skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a good reading list. You should probably pick up a copy of these, flip through them and see why they are so recommended. Having not done something doesn't make you an idiot. Having an opportunity and a recommendation, and rejecting it for no good reason... that could be different.
Appreciate the detailed response. :)
Yes, I'm referring to big and detailed relative to what we can simulate with foreseeable technology. Sure, we can see how to maybe simulate a universe the size of a cell, and a much much larger universe could maybe simulate everything in ours. But in either case, the larger universe is going to view the smaller one as a simplification.
Top 5 things to keep in mind when migrating from Varnish 3 to Varnish 4
Agreed — if you read the great Vanity Fair article [1] about Theranos, one thing that becomes apparent is that Holmes's public statements were classic sales hubris; she was publicly announcing rollouts of technology that didn't work yet, and her scientists were learning about the plans after the fact. It's possible that she genuinely believed her own hype — her surprised reaction to the FDA shutting them down seems to indicate this.

[1] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/elizabeth-holmes-ther...
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'drive' of undefined
The tone of the book is that of learning programming and computer science for enjoyment, learning, and fun. That's what makes it timeless.

A "stronger" example of this tone would be The Little Schemer series.
Well, if you want to become a doctor, at least in the US, knowing some biology will certainly help you on the first step of licensing exams... :-)

But the general point does hold that yes, a high level of math or CS training is advantageous for anyone moving into a career in the life sciences, since it appears that that's where much of the foreseeable growth (in careers and research funding) seems to be.

It's also been said by many that it's easier to learn some biology after training rigorously in CS/math, rather than the other way around. Dudley Herschbach (a Nobel-prize winning chemist) once said to me that his one piece of advice for young researchers would be simply, "Learn as much math as you can."
Config management and cloud provisioning: a dangerous pair
I don't know that it leverages libgit2, but SourceTree is something we use and while I was initially unsure, it and PowerShell are my preferred ways of working with git. (I maybe use VS's git integration once a week or so.)
Ask HN: Do you have a favorite GUI Git client for macOS?
I've been evaluating SourceTree and Tower lately after being an exclusive CLI Git guy. Both are really nice, but Tower has a pretty steep price at $80. Are there any other great free or paid apps around?
The same might apply to Head First Design Patterns:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/head-first-design-patterns/
It's a little more tricky than that when you can't just pick whichever byte you want to change :)
Use and hatred are not mutually exclusive. I can't be the only developer in here who has to maintain legacy webapps written in awful languages. If I see a post offering a 200× speedup on my crappy old PHP scripts, it gets an upvote.
“Twitter search doing to Google what broadband did to AOL” (2009)
Shameless plug: https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement and for Git commits https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-git-integration

Bitcoin timestamping can be a lot more convenient and efficient than that site, and totally free too.
>How do you understand what kind of "lightweight" object you should pass to this function

...and this is where well-documented interfaces come in.

>but I don't understand what is the meaning of SuperUser being inherited from some user charlie.

That was merely an example to express the difference: the idea is, instead of writing a class and doing things that way, objects are cloned from one another. If you want to create a user with special powers, you clone the user object (usually running a constructor function along the way) and give it whatever new functions you want. If you want to create more of these special users, you make them all have that one as a prototype. Typically, the prototype object is never actually used or altered from the defaults, as this would be confusing, and is given a constructor function to instantiate state. But it doesn't have to be.

>I think JS was supposed not to have any inheritance at all. The objects were supposed to be created with constructors and that is all.

Wrong. Object.create may be new, but prototypical inhertance is an important par of how the constructors you claim to be the way objects were meant to be created work. Function.prototype, the property which determines the prototype of objects created by a constructor, dates back to ES1.

>I also guess JS doesn't have classes because it was designed for writing simple form validation scripts and not large applications.I also guess JS doesn't have classes because it was designed for writing simple form validation scripts and not large applications.

Also complete nonsense. Prototypical inheritance was originally implemented in Self, a system developed my Sun Microsystems, and a descendant of Smalltalk-80, which certainly was designed for large applications. JS may have been built for writing simple for validation scripts, and it may be a deeply flawed language in some respects, but the fundamentals of the language, prototypical inheritance, true first-class functions, and lexical scoping, are all things that Eich got right. And given first class functions and lexical scope are still things that language designers have trouble getting right (I've got nothing against class-based OO, so I'm not including it here), it's even more remarkable that Eich did it properly in 1997.
Ah. Here you'll find you're miles from most people's definition.
Turns out jailing addicts, even those addicted to hard drugs, has ugly consequences for its users and society as a whole too.
Governments spy on other nations businesses, then pass the information back to their companies who process to undercut the competition (because they have all the information)

Here's China doing it to America http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/china-business/10842339/A...

'According to the indictment, five hackers “stole trade secrets” which allowed Chinese companies to undercut their American competitors, or gave them “insight into [their] strategy and vulnerabilities”. '

And here's America doing it to everyone else (including allies both domestic and foreign) https://theintercept.com/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use...
I feel like this has been posted before, not too long ago.

And even though it's "impossible", I and hundreds of my peers at work do it every week with a workable degree of accuracy, relative to company-wide work in progress.

In any case, the usual problems are:

1. We software developers think we're the first to face uncertainty, including massive uncertainty. We are not. We are in fact lightweights in this department. Ask a civil, structural or plant engineer for war stories. Or read Industrial Megaprojects to see how skipping a single water-temperature test cost billions of dollars.

2. We tend to embrace the nirvana fallacy. "Perfect or very accurate estimation is worthless; therefore, all estimation is worthless".

3. "Some projects are pure research". Yes. But very few. And even they contain bog-ordinary implementation details. Writing a fantastical new language? Well guess what: parsers have been written before, and someone with data or relevant experience could break down the task into subtasks and estimate them.

I think the real reason that we so dread estimates is:

1. They aren't treated as estimates. People turn them into deadlines. Or try to negotiate with the estimate. Which means they aren't estimates any more.

2. We get them wildly wrong the first few times and throw our hands in the air. Improving estimates is hard. If it were easy, we wouldn't need to consciously do it.
Excellent intro (free): The Fable of the User-Centered Designer [1]

His Udemy course is also very good: User Experience (UX): The Ultimate Guide to Usability and UX [2]

[1]: http://www.userfocus.co.uk/fable/

[2]: https://www.udemy.com/ultimate-guide-to-ux/
I upvoted you for adding to the discussion.
2006 Mazda3 with a bunch of miles. My wife bought it new and it's hard to make myself want to get anything else since it is paid off and gets great gas mileage.
Quoting Charles Simonyi (1986):

"SIMONYI: We have great difficulty in predicting the time it will take to write a program. There are valid reasons why this is so. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try our best to predict, because there are reasons why a prediction might be useful, just like when a weather prediction has economic as well as other benefits.

Really good programs will live forever and take forever to write, at least as long as the hardware exists, and maybe even longer."

Source: https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/programmers-at-work-... (great book, btw!).
Well. I guess I'm going to be using Intel!
One imagines Uber's seasoned leadership mulling over the pros and cons of such a provocative campaign thusly:

"Sure it's obnoxious, and more to the point, endangers the safety of motorists. But the lawyers said there's nothing on the books against flying drones over public freeways during rush hour. So I say let's go for it!"
Ask HN: Run SaaS app? How do you send newsletters from your app?
I am asking because I can't find the right solution and don't want to build it myself.
I don't like the idea that I must upload/sync subscribers data with the thirdparty services like drip.io or customer.io
Want something that can integrate with my app and allow me to send newsletters using the subscribers list in my database.

Thanks in advance.
...but they changed it. Also, they're not actually on the other side of the issue. Not really. That kind of us-vs-them mentality is what got us here in the first place.
might work for a small shop, but the bigger companies have legal departments who've already been served with warrants and met with feds. And who knows, maybe NSL's start with a conventional subpoena to appear at your local court room or FBI office for a meeting you cant refuse. In fact, I'd wager that they would be served in a federal courthouse before a judge informing the recipient of their (lack of any) rights.
Of course.

But you do see the darwinian implications of this, correct?
C is a far smaller language than C++, and perhaps the writing style of K&R is somewhat more accessible. Stroustrup's book does have some parts that give an "I invented this language, see how awesome it is" impression, whereas K&R is quite unopinionated and neutral.
thank you! this is really great information
What do you mean "reversed"? DK says that both low and high skilled people estimate themselves as close to average, due to the obvious bias in one's available data
Just for the record, I believe that the Jewish Community Foundation of Kansas City is completely responsible for the behavior of its employees. Including the off-duty police it hired.
Really the problem is that scheduling a drug makes it illegal (or at least, incredibly difficult) to do research on. I'm not a fan of drug regulation either, but even considering the standpoint of those that are, letting these things be responsibly handled by professional medical development scientists sounds like a win-win situation.
As much as I admire SpaceX and am cheering them on, I can't help but wonder if they would have had two rockets blow up were it not for their fabled workaholic culture.
The DEA needs to go away. It's not a useful agency, and does little which other agencies couldn't do to the extent that society actually requires it.
I think it boils down to this.

1. If you are doing something that people have done before, then it is possible to come up with a reasonable estimate. How? Just talk with someone who has done something similar before and they will help you understand the complexity involved. Example : Rubik's cube.

2. If you are doing something that no one has done before, then it is more difficult to come up with an estimate. Example: Unified theory of forces. In the 1970, people assumed that we are very close. It's been 45 years since then and we aren't any closer.

Of course, I have often made the mistake of underestimating tasks of type 1 because I didn't talk to anyone with enough experience. Maybe this has to do with self confidence. I am very confident of my abilities so I usually tend to underestimate things rather than overestimate them.
Love this idea. How do you vet the teachers and how do you make sure they keep going through your site (and not just go direct)?
Yarn doesn't lock dependencies of published packages
It's not even grammatically correct. The original headline was fine.
Software developers as resources. Glad your not the lead of my team.
I'm not American so forgive me if this is a silly question but isn't/shouldn't the responsibility for evaluating the safety and approval of foods and drugs belong to the FDA?

Isn't the DEA being in charge of this like the FBI passing laws?

Why does the DEA have this power?
Can we put the subject of the ban (WHICH PLANT) in the title please? HN is a bit more useless than the DEA with these obscure and clickbaity titles.
> I’ve sat in a few roundtables with fellow CTOs

"Sorry guys, the event for tonight is cancelled, turns out the tables we were to sit at are rectangular."
Why bother? You can just put your Python script into a CGI-enabled server like you do with PHP:

#!/usr/local/bin/python2
import cgi
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"
query = cgi.FieldStorage()
if "name" in query:
print "Hello, %s!" % query["name"].value
else:
print """
<p>Insert your name and hit Go! to get greeted!</p>
<form action='/cgi-bin/hello-py.cgi' method='get'>
<input type='text' name='name'/>
<button type='submit'>Go!</button>
</form>"""

chmod 750 and go.
Another one of these?

Bad estimation techniques - eg. guesses without a basis in historical data (most developers don't collect historical data) - are usually wrong. No one would argue this point.

If you do iterative development with intelligent planning and collect some historical data to use in estimates the game changes. First, most of the examples of "unexpected complexity" you gave can now be identified early and factored into your estimates. That leaves the 1% of truly unexpected stuff that you can then deal with as it comes up and factor into your future thinking in a post-mortem. Second, since you now identify risks earlier and can factor them into estimates, most of your work becomes estimable, and with historical data your estimates will improve.

There's even multiple process products around this idea already, but they're mostly used in the "safety critical" industry, see [1] [2].

[1]: http://resources.sei.cmu.edu/library/asset-view.cfm?assetid=...
[2]: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/tsp/
It's interesting because this gets into the entire "Do you have a right to your own body?" debate.

Just a side note: just because things are natural/plants doesn't mean they won't kill you. There are a ton of poisonous mushrooms out there for instance.

But anyway, if you want to eat poisonous mushrooms, you should be able to right? Should you be able to kill yourself? Do you have a right to what happens to your body after you die? Who..owns your body?

There are a ton of great articles out there on all of those questions and they all get into really weird grey legal areas. Have phun.
Science Fiction Predictions That Proved True
I mean that for difficult tasks, people who are unskilled rate themselves as unskilled, and people that are skilled rate themselves as skilled.

"Our studies replicate, eliminate, or reverse the association between task performance and judgment accuracy reported by Kruger and Dunning (1999) as a function of task difficulty. On easy tasks, where there is a positive bias, the best performers are also the most accurate in estimating their standing, but on difficult tasks, where there is a negative bias, the worst performers are the most accurate. This pattern is consistent with a combination of noisy estimates and overall bias, with no need to invoke differences in metacognitive abilities. In this regard, our findings support Krueger and Mueller’s (2002) reinterpretation of Kruger and Dunning’s (1999) findings. An association between task-related skills and metacognitive insight may indeed exist, and later we offer some suggestions for ways to test for it. However, our analyses indicate that the primary drivers of errors in judging relative standing are general inaccuracy and overall biases tied to task difficulty. Thus, it is important to know more about those sources of error in order to better understand and ameliorate them."

Burson KA, Larrick RP, & Klayman J (2006). Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: how perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons. Journal of personality and social psychology, 90 (1), 60-77 PMID: 16448310
What's also interesting is that it seems the inverse is also true for computing. The human brain is a very cool processor and I think in the coming decades it's not super far fetched to see synapses arise as synthetic computers much like the inverse has been true for the past couple decades.
Bill Nye-backed solar company aims to cut the cost of solar by 60%
I'd rather die a bit earlier than lose my mind. I reject this fetishization of prolonging life at all costs, including dignity and autonomy. A good death is far preferable to a shitty life in my view; an ideology of survival at all costs is only suitable for slaves. Frankly I don't care for the notion of an autopsy either since my body is not anyone else's property, and if that seems a likely outcome I plan to take steps to prevent my own body being recovered.

My first interesting job was in a nursing home so I've had ample exposure to end-of-life situations and living conditions. I've also had a disproportionate number of near-death experiences so this is a considered position rather than a mere posture.
It looks like three breasts.
I think it's still grammatically correct. "withdraw" can be a verb; in this form it would be interpreted to mean "to leave from a place" (e.g., "the troops are withdrawing"). However, the title, as currently written, certainly doesn't mean what it was intended to mean.

I.e., the way I'm parsing it is "(the DEA is leaving/retreating (to where isn't specified); once there, they're going to ban another plant); this occurred after the Internet got mad."
New Documentary by Adam Curtis: HyperNormalisation
Let's see.

Never come across Code, Head first Design Patterns - WHY? GoF book is much better, and well written and explained. Read all the rest, though K&R 1st edition. Bought 2nd when someone 'borrowed' original from my desk and never returned.

Of the rest:

Never heard of the first one, but I'm British.

My green dragon book was read cover to cover a couple of times, and I tried to build a compiler off the back of it. I used another compiler book in equal amount, I forget the book though.

I've three volumes of Knuth. I should have bought one at a time - I got about 1/2 way through the first volume.

Design patterns was extremely well used.

C++ was mainly reference, unlike K&R it wasn't a good read to learn from. Pretty heavy going if I remember. The Design and Evolution of C++ was much more interestng. Then the 2 Scott Meyers books (Effective C++ 1&2). Thinking in C++ was the book recommended to learn from at the time, though I've not read this.
And the problem it solves is Murphy's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law
Why I Don't Vote: The Honest Truth
> Why does the DEA have this power?

Because Richard Nixon hated hippies and wanted to set up a nearly unaccountable police agency to persecute them. I'm not kidding and only exaggerating a little bit.
I don't think so. Even if they were built the aircars would cost around half a million each. Nobody cares that much about the fuel burn on a product that only a few hundred people would ever own.

Plus, they would spend most of the time in the shop anyway. Moller's big idea was to design an engine that was cheap, lightweight, had a very high power to weight ratio, efficient, and extremely reliable. For some reason he has had trouble making an engine that ticks all of the boxes.
Given Google's size and how much information they have, you'd imagine they've been subjected to every secret demand allowed.

Are there any good examples of a gag order like this which was reasonable? When would they ever be justified?
Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUiqaFIONPQ
I could not agree more. Not only is dementia horribly corrosive for the family, it's frightening and confusing for the patient in most circumstances. By far the most depressing cases I dealt with as a nurse's aide were those patients who were still physically healthy and strong but suffering from dementia, because they were the most likely to need to be manhandled if they wandered away or got into an altercation with the nurses. I still remember the fear and confusion in some patients' eyes 30 years later and have no desire to experience that.
Look up MyHDL.
Compiler Bomb – Wikicoding
Wasn't sure, so I asked the Mellanox people (gerryh@mellanox) about it.

No response. :(
Our law makers have delegated many of their powers, under the constitution, to administrative organizations.

There are lots of good arguments for and against this, but it is the primary reason why presidential elections are so important in the USA.
Cyclone is a new scheme that uses Cheney-on-the-MTA _and_ has native threads.

https://justinethier.github.io/cyclone/index
Node v6.8.1 (Current)
FaaS: Forth as a Service. I love it.
The Dharma of Emanuel Swedenborg: A Buddhist Perspective
If it had acme/letsencrypt in the box I'd be more inclined to switch to it.
The main argument to why plea bargains arent due process is that they usually are prosecutors charging people with inappropriately serious crimes and offering to settle on reasonable charges if the person pleads guilty, coercing them because they either get improperly charged (violation of due process) or waive their right to trial (violation of due process if coerced).

It's a prosecutor willingly not performing their duties (charging people with appropriate crimes for their actions), because it makes their tracked stats look better (conviction rate).

Im of the camp that believes plea bargains should only be allowed to negotiate sentences on the charge, not involve prosecutors charging a different set of crimes.
"Madonna" is the Italian name of Christ's mother. The singer chose her name for that reason
I looked at CloudRail, but the Dropbox and Google Drive API's are pretty easy to use.

Adding this layer of middleware is just another layer of complexity for us.
I don't flat-out refuse to take them, but being asked to take one is a negative signal about a potential employer. I consider almost all of this stuff to be pseudo-scientific gobbledygook, roughly akin to a lie detector test. It's like reading tea leaves, or animal entrails: you can find anything you want in there.
Right. And I think the parent asked a really good question: isn't the power of regulating what foods and drugs are safe for the populace to consume a responsibility that was delegated to the USFDA, not the DEA?

If the DEA does have this power … isn't there overlap between the FDA and the DEA?
Possible formation site of icy giant planet spotted
My wife refused the "CTO" title at a smaller SMB (~250 headcount) because (A) she felt that the company was so small that it devalued the title, and (B) the title has already been so devalued elsewhere that it's actually a marketplace liability. "EVP Operations" was both more descriptive and more valuable, though not a "C-suite" title.