skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, it depends. I've been in healthy situations where this was true. One company in particular where this was mostly true from the very top down.

Of course, yes, there are plenty of situations where it is just double-talk.
"And to be honest, I would be too humiliated"

Oh, cry me a river. I put myself through school on retail. I am a programmer. If I lost this job, I'd be back to retail in a heartbeat while I worked to find a new IT job. I have a very hard time having sympathy for someone who goes on and on about how bad he has it while he's not willing to work a job that is "beneath" him. What classes are you taking? What are you doing to get more relevant? Github is free. Resources are free. Many classes are free. Get your StackOverflow on. Shit, I get offers from there frequently and all I have done is answer some questions.

Your kids are hungry because you're too good to get a job at a freaking grocery store??
Glad I wasn't the only one. When it was just her face, it was fine. As soon as she talked it bugged me.
4 Fast communication tweaks to quickly improve client relations
The grumpy snarky HN user in me says that a lot of the "I deployed a server to do X" and "I wrote code to do Y" in this blog post should actually say "A Facebook engineer provided me with direct API hooks to do X and Y", but it's anyone's guess.
And he's still too embarrassed to take a job at the gas station?
> But when I see a component for a button, you know, just a regular styled link... I wonder if there is really a purpose to that?

Why shouldn't there be a component for a button? Buttons can have endless styles and animations. They have a myriad of behaviors. For instance, there are differences in how they could respond to touches versus mouse clicks. They have a standard interface. With a component, you could keep them consistent across an application and share them across applications.
Is there a reason to use Swift over Rust?
The Business Stack, 2016 Edition
So do you think that any fictional character that weighs more than X kg should be not be represented anywhere? That is offensive.
I think there is a problem relying on big business to fight such fights. I wouldn't think they would care except that it would be a tax on equipment they might use, but that could be sidestepped in a number of ways. The businesses could just get a commercial exemption written into the law or just import their compute gear from a remote division.
Neuroscience Spots Potential Criminals in Pre-School?
For anyone who isn't a crypto nerd:

Daniel Bleichenbacher is one of the most famous living cryptanalysts. He's famous for a number of attacks on public-key cryptosystems like RSA and ECSDA, and published one of the very first error oracle attacks. Many attacks on SSL/TLS trace, intellectually, back to him. Crypto nerds tend to be surprised to learn that he's been working at Google for years now.

Thai Duong is part of the teams that discovered the TLS BEAST attack, the CRIME attack, and the POODLE attack, in addition to a bunch of other crypto attacks on software (for instance, he and his partner-in-crime Juliano Rizzo discovered the CBC padding oracle attack on .NET, and the SHA length extension attack on the Flickr API).

The most important thing about this work is the crypto knowledge encoded into the unit tests. Relative to the effort it takes to come up with these test cases, it's comparatively easy to port them to other languages.

It's worth reading through the source code on this project just for the comments. For instance: there was apparently a bignum primality flaw in Gnu Crypto that broke SRP --- which I learned only from a comment in the bignum test cases.
> There is, however, something to be said for people that never settle and by force of will reshape the world around them to conform to their expectations.

If by force of will I wanted to work at Google for example, I would take steps to improve my chances of making that happen. This story is not about force of will at all, but someone with low self discipline and possibly depressed (clinical depression could be a factor here and he should look into it).

He complains about lack of something to do. There is plenty to do starting with making a schedule listing things to learn for the day that will improve his chances getting the job he wants. I'm sure potential employers are looking at him asking the same questions people here are asking. You've been unemployed for 2 years and have learned what?
Would this not hurt SC more than it helps? If everyone is forced to purchase electronics online, then will local stores not suffer?

How will they enforce this for online purchases? Maybe Amazon would eventually give in. There are many places to buy computers online.

Am I missing something?
Well, you could say that the internet was not a totally unique thing in itself, but just another (big) forward step in the ever-improving telecommunications sector, which had already seen the expansion of telegraphs, radio, telephones, and so on, and would also have represented big improvements in communication capacity.
Unfortunately, sysadmins have resolutely refused to make the right choices, thus forcing the issue.
Provide some examples.

Thinking back to my bachelor pad days you are correct for processed stuff like making your own PB&J sandwich from bottled peanut butter and jam and purchased sliced bread. I'd end up throwing out moldy bread and jelly and rancid old peanut butter. Ironically to save money I had to cook healthier, stir fries of frozen veg and deli meat, salads I could eat in a day or two, fruits and veggies, stuff like that.

I could buy a hot dog from a hot dog stand or make my own at seemingly lower expense, but if I made my own hot dog there is no way I could gulp down a whole package of hot dogs and bag of buns at once, and of course the package sizes are different and the LCD is quite large, so I'd toss an opened package of hot dogs after some days of it looking or smelling questionable, or toss moldy hot dog buns, and swear off "cooking".

But boiling a wiener and putting it in a bun is not what most people mean by home cooking, nor assembling a PB and J sandwich.

Generally speaking you can save money by cooking at home, but not by assembling processed components at home. Or at least its much harder. I don't think I can run a net profit off homemade pizza if its made with pre-made store bought crusts.
Eating a gluten free diet often means avoiding junk foods such as bread, pasta, etc. So those people might be wrong in that they aren't gluten sensitive, but they're probably right that their diet improved their health.
Backpage has been investigated for human traffiking and the sex trade

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-16/can-prose...

and here is an article on the link between human trafficking and internet pornography

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johnhenry-westen/want-to-stop-...
All this gets me thinking back to the micros and how they booted straight into a BASIC interpreter.

I grew up in that era, and I'm still nostalgic about it. On the other hand, a tablet PC plus Jupyter/Python comes pretty darn close to satisfying that need.
This is a good question. I think there is certainly some consumer surplus not captured in GDP statistics, though it doesn't necessarily undermine my point.

That said, your example of curing disease is a bad case of the broken window fallacy. No longer having to combat specific diseases 1) leaves people healthy and able to contribute to economic activity, and 2) leaves the people previously employed in medical fields able to take other jobs.

Maybe in 2016, where there's a seeming lack of jobs in the developed world, that's not a clear driver of economic growth, but in 1916, it was.
Adam Ruins Everything - The Truth About the McDonald's Coffee Lawsuit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNWh6Kw3ejQ
> You get to choose your friends--you don't get to choose your conworkers.

I don't like that you say this. For us introverted folks, that's the only way some of us meet. This is, in a way, questioning the sincerity of my friendship with my coworker... with whom I'm now connected with pretty intimately. I know I became close with this person because I was forced to be with her 7 hours a day every weekday for 3 years. No way I would have become so connected were it not for this weird scenario.

And besides, when choosing friends myself I'm probably going to find like-minded people... life is more exciting the other way... and that's more likely to happen when relationships are made without your choice.
Agree. Multiple backups alone won't protect you from bit rot though. But they are definitely the foundation because without them you have no chance.
We'll get there. We're very close actually. We took a huge hit in the 1990s when Bill Gates use chilling effects to try to own the software industry.

The web finally recovered with things like Chrome that got browser competition going again, and Facebook Apps that reminded us we can make our own stores and ecosystems of import.

The next big hit setback was the cloud transition. Servers are just super useful and they are orders of magnitude harder to administer than a PC. This consolidated power amongst sysadmins (and away from users and coders). That has driven the slide back towards proprietary web apps.

But we have been slowly chipping away at the complexity differential between administering a server and using a laptop. See Heroku, etc. We're not there but we're very close to the world where you can spin up a server as easily as you download apps.

Then of course the most recent hit is Apple and the App Store. We eealized there is some value to having a trusted third party curate a collection of software.

And again, we don't have tools to allow people to do that in a decentralized way, but we'll get there.

The question to me is: will free software always be playing catch up? Is this a forever thing?

I think no: it's a disruptive technology with an inherent differentiating factor (access by default, vs paywall by default). I think we're still getting to feature parity with the proprietary development culture, but when we do I think the fortunes of centralized/decentralized will reverse.

But we'll see! 2043 at the latest, if anyone wants to wager.
Okay, I'll answer them.

> Why shouldn't someone have an opinion on things?

The commenter I replied to doesn't know whether kernel devs are paid, thinks this is a case of getting yelled at by your boss, and seems to not understand why people work on the project.

Does that answer your question?

> Who are you to tell the parent commenter not to?

The parent commenter is calling someone "abusive" in a situation that they clearly aren't involved in and seem pretty clueless about. If I suggest they not do that, does it really matter who I am?
I don't disagree that this law could be passed. I'm asking, in regards to this specific bill, why you feel that porn being an "obscene" activity means that it should be blocked by a state-controlled censorship paywall.
Vala is one of the most underestimated great languages!
Ask HN: What's the value proposition of RISC-V?
I've been seeing more interest in RISC-V lately, I suppose due to the recent RISC-V workshop at the end of November:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=risc-v

I can see how the architecture is of benefit for academic research, given how conservative all the other ones are with regard to protecting their IP. Some of the NDA related hoops I've had to jump through as an embedded developer have had a direct revenue impact on past projects, so I'm pretty motivated to avoid that nonsense by supporting a neutral, open, consortium-backed architecture instead.

However, if I put my business hat on and am preparing to bid on a project, I find myself without a strong argument for favoring RISC-V instead of ARM or MIPS. I can make an argument for the usual open source benefits of design longevity and avoiding vendor lock-in, but it's a really hard sell when it boils down to SiFive versus essentially the entire rest of the semiconductor industry.

Is there something I'm missing about RISC-V? Some commercial advantage I'm not aware of?
This is a very light treatment of an important case.
It didn't go into the extensive surgery she had, and that her case wasn't for $20K, it was just to pay for her medical expenses.

Also, though maybe not important in this article, was the logic behind the jury's award. They placed the award at 2 days worth of McD's nationwide coffee sales.

But I am glad that they did mention the other 700+ suits filed against McDs, but they should have gone into a little more depth about how McDs used its extensive legal department to squash those complaints. A practice that still continues today.

Edit: And for more interesting reads, check out the Stella Awards site. Now defunct, it was devoted to finding really stupid law suits, and debunking urban legend law suits. The quoted aim was to show that there is a real issue with US law suits, that doesn't need fake "I microwaved my poodle because the instructions didn't let me know that was bad" to let people know there is an issue.

I teach lawyers English, and one of my more fun classes is mixing up a bunch of true and fake lawsuits and watching them try to figure out which is which.

Pro-Tip: The more ridiculous sounding ones are actually real.

Case in point - a couple who lost their 2 year old in a lawnmower accident at day care found out that the day care only had a $100K insurance policy. So they dropped the case against the day care center and sued the manufacturer of the lawn mower.

There was a safety feature that was invented 16 years after the mower was built that the mower didn't have. No recall statement or after action was specified by authorities. The jury awarded the couple a $2M award.
The rule sounds absurd on its own, but makes perfect sense when you read the example.
In his world "finding the time" to do the running counts as part of the effort. I swim farther than that each year an see no acomplishment in such a distance.
> And if you think I'm wrong, ask yourself why GDP growth has been so anemic in the age of the Internet.

Global GDP growth has been fairly steady for 40+ years. http://www.worldeconomics.com/papers/Global%20Growth%20Monit...
C'mon people. We're trying to use facts to negotiate.

In the USA post 2017, everybody is entitled to their own facts, but not their own opinions.

So, it's entirely pointless to use facts (such as the fact that the internet is hard to censor even with Great Firewall of China scale infrastructure) in conversations with elected officials.

Facts are in the eye of the beholder. Facts are just "smart" people yakking away spouting stuff that's contrary to established opinion. So, our facts are wrong. Get over it. We can't convince people whose livelihood depend on sticking to established opinion.

How do you counter this kind of stuff?

1. Say yes.
2. Do whatever you were doing before.
3. If a jurisdiction imposes some kind of tax on some kind of product, just say that it's contrary to established opinion for businesses to collect new taxes for governments.
4. Do whatever you were doing before.

I lived for a while in an open-town-meeting town in New England. Occasionally the townspeople would vote in two contradictory articles, giving contradictory instructions to the town manager or public works department.

In those cases, the moderator often said, "It's possible the town manager won't be able to obey article 7 without violating article 8. Do you want to do anything about that before we adjourn tonight? Do I hear a motion to reconsider?" THAT's the way to deal with this stuff: let the legislative machinery deal with conflicts in established opinion.
If it's literally Zuckerberg building all this, I bet it's full of security holes (not that he's a bad dev, I wouldn't know, just that one dev can't reasonably be expected to develop a secure app at a pace even remotely quickly).

Dunno what that means, just that it would be mildly funny if someone used this fact to try to get a job at Facebook or something.
React Native Calculator
I'm not sure who these guy's target market is.

The annual plan for $300/yr costs $25 a pound, the monthly costs more. Coffee should not cost $25 a pound, no matter how hipster and unique the experience is, it's coffee.
I suspect that buying something that is a good idea and bring it to commercial success is what an accomplished founder should be best at doing. A successful founder is usually good at telling a better idea from a worse idea ahead of time, when the competition hasn't yet done the same.

A successful founder is usually good at execution, so the next logical step is to bring the idea to fruition. OTOH coming up with a new and worthy idea by oneself is much harder: most good-looking ideas do not survive a contact with the reality.

This is why Google came up with Maps and Android, both hugely successful, by acquisition. This is why Facebook got its iconic "Like" functionality by acquisition.

As you noted, coming up with an idea and following it through to making millions off it is a lottery. Acquiring a good idea in a semi-product shape and making millions off it is also a lottery, but with much better odds. Guess what an intelligent person would choose more often, given the choice.
I was thinking the same that JavaScript might not be a very suitable as a starting point. Maybe a more traditional language would fit the bill.
Such strong opinions.

> GC sucks

> android app

Android's runtime is not the Java Runtime. I'm starting to think Oracle should have at least gotten some damages from Google for causing so many people to think that the stuff running on Android is the Java and getting people like this guy vocally misplacing the blame.

> name clash: X and Y have the same erasure

Programmer unfamiliarity. Consume a List<T> with one function.

> Methods With the Same Name as Constructors

Constructors are never void. Obviously, because they have to return the object.

> Inner classes Don't Work

This is a quip. What's the critique?

There are a handful of reasonable points but the overall product is not. Furthermore, the pre-emptive rebuttals make it clear that there's no convincing them.
Yes. This is the software "engineer" answer. Nothing sacred, each choice is simply a trade off. Sometimes an FP lense is the best one to view and tackle the problem with, when it's not you use something else. You don't strain or try to unnaturaly shift the goal posts--you use something else.
Wasn't that case then used to justify laws making “frivolous” lawsuits harder?
That was 700 complaints out of 171 BILLION customers over the course of 10 years. This is statistically nothing.
I think the fact that people with good track records are more likely to get a good ROI is mostly a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Everyone buys into the same illusion; that because someone succeeded before, that means they must have the secret sauce for success. In doing so, they forget the thing that actually matters; the product/service.
Answer:

When you have money to burn, just want bodies in the door by a certain date, and don't really care about quality or fit of candidates you hire.

Longer Answer:

Recruiters fuck up. A lot. They work on commission, so it's just a numbers game to them. They screen out good candidates because they look for interviewing skills, or communication / sales skills, or ability to complete LinkedIn profiles... signals that aren't nearly as important to the job as they are to the job application process. Additionally, recruiters don't tend to have the background to know how to screen technical talent.

You are the best judge of your company needs and culture. Hiring the wrong person is very costly -- money, time, productivity, and frustration. Hire an incompetent manager, and you may lose the entire team of junior talent under him. With all this in mind, it's always OK to carve out some time for interviews. You know first-hand what really matters and what you're really looking for -- you can make the judgement call on compromises in real-time.

What I tell my clients who say they can't find talent is to make sure they have built up their farm system. Budget time for their team members to network and socialize -- as part of work. Make sure it's the sort of place where your current employees want to tell their friends about job openings. Sponsor some Meetup groups, host some public lunch and learns, participate in career fairs, be active on social media... way better use of your company resources than paying recruiter commission.
These are all long term solutions, and good ones. But life isn't always that simple. Why let one bad dev ruin it for everybody else? It's a bit like one person being rude. Would you leave for that? I meant it more in a "accept it and move on" way. To be honest, if you're in a similar situation at MegaCorp Inc, you already have to put up with many things out of your control.

But should we as professionals an answer to this problem? Or is it a management problem? (Although that's a cop-out, because that's still part of our profession). Is it human nature? Do other professions suffer from similar situations? These are interesting questions, to which I have no answer yet.
Not necessarily true https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?la...
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...
GitHub is doing much better than Bloomberg thinks
Ask HN: Tips for goal setting in 2017?
> What does plain vanilla adult materials have to do with child trafficking????!

Yea, it's basically a morality tax wrapped in child-protection language. To a certain puritanical set, the difference is indistinguishable. It's a similar rhetorical strategy to saying that anti-gay laws are for the protection of children, or anti-trans laws are for the protection of cis women.
> We both agree that there is something to be done.

Right, and if there is enough of that to be done it makes more sense to hire someone to do it specifically, so that the senior/lead developer's time can be spent more effectively.

> I personally noticed that it doesn't have to be assigned to an full time manager position.

In my experience it's much more about the quality of the manager. Unless you're in a company of only 10 people or so there are almost always more things a good manager can find to help with.

On the other hand, even having every member of the dev team being swamped with management/coordination work is better than putting a bad manager over them.
For some reason over the past few years I've been waiting to hear that Snapchat has gone under. Never really thought they would execute.

I still think they're one slip up away from disappearing, but I've got to give them credit for building the way they did.
Astronomers release largest digital survey of the visible Universe
How would standards be lost? The exact same change in behavior is being requested, just more politely.

I think it's insulting because it's an implied value judgment on a person as a person, not just a judgment on the work.

I don't understand why you don't think it's insulting. If I'm trying to do my job, and you come in and shit all over me in public because I made a mistake, which one of us is the problem? Would you really want to work for someone who thinks it's okay to do that as a management technique?
> lot of hoops to jump through, coupled with equally many gotchas

In fact, it looks like a lot more gotchas than, for example, GNUStep...
The other side's point of view: http://www.hotcoffeetruth.com/
Ah interesting.. I just assumed it was actually spec'd out-of-document, so shame on me :)
The Primordial Fertility of Rock
Am I missing a joke here?

Interface builder, xibs and storyboards are very useful tools for even extremely large projects. Makes building and maintaining the UI extremely easy.

The idea that because a tool is easy to use is somehow indicative of the skill of the person using the tool, is completely bogus. Interface builder has a lot of advanced features for setting up complicated UI.

You could quite easily argue the opposite for someone who needlessly creates all of their UI in code rather then in interface builder.