skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is blindingly obvious from an evolutionary standpoint that this is happening. I have thought about it a fair bit, as it has directly impacted my own family, and I've no doubt it will continue to do so in subsequent generations.

I don't think it's something to worry much about, as the much broader benefits of modern medicine (namely, antibiotics) have had so much impact on our survival rate that this would pale into insignificance.

Which may be borne out (pun intended) by the numbers: 3% to 3.3% or 3.6% in 50-60 years - is that statistically significant? The error there is in the same order as the overall increase, so it's hard to believe it's even measurable at this stage.

Because it is so obviously going to happen, I suspect there may be some curve-fitting going on here?
very boring and predictable one. "whayyy, very cool, more, bigger, better, whayyyy".
Complexification – Gallery of Computation
He says it's better than anything other than the Tesla, yet he ran away the moment NHTSA looked into his project. I've been around long enough to know when something smells like bs, looks like bs, and sounds like bs...it's bs.
Sometimes I wonder if PHP gets such a bad wrap because most people learn it through modifying WordPress. If I learned PHP by looking at WordPress code, I'd also be on team "kill it with fire."
Trump's One Point
Inside TD4PAI, Northern Nigeria's First Technology Hardware Incubator
"Women with a very narrow pelvis would not have survived birth 100 years ago. They do now and pass on their genes encoding for a narrow pelvis to their daughters."

and

"Our intent is not to criticise medical intervention," he said. "But it's had an evolutionary effect."

The article said everything you said, and more, in what way did it "not get science right"?
It's a very large and fuzzy topic. It depends on what computer system you run. Being able to use windows is not a skill, it's extremely unconceptual and ad-hoc, and mostly coll rote learning. I'm sure older systems, with less layers and cruft (think 70s box) taught you more, giving you simpler tools and more ways to solve problems on your own. Nowadays it's mostly fads.

You're right about self deprecation. Society lifts computer usage as a value even if it's mostly absurd in reality (because I knew excel, people would look at me doing basic tasks saying they couldn't do it). It affects many people, it's very very hard to reverse. It's indeed very similar to math anxiety. Reminds me of childhood friends who dropped out of school in Junior High, couldn't do the "simplest ratio" but were doing them on the fly with custom units to sell weed, I couldn't follow them. It's all ceremony, sadly.

ps: one last thing, I wonder how illiterate people would feel if given a system like NixOS or GuixSD with almost fully rollbackable system; meaning they can mess with it without negative emotions or almost no superstition.
We suffered one, he was on a two man team. Reviewing his pull requests took at least a day, which were effectively rewrites by the more experienced dev.

We eventually had to let him go, but the technical debt remains. For example, tests that mock everything so that they didn't actually exercise any of the code!
AptDeco (used furniture marketplace) is hiring Dir of Ops and General Mgr
There's two sides to this coin. By allowing normally lethal genes to be passed on were likely to cause more death in the future. This is definitely something that should be screened and prevented, whether through gene editing, surrogacy, or just selecting for embryos that are either male or lack the undesired trait.

Nobody has to die to voluntarily select this out of the population. The Jewish community has been on the forefront of this for a long time. On the border of eugenics I guess, but self selecting against genes that will cause suffering or death.
you'll lose your job and will be replaced by AI. Astounding?
So...? I can just refuse, can't I?
Interesting, but it is not surprising that git and redis are more stable than node and angular. Git and redis are well defined problems that won't change that much. Angular is a framework and node is a platform. They should change more. But then again... javascript fatigue is a thing from what I heard.
Self-driving tech would make vehicle sharing much easier, which would in turn allow people to use vehicles properly sized for their current need.

In other words, people wouldn't need a big honkin' SUV or truck most of the time, and could ride around in something smaller with just the fuel range they need for that trip.

Also, traffic might get better. If everything became automated it might even be possible to eliminate traffic lights.
I am with you on that, but those services have to be paid in some form, as those people also have bills to pay.

So if it isn't with money or advertising, it has to be whatever else they can extract from the users.
If we were going to make an Orange Catholic Bible for programmers, this line of his should be a commandment in it:

"You’re not here to show your superior knowledge or to shame people for not knowing what you know. You’re here to help others learn and grow, to show them that they’re not bad for not knowing, but that it can be harmful."
"You pick the search button from the menu on the top, just like copy and paste, right?"
That's a tool they already have plenty of access to. I've tried to make a tool that will work against them, making it possible for any service, running any software stack, to efficiently blacklist hundreds of thousands of common passwords.

I can (and should) start tracking down more password dumps and compiling them myself to do the same thing, but I've been spread pretty thin for a while. It's been on my mind but there hasn't been time for it.

A massive list of plaintext passwords from Troy's dump, the ones that were available anyway, would have been really convenient. Odds are my index file would already be updated to a newer version.
Maybe Linux is not rewritten because it doesn't have tests
This is more like "A look back at the drug hysterias of yesteryear".

"An Economic History of the United States, 1961-Present" [1], by yours truly, provides a superficial president-by-president review of the most popular drugs of yesteryear, with more superficial commentary about the political climate that set the stage for the various substances.

[1] https://dontsuemebro.com/story/2016/11/10/191217/82
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> Patenting something you _ copied _ ...

Strawman. That's not what your OP's quote says.
Yeah, I doubt that this code dump will stimulate a community to form in a legally safe way similar to the Linux kernel or GnuPGP, the choices of BSD and CC-ShareAlike-NonCommercial are likely to encourage manufacturers to pull a Sony and take the code, build their own training data and contribute nothing back.
It's a good point and I wouldn't argue otherwise.
It would be interesting to have somebody who was knowledgable in the area of self driving cars to analyze his code. I mean it seems like he might benefit from a combination of learning a few things and some level of humility. I mean, Kalman filters, and even the algorithms used to lower the noise in images and radars were not invented overnight but when it comes to a car that may easily kill somebody it seems like it's worth it to be a bit cautious about learning about potential pitfalls to different algorithms and technologies. I mean build all the self driving car algorithms and cars that drive on test tracks, but if one of his cars ran over my kid, or anybody else's kid, then the price of progress is too high.
> yet he ran away the moment NHTSA looked into his project

To be fair, this could have nothing to do with the quality of the project. I don't want anything to do with the NHTSA (or any other government regulatory body) if I can help it.
The same reason you want literacy in any other field: to not be taken by the nose, taken advantage of.
Example medical care, in theory I should not know a thing about it. Yet not all doctors show the required dedication to figure out a problem to it's root cause. As such I need some literacy in this field, so I can solve, or insist/steer the problem to a solution.
Do interviewers actually really care about the curlies being in the right place? I've never interviewed in the US, but certainly every interview I've had in Europe that required whiteboard coding only required essentially pseudo-code that looked more or less like the target language.
HN isn't immune from macro trends.
Highly depends on what you mean by bad choices. I couldn't name one "bad" decision I made then that has a negative impact on me today.

I did wander and skatboard in a lot of locations that were closed off, or we were not supposed to be, which isn't something your parents would usually want. Doing that I made a lot of great connections with people I wouldn't have met in my otherwise pretty sheltered life.

I think it's more important that such a system could easily destroy a lot of good experiences for the children and less important that it prevents bad ones (which can also be valuable experiences).
Word of warning on those backup systems: occasionally run a full-checksum/file-contents sync in case of corruption.
And in the process also safer.
Nice share!
Here are few my points to add on: https://www.softprodigy.com/top-graphic-design-trends-every-...
That is a Western stereotype of Eastern parenting, _not_ how they necessarily parent.

Plus there's some selection/survivorship bias in immigrant populations. (Nor is it unique to Asian immigrants!)
Sorry, I'm agreeing with you. I think the stats are bogus on this one for a few reasons
New Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Is Misguided – GrrlScientist – Medium
Don’t assume that safety comes for free: a Swift case study
Only Programmers will get these Jokes
He addressed this partly in the article. Even when looking just at the early days of the more mature projects the code churned much less than projects less mature now.
My university has a project where you implement a shell in c from scratch with most of the commonly known features of bash -- scripting, file redirection, command substitution, the whole nine yards. Needless to say it's a mess by the end.
That's when teenagers start to conveniently forget their phone a lot more than before and end up being less safe overall.

Of course you worry, you're a parent. But is it your kids' burden so they have to be tracked 24/7?
In general, it's hard for me to agree with that too. I can remember a few times where the hardware side of things was done decently (or at least at a level I could put up with) but the software side was shit and felt like a necessary evil, an afterthought, a forgotten checkmark on a todo list that needed to be taken care of.

Belkin WeMo comes to my mind as a prime example as their app is slow and buggy. Philips Hue lightbulbs I've bought my for parents last christmas can be another one - lightbulbs themselves look and work nice but the software is (imho of course) buggy, unintuitive and incomprehensible.
I already have an app like this that lets me share my location and everything with my loved ones. It's called text messaging
My 100 Favorite Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part Six
It is being rewritten all the time, but new code per arch or driver dwarfs common.
I don't know for sure, of course, since I don't know him - but, from all the interviews I've seen of him where the conversations were variable and unscripted, he has a very broad but also deep knowledge. I'm convinced that he's a voracious reader.

On a tangential note:
Over the years, many people have asked me how I know so many things... and I always give them the same answer: because I wanted to, so I put time into making it be that way. That's it.

While I feel that I should recognise that being reasonably gifted has likely benefited me here, there are _many_ people considerably cleverer than me!
I take pains to attempt to drive home the central point, which is that I believe it's the _attitude_ that matters the most of the two.
Just because I might have had a easier time than many when learning _doesn't_ mean it was easy, or didn't consume a lot of time and effort! No.

I just thought it was important, so I did it. It requires effort. It was an investment.

It greatly irritates me that many jump to the conclusion that some talent negates all the hard work that it required - and still requires. Learning never ends - or, it shouldn't!

I think most people are considerably more capable than they think - they often just don't try.
تور کیش ۳ شب و ۴ روز ویژه ۲۰ آذر ۹۵
Growth Hacks for 2017 – free eBook
To be fair, aside from the preschool formatting of the article (one sentence per paragraph, a concerning recent BBC trend), the journalist didn't actually say anything incorrect.

But she did not answer the main question that was asked: why the human pelvis has not grown wider over the years? She said that there were two opposing forces, one for larger babies (they have more chance of survival), and the other was natural selection preventing them getting too large (by killing them both in childbirth).

Maybe I'm missing something, but neither of those answer the question of why the pelvis has not got larger.

All I can assume is that it is (a) an evolutionary trend of men to be attracted to younger and potentially, on average, slimmer and more healthy or fertile women, and (b) cultural, since there is evidence that in historic times and possibly also in less technologically advanced societies, larger hips are considered desirable (which makes total sense in a society with no access to modern medicine).

I'm sure some anthropologists will beat me up for these terrible generalisations, but in general, on average, it seems these forces may have an impact on pelvis size over generations?
But where are the files hosted ?
Sorry I didn't see this earlier. That's a tough one. On the one hand it's a substantive news story on a subject of core interest to HN. On the other hand it's bound to result in a highly politicized discussion, if not a poster child for the kind of flamewar we're trying to avoid. So I don't have a good answer for you.

Since we asked people to err on the side of flagging for just this week, I don't think we can ask them not to flag that one. It would be fine to post it next week though.
It is also a reason that as engineer (real degree, not self named), I support software being regulated just like everything else, not only on life critical situations.

Thankfully at least EULAs are void in most European countries and companies can be accounted for.
Which one do you recommend then ?

Is Firefox Focus better ?
With your own solution you will likely encounter the same problems that pingdom faced including this one. The benefit of a service like pingdom is that they already solved those problems for you or if they haven't you don't have to waste time solving them yourself. It's not very efficient if everyone solves the same problems over and over again.
A catastrophe based model seems more appropriate. You see big refactoring taking place. Only in a big number sum those Poisson-like events turn into exponentials.
Seems to me that you're describing the exact sort of psychological tactic that software vendors favor to get people to install the bloatware in the first place.
> To be fair, this could have nothing to do with the quality of the project

To be fair, looking at the code, it has all to do with the quality of the project
It works very well indeed!
There would likely be vehicle sharing benefits, but self driving cars are apt to make traffic worse. Your average 8 lane freeway will still only be able to carry 11k cars an hour assuming everyone has minimal stopping distance & is driving at 40mph for ideal throughput.

Traffic lights are also unlikely to disappear, as self driving cars do not magically get perfect traction or stopping abilities, and they will have to share the road with the other humans that exist on our streets, whether they be pedestrians, bikers, joggers, skateboarders, etc.

In contrast, a light rail alignment can move 20k people an hour. It also won't reduce traffic, but it'll slow traffic growth by reducing latent transport demand and allow cities to remain economically viable as traffic increases.
> A complex task that (imo) is very likely to be solved better by some sort of AI approach than human tinkering.

Citation extremely needed.
I think there's clear danger of having a local maximum problem here. This is because the role of hypothesis in the process seems either misunderstood or misplaced.

The Tim Robinson example in the article recounting the removing of links on the checkout flow illustrates this. He observed something interesting in the data (people clicking on links), but he then skipped straight to a test which removed links and found conversion went up. It's implied that people were being distracted from the main task by the links.

But it might equally be that they wanted to click the links to find some missing information about the product. Or even some other reason. Without any qualitative analysis to establish a reason why people were clicking on them, you don't know if he might have raised conversion even higher had he kept the links and addressed a need people had. This is particularly important in a checkout flow where the numbers of people are comparatively low and behavioural elasticity is also comparatively low.

So I'm reading between the lines here that because qualitative analysis is hard, people don't do it. Maybe that's fair enough, but that doesn't prevent you from kicking the tyres on hypotheses. Quant analysis and A/B testing will only tell you what happened, not why did.
Meta-UI problems
Hi chupapuma, thanks for reaching out. Notebooks is certainly very interesting product, I wish you and your team best luck.
If your random numbers are generated with a fixed seed and the algorithm runs for a deterministic number of steps (e.g. not using a wall-clock timeout) then the output should be deterministic.

One potential for nondeterminism is if the compiler or linker is multithreaded, and multiple threads could update a shared data structure in no fixed order.
Projects Can Sometimes Be the Worst Way to Learn JavaScript
Yes we should, but the creative energy you're alluding to is the first thing to leave when the vitriol starts flowing.

What should we do? I don't know, but I don't think a week off is going to hurt anybody.
Sadly, despite 50 years of work on it (and there are still lot ot work on it), we have no idea on what to regulate. Which is the culprit here.
> It was painful to watch them stumble about, trying to debug installation errors that seem obvious to us
At least they were trying and did not dismissed the error messages as soon as they appeared
> It was painful to watch them stumble about, trying to debug installation errors that seem obvious to us

At least they were trying and did not dismissed the error messages as soon as they appeared
Big Tablets Are Coming
InterSystems Developer Community – InterSystems Technologies on Amazon EC2
As someone tempted to comment on politics, I'd love for the detox to continue indefinitely, with an instant lifetime ban for the first offence.

HN doesn't add much to politics (it looks just like that kind of discussion would look anywhere else) but politics does detract from HN (firstly because you get less of what HN has that is less prevalent elsewhere, and secondly because politics is great at distracting attention from everything else.)

This would not be a controversial statement if "politics" were replaced with "pornography" and I think the two are, in this context, very much a like - you can have none, or you can have just that one thing as they do in many places and that too "works" in its own way, but having a little works badly.

(And if anything, if HN had porn it'd be easier to ignore it than politics because with politics, not only do you need to avoid the temptation to read about it but also to argue with the harebrained viewpoint in the comments that threatens your family, country and the entire humanity, and then they have to avoid the temptation to push back against my harebrained arguments threatening their family, country and the entire humanity. And just standing there and doing nothing when humanity is at risk, for the sake of a goal so narrow and insignificant as keeping HN about one thing and not another, is very, very hard.)
>26% of adults were unable to use a computer

What? This is really surprising. I expected some people to be really poor at using computers, but not being able to use them at all? Wow. TIL
Am I missing something? I only see the dataset available but no source code.
Alas, most of the libraries are pretty old and not currently active. But still seems to be a decently simple/useful spec. However, messagepack protocol seems much more broadly supported and some new rock libs are popping up, but no common rpc spec.

Based on those facts, I decided to build a Bert-rpc but using message pack and geared for embedded devices. Just released (as in tonight!) the initial code for an Arduino RPC library. It uses the msg pack for Arduino (https://github.com/HEADS-project/arduino_msgpack), a great little library. Enjoying it much more than most JSON libraries.

It's intended purpose is to make interacting with sub-1ghz radios and be easy to interface with elixir. Only have basic Call and Cast semantics at the moment, but it's only two days old. :-) If anyone's interested in helping, I think C++11 lambda might be a feasible way to create rpc callbacks that non-devs could use (maybe...).
Blueprint: Reverse engineer server configuration
With regard to the cheerleaders saying there are no problems whatsoever with this feature:

1. The reason people raise concerns about Google, and less so about iOS, is that Google and Apple are in different businesses. Google is in the business of profiting off your personal data and that of your family members. Apple is not, and iOS makes it significantly harder for rogue apps to get access to personal data without the actual user's direct permission.

2. Google (Android) and Apple (iOS) place different priorities on security relative to other factors.

3. Many of the naysayers are raising issues that do not single out Android, however fair it may be to do so. There are some issues that remain the same beyond the specific platform. For example: this kind of app creates social pressure for people to be tracked by their family and show trust that they may not sincerely feel.

4. If you think they can "just" turn the feature off or "just" remove the trusted contacts when they feel uncomfortable, you are not thinking this through. These "trusted" contacts may be authority figures in the family and may be able to examine any settings done by the actual users.

5. If your kids are carrying a cell phone, it should probably be a secure phone, with strictly enforced app store policies, and with a secure OS that is not provided by a company with every incentive to gather and monetize personal and private information. Your kids do not deserve to be the targets of this kind of commercial activity. So even if you think the feature is good, it is tainted by the interests of the provider. But whether the feature is good or bad, Android is a bad way for children to get the feature.
Only if we get enough to make beowulf cluster of old memes.
GoPro Declares War [video]
Read uClibc and Busybox code. They're both fun platforms to hack on and the people who wrote them know a little bit about C.
well the author of the piece is Josephine Livingstone; she might be British. I don't know whether she is; but i do know that i have read article by her in the Guardian which is a leading newspaper published in the UK.
I've also contributed to chromium devtools. I did it because I liked the idea of contributing to something that big, also having my code reach that many people is a nice feeling.

I agree that their tracker and review tools are a bit outdated but their code search is top notch. It was really easy to find my way around that codebase.