skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What's the best laptop for a programmer that isn't a MacBook Pro?
I'm soon graduating from college and I'm looking to upgrade my 4 year old laptop. I'm not looking to buy a MacBook as I run Linux full time and I intend to continue doing it. I want to know what the programmers at HN would consider to be a good machine given that:

- It should be under $2000, preferably closer to $1500.

- It should have upgradeable parts, which preferably includes the RAM

- Decent battery life as I'm not looking to work from a café the whole time. Anything over 6hrs is great.

- Good screen. But not a touch screen. Preferably matte.

- Discrete graphics is good, but not required.

- The manufacturer provides reasonably good service for its products.

At this moment I'm looking at Dell XPS 15 and Thinkpad T460. I'm actually looking for personal opinions because a machine is more than the sum of its parts.
BlackBerry Joins Self-Driving Car Race with Its Own Software
Republics don't really solve the problem of the people making poor decisions based on bad information. They just introduce a layer of indirection, punting the problem to the election of the "handful of trusted individuals." In order to truly get around the problem of misinformed voters, we'd need a metarepublic to determine which individuals can be trusted to represent our interests in the republic — and then it's turtles all the way down.
Resigning from Oracle – George A. Polisner
Exploring Fitness Data in R
The Wirecutter suggests the TP-Link Archer C7: http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-wi-fi-router/

There's an implication along with this that "best casual" also includes "affordable". If not, the best casual router is the same as the best non-casual router - I'm happy with my Google OnHub router but it's more expensive and depending on your use case (and mine, to be honest, but I've already bought the thing) it might not be worth the extra cost. Over the years I've become less enthusiastic to do things like flash DD-WRT to my router and to instead just pay money for something that I will never have to touch again.
MAUs from 8% to 48% in One Year (and One Move)
This site[1] says it's because people conflate content with illustration. It also cites Hacker News as an offender (although looking at their screenshot to what I'm seeing, I think it was "fixed")

[1] http://contrastrebellion.com/
this chrome extension, octotree https://goo.gl/BZRqop, is very helpful for reading code on github. Reading github is how I started learning how repos are structured and how to read other people's code when I was early in my cs degree.
According to a LinkedIn query, admittedly a coarse metric for current headcount, Snapchat has 1290 current employees (includes founders, etc as well) [1]. Crunchbase says 101–250. They seem to have somewhat intentionally disappeared off of AngelList with just 3 employees listed.

Edit: LinkedIn is not too far off from what's mentioned in the article:

> The top-secret Snap Labs group overseeing the Spectacles is such a priority that the group earlier this year set a goal of hiring 200 people in just sixty days, according to the staffer who left. The hiring plan was especially aggressive for a company whose total headcount is just above 1,000 employees.

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?f_CC=3186630&trk=rr_conne...
That was a compelling, well thought-out intellectual answer to my question. Somehow I am not surprised.

And it confirms that this is all about winning at any cost. Yep, sounds about right.
Same for us at Reddit. Howdy, neighbor!
> I don't expect to be able to claim a UK state pension -- they can just keep putting up the minimum age from 65, to 66 to 70 to 75 to 80

What would be the point of doing this? Whose interest does it serve? It does not serve the banks' interest. It does not serve the politicians' interest. It does not serve your interest.
Berlin Breitscheidplatz: Lorry kills nine at Christmas market
A No-Nonsense Machiavelli
Thanks, I haven't read 3-5, I'll definitely check those out! Dune is incredible, although it always felt a little too much like epic fantasy for my tastes.
Go Hack Yourself
Data Science vs. BI vs. Statistics: What's the Difference?
Ruby Skye was the one of the it places, back in the day.

Hidden Vine was also chill.

I just don't understand a nightclub that cannot make money with drink prices, cover, events and promos... unless rent is too high and/or in the wrong place.
The game industry's disposable workers
I agree, I've found myself tweaking site CSS often lately as well. To some designers' argument that there's no such thing as true black I say that this is a limitation, not an ideal. https://bestmotherfucking.website/#grey-text

Were my JS fundamentals a little stronger, I'd work on a browser add-on to detect low-contrast body text and improve it automatically.
The queen does not rule
I love Material Design and so does everyone else,so I'm definitely in the target group. Thank you for making this.
Peter Lambert wrote his own guide on getting a perfect SSL Labs score by tweaking the go HTTP server config (https://blog.bracebin.com/achieving-perfect-ssl-labs-score-w...). Both of these articles are a good quick read for Gophers.
There have been and will be improvements. Go 1.8 improves timeouts.

They are constrained to some extent by the Go 1 compatibility promise, for example they don't want to change default behaviour on timeouts probably because of that. Hopefully if they have a Go 2 at some point they'll use that opportunity to clean up some APIs and fix a few things like this.
Like Google Plus reduced the need to use Facebook.

Instagram's efforts seem to accommodate (and be championed by) so-called "influencers," people who make funny videos or pose half naked to attract large numbers of followers, and then cash in by promoting herbal teas, waist trainers, clothing brands, apps, etc.

That's the community Instagram is cultivating, and since there are large audiences following this stuff, apparently it's a good business strategy. Still, Snapchat is targeting a different audience by not courting influencers. We may end up with two platforms with similar features but with different demographics.
I think a more appropriate example scenario would be something like this: You are driving through the desert with a truck full of food and water. You come upon an old couple whose car has broken down, hundreds of miles from the nearest town. They beg you for help, offering anything for some water. As a shrewd negotiator, you assess the current market situation and offer a gallon of water in exchange for the woman's diamond earrings and the man's gold ring. This is a win/win scenario! They get to stay alive a little longer, and you get a great deal on some jewelry. No coercion needed, and since both sides entered into the deal voluntarily who can complain! As you drive off, you smile to yourself at the thought of how wonderful it was that everyone acted in their own self interest and managed to improve their situation.
Well everything to do with the RBI regulations on bitcoin in India. The end outcome is that bitcoin is not a viable option to solve the India payment problem.
And an assignation of an Russian ambassador in Turkey by their policemen ... it will be one of those days. again.
Apple said there are 2 billion Siri requests made per week.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/13/11906654/apple-wwdc-2016-n...
"Start Small, Stay Small" is a great book that really goes into detail about this. Highly recommend it!

(No affiliation, just really like it)
IBM’s Role in the Holocaust (2012)
Not true...Philips did at least a 74F and 74HCT version, and TI did a 74AS181. Weirdly, Hitachi did a 74AC182 (lookahead carry generator for '181), but AFAIK only the 74HC181. Never figured that one out. There's also an ECL version (MC10181).

If you jumped to the 74381 you could get nifty things like the IDT7381 or L4C381, which are the equivalent of 4 '381s in a PLCC package that ran at a 25ns cycle (faster, I think, as well).
Most of your "heck yes" people will disappear or forget anything about having that conversation within a few days as well.

Also, discount anyone who has any reason to please you. Their responses are often biased and not helpful towards validation.
Mimicking biological movements with soft robots
Try looking at these recent HN discussions:

Introducing a new kind of Wi-Fi system
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637230

Ask HN: Best current model routers for OpenWRT, DD-WRT, Tomato, etc.?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13113766
Solve Problems, not Stawmen
I like this characteristic of OLEDs. When I'm reading a book on my phone in low light I like to set the background to black and text to white. It significantly lowers the light output of the screen in that scenario compared to a traditional LCD. That factor alone made me prefer my Galaxy S5 over my gen1 kindle fire for reading despite the screen size.
> There is plenty of housing being built that is not "luxury high rises," though even plenty of those are being built too--parts of Silver Spring have been transformed over the past decade.

That is even less true. There's almost no affordable housing being built in the Silver Spring or Bethesda/Rockville area.

All the condos in new construction start at ~$300k for a 1BR, which is definitely not in the affordable category.

Still waiting for those counterexamples with Zillow listings and the such.
Retiring SHA-1 certificates
As someone who worked on a whole lot of integration projects in the recent past, I think network APIs can be "solved", but not by the means this article describes.

JSON-LD looks like a reimplementation of something that was already done by XML, XML Schemas and WSDL. If several technologies that were designed to be semantic failed at automating network API integration, why would you think a sub-format for JSON will succeed? What does it do differently?

To really solve the problem of service integration we need to rethink our approach to "services" altogether.

One solution that I see would involve a global registry of semantic symbols (e.g. "temperature", "location", "time") and a constraint solver. So yeah, distributed Prolog on the global scale. Systems would exchange constraints until they reach a mutually agreeable solution or fail. Then the derivation tree would be used to generate a suitable protocol. While I think this is possible, I don't think there is any real interest in stuff like this right now.
Yes PayPal works if you have it linked to a credit/debit card that allows international payments. The problem in only a small percentage of Indian cards are able to be used to make international payments.
> Perhaps this seems a bit lazy, but I think of reading code as similar to reading books or articles: not everything is worth the same level of investment.

The point of reading code is to understand it. How to read code efficiently depends also on language and coding style. Which would require full blown IDEs just for proper code navigation. And honestly: If setting up an IDE for the language you want to read is too much trouble, programming is and therefore there is no need to read code at all.

EDIT: When I review code that reads like a book, the programmer immediately makes into my hall of fame. Such code is so rare that its coders should be paid their weight in gold - per hour.
In at least one startup I worked for, the founder sat in the same open office as everyone else (except the sales team that had a sound-insulated room). The company was about 50 people, though, about an order of magnitude smaller than Snapchat.
Driving Down Memory Lane in the Original Minivan
Personalized prices are difficult to manage, partly because they can be gamed, and partly because it's bad PR.

I'm trying to enable it on a larger scale with https://icanpriceit.com/. But that's explicitly opt in: you name the price, and understand that you won't get a better price than you put in. You're trading the possibility of even lower prices for the ability to name your own price and have us fulfil it if it's within our minimum margin.

I can't see Amazon doing it, at least not within the next couple of years.
Anything which involves serious preparation. Really good Ratatouille for example.
For me, my preference for languages like C and Go (work and fun) and Java/C# (work only) has nothing to do with "expressiveness" - in fact, I can't even think of a language less expressive than Java - but with the fundamental truth that computers store state and programming is about modifying that state.

And when I play around with Haskell or any other functional language, I love the expressiveness, but I hate how abstracted away the actual state modifications are and how we like to pretend we live in some "pure" mathematical land without state (that sadly doesn't exist).

I love the beauty of Haskell but hate having to muck around with monads - I just want to poke that memory address right there and flip that bit thank you very much.
After all that, your low-brow partner in crime picks up a rock, smashes a window, and bob's your uncle.
HttpClient has no usable defaults. In fact, you can't even make a usable file downloader because of the way it handles timeouts, you have to write your own.
You say unethical, I say its not. What happens now ? Do we fight ? The exactness/objectiveness of law/contract is their for a reason.
It's interesting that when discussing car traffic, knowledgeable people rely heavily on concepts like induced demand, and remedies like congestion charging and mass transit.

But when the issue is net neutrality, issues about fairness and equality reign supreme. The complete opposite approaches are preferred--flat fees, minimization of priority routing, more exchanges and less centralization, and a commitment to maintaining the packet-based IP infrastructure rather than moving to more specialized (if less flexible) "mass transit" protocols.

Obviously there are plenty of good reasons for the dichotomy to exist. And I'm not challenging the normative goals regarding net neutrality, nor net neutrality as the means. But certainly in the short-term net neutrality can require expensive solutions (technologically, financially, and politically). We do it more-or-less successfully because so-far the consensus by-and-large is that long-term it provides an optimum environment for technological growth and economic mobility.

While I'm all for mass transit projects, I think our community really sells short the benefit of personal transit. And especially in the United States, we fixate on solutions that are basically untenable. Yes, the fiscal, technical, and structural problems with personal transit only grow more significant at scale, but recognizing that does not require admitting defeat.

The U.S. is unlikely to ever see mass transit on the scale of London, Seoul, Tokyo, and various Chinese cities. For social and geopolitical reasons, our future is almost certainly going to rely heavily on personalized transit. I hope and expect subway systems to grow by leaps and bounds, but the demographic shift back to the dense urban core will have its limit, and in absolute terms suburban commutes are likely to continue to dominate transit planning. Also, as the rich swap places with the poor and working-class, an excessive focus on mass transit will only exacerbate inequality of income, of wealth, and of economic and social mobility.

I say this as someone who _loves_ mass transit. I'd cut off a finger if it made a Geary Blvd subway a reality in San Francisco.
And for anyone interested the record for the race is 20:25:00 by the legendary Yannis Kouros.
I wonder if you might be approaching the problem from the wrong direction. In all likelihood, you're not going to make any grave mistakes -- you're just going to make food slightly below par a couple times until you hone in your cooking skills. It's probably worth practicing cooking some simple meals until that sense of paranoia diminishes rather than trying to cater to it.

(I honestly used to avoid cooking because I wasn't good at it -- the only thing to "fix" that was to start cooking, and now I feel comfortable with it and cook all the time)
The code example you give isn't an example of evaluation order, it's an example of different expressions not giving the same result.

Order of evaluation being irrelevant means that when evaluating

(cons 'a (cons 'b nil))

it doesn't matter whether you first create the outer or inner cons cell. Or, for that matter, whether you do anything at all at this point (you could for instance just suspend the entire expression as a thunk and only evaluate them when you try and access values within the list -- i.e. lazy evaluation).
There's pretty much no food in a modern supermarket that will be unhealthy/kill you if you don't cook it. Like, even meat you could pretty much eat raw. But it is easier to digest and healthier when prepared properly and that comes with practice.

Start cooking. Any vegetable can be boiled and any meat or fish can be grilled/fried. You'll figure out with time how to make things tasty, just avoid too much sugar and too much salt. And don't eat anything if it tastes like crap, that will save you from most unhealthy things.
I am glad to hear that corporate cards can also be activated. It looks like the best option is far is provide customers with a guide on how to activate their cards. Still pretty high friction, but at least it is a viable solution.
Most big companies (Google, Facebook, Adobe, etc.) have internal UI frameworks that you share amongst 100s of developers and dozens of projects. Your interviewer should not ding you using code to build your UI. If anything, that's a plus as it should help you have a deeper understanding of how UIKit pieces things together.
As if that guy had any clue what are "javascript" "drive by" or "DDoS".

Might as well have sent an email in chinese.
I would not want to be in charge of filing the Environmental Impact Statement for such a facility.
You may want to try: http://photonkit.com/
I think people who clap back like this assume the indigenous groups were able to negotiate with full, symmetrical information and legal leverage. The article reflects history in this regard, suggesting that they did not.
ad hominem. Attack the arguments presented in the video, not the arguers.

edit: the message that I replied too got heavily edited after the fact.
this is a guy who has multiple armed security guards outside hit home 24/7. Plus the fact he almost certainly has staff and assistants who are coming and going from the house. There is no way you make it to the front door if you are not expected, this is just to save his staff from having to use the key or for someone to open the door for them. This would never be secure enough for a normal persons house
> Would you want to hire a 40-year old programmer who had just spent the last 3 months flipping burgers because he couldn't find a job?

I wouldn't care, personally. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Also, that implies that you have to disclose your entire employment history. You can skip over jobs that don't directly apply to the job you're currently applying for.

> The stigma is real and it's more than just pride.

No, it's pretty much just pride. There's no stigma, at least in my social circles. To take care of your kids and your family you do whatever it is that needs doing.
Totally agree. A inbuilt story for concurrency helps to create a solid and mostly unified ecosystem around the language, especially around anything that is IO related.

The contrast to these are C++ systems, where nearly each application and framework has it's own eventloop integration (and/or coroutine implementations, thread models, futures, ...). This means integration between various libraries gets super hard and code reuse isn't that big.

The only language I can think of which isn't super opinionated but get's now halfway standardized APIs is C#, due to the standardization on Task<T> APIs and async/await.

It will get pretty interesting what the future will bring for Rust and Swift, as these are not opinionated either.
A Lifetime of Learning to Code
I would generally agree an IDE should be the best place, but I've had trouble in practice. Maybe I haven't leaned on those features enough? My trouble with a brand new codebase (framework, language, or library) is sussing out separation of concerns (usually split between files/functions/modules) and flow of code. An IDE should definitely help navigate those things (sometimes you need to actually run the code and look in a debugger).

One reason a website might be more handy is skimming codebases you don't actually intend to build and compile. I do this to new projects all the time to stuff I see here (generally on GitHub). I'll also often look into the cPython codebase because I use Python, but it's very rare I have the need to download and build it.
From his home in Russia, Calexit leader plans secession
What communities and groups are you a member of?

The only way you get to meet new people as you get older is by making a concerted effort to participate in events and to try and make a wider group of friends in general.
Paranoid cooking as in "how can I be sure what I'm cooking isn't toxic"?

I started cooking relatively late in my life, and the lesson is: unless you're doing something strange, it's really hard to poison yourself by cooking. Also: real cooks improvise, they don't follow a recipe set in stone.

You can always screwup and cook something that doesn't taste nice (especially by overcooking), but if you mix and cook random vegetables, chicken, rice, etc, you'll generally have something edible and non-poisonous. If you follow an actual recipe it's even better, of course. Eventually you'll learn some tricks (e.g. sautéed onions go with everything and smell nice).

I suppose stay away from seafood or anything you're unsure of how (long) to cook.
> Could actually see a "flash of unstyled content" on my desktop PC. No biggie, but that makes me think about just how overkill I want to go with VueJS. (edit: wondering also if they precompiled those templates with vue-loader?)

yeah, I agree that seems a misconfigured vue-loader/webpack issue. but when you do approach overkill, however you choose to define it, vue's server-side rendering starts to make a lot of sense. personally I wouldn't use a JS framework without SSR because progressive enhancement is important to me, but that's a digression.
I wasn't making a specific claim regarding Amazon vs. Apple. Just pointing out that scale, and thus time-in-market, does have competitive meaning in this context.
Check out this recent comment and discussion. User TeMPOraL describes a similar wish and gets many nice responses.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13020845
Adoption is not the same as appropriateness at all.

As far as memory usage goes these benchmarks are completely irrelevant. They use very little memory and they measure it in a way that is unsuitable for a memory benchmark in the first place.

The problem with tracing garbage collection is that it requires a lot (~50%) of spare memory at all times to give the GC time to catch up without slowing the program down too much.
If this were true, the next 100 years we would have no progress. Unless one says "All of the ideas are taken, but few have executed on those ideas"
Because the author of this article is hoping this goes viral. If this goes viral, he is going to receive a lot of emails from people wanting to donate money to him and offer him jobs.

The author knows exactly what he is doing and he is succeeding. I'm certain he will either have several thousand dollars in donations or a high-paying job by the end of the week.

This is the age of entitlement. You only have to do what you feel like doing and feelings are all that matter.