skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The main languages I use with work are:

* C

* Scheme (Gambit)

* Python 3.4

* Pony

I find all of them frustrating at times.

Python's dynamism is nice, but it's so damn inflexible, requiring my to follow the One True Way.

That can be good, and makes it easier to eliminate bad code in reviewing.

But it also means that you can fight with the interpreter to do what you want.

Scheme gives me both dynamism and flexibility, with less speed tradeoffs. Yay!

However, there was someone on my team obsessed with turning everything into a macro.

What's the point of first-class functions if you just macro everything?

Also, Scheme's stdlib is purposefully small, so you sometimes need to reinvent the wheel. Thankfully Scheme makes it both easy and pleasurable to do so.

The rundown is, though fast and dynamic, code review can be painful unless you follow standards, and you might run up against, "Oh... I need to build my own FTP library", though SLIB (depending on your circumstances), can eliminate some of that.

C's compiler feels like a breath of fresh air after that.

Unless you hit a runtime error, it makes writing code a breeze, quickly and efficiently.

Unfortunately, it doesn't protect you against yourself, or lazy people on the team trying to use void pointers for everything.

So code review can be harder, and catching edge case segmentation faults can be quite difficult.

Enter, Pony.

Pony deals with the same areas Rust does, but for reasons I won't go into, when both Rust and Pony were young, my team started using Pony for a few little things.

It has been... An experience.

Pony is very type safe, it is exception safe, and data race free, all enforced by the compiler.

Which sometimes means the compiler will sit there bashing your code for a full day before you realise that you weren't writing it safe enough, and you can't just tweak it, the whole thing needs to be rewritten.

Also, the Actor Model being central to everything can be quite annoying, when you just need to fit a couple extra functions in somewhere, but you aren't sure where's best.

However:

The compiler doesn't let you screw up.

What you do write can become massively concurrent fast programs, easily.

Pony also has some fairly good documents, for such a young language that really doesn't have the backing of Rust.

So...

I get frustrated with any language I am forced to deal with over time.

I wish Python had compile-time contracts, but there is mypy to ease the pain now.

I wish Scheme had a better stdlib, but it goes against the ethos. (See RSR6 community breakdown).

I wish C was safer, but it's lack of safety makes it easier to do things like JIT.

I wish Pony was more flexible, but it'll never let me point a shotgun at my own foot.

If I spend too long in any world... It's time for a breath of fresh air.
For experimenting and throwing an example together. So you have something in mind, maybe a wireframe or something one of your designers has made, or a customers existing site.

You go to bootstrap, hook into the CDN and start throwing some tags down. Boom. Bootstrap have you, you've invested time, effort and emotion into it. 90% of coders move on to the next profit making exercise. I know I did.... Sure, there are better CSS frameworks out there. But bootstrap is better than the crufty stuff we used to use, so it's win win win for me.
The idea for the TXR extraction language came from simply wanting to do the inverse of what "here document" interpolation does: have some text with variables, and have that match a similar text, binding pieces to the variables. I had a passing familiarity with pattern matching (as in logic programming) without much actual experience using or coding that sort of thing. I wasn't aware of how SNOBOL works, and also wasn't aware of PEGs. I just started implmenting and adding ideas as they occurred to me.

The pattern language is basically equivalent to PEGs, which can be seen from the examples of arithmetic expression and JSON parsing.

When I added functions, and hence recursion, I knew that the matching would increase in theoretical power from just regular languages to context-free. But only when I used it to implement some parsing it hit me that the code is basically just grammar rules that execute. After that when I encountered PEGs in some paper, the material was obvious.

Someone told me some years ago that it reminded them of SNOBOL in some ways. That made me curious, so that I researched SNOBOL a bit.

The directives which capture or assert a chracter or line position might have been influenced by SNOBOL. :)

http://www.nongnu.org/txr/txr-manpage.html#N-02D5D09D
I usually ask about what the candidate has worked on. Or maybe the topic of their PhD thesis. I prefer that people explain to me what they know instead of having a list of questions about what I know.
Oh, I'm aware of the MediCal providers, because my friends have to use them. That's what Obamacare coverage gets you -- access to the cheapest doctors, or the ones who are willing to essentially donate their time.

The only reason I'm against "repeal and replace" is because I expect the end result will be worse than the ACA. The system is fundamentally broken, but still getting stuff done. In the way that many major software projects are. If the Congress was willing to write their own code instead of outsourcing it to lobbyists, I might be a little more confident in the results.
- Ecological fortitude as you say. Good for food but cleaning up our other messes which can harm us.

- Biodiversity helps us understand life better by providing exceptions to dogmas

- Biodiversity is the crowning achievement of this earth and would take along time to recover. We can colonize other planets more easily than we can replicate our biodiversity on them.
You should never store or work with dates as unix epoch-based timestamps. Use proper date/time datatypes, and manipulate them with library functions. Naive integer arithmetic on unix timestamps will bite you in the ass a hundred different ways.
Comes from the latest Startup Genome report:
"Its startup density is second only to Silicon Valley and a full 50% higher than its closest follower. How can such a small city compete against cities 10 to 30 times their size such as Rio, Atlanta and Rome?"

http://blog.compass.co/waterloo-the-david-vs-goliath-of-star...

Will add the citation to the Medium post as well.
> the JavaScript on the website is free but doesn't work with analyzers like LibreJS

How hard would it be for GNU to maintain a fork of that instead of maintaining their own codebase?

>GitLab doesn't discourage bad licensing practices

If they host it, they can discourage whatever they want
Take whatever job you can... as far as it's related to the kind of things you want to do.

Forget about the big companies that everyone knows, forget about the high pay that appear in the newspapers. It's not real, it's not for you.

Get an entry or junior level position and get experience. There are many unknown places that will take people only because they're cheap. That's where everyone started.
My inlaws have a bird clock, the kind that plays a different bird song at each hour. Cats figure out which birds to listen for.
It's settled. I'm on vacation, and I'll give it another whirl ;)
we would have hg.

as a user, I'll take premature optimizations over slow as balls any day.
The server returns the certificate of the name given in the SNI, which is the fronted domain, not the real one.
Interesting. I have a statistics/data science background, but personally I find programming much more satisfying.

Programming is a tool to create and synthesize. It leads to new products, companies, and solutions. Data science is analysis, not synthesis. You collect data, you interpret it, you move on to other data. Nothing gets created, which for me, is a deal breaker for job satisfaction.
after correctly doping them with gallium/arsenic/etc. we can call them nano- chips/computers.
This conversation has been hashed and rehashed multiple times, here and elsewhere. If you're curious about people's thoughts on Signal, just read literally any thread about them.

As far as Silent Phone goes, their app isn't open source, so it can't be trusted. That's really as far as the discussion goes.
Understand how you feel about the issue, but as been pointed out to me on other posts that were about Signal, your basically hijacking the thread to cover a topic that is largely unrelated to the post that's the subject of this thread.

---

Per a HN mod:

>> sctb comment: "Please stop harping about this, especially in unrelated threads. It distracts from the thoughtful kind of discourse that this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13046683
Looks like the Million Dollar Challenge has been terminated:

http://web.randi.org/the-million-dollar-challenge.html
This author cuts to the heart of it at the end of the article - the economics of current arts patronage supports an obscuring attitude that makes new ideas deliberately less accessible, else they must be crammed into a hyper-marketable popular formula.

In the same way that we have class or income divides, we have a culture divide through the hard division of "pop" vs. "academic" styles. This divide affects not just the arts, but math, science, philosophy, and related endeavors.
> vision

Could you elaborate on which elements of vision science are relevant? Do you have any examples of what these people end up working on?
What I did (last year) was to make sure they had at least read https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/WindowsForBusiness/End-of-IE....

IT only pushes back because the business users who use old web apps push back. Gotta make sure that IT knows the MSFT no longer has their back and so they need to be more aggressive with the business users and their app vendors.
Thank you for this. It is definitely good, in my opinion, not to forget all his flaws. He was an asshole. But he was also a genius. Most great people are like this, imperfect in some way, and I think it is naive not to recognize that.
Cats don't like being in cages, and they are nocturnal animals.

Personally, I just put him with food and water in the garage (and a trapdoor to go outside), but then I live in the countryside.

If I forget, he wakes me up to go outside anyways...
Stackoverflow Top Tags 2010 to 2016
CRTC (Canada) declares broadband internet access a basic service
How to License Your Work
This hacker-fiction y2k is fun (if quite dated now): https://www.amazon.com/Wyrm-Mark-Fabi/dp/0553578081
I've worked primarily in Java and C++ for the past few years, but also with several dynamic languages. I sometimes miss the expressiveness of Python, but I can't say I'm ever frustrated by a strong type system nor does the compile step annoy me as long as my write-compile-test cycle is reasonably quick (usually achievable). With Java 8, and even more so with Rust, I'm less frustrated by the lack of expressiveness, so I find myself missing dynamic languages even less.
I disagree; this is good feedback that the developers aren't communicating their value prop to a potentially obvious audience (ops teams).
I think I meant single-payer in the way that Medicare works in the U.S. There can be companies who manage it, or supplemental policies, but the primary payer remains the U.S. Government.

So the approach would be to extend Medicare to everyone (or in our case, MediCal). Increase payroll taxes to pay for it; remove the requirement that employers provide health insurance. All other laws remain the same.
Humble Book Bundle – Astronomy
Strongly agree -- resilience against catastrophe is an externality that the market general prices at $0, unless government intervenes.

Simple example: we all benefit from not getting hit by asteroids, but good luck trying to build a profitable business based on that fact.
The Armory Manifesto
U.S. House 'Encryption Working Group': Weak Encryption Harms National Interest
I've moved away from Rust lately (long story), but in my attempts to move to Rust i was blown away by Steve. His presence in the Rust community is staggering, and his efforts truly made a Rust newbie like myself feel very welcome.
This is amazing. Do you have something similar to learn HTML or CSS?
The Most Popular DevOps Stories in 2016
Plus Size Fashion
I'm not really sure what the use case is for this as I don't do a lot of indoor gardening, but it's very well made. Kudos!
> You need opposable thumbs to remove a bolt (even a finger-tight one), so I’m confident this is secure.

> You might say I’ve won this battle. However I just spent 20 hours armor-plating a cat feeder. I think we know who’s really in control here, don’t we?

I find this very disturbing... That said, the final result looks very well-made. Nice hacking!
A very recent commit[0] added +968 as well, but that was made after this update was tagged.

[0] https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/commit/7488...
If I remember right you can specify encoding as an attribute on the extern decl.
There are a few ways to do it, including Unicode superscript and subscript characters rather than formatting. These ones all look a bit different in my browser:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...
2 profiles:

- Research departments that make prototypes that are consistently abandoned and never get any real world usage.

- Actual companies that make prototypes for real business cases that are then shipped to production, maintained and improved as they bring in $$$.

The first experience is of limited value to the world of real business.
Thanks. Also available on Google Music: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/album/B7rnljvunduk...
>But I bet people will welcome documentation contributions with little hesitation.

People should treat documentation issues the same way as critical bugs IMO. Can anyone point me to projects where this is done? e.g. documentation category on a bug tracker, open issues requesting additional documentation.
Thanks for your comment. It has eased some of the anxiety caused by reading through this thread. My current job fits your description. I currently have an analyst role and I spend maybe 25% of my time building predictive models in R. I just haven't had any success finding a role that ups that percentage (and the pay). I know I need to be more patient, but it is difficult.
> We once proposed a 82m tower within a 100m of a subway station in midtown Toronto. The most senior planner at the meeting exploded at us - "Why is there a tower there!?"

I thought the trick to getting an 82m tower built in Toronto was to propose a 182m tower...

I'm not a transit user, but I thought the YUS (North/South) subway lines were (soon to be?) past their saturation point during rush hours.
> Paying a little more up front for what is effectively a permanent insurance policy is a no-brainer for any large organization.

As opposed to paying a little more up front to a third party insurance agency or offering to pay more to the OEM for an optional insurance plan? I don't see your point.

A medical institution will be paying for the insurance one way or another no matter what. It's either fronted by the institution itself, or in the cost of the equipment that they purchase.
You should explain simply that this is not food. Poor dog does not know any difference. Also check if doggy gets enough minerals. :)
(specific to Austin, TX area)
the data science people I've worked with in multiple VC backed companies were not engineers at all. They were either "data scientists" or had engineer tacked on to the name.

I'm continually exposed to new kinds of software engineering roles I never heard of at tech companies. (fwiw software engineer is sometimes still considered an inflated title.)
Not everyone has a house... I wouldn't let my cat out in the middle of Manhattan.

(Even if I think you shouldn't own a cat if you don't have somewhere for it to roam, sometimes, life happens)
> whereas Intel only allows virtualization on Xeon and K-series processors.

I'm not an expert on Intel CPU market segmentation, but I do work for Intel on the i965 Mesa driver. I don't think your statement is true.

See http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?s=t&VTX=true

That's a list of all Intel CPUs with VT-x. It's really easy to narrow down the selection from there. FWIW, I see lots of Skylake i3, i5, and i7s with VT-x.
Retention is greater than Acquisition
Cane/beet sugar is making a comeback, for some reason people seem to think it's healthier than HFCS.
> As far as I know, self-driving cars don't learn to drive better in real time. Instead the data is collected and used to improve the software. There might be frequent software releases (perhaps even every day) but this isn't quite the same thing.

Most self-driving cars probably use some variant of local search[1]. In this case it probably doesn't matter if the agent learns offline or online.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_search_(optimization)
Yes, it's one of those 'joke' things. Stay cool :)
The problem with premature optimization is that most of it has little effect on overall performance. Software performance almost always follows a Pareto distribution.

But, wtf do I know, I'm just some regular person.
Because the processes and mindset won't be setup for it. Decisions will get made in hallway conversations or even in meetings in which no one thought to send out a phone number for the remote employee to attend.

Hence the idea that remote working is probably most effective when companies treat it as the norm--at least on a group by group basis.
Interestingly, I used it on Apple's MkLinux on a Powermac. When I returned to that office, all the retired Powermacs were running it on the operations staff desktops. Felt good.
Certainly a good idea, but sometimes it's difficult to tell if OS functions and 3rd party libraries you depend on are doing that.

The ext4 filesystem in Linux, for example, uses epoch time. I think they have it all fixed now, but there were bugs still out there as recently as this year: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23732
California's climate fight could be painful
I loosely used the term to refer to computer vision, which overlaps a bit with vision science (especially color, perception, etc.). But yeah, computer vision.
Then maybe you should provide sources for these remote companies that are awful and provide proof that them being remote was the cause of that failure, not them being terrible companies in general?

Here are just some successful companies that are heavily remote-based:

Automattic (WordPress)
AgileBits (1Password)
Basecamp
Chef
Gitlab
Olark
Percona
Plex
Zapier

WordPress powers over 25% of the web, remember. They have been remote since the beginning and have hundreds of employees.

I've worked remotely for many years. There are good companies and bad, but I've never seen evidence a company failed because it was remote and you've provided no data or examples. Companies fail for a multitude of reasons, but you're essentially saying that successful remote companies are a fluke. Nonsense.
Show HN: Jottings – Real-time collaboration in Markdown
Do you really think any civilisation could exist in this universe without having discovered the musical piece of 'play nothing and listen'?
I would like to show you a third product I created this year with my brother.

Do you remember Hackpad? Jottings is something similar but for Markdown. Our key feature is group text editing by multiple users in real-time. We are launching this as an open beta which means you can experience bugs but the app is free to use.

There are plenty of things we plan to add in the future like native desktop and mobile apps, a more advanced text editor with file attachments and syncing with external services like Google Docs.

We're looking for feedback!

Entry on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/jottings
It's still in place and 20% projects are still advertised internally. I think Google might have made it a bit more formal (requiring manager approval etc.), that's all.
How about "a net drain on resources that the provider of the resources would prefer to spend elsewhere"?
[Day 0] Starting a Research Project
I hope they take your criticism constructively though, because I agree. I'm a longtime Bootstrap user but wouldn't be opposed to trying out Foundation...but I honestly don't know where to start.

Like Bootstrap, Foundation has a nice big "Getting Started" link to click on. OK:

http://foundation.zurb.com/develop/getting-started.html

Neither Foundation's or Bootstrap's "Getting Started" page is particularly interesting to me. But Bootstrap also has a "CSS" nav button that my eye naturally gravitates to, right next to "Getting Started". I click on that, and I see right away what opinions and conventions Bootstrap has, starting from the HTML5 doctype. The sidebar on the right makes it easy to get to specific topics of design, such as "Tables" and "Grid system".

Where is the corresponding overview page for Foundation? They also have a "CSS" link but it's not in the nav bar, it's nearly below the fold on Getting Started. And clicking that brings me to this Download page. Is that intentional? There's already a prominent "Download" link in the nav bar. I expect CSS to take me to some kind of page that demonstrates the CSS conventions. Clicking on "Sass" takes me to an anchor on the "Installation" page for the "command-line tool"...what does that have to do with how Sass is used?

I guess the next best link is Kitchen Sink, which takes me here: http://foundation.zurb.com/sites/docs/kitchen-sink.html

And I get an alphabetical list of elements, the first one being "Abide", which...I have no idea what the name has to do with the element, whatever the element does. The Kitchen Sink page has two sidebars, and I'm not sure which one I'm supposed to focus on.

Maybe I'm an edge-case user, in that I don't really care to read tutorials to figure out how to use a front-end CSS framework. But that's what was appealing to me about Bootstrap from the very beginning. The design looked nice, the writeup of Bootstrap's most prominent elements and conventions had me sold right away. I didn't even know what a CSS framework was before Bootstrap, and had up to that point been satisfied with hand-coding CSS for every site. So whoever designed and edited the initial landing page for Bootstrap was doing something right, to so quickly make me realize my ignorance :)

Edit: Like the parent commenter, I regret my dickish tone of criticism and realize I need to take a nap. Not knowing much else about Foundation other than high praise from devs I respect, I would love for it to be as ubiquitous as a solution. Just pointing out that whatever technical flaws Bootstrap has, its introduction and overview docs are highly accessible and appealing.
I think this may be generalizing a bit too much. Certainly I would use Twilio instead of building my own telephony system, or use AWS instead of setting up my own servers. But in this case I think the reason many developers here (myself included) have an episode of build-it-myself syndrome is the many millions in funding and exorbitant pricing for something that seems (but may not necessarily be) trivial to implement.

Obviously there is the benefit of having a team of people who are constantly making the system better and more robust. I think with ML there would be a serious value proposition here, e.g. allow a learning system to automatically roll out a new feature for you, and reverse the rollout if things appear to be going poorly. Even the worst case of built-it-myself syndrome would not engineer a custom feature flag system that far.
I agree with both you and jdcarter. Is this silly? Sure, but isn't that also a huge part of the fun in having cats in our lives? Everything else must make sense, but not cats. As for "solving the wrong problem" - I'm sure OP isn't the first machine shop welder to turn every problem into a reason to weld.