skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TL;DR there are a lot of incompetent developers out there.

This isn't a comment about the author, as much as it's about something she said.

"Today you can take a lot of programming and Computer Sciences courses online. Everyone can be developer! There are also a lot of developer bootcamps: within 8–12 weeks you can become a developer."

This is a very dangerous line of thinking. Some people have convinced themselves that they are competent developers because they went to a bootcamp. And they might have just enough domain knowledge to convince a company with poor hiring practices that they're worth hiring.

I inherited a situation like that (this dev was hired a few weeks before me). After a few weeks it was painfully obvious that this guy was a detriment to the company because of his lack of coding ability. For reasons above my paygrade, we couldn't fire him immediately, and eventually we took all responsibilities away from him. We paid someone to come in and not do work for us.

I've interviewed dozens of developers since then. The one's coming from a bootcamp (or similar situation) have no computer science skills. They also have no problem solving skills; they're unable to break through the box that they were taught in. Most companies can't afford to hire a developer who knows one thing, and one thing only.

Now, we've had 4 year university graduates with experience in the field come in from top schools with degrees in CS. A (scarily) large percentage of them are incompetent as well, though not to the degree of the bootcampers. They're typically serviceable though.
Automate Tweeting: how to build a Twitterbot
wait, so reading this over, there has not been a previous warning, and the implication is that this person is pretending to be a moderator, which would be totally nuts.
The article is missing a bit, since Word for Mac (1985) was more the model for the eventual Windows 1.X version, but isn't even mentioned in the article. There were also versions for other "windowed" OS's during the same 5 year period before Windows was sufficiently viable to make it work. People often forget that new apps appeared first on the Mac until around 1990 or so when Windows 3.0 shipped (Word appeared a bit before); basically MacOS was much more advanced than Windows up until that point. After Windows 3 the first platform flipped completely to Windows. I shipped my first MacOS app in 1987.
Autonomous Brakes May Have Stopped Berlin Truck Attacker from Killing More
I do believe that the very basics of programming can be taught to everyone, like you said. I think everyone should be able to learn the basics in school (or elsewhere). We are surrounded by software, coding is like a new literacy.
But I also think not everyone will like coding. It is kind of abstract but also creative. People have different interests and silks: writing, coding, drawing, taking pictures, sports,... and that's ok!
Venezuelans Hawk Snacks on Dominican Streets
Ask HN: What features/behaviour do you want in a cron management tool?
Background: I have recently begun using configuration management software (specifically ansible, and more recently, salt). I also make use of cron and the cron module in salt. Unfortunately the current cron module is buggy, so I'm in the process of writing a new module for it, which I may expand out to a self-contained cron management software in future as well. You can follow development at https://github.com/swalladge/cron_ng .

I'm posting here looking for feedback on what features and behaviour you believe a cron management module should have. Things like:

- should it work with crontabs or the `/etc/cron.d` directory

- should it be allowed to work with lines already present in the crontab?

- what syntax would you want to be able to use to control it?

- what api points would you find useful? (eg. job-present, env-present)

- how should it manage environment variables in crontabs? (seeing as a command only sees variables defined _above_ the line)

- what are your most/least favourite things about existing cron management tools/modules?

- anything else!

For reference, the current cron module in salt has docs at https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/modules/all/salt.modules.cron.html and https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/states/all/salt.states.cron.html

This is not just for Salt users - if you use another configuration management tool or none at all, please voice your opinion as well!

Thanks
Boxing on the Wii is so frustrating for my son
Show HN: PyBites – sharing our passion for Python, one bite a day
>> when I brought it back up, a hundred or so old timers appeared out of nowhere.

Many of them had to purchase iOS devices just to play, but they splurged.

And they started playing insane hours...

They're playing upwards of 8 hours a day, around the clock.
Not minor at all. It's very easy to mislead intentionally or not with statistics and that's why rigorousness is needed. No details are given for the analysis, even basic things like definition of what "top university" or "top company job" even means.

It's just amazing to see how many positive comments a post like this gets without even the hint of methodology.
> A 'Chinese crash' combined with slightly higher interest rates - would put Toronto in a really, really dire situation. And we we can't blame economists for that one - the risks are clear.

Agreed, I personally hope it results in a new common sense that housing is not the perfect silver bullet investment for everyone. And hopefully it results in more capital going to entrepreneurship and business, rather than 90% of people betting on stable corporate jobs and mortgage payments for their future financial independence.

There are always economic tradeoffs made in bubbles, as capital is misplaced and used inefficiently, that are just as costly as the money lost on the actual investments.

The banks are just as responsible for this too, I've heard ridiculous stories of middle class people getting offered million dollar mortgages while small/medium businesses are shutting down at a faster rate than new ones are being started.
Manhattan Luxury Co-Ops Fall Out of Favor
Ooh, let's continue the metaphor.

Sometimes Linux Airlines forgets to equip its planes with doors. Others in Linux Airlines, who are used to entering through the windows, suggest that you should start a door company yourself to outfit the planes.
This is true, the processes and technology for far greater efficiency in business, manufacturing and politics have been available for a long, long time. But why would a manager in a corporation leverage these things if it means losing an empire?

This is the same for so many areas of society, especially politics. It would be easy to build a system which replaced representitive politics, think micro-voting on particular issues by all citizens. This hasn't happened en-masse because politicians are going to have to remove themselves from their jobs first.

Robot domination might actually never happen, I mean even if we ever manage to create AGI, there is little reason to believe that it will:

* Want to stick around and serve humanity, because why would it?

* Care about us at all, ignore humans just do what it likes and forget about us entirely.

Edit: I forgot to add that if we built more welcoming, welfare bsaed societies where people are looked after when they're out of a job, then the adoption of automation and "robots" would probably be more accepted and less imposed upon us
Another important difference: UDP can't be used in the browser =(
The main difference between TCP and UDP, as this programmer discovered, relates to quality of realtime service.

Times to use UDP over TCP

* When you need the lowest latency
* When LATE data is worse than GAPS (loss of) in data.
* When you want to implement your own form of error correction to handle late/missing/mangled data.

TCP is best when

* You need all of the data to arrive, period.
* You want to automatically make a rough best estimate use of the available connection for /rate/ of transfer.

For a videogame, having a general control channel to the co-ordination server in TCP is fine. Having interactive asset downloads (level setup) over TCP is fine. Interactive player movements /probably/ should be UDP. Very likely with a mix of forward error correction and major snapshot syncs for critical data (moving entity absolute location, etc).
I am in complete agreement. No matter how many troubles Windows may have caused me over the years, at least I've never managed to somehow completely delete its entire GUI while attempting a routine software update.
You won't be able to upgrade the Nintendo Switch's battery
Would love to test it. Where do I use it from???
I've said this before, but Python is dangerous in this way. You can learn how to write an executable Python script in a few hours, which if you do this for a few years, you might be convinced you're "fluent" in Python, when in reality you know nothing about how to build and deliver quality software.
That depends on if you respond with a comment that indicates it's not likely to be merged. Then it is understandable, otherwise it is just rude and confusing.
This is exactly how I reacted when reading that line. Everybody can become a developer, yes. Everybody can become a good developer quickly, most likely not, and that applies also to people coming out with a formal education in CS, not only bootcampers.

I don't understand fully why so many people think that about coding, but not about other fields, like cooking/building/who knows.
I don't think Operation is a "board game" in the traditional sense. It relies on dexterity, not luck or strategy.
I was hoping this would explain how the upper bound was derived, but citation [1] just listed it with its own citations, and citation [6] is a book that I'm not going to purchase.
I looked briefly at your code. I don't believe it is possible to be compatible with the STL and safe in the way the Rust guys intend.

I might be wrong though. What happens with your vector in this code?

using namespace mse::mstd;
vector<double> data(10);
double& dangling = data[0];
data.resize(100000);
double crashing = dangling;

You use a lot of typedefs, so I couldn't tell for sure, but I think your operator[] returns a C++ reference right?

The problem here is there is only one operator[] for both reading and writing. This is a simple contrived example, and taking a reference like that looks artificial, but there are a lot of other ways in real programs to stumble on to this. (I don't think it's as bad as the Rusties do, but I stumble into this bug once or twice a year...)

The Rust folks seem to believe you need a borrow checker to solve this problem, but I think that a different container library in C++ could do the trick. For instance, favoring value copies instead of references, and returning a proxy object from operator[] instead of a reference.
My C++ skills have atrophied worse than i thought - I completely forgot you can't return an abstract class by value.
What specifically are you looking to get into? Tech is pretty broad.
I think it's difficult to search a functionality by words. For example, if I want to fund matrix multiplication, the function name could mulmat, matrixProduct .... could be anything.

second, even code is found, building requires lots of work. missing dependency, mismatching interfaces, unsupported os...
The ugly, unethical underside of Silicon Valley
I honour every trade job! And as an office worker (secretary/ developer) I really miss to create something physical or with my hands. I started to create my own feminine developer t-shirts (NERDpraunig.com), something I can touch and wear.
I don't care which profession someone chooses and whether it is more brain or more physical work.
Here's Part 1: https://ml.berkeley.edu/blog/2016/11/06/tutorial-1/
1) is laughable. Economics is hardly developed enough for someone to a.) come up with a theory "no body else" has and b.) have that theory be specific enough that one individual in a short amount of time could profit greatly from it and c.) studies a topic that's so chaotic the best theories of it are "long term" - i.e. 10s-100s of years, not days. The exceptions to my point here are so widely known as to not be profitable or not really be 'doing economics'

2) By the nature of the work of an economist there will always be people who want to say they're an economist so people will 'follow them'. Everyone has an opinion about the economy. The best system in place is the academic route - university education, accreditation, and peer review. Those aren't perfect. I'm saying they're the best we're likely to get.

3) I'd say economists either work in academia, government, or private enterprise. In academia they're refining theories, teaching, and publishing. In government and private they're running numbers. In private enterprise, I'd say they're expected to tell who ever what that person wants to hear in the way they want to hear it.
Gotta be a dealer, I mean those are all the same Maserati..
> Right. Instead of joining BART, Santa Clara put that money into car centric expressways and the VTA system and then people use their poor transit planning to indict public transit systems that work.

This is almost in line with my initial premise, that politicians putting together public transportation systems are the reason we can't have nice public transportation systems here in the US.

There is one reasonably good public transportation system (the NYC subway - much of it being privately built ages ago in a different sort of era) and several sorta-quasi-nice public transportation systems in the US. BART is one of the latter. We don't even make them like that anymore, though.

> * If you include fuel taxes as part of the recovery ratio for car infrastructure, you should include dedicated sales taxes and other funds as part of the recovery ratio for public transit infrastructure.

No way. Most gasoline and diesel that is sold is sold for the purpose of driving a vehicle on a public road, and it is roughly proportional to the use of that road. It could be closer to a fee-for-use provision if one added a separate tax on square-of-vehicle-axle-weight times distance - the real thing that wears down highways - but it is a lot more practical to enforce with a fuel tax and without computerized surveillance on all automobiles.

A sales tax on all transactions is completely different and drains unrelated economic activity to maintain and operate transport: the most common use of public transportation by volume is to commute to work, an activity that's pretty poorly connected with shopping at the store.

A dedicated fund covering a portion of taxpayer expenses does nothing to improve it, either (the money is fungible).
Nigeria: Faces Greatest Cyber Security Threat Ever in 2017
Theoretically this seems possible with Haxe (http://haxe.org/manual/introduction-what-is-haxe.html). It seems possible to write something that went from Python -> Haxe -> Java?

Right now all I know for sure is that Haxe offers Haxe -> Python in sourcecode (though an AST would be better, probably), and Haxe offers Haxe -> C++...

Generally, it might make more sense to go from AST to AST then back to source code or something, if you didn't need to see the source code after.

I personally appreciate that different languages have different syntax. In some languages it doesn't matter (because they're so close anyway), but across large gulfs there are non-negligible differences in productivity, IMO. If I need to write lots of regexes and do some small scripting or write something no one will understand later, perl's syntax might shine there, it would be bad (I think) to get into the habit of writing in one syntax or with one syntax when there are better syntaxes that might cut down on writing time for the job... Of course, there is the benefit of cutting down unnecessary writing by using perl INSTEAD of something like Java by using this idea...
type interface is usually enough

https://www.haskell.org/hoogle/
The recommendation to avoid TCP altogether is surprising to me. Having encountered a number of video-conferencing systems which are in a similar space, it seems pretty standard to have separate real-time and control sockets on UDP and TCP respectively. I skimmed the linked paper and didn't find it conclusive; can someone summarize how it is that having a TCP socket can affect UDP traffic on the same interface?

All that said, I certainly see the argument for an all-UDP protocol in terms of defining your own retransmission approach, or attempting to avoid it altogether with forward error correction or whatever.
You may well be right, but it's pretty common to initially overestimate the pace of progress ("it'll be ready in 15 years" for 100 years running) only to severely underestimate it later on ("it feels premature"). Given the recent evidence of unexpectedly early breakthroughs in AI ("it'll take another 10 years to beat humans at Go") I think it's not crazy to ask whether the inflection point has been reached.
Searched the article and the comments here for "Pluralsight", with zero hits. So what makes Udacity/Coursea preferable? TLDR, I'm asking this as Pluralsight was a significant contributor to my landing my latest role after redundancies.

The long version: I recently landed a role after some time off, having changed from mainly back end Php/Coldfusion to C# in the last year. I was able to make the switch in my last role. For me, moving to C# was a big transition; as well as guidance from a (fantastic) mentor, I used Pluralsight to learn C#, asp.net and DDD - e.g. from Jon Skeet, Scott Allen and Julie Lerman, to mention but a few.

Being completely burnt-out on the old stacks, I was set on making my next role a C# one. I've come to love what Microsoft are doing with Core, open sourcing etc, as well as the strictly typed C# language and ability to use NCrunch with live unit tests. So I signed up for a year after relinquishing my corp subscription, kept doing their courses, and found the training material highly accessible with great quality content. Each interview was a learning process, when I didn't know something from a test, I'd go and study it so that I'd be better prepared for the next role. One of these was the study of data structures and basic computer algorithms, where I was lacking. I might not have had years of experience, but the experience I had was mostly best practice.

During my search, I typically got great feedback on the fact that I was doing Pluralsight courses, and it was a significant factor in being hired for the new role - it showed cultural fit, in addition to passing their tech tests (which happened to involve structures). My company had interviewed a lot of candidates, struggling to find the right talent. Just possessing technical skills is one thing, having the right attitude towards learning is another.

At any rate, I'll keep using Pluralsight to raise my proficiency in my new stack - even as an old timer, I am having a newfound level of enthusiasm towards my whole profession which I haven't felt since I coded in assembly on the good old Amigas. I would be interested in knowing why Coursera / Udacity might be better or more accepted in the marketplace though.
Surprise Surprise, Open Society.
But wait,who denies climate change ? This wikipedia quote is not even about climate change. Is it ?
As an EU citizen, she has the right to live in the UK, currently. Applying for permanent residency would be approximately like me, as a US citizen, applying for permanent residency in the US.

With Brexit, in the future, that won't be the case. But until the UK government, in negotiations with the EU, determines how that is going to work for current EU residents, there's no point in dealing with an application process that is not meant for her situation.
I dunno, maybe it was intended satirically.
>> They can easily decide that they won't carry region-locked software

Unless you're Netflix or HBO, few business have the resources to release a video product in multiple markets. It requires translation (subtitle or audio), marketing & advertising, financing, distribution, customer service, and many other invisible functions required to run a business. When you're a ~20 person studio, that's a little out of your budget.

This often requires working with a separate distributor in each market that can provide those services, including taking on the financial risk of distribution in exchange for profit share.

In most cases Steam is just a naive distribution platform and the last step in the "supply chain". It has VERY little impact on the overall success of the project, but helps simplify "last mile" distribution by getting the final product into the hands of customers - only instead of DVDs being shipped across the country in trucks to CostCo, we have Steam.

>> They can easily decide to fix their broken storefront to not show misleading and false data (they also didn't)

The responsibility is on the business managing a Steam account to ensure this data is accurate, not Valve. Same system is at work with the Apple, Microsoft, and Google app stores.
Another article on this site addresses TCP plus UDP mix. The tl;dr is that they should not be used at the same time because TCP retransmission will interfere with UDP (and routers give TCP priority).

As long as TCP happens outside of the "hot" loop, it's fine.
Not really.

I only bothered with C in 1993, yet I started coding in 1986, used Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal 3, 5.5 and 6.0, alongside TASM before that year.

Similar experience to many other Portuguese fellow coders.

We only bothered with C either at the university level or because some had access to UNIX at work.

My first UNIX experience, the teacher carried a PC desktop with Xenix into class and we would take turns to use it.
What Each State Googled More Than Any Other in 2016
With the exception of the QUIC protocol.

* TLS over 443/udp
Shame you can't select all the selectors for markdown.
Google's specific interview standards only select for academic rigor, not just successful software skills.

Look at how many failed or poorly designed products and libs Google has released.
Author here. Yeah, the lack of authorship (and any kind of user awareness, really) is a pain.

There are so many ways in which Git has simply failed. It was basically an experimental piece of software designed for a hypothetical world which never really eventuated. Truly distributed version control (code shared between different servers) turned out to be a fringe use case, and the vast majority of all collaborative developed source code has a primary repository. So it has all these features built around the edge case, and a lack of features for the primary case (many users, with different levels of trust, contributing to one repo).

Gitless is pretty cool. http://gitless.com/
Is it as problematic as censoring government reports about crime and immigration and using anti-terrorism laws to go after legitimate anti-government protestors?

Most European news sources these days are heavily censored to the point of being near propaganda themselves.

I would think Germany, Sweden and quite a few other countries would want to take a look at themselves before going after facebook.

It seems lately that Germany and the EU as a whole are going after multinational corporations because they see fines as a new revenue source rather than because of due cause.
Satellite spots killer asteroid under Antarctic ice
after a few tens of thousands of hours of data, i'd say any behavior which isn't present in the preceding 10k hours is a bad sign.
- A dockable mobile to desktop PC solution will gain traction. It's too obvious useful tool for someone not to do something good here.

- Increased digital or non-government currency options grow in popularity (probably bitcoin but maybe others). I suspect this will happen on the back of some financial crisis, probably market trust issues due to excessive debt.
No, it really doesn't. Secretaries have been mostly replaced by computers already -- a trend likely to continue.
And hard to avoid Imposter Syndrom the hard way ?