skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Now that I've gone back to do my PhD, the only reason I can do something I consider meaningful is because I am not a regular PhD student.

Interesting, your experience matches mine very closely! I once quit a doctoral program in disgust but once I had enough money to fund myself, I could go back to become, perhaps similar to you, a "not regular PhD student" and create a more suitable situation for myself. Not only did I become free in my choice of research topic and collaborators/supervisors. More importantly, I was able to reject proposed, "faster" topics that would have led more immediately to bite-sized, publishable results. As a result, I was able to find and work on something I believe could be fundamental in my field.

On a sidenote, I just started re-reading Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I am growing more and more convinced that the right way to do something important in today's academic environment (that's the link to OP) is the sort of half-half position that seems to be our shared experience. If you are too much of an insider, you might end up doing "normal science". If you are too much of an outsider, the risk is high that you are/become just another crank. Half-half seems like a good position. Maybe a few decades ago, it was still possible to hold an academic position and maintain one's independence. Today, a full-fledged, conventional academic career seems hard to square with a free spirit, what with all the dross of admin and the drag of teaching duties.
Same experience here, hiring more experienced (generally older) developers works out better sometimes.. Who would have guessed?
Hillary has been a criminal, cheat and spineless demagogue her entirely life.

She belongs in prison, nevermind the white house.
Hm... She seems to be following Obama's lead in Syria, e.g. supporting the no-fly zone, which leads directly to a war with Russia. Very irreparable IMO.
Self-Driving Mercedes Will Sacrifice _mere peasants_ to Save the Driver
> I don't think this race is nearly as over as most people seem to believe

This feels a lot like the atmosphere over here (in Britain) just before the Brexit vote.

Many people thought it was a guaranteed Remain vote, and woke up to a terrible fright on that Friday morning.
Thanks for the more sane perspective on this.

I was like "wtf" when I read this article.
As a Swedish citizen, the article got me a bit worried.
As you say, PHP is pretty old and still widely used. There is still a lot of Cobol code running in the world. I would argue that there is so much inertia in programming languages that you can allow yourself the privilege of selecting strictly from which language you enjoy the most, not by trying to analyze which will provide a stronger career path.
For beginner tasks, it usually doesn't matter - even a dumb AST interpreter will do.

For more advanced stuff, BASIC compilers usually don't generate particularly impressive code, because the language allows so many inefficiencies. Code generation is better if you're strict about your types and explicit about your conversions, but then you might as well just write in C or Pascal.
The Best Way to Chill Your Drinks
> "So my comment should be correct in a year or two, hopefully."

Look again at that graph:

http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tech...

OS X is treated as a single category, but Windows is split over multiple versions. When you add up all the Windows versions, OS X isn't close to 50% market share.

Also, I'd question why it should be 'hopefully' correct. Other than better support for Unix command line tools, what gives OS X the edge over Windows 10 as a dev environment?
Triple DH + the double hash ratchet makes up two of the big (separate) parts of the crypto in the protocol. One does key exchange, the other does per-message PFS.
In the early 90s, on two separate occasions, I was offered
"3 Altos" for just a few dollars (one batch was from Stanford that had been using them for printer servers, and I don't remember where the second batch came from).

Over the years I wound up donating them to various places (the Computer History Museum, the Kyoto Prize museum, the Boston Science Museum, etc.). We kept one at Viewpoints as a mascot, and my last one I gave to Sam Altman because he wanted to do a restoration. That one turned out to be a late hybrid that Ken Shirriff and company are having fun puzzling out.

The "random mouse on ebay" was at my suggestion, because the Alto I donated to Sam didn't have a mouse.

Most of the original runs of Alto IIs (at least 1500 of them were built) cost in 70s dollars about $22.5K apiece. Inflation (according to the web) since then has been about a factor of 5, so each Alto would have been about $112.5K (and I'd love to have a $112.5K personal computer today -- that would really be "computing in the future" as we did at Parc).
> This would be a big misstep for Finland. At the moment, the old forest industry & export is dying off, with no replacement in sight. A viable candidate would be datacenters

Yes, this vision has been thrown about, but they thing is, even if the wildest predictions were to come through, the employment generated by these large-scale datacenters is a small fraction of the jobs lost in other industries. And most of these jobs are relatively low-paying ones such as perimeter security, replacing faulty servers etc. A far cry from, say, the hordes of engineers employed by the telecom sector during the boom years.

Sure, they may indirectly generate a lot of jobs, but you don't need to live next to (or even in the same country as) an Amazon, Google, or whomever's, gigantic datacenter in order to use it.
there is brittle base underneath the lander, when it drops that base breaks into pieces to absorb the shock, interesting.
Get films in the language and watch them with subtitles (in that language). Read novels as soon as you can. This is hard to start off with, stopping every couple of lines to look up a word, once you get down to 2-3 words a page that you don't know then start reading without a dictionary, skipping words you don't know (humans are great at interpolating meaning). Just those 2 get you half-way to fluency. For the rest, I think you really need immersion.
You shouldn't assume the SO developer survey is a good sample of the whole profession.
I left the game because:

+ Disabled footpad tracking made it less fun.

+ Some update made it sluggish on my 10-month-old phone.

+ They don't let you play with Root (I have a workaround, but it's a pain).

+ Gameplay is highly repetitive past lvl 20

I just feel constantly trampled on. I'll waste my time with someone who treats me like an adult.
Exactly ...
It can still be "save the world" situation even when understanding this. Long-term, it would be nice to have a SCOTUS that would be more of a check on someone like Trump, and less of a rubberstamp.
Oh who's this Stefan Molyneux character, let me just check out his Twitter...

https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/787530311299112961

:\
Not on the right trajectory to retire as a startup billionaire with 30.
When I have a choice between Pokemon Go or root, I choose root every single time. I loathe Niantic for this stupid decision. The equivalent would be if Riot decided that League of Legends can only be played on PCs with a guest account and not an admin account. Completely pointless and dumb. I can't believe I bought some stuff in the Pokemon Go store, I want a refund. They robbed me, a legitimate and paying customer, of the ability to play the game on my device. This borders on fraud.

This practice needs to be stopped. There needs to be a simple app that can be installed that completely shields from, blocks and stumps this fascist SDK that detects root. And every custom ROM should have it installed by default. The problem is obviously bigger than Niantic. The problem is that people think we shouldn't fully own our phones and that such a mindset is acceptable.
OS X is treated as a single category, but Windows is split over multiple versions. When you add up all the Windows versions, OS X isn't close to 50% market share.

What was claimed is that most developers don't use Windows, not that they use macOS. If over 50% of developer use either macOS or Linux, then the claim is true.
Scènes de ménages, very funny, lots of slang and real-life usage.
Home servers connected over I2P, hopefully.
GitLab is a (bad) copy and paste of GitHub, even the name is similar.
I know maybe I will burn some karma point but I want to express my opinion cause I believe in the value of creating things, not to steal ideas.
What if the list were put on GitLab first? Probably, without the GitHub example you would not remove it, even notice it.
Unfortunately, this "wtf" should cover a large part of the news we read.

However, here the thing is that the discussion in Finland is about "following the Swedish model", because in Sweden the FRA (Försvarens Radioanstalt) has permission to do things that the corresponding Finnish authorities would like to get.
Libertarianism is basically about negative rights - not so much about "do what you want", but more about "nobody is going to force you to do something you don't want". As an ethical system, think of it as utilitarianism which assigns infinite value to freedom from violent coercion. Everything else follows from that.
That was made apparent in their documentation.

Or would have been, if they had any.
A lot, I guess. Famously, Java's String worked that way (sharing the buffer for sub-strings and only storing offset and length) for a long time, until they changed that, I think in Java 7 to the same what .NET uses currently (copying the sub-string).

Both approaches have benefits and drawbacks, but apparently copying the sub-string seems to be best for the vast majority of cases and you only benefit from the shared buffer in select cases (also it's a great memory leak opportunity if you don't know how it's implemented). So I guess it makes sense for .NET to add the capability (in a more general form that also works for other things) instead of only having one or the other.
Cannot understand why you're downvoted. It is definitely a concern.
GitLab is a joke. They just copy what other do, but as soon there is a bit of bad publicity they immediately change their opinions just to please the community. GitLab has really become the communities' bitch. They copy paste everything they find and try to please everyone, but I don't think this will get them very far. I am glad there's so many other tech companies who try to do their own thing by being innovative.
> The most important part in my opinion is to live in a country that speaks the language you want to learn. You have to immerse yourself as much as possible with the culture and language. Also very important that you aren't afraid to try to use what you learned.

I cannot agree with this more. Coincidentally, I'm also fluent in German and English, and am learning Japanese.

At school, I took French, but I hated it. It only clicked when I went on an exchange, although I never kept it up. With English it was easier to pick up because of TV, films and games. But I only got good at it when I moved to the UK. The same with Japanese. Made almost no (real) progress until I went to Japan, and started using what I'd learned. Sure, learning the alphabet first helps, but language relies on being spoken IMO.

If you can, take a chance and just move to a country that speaks the language you want to learn.
I doubt it. Thiel's personality - in all his public appearances - has been hyper-rational, not exactly the sort who would hold onto a childhood dream for 20 years. And he's talked about how falling off that track was the best thing that ever happened to him - so much so that he now wants to help other talented college kids fall off the established track.

Also, he's not U.S. born, which disqualifies him from being president anyway. He could potentially seek some other office...but I really doubt that he would want any position that makes him just like 99 other or 434 other people.
Just to clarify, Eich did not get fired - he got pressured into resigning. Note that people in fact have been fired (in some cases, allegedly - I'm too lazy to verify all the stories I just googled) for being gay, supporting Occupy, supporting Obama, or more trivial reasons like bikini photos on facebook or because the employer found their short stories offensive.
Yes, if this proposal were to go through (hopefully not), it would give Finnish authorities roughly similar powers that the corresponding Swedish ones already have.

One can always hope that the Finns will reject this dumbfounded proposal, giving an example to the Swedes to repeal their corresponding law.
Similarly, lowRISC are planning to put together a RISC-V SoC:

http://www.lowrisc.org/
>>> Why bother with owning a house or a car if not with the end goal in mind of supporting kids?

That's an incredibly... urban...? [1] point of view. For me, the #1 argument for owning a car is flexibility -- knowing you've got the option to drop things at a moment's notice and head off to... wherever.

Owning a house is also an enabler for things which might be meaningful to those without children: building up and maintaining a garden, for one. Hobbies which need a decent-sized, stable, workshop tend to be easier in a house you own than in a rental, too.

(We do have a child now, but my wife and I owned both house and car for years before deciding we wanted children. And now have rather less time for hobbies that make houses and cars essential...)

[1] Not so much in the specifically "city" sense, but in the sense of preferring external infrastructure vs. building up and maintaining enough infrastructure of your own to feel somewhat self-sufficient.
that's usually how things go :)
The only place where I've seen this "both are equally bad" false equivalence is US.

Most European media seems to like Clinton. Most definitely, she's preferred to Trump by a large margin.

The only (part) European country that I can think of with a prominently different internal opinion is Russia. But they don't go for equivalence either, they just root for Trump.
Hey I t's me Jane here :) Sorry to make you go through the signup. Hope it was worth it!
As a European following the election, I think Trump is a very scary man, yet you provide a good reason to support him, so I am grateful for that as it illuminates my perspective of the US election. Yet, Trump didn't mention those connections between HRC and the finance industry (which were already well known) in the presidential debates.
Why Elm Is the Future of Front End Development
Thank you so much for mentioning it here Charlie! Indeed, the book is written specifically for founders to facilitate their design decisions.
I find it useful.
On the complete other-side of the spectrum we used to have Cinemageddon. :P
What would you prefer instead? Everything to be available via Netflix?
State of Play
I like the videos. Did he ever mention what drone he was using?
Have a look on https://www.justwatch.com in the country you want to know and filter for Mubi!

Disclosure: I'm Cofounder there :)
Wait. When did expecting delivery of the product or service you paid for become "classic entitlement"?
Weekend’s Brain Food #1 – Single Responsibility Principle
I'm surprised to see no mention of Kindles / ebook readers. I tried reading novels to improve my German, but the physical effort of switching to a dictionary (either physical or web-based) was enough to make reading a chore. With my Kindle, I've downloaded an English-German dictionary and some novels, and now when I don't know a word I just tap it (well, kinda hold my finger down in a ZX81 fashion) and a translation appears. Makes the reading process that much more fluent and therefore enjoyable. If the ease of looking up words makes them a tad less "sticky" in my memory, the quantity of text I'm consuming makes the language-learning experience, on balance, more efficient (for me).
Also brings to mind John Sulston (Physiology and Medicine 2002), working for many years in a relatively low-key "staff scientist" job before emerging to lead some of the early genome projects. Quotes from [1]:

>>> JG: You never entered the professorial track, but remained a staff scientist at the LMB. Did that suit your temperament?

>>> JS: Absolutely. It was a very good fit for me. If there was something that I thought was important and worth doing, I could just focus on that, and the only pressure was from family life. It meant you had time to sort all this out and not feel the pressure that you had to cut corners or guess.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1756915/
What is its size and weight? How long does it fly?

Edit: I watched the video without sound.
The polls showed Brexit winning.
That's an incredibly... urban...?

Yes. I was going to add car racing or some offroader as an exception but most people live in cities and don't have that kind of hobbies. And it's probably still more convenient to join a hacker space.
This is what worries me, especially given the state of both the mainstream press and feminism right now. Here in the UK, we've already seen the leader of the opposition accused of supporting harassment and violence against women for opposing bombing Syria merely because some of pro-bombing MPs that had anti-war protests outside their offices were female. Imagine what will happen once the President of the US is a hawkish, well-connected Democrat woman who can defend a man accused of brutally raping a 12 year old girl, leaving her with massive internal injuries, by convincing the court to put the girl through a forced psychiatric examination so nasty she refused to testify afterwards using an expert witness who argued that little girls fantasise and lie about sex with older men all the time - and have the press spin this a feminist act that only right-wing propagandists could object to. We're doomed.
I think one should differentiate between app/tool code and library/plugin/daemon code.

A typical tool like git starts, runs for a while and then exits. In this case worrying too much about memory cleanness is counterproductive.

This changes when you are writing a data structure, like say a hashtable. You don't want a hashtable that leaks during operation. It changes when you write a daemon, that runs for a long time, you don't want it to consume all address space. It changes when you write plugins, that get repeatedly loaded and unloaded.
I am serious.

There is no such thing as "stereotypical male in all senses", everyone is gender-fluid . Most men were called a "pussy" or "not a real man" at some point.

People come from different backgrounds. In my country people often changed their religion or race, not doing so would bring unpleasant consequences. For example my parents become atheists to get a decent jobs. Some people are also distracted by feeding family.

"Being diverse" is simply just another job requirement for some people.

I personally spend one year at military outpost in mountains. I would be very happy to give-up my "male privilege", and wear tutu with tiara on public for that year. Work visa in US would be similar case...

As trans woman I would be outraged, that I am treated as lesser woman (exclusion from sport events, included in Selective Service, exclusion from women's prisons...). Not that more people choose to identify as trans.
I think problem is deeper. If one predicts heads as result of coin toss and other predicts tails, than one of them will be right. It says nothing about their abilities to predict.
We always can find some outlier who predicts results different from majority of pollsters. The keyword is 'always': if such a possibility always exists (probability of existence P=1), then we can't extract any information from it (-log_2 P == 0).

To extract information we need to carefully revise methodology behind outlier predictions, and such an activity is a complex task for skilled data analyst.
Yes, at the beginning.

http://freeflysystems.com/alta-8
> justified by the blanket word "attitude"

I really wish people wouldn't hide behind cultural fit as justification. A number doesn't reveal attitude. I'm past 50, but I haven't yet started to aspire to being being middle aged, and have no slippers, cardigans or golf clubs. If given a choice I'll take many a young startup or company over a similar sized company of people my age.

When I look at people my age, I'd guess less than a third have settled into some form of middle age, and those are the friends I've tended to lose touch with. Of the rest, well we probably all-night party a little less, have a few extra commitments, and the kids are a bit older. We all seem to get on with people in their 20s and 30s far easier than my parent's generation did.

If attitude is a euphemism for "won't work extra hours and weekends almost constantly", then yeah. Though I gained that attitude in my 20s six months into my second or third job.
Joke HN: JavaScript n00b Joke
Been trying to learn javascript, and starting to wonder if my browser intends "console" as a noun or verb.
Recognising Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
It is simultaneously amusing and frustrating how completely wrong this is. Coercion and constraint imposed by government (or similar institutions) is absolutely central to libertarianism! The whole point of property rights is to constrain people from doing things. E.g., you own a beachfront property? You get to constrain other people from swimming there, and the government is there to help if necessary. And so on.

Saying that libertarianism isn't about coercion and constraint is like saying that the GPL or copyleft in general isn't about copyright. Both are equally wrong: the GPL absolutely requires copyright law in order for it to work, and similarly libertarianism absolutely requires coercion and constraint.

It's just that there's this sleight of hand where for some reason, most people are so used to property right that they don't even notice it anymore. Talk about successful framing!
Sorry, but your argument loses serious credibility beginning with the first sentence. The last thing, really? How about, say, making cardboard boxes for a living? Flipping burgers? Don't get me wrong, I understand the point you are making, in part because it's been made more articulately by others many times already. But you are simply wrong when you say that "there is no such thing as a senior researcher". I personally know at least four -- late career academics who still engage deeply with research, have their own ideas, write single
-author papers, and all the rest. It's true that many others do go the route you have described: possibly more than is optimal, though there is some value in a field having a few caretakers (or managers as you call them) which I rarely see mentioned. But the situation is not the cartoon that you make it out to be. Not by a long shot.
Before being used in computers, punched cards were used in the textile industry (mechanical looms), and in some musical instruments.

Must have been a "accidentally turing complete" moment. http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complet...
I would hope that the logic in saving the driver would ultimately save the pedestrian. I'd think that the "collision" of any object, including that of the body of a human being, could potentially do damage to the driver.