skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article has completely missed several points. Computer Programmer, or coder, or whatever we want to call it, is not at this point a recognized "profession" with special protections/duties that come along with such a designation. Comparisons to engineers/doctors/lawyers is therefore nor appropriate.

Professions are fields that grant members special abilities and protections beyond lay persons. They are officially trusted by society to do things that normal people are not allowed to do. Doctors cut people open. Engineers put their stamp on bridges carrying people. Lawyers hold client secrets. Nurses handle dangerous drugs. These professions are officially recognized in law. They have societies that too are recognized in law (State Medical/Bars etc). With this then comes the ban on anyone outside the profession performing such tasks.

What would a world look like should "computer programmer" become a recognized profession as the article suggests? Will non-professionals be forbidden from writing code? Will we have state boards deciding how and by whom computer programing may be taught as they do law schools? Would hardware with open firmware be sold only to licensed professionals as we do with medicines? That's an absurd world.

Programming isn't a profession because it simply could not exist as a profession. Professional associations and ethical standards certainly have a place in educating, but they should not be given the power to actually regulate behavior.
Eh, I can't honestly tell if there has been more X's added since the last time it was posted and I don't feel like putting in the time into the wayback machine to find out.
Any pictures? That sounds cool
I recently developed/launched http://framestr.com. It's an online form software that I developed, originally, for a few lead generation websites that I own. It currently generates around $950 / month.
Which one from the list are you thinking of? The last one someone (a clearly reasonable commenter) picked out turned out to be a perfect example of the kinds of sites I'm talking about.

Incidentally: I have nothing to say about the utility of this particular project. I just know that there really is fakenews, and it's not subjective.
Exactly. Those are the only websites I'm interested in targeting with this extension.

For example, I would never blacklist Breitbart, because I'm not interested in censoring political opinions I disagree with. I just want to free us from the burden of these websites that add nothing to the world and leech attention from everyone.
Sorry, what's the high-powered mac desktop you're referring to? I would love to buy that one to replace my 2008 Mac Pro.
This is not true in all cases, but H1B workers show up to work hard, show strong understanding that they are being paid to do a job as opposed to being entitled for some lifestyle, and have more respect for the hierarchy of the org. They will tend to stick around for a while too, and not be job hoppers. It is saddening to see them exploited as basically indentured servants.

On the flip side, they do not challenge authority when they know a better way to do something, their educational foundation is not as solid because of too much focus on rote memorization, and tend to let interpersonal problems fester instead of escalating because they cannot imagine speaking out of their place in the hierarchy.

The top tier of Home country employees are great, but once you get to the lower part of tier 2 and tier 3, they tend to have an attitude of "what can the company do for me?" , Instead of "What can I do for the company?" And they start feeling like dead weight.

Of course these are all generalizations and there are exceptions everywhere to what I have said.
Thanks a lot for taking time to respond. I've a couple of clarifying questions:

> Two reasons really, the first is that AWS has become this bloated mess of "stuff", making it increasingly harder to use

Are you referring to any specific offerings: CodeDeploy/Beanstalk/EC2? Or generally the entirety of AWS catalog? I agree that the sheer amount of configurations and the breath of offerings might appear bloated and there are parts where AWS looks its age, not necessarily a bad thing, though.

> because so much time is needed to either constantly look at it to see what's new/changed or vigilantly document everything

I am not able to relate to this. AWS is pretty serious abt backwards compatibility and making transitions smooth unless there's a serious security risk.

Re: Console:
This complaint comes up often on HN. Thanks for pointing it out.

Re: Convention over configuration:
K8s seems to be a great piece of software from what I keep reading abt it. I can understand why anyone would choose to use it. I am left wondering why it isn't as easily usable on AWS infrastructure... I guess I must try it out myself, someday.
US does the same actually. $.05 tax on all bottles, $0.05 payment for recycling. It used to get people to recycle but now the penalty is too small to be worth it. On the flip side, rooting through garbage cans for recycling deposits is now a viable source of income for urban poor.
How Redis works for beginners
> start with the prebuilt binaries and then do `stack upgrade`

Thanks but in this case I could also download the newest binaries instantly. The point is that I don't want to be dependent on any binaries. Compilation from scratch doesn't work.

Btw Rust has the same problem - it also depends on binary upgrades. Nim (nim-lang.org) proves how easy self-hosting can be - which also means how easy porting to other platforms can be.
OP here. Your assuming I'd stay in tech to arbitrage the wage gap to give altruistically. You discount that maybe working in tech isn't what makes me happy (disclaimer: I like my current gig because of the people I get to work with, but nothing is forever), farming seaweed from my 41 foot catamaran (now depreciable as a business expense if commercially farming seaweed) might make me happier after working in tech for 15 years, and that I'm saving up to eventually leave the tech industry for living on a sailboat with my family.

> but the typical conclusion would be "effective altruism indicates I should stay in tech and give money to helping fisherman transition to seaweed farming."

Don't make assumptions. Life is meant to be enjoyed, and we work for a third of our lives. Perhaps some of us don't want to do the same work for our entire lives.

Lastly, tech isn't how I would give altruistically. I'd trade options and futures and donate the profits. The impact would be orders of magnitude higher than donating my hourly/salary wages.
Goddamit, I wanted to get to the comment about the superoptimizer, not this mass hallucination over crap sience :(
Sure, thats why I said generally. The UK and Germany don't have especially healthy diets in my opinion and have a lot more people than the Scandanavian countries that you mentioned.
Macro vs. Micro in Products
Second Chinese Firm in a Week Found Hiding Backdoor in Android Devices
Not your grandad's .net
If this article made sense to you, you should read the author's book on the topic. I've just finished it and really liked it.

http://amzn.to/2fdEaol
Cool Stylish Sub Heading Plugin for WordPress
Click 'Reader View' in firefox.
That doesn't help when you need to review each individual branch to find out if it needs to be worked on, merged, or deleted.
Considering seaweed is rich in glutamates I'd wager it makes the meat tastes really savory and umami. Pure speculation though.
Giving a shit about others
Whilst some of the replies rebuke large part of your points well, I agree that the argument "mathematics is only good when it's tied to physics" is wrong.

I'd reformulate his point to: Mathematics, especially when being taught, benefits from intuitive examples that motivate the abstract definitions.

A point that is quite obvious. Whilst certainly much intuition concerns physics, that need not be the underlying source of the intuition.
There is, it's a soft paywall, letting you read a certain number per month.
Obama has deported 2.5M illegals
You never know. Also, the smart enough person can install it on browsers on less smart people.
Wait a second, it just occurred to me that all of you who are dismissing NRA membership numbers due to it being required for an activity are making an error that's entirely relevant to the actual discussion:

Oh, yeah, let's say you join the NRA because of that, it was certainly true for the first and penultimate times I joined it. But even if this is a politically neutral decision, and/or the gun owner is relatively neutral on the issue of gun control (rather unlikely for serious target shooters, I'd say, due to the patchwork of flypaper laws that will throw them in prison if they make a mistake while traveling to a match), they'll automatically get their choice of membership magazines (American Rifleman, American Hunter, and there's at least one more).

Which will expose them to the government's atrocities, and politicize all but the most callous of them. And then they're also in the net of Institute for Legislative Action, the NRA's lobbying arm that also runs their PAC (although PACs are small potatoes, more valuable to signaling than anything else). And they'll get alerts about legislation, scoring of their politicians, sometimes a major campaign for one as I noted WRT to Roy Blunt, and of course at least post-Carter a major effort every Presidential election (Carter was anti-handgun, but he and his southerners were not in a bubble and too smart to mess with gun control (it was discussed and quickly shot down, you might say)).

E.g. if I hadn't already read of the atrocities in other gun magazines, joining the NRA as a sophomore on my high school JROTC rifle team would have started me down my RKBA activist path.

So, no, "not [joining] necessarily because they agree with the NRA" (I don't and don't belong to it, although I re-joined for a year after Sandy Hook), but by definition these guys and gals are gun owners, and can't ignore politics if they want to continue to be so.

Anyway, why don't we put this slagging of the NRA, which is only responsible for a fraction of our success; for example, not Heller and McDonald, nor most of the nationwide sweep of shall issue or better concealed carry regimes, to the side in favor of, you know, trying to apply the lessons learned from the general gun owners' wildly successful efforts to this surveillance problem.

E.g. am I wrong about atrocities being committed with it that would play well to the public?

On the other hand, the flip side of the "join because you have to"m if you truly believe it's so big, is that that isn't an obvious way to bring people into the fold, I don't see us being in a position to require stuff of normal folks. But that's not so true of FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and company, is it?
> But as they say, democracy is two wolves and one sheep deciding on what to have for dinner.

That's why USA is not a democracy, it's a constitutional republic.

> but the rest have to for the next sixty years.

If you delude yourself with the idea you know what's going to happen in the next 60 years, you overestimate your abilities in such a way it's not even funny.

> You look at something like marriage equality, and per Pew research, 71% of millenials approve yet only 38% of the silent generation do.

So?

> Yet the issue has a serious chance of being reversed due to Trump's inevitable Supreme Court picks.

Based on what? Trump's position is that the issue is settled.

> And our generation will be stuck with the fallout of that (and every other social issue that's bound to come up in the future) for likely 40+ years.

There are a lot of SC decisions that the right didn't like. There are a lot of SC decisions that the left didn't like. Some of them change, some of them don't. I don't see how anything here is new or has anything to do with anything - there always will be some decisions somebody won't like. Trump pick would make SC as balanced as it has ever been - 4 lefty judges, 4 righty judges, one swing vote (Kennedy). Simplifying, of course, but that's what it is.

Moreover, SC running ahead of public consensus is not usually a good idea. The continued abortion struggle is a proof - there obviously wasn't/isn't public consensus, and the issue is still a hot topic.

With gay marriage though, the issue is much closer to public consensus and I predict it will vanish from public discussion (except of course panic propaganda on par with "Republicans are going to recreate slavery!") very soon.

> Look, I'm aging too. I'll be old soon. What I'm saying will already affect me as well. But this is just a matter of basic fairness.

No it's not. Nothing you said has anything to do with "basic fairness".

> This administration is going to push us well over the edge on carbon emissions.

I have no idea what that sentence means. I suspect neither do you.

> Our grandchildren and beyond will pay dearly for the harm that's going to be done.

That's always true - whatever we do, our grandchildren and beyond will have to deal with it. That's kind of by definition.

> Those responsible will be long gone by then. That is not fair.

I agree. I'd like to stick around for the next 1000 or so years, just to see what happens. Unfortunately, so far nobody found a way how. Very unfair!
Agriculture is not "low-tech".
That sounds pretty awesome. So, are these only instruction-level optimizations or is there a good toolkit for doing it SSA level as well? My idea being combining it with formal, equivalence checks in certified compilers so we get optimizations plus ensure correctness given original version was correct via certified transform. Certified to v1 -> superoptimize to v2 -> certified checker (v1, v2) -> rinse repeat.
Maybe this is all the natural progression towards the final marketing scheme. Eg. The automotive industry.

Did you want the DLX, GS, or GX trim package?

Obvious extreme sarcasm here. But it seems to be the trend.
Maybe this is your speed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WQAwQ0SGkc

GOES-R represents a nearly 2 orders of magnitude improvement over previous generations. Imagery will have higher spectral and spatial resolution, by significant margins, and provide coverage in new areas. Consider just one aspect: lightning observation, GOES-R will vastly increase the amount of data available. This is a huge amount of data that wasn't previously available and will no doubt be able to be used in improving weather modelling. However, lightning intensity has been recently discovered to be a key predictor in thunderstorm intensity and tornado formation so having that data available in real time will likely end up leading to better tornado predictions and many lives saved. And that's just one element, every aspect of the satellite is a huge leap over previous generations and will have a tremendous impact on weather forecasting and climate research for years to come.
Consider that I built it this night for http://lauzhack.com/, so it's not intended to be a fully-featured solution to the problem.

The main issue I wanted to address is the fact that such a blocker must be widely installed to be useful. Therefore, the Facebook message is intended to prod current users of the extensions to ask that their friends install it as well.
It makes extra sense to have it on touch-only platforms, where selecting text is more difficult (and long-pressing a link doesn't initiate text selection).
OpenBazaar: Truly Free Trade Through Crypto
We use Lambda and API gateway for all production[1] requests. HTML, Server side rendered JS, API calls. All through lambda. There are some rough edges. We wrote our own framework/deployment tool[2] to fix some of them. AWS has been making lots of improvements too. Many in just the last few months. This setup was much harder to run when we first started a year and a half ago. Overall our team is super happy. It is cheaper and simpler to operate than our previous ec2+Opsworks setup. We get code to production faster and spend more time on actual business problems vs infastructure problems. I also pretty much agree with everything Ben Kehoe said in this article: https://serverless.zone/serverless-vs-paas-and-docker-three-....

[1] www.bustle.com and www.romper.com do a combined XX million unique visitors per month.

[2] https://github.com/bustlelabs/shep
He copied an exe file from windows to linux and tried double click...

If you have Wine installed that actually works for a lot of programs.
It so unbelievable that this is still happening. Is the INS that ineffective? I really can't trust what I read anymore.
Exactly! Now consider that deep networks that classify images are tasked with getting reliable statistics in very high dimensional spaces. Conv nets are being forced to map from high dimensional spaces down to a very low dimensional categorical decision. This is why weird classification errors you see in "adversarial examples" keep popping up. The learned classification boundaries are very spiky, and it's easy for the world to fall in between the spikes. More data can't solve it (at least not practically) because there are way too many gaps between the spikes.

A more tractable approach is to learn to use dynamics for perception rather than ("just") statistics. The dynamical physics of a ball rolling is much simpler (lower dimensional, more tractable) than a statistical view of millions of differently illuminated pixels hitting a camera.

(A colleague of mine has a blog post on this issue of "statistics and dynamics" at http://blog.piekniewski.info/2016/11/01/statistics-and-dynam...)
Any idea what the expected reaction would be if you sold it slowly but everyone knew that you had a massive reserve sitting in a warehouse somewhere ready for sale?
EzOfficesuite Web Apps Released
Show HN: StockDroids.com – A curated list of near-stock Android devices
People need to stop using the word "fake news" as though people were seeing stories about "bat boy" in the grocery store checkout aisle and believing them. This is propaganda. It's inflammatory, it's knowingly false, and it has a political agenda. It's propaganda.
"Like C, but with memory safety and QuickCheck" sounds like a pretty good language for a SAT solver... "Idiomatic Haskell won't produce a very fast SAT solver" is something that doesn't surprise me.
I agree with this sentiment mostly. I did delete my personal facebook. My twitter account I removed a lot of previous posts in the hopes to inactivate it without deleting it publicly.
Interesting project, Is censorship the best coarse of action? Bare with me for a second, would it not be better to somehow overlay a meter or light indicating that this story is likely false. Even better, some sort of indicator that showed the # of sources (if any) and devised some sort of rating of quality/truthfulness.

I'm against all the fake news in Facebook et all but if we dont teach people to be good at detecting it we're just putting a bandaid over a broken bone so to speak. Am I being overly optimistic of society, that learning how to detect bullshit is better than doing the hard work for them?
Multiplayer Coding Kickstarter just funded
How do you guys deal with potential cold-start issues?
> "He refused to do it but says, "there's always an engineer willing" to simply follow orders"

It's not just about that. If you are not in a first world country, then feeding your family and ensuring you have a roof over your head are more important than breaking your own ethics with developing software.

As someone who lives in a first world country, the UK. I have I found ethics to be a sliding scale.

We live in a world where gaps in the market will always be filled by someone. Frackers, Oil companys, GMO companies, Chemical companies, the list can go on and on. One side will say they are doing a public good. One other side will argue they are harming the planet and it's unethical for them to operate.

The only way to really change things, is make a movement and vote with the collective wallet. The market will dictate what is acceptable and what is not.

Per the article: I think the more programmers will adopt this attitude, companies will simply stop asking and move the project offshore. I know from experience, they have no such qualms.
here is a way to intuit that:

- because (1-ε)^n/1^n goes to zero if n goes up, most of the volume of a cube gets concentrated near its surface.

- to go from a n-dimensional cube to a n-dimensional sphere, you have to cut away most of its surface (everything except for 2n 'caps' near the points with coordinates (0,0,0,...,0,0,±½,0,0,0,...,0,0,0)), and hence, most of its volume.
The Alarm Clock Paradox
And authors that embark on ambitious fantasy or Sci-fi series often die before completing them...

Hopefully he doesn't go the way of Robert Jordan or Frank Herbert.
The analogy is more like if I was borrowing money to pay for my gym membership or going to restaurants. And pass on my debt to my children.
Can't wait to see how it will handle Starcraft 2.
I think a lot of his points still stand though with ST being elegant in a lot of ways and relatively easy to learn.
Parinfer explores some of the same ideas, but as an editor extension: https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/
Really cool tutorial, thanks for writing this up !
I am divided on this. I think we as the software industry have serious performance issues, maybe except for some legitimate use cases like number crunching, video editing etc.

I don't know of a non-trivial Rails app which uses less than a couple hundred MBs of RAM. We have a VM with a minimum RAM requirement of 8 GBs at work which runs a conglomerate of Rails APIs, which makes 16 GB a minimum on my laptop. The only reason the memory bloat/leak of a freelance Rails project I'm working on goes undetected is that Heroku restarts their dynos daily. For comparison, an Elixir/Phoenix app is using < 40 MB right now.

AFAIK base RAM requirements of many Java apps are even worse.

Opening Gmail in Chrome immediately eats 1 GB of RAM, vs. 60 MB for Apple Mail app. Many Electron apps like Slack, Atom and Spotify use hundreds of MBs to GBs of memory, vs. 150 MB for Sublime Text (5 MB for Vim!). And they are sluggish. As much as I love the open web (and I'm mostly a web/backend dev myself), I hate the fact that I often have to prefer native apps.

I'm seriously considering other laptops right now, but can't find a serious alternative, especially considering the fact that there are no Linux-rated laptops close to my location. And shoehorning Linux into Windows machines is pain, I tried that for ~1 years both at work and at home. The best non-Mac laptop candidate I'm considering right now has a long article written by someone describing how to install Linux on it, with some "slight" annoyances like a non-functioning webcam and a problematic wifi in the end. Windows? Nothing there comes even close to iTerm2 and oh-my-zsh combo (and many other tools, workflows etc). And I haven't even touched the subject of design.

None of this is heavy computing. I think we seriously need to consider slowing down this madness and try to improve. I'd normally love the 16 GB limitation so that we'd be somewhat forced to that direction but since there is no "kill the bloat!" initiative or something, we sadly need beefier machines for the short/mid term.
Not that short-term.

Methane has a GWP (Global Warming Potential or equivalent impact compared to same amount of carbon dioxide) of 86 over 20 years; 34 over 100 years; and 7.6 over 500 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential