specialized filesystems!
You don't have to have a "lawless government" for a prosecutor to do something that seems wrong, but for which there is no penalty, if it would give him an advantage.

You just need ambitious, aggressive prosecutors.
The Starry Night! It really does.