skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of the books I finished in 2016, I'd nominate a couple as contenders for "best of 2016":

1. Mastering the Compex Sale, by Jeff Thull. If you're interested in B2B selling, I highly recommend this book. Thull's approach is dramatically different from the old-school "Alec Baldwin rant in Glengarry Glen-Ross" stuff you may have been exposed to. He encourages a model where you act more like a doctor, or a detective, and practice "Always Be Leaving" instead of "Always Be Closing".

2. It's Not The Big That Eat The Small, It's The Fast That Eat The Slow by Jason Jennings. The title is a good summary. Jennings makes an argument for the importance of "speed" as the primary driver of competitive advantage. There's more too it that that, so just read the book.

3. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold. If you didn't take, or have forgotten, classes like Computer Architecture or Digital Logic, this is a great book for getting your head around the low level details of what's happening in side a digital computer. Petzold starts from VERY basic examples (using a flaslight to morse code messages to your friend across the street) and slowly builds up to a full-fledged (if somewhat minimalistic) CPU.

Edit: some unlucky soul commented Atlas Shrugged and got downvoted / flagged / whatever to death. I didn't read AS in 2016, but I have read it, and I do recommend it to everyone. It has its issues, but it's absolutely a book everyone should read, whether you agree with Rand's ideology or not. And if you aren't familiar enough to Rand's ideology to know if you agree or not,that's all the more reason to read Atlas Shrugged (or The Fountainhead).
By that rational, any publicly traded commodity is a ponzi\pyramid scheme. Anything with a finite supply and demand will command a price. The market doesn't care if you dislike the speculative nature of bitcoin; it is simple supply and demand at work.

You could make the exact same arguments against gold but that doesn't stop central banks of the world from hording it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve The only differences are 3,500 years of history and... teleportation.
Yes, but I didn't want to spoil it.
Ron Gilbert needs a soundfile of a Commodore 1541 disk drive
Do you have a good way to let clients update their site if it's static? I'd love to ditch CMSs, but asking my clients to write HTML is a stretch and expecting them to sync changes over SSH is right out.
The Three Laws of Robotics in the Age of Big Data [pdf]
For various reasons I didn't read as many books in 2016 as I normally do, but "Flash Boys" by Michael Lewis was a standout.
You would make more money working at a bank in SF downtown rather than at apple or google in south bay. Though, these two should give you a lot of RSU's on the side. Which at the end of the year will put you up high.
> In the end, the lowest common denominator dominates. It’s a common scourge in social settings: think of dinner conversations that consist of people repeating to one another the things they all read in The New York Times.

Blessed is the man who thinks of parroting the NYT as lowest common denominator conversation.
Too-perfect stability makes your brain realize it is fake. It's the same reason music producers make their digital instruments play very slightly out of time.
Is there an App Store yet for either Alexa or Google Home?

I just got a google home and I want to program/add apps(games) or actions(movie times, order a pizza, call x friend on skype, call 911, record & playback my sleep talking recordings and many other ideas thought of).

I can't see why such an App Store isn't available yet for programmers and either Google or Amazon to profit from!!! One that is run like Apple's App Store where things are reviewed and approved, as for me I think these AI speakers are the next big thing like the iPhone.
The Neapolitan series by Elena Ferrante was some of the most beautifully written fiction I've ever read in my life.
I will continue to use gogs, forking is not correct.

The maintainer cares about code quality, it seems like gitea does not
I started not even trying to learn "web". I was self teaching Python and trying to solve Project Euler problems... it was fun!

But also not very useful. I became pretty clever (imho) but didn't know much about the web. I had no idea how JavaScript would interact with HTML, for example.

I found that learning how the internet worked helped a lot. So TCP, HTTP, DNS. Before I learned these things, I struggled a lot.

From there I learned Rails (and then Ruby, which is common but perhaps not ideal), and the rest is history.

This was over the course of several years though. One thing I'd really like to point out is that you're likely able to get a job earlier than you expect. That's not to say that you should be overconfident, but embrace being a beginner, ask questions, and know that you can still contribute.
Been using 1Password for a year now on OSX/Windows/iOS and haven't hit any issues yet. The Windows app has a lot of catching up to do in terms of UX (I know there is a beta, but isn't stable enough for everyday use)

What surprised me is that they still don't have a Linux version!
London is built on clay and is easy to tunnel. NY is built on rock.
I get that union dues can be a contentious issue for members. However, does organizing necessitate membership fees? It feels like jumping the gun to assume right away that an uber-drivers'-union would both have dues and they would be expensive enough to put off new members.
Νέα χρόνια με προγνωστικά στοιχήματος
You need to check that .3g number with pregnant women. I recall that the reason they accelerate they way they do current is to avoid having pregnant women urinate from the fetus pressing into the bladder.
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.
DeepLearning.scala, a toolkit aimed to create complex neural networks
I'm not a time traveler or the poster you are asking but I suggest you watch this, history of the evolvement of Russian

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4cXIyyc-L0
AlomWare Lights – Always See the LED Status of Num, Caps, and Scroll Lock
Collect files, handle zipped files, preview, provide file to other app, spotlight search, these keywords make the CollectFile special.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro

If you're interested in the complex history of LBJ, the Senate, or America during that time, I'd recommend this (or really, any) Robert Caro book.
How is your banner avoid ad-blocks? Over the past year Ive doubled my traffic but adsense views were flat. My site gets a ton of ad-blocked traffic now.

http://roadcamvideos.com
> Food could be free and there'd still be malnourishment. It's necessary to look at a bigger picture when looking at the overall performance.

Hmmm ...

I'm talking about the whole economic system of production and distribution, the 'free market' (or whatever it is), so I agree with the second statement - I wouldn't throw the whole thing out, but it needs to be supplemented. It doesn't seem like much defense of the current system that radically changing one element of it, the price, won't achieve a perfect outcome (and I frankly doubt you mean it that way but I don't want to speak for you).

You seem strongly attached to the free market concept - what if another system worked better? What's more important, the people or the economic system which feeds them?

To be fair: I strongly support a 'free market' as a great tool for a great many use cases, but it's not a universal tool or panacea and it's not the goal; it's merely the means - my favorite one in the toolbox.

----

Happy New Year Walter!
1999 or 2000: it's describing an ancestor of the Racket programming environment.
$2T in Proceeds of Corruption Removed from China and Taken to US, AUS, CAN, NL
Show HN: Drop a Pin from Street View to the Lat/Long (Chrome Extension)
Interesting point on the Vancouver angle:

Q: In Canada, where does the money end up and why?

A: Vancouver is the preferred destination, by far, because of perceived
more relaxed anti-money laundering on-boarding compliance and more
importantly, easier access to better schools and lifestyle for children
of Chinese foreign nationals.
Loved that a thinly veiled Neil deGrasse Tyson was the hero out to save earth.
However, does organizing necessitate membership fees?

The union is going to hire an attorney to represent them in negotiations right?

And yes dues are a huge issue for new unions where members don't know what the benefits are yet - particularly for part-timers. My wife who's a management side labor attorney actually raised this point and said it was significant - and the law was written smartly to address this.
Why your smartphone doesn't belong in meetings
> That, of course, depends where you work.

Small correction: it depends on what problems you work on.

There are people at top companies making big money working on complex problems, there are also people at those companies who passed through a super-algorithm-heavy interview and work on much less mathematically demanding code. And there are people at small companies you've never heard of working on much more intense problems than them. But the people doing boring work at big companies are often making $$$ compared to the people working at small companies working on interesting stuff. (I've been both of those people...)
Monoculture is the risk. GMO is just a symptom.

We've had genetic engineering as long as we've had farming. The difference is that we've applied industrial practice to everything. The result will be destructive in the long term, but profitable for now.

It's profitable because everything is fungible. There is no incentive to maintain the land. Ancient Rome literally had the same problem.
Ask HN: When does traffic return to normal on HN post Christmas?
Space-Time Structure, by Erwin Schrödinger. Great read to understand complex systems, manifolds and tensors.

And...

A History of Warfare, by John Keegan. Great analysis of various cultures and how they have approached war across history.
Ive made a lower SV salary after my education in Bern Switzerland. I had to pay way less taxes, had benefits included, and cost of living was lower as well.
Pale blue dot - Carl Sagan

Fundamentally altered my worldview and the way I perceive stuff.
I'd love to see The Righteous Mind as required reading for HN! I picked it up originally for its subtitle: aptly subtitled Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Probably had the most impact on me of any book I've read in the past few years.
Technocratic Despotism: when startups become crony capitalists
Unless I'm missing something...is Uber forcing people to drive for them? If not...how exactly is Uber exploiting them?
You go for the company that has the biggest growth potential, of course.
So is Bitcoin a currency or an investment vehicle? How can such volatility in a currency be considered desirable?
I work with a lot of environmental data coming from disparate sources.

.csv is like the lowest common denominator of data formats.
Ask HN: Thoughts on making desktop apps with web tech
What has your experience been like with NW.js or Electron? Do you recommend using such systems for simple, single purpose apps?
There is: https://developer.amazon.com/alexa
Show HN: Latency Between AWS Regions
Happy New Year!

I've been working on collecting data for a while that is basically latency between all of the different AWS regions. There have been several times over the course of last year where I had been working with a client on trying to quantify latency between different AWS regions - I found lots of static, or old data, but nothing that was really up to date.

So I made this tool: https://www.cloudping.co. Basically, it collects data every 6 hours between for latency between all of the AWS regions and then I pull the data into the table displayed on the above website. I've made it a tad more complicated than it probably needs to be, but only for my own learning benefits.

Anyways, I'm wondering thoughts/ideas from the greater community. Does this tool seem valuable to anyone besides me? Any ideas for improvements? More technical details are on the GitHub Readme, as well: https://github.com/mda590/cloudping.co

Thanks for any feedback!
- Make my goals/actions towards my vision for myself more structured + keep myself periodically accountable for them

- Learn Go, improve my JavaScript skills, become better at "engineering"

- Make sure 2018 has a baseline of opportunities for me to grow with

- Start reading more long-form content (recommendations welcome)

- Start consistently taking on client work as a freelancer again

- Write more
Thanks for the tip. I'll check out Mikrotik.
I graduated as a mechanical engineer and tried to make the switch to web dev but I got caught up in not really knowing what to learn to get an actual job. For instance, I'm a natural at CSS, came as a no brainer, but all places want you to know less and then it was sass and then it was one of those along with gulp and then grunt, and then everybody became crazy about mom and then webpack. This is why I gave up and moved on. I still love to code in my spare time, but as far as work wise I never made the transition. I felt like I was chasing a never ending qualification list.
What happens when you build the next infrastructure project? Then you have to dig even deeper to be beneath this one.
If we were as efficient as Paris, Seattle's recently passed $53B ST3 package would give us 140 miles of fully underground subway. Instead, we get 62 miles, mostly above ground, and on a 30 year timescale. However, this argument was basically dismissed by transit advocates and anti-transit advocates alike. The cost problem in the US is infuriating because those who care about costs don't care about transit and those who care about transit don't care about costs.
So you can charge a buck for each download?

Also, I'm sorta partially to Google Home as I think it's AI is superior... though i could be mistaken.
> As a society yes, but there are clearly some actors of the "war on drugs" that benefit from it, such as the police with asset forfeiture laws.

Some people hate the police (or fear them) because of that time they got arrested for not hurting anyone.

The "War on Plants" is the mistake that transforms the police forces from Public Servants into political operatives.

One night I chatted with our team's night driver, just before turning the cab over to him. He commented about smelling some "really good" marijuana on one of his recent South-Phoenix passengers. I said, "But [Xxxx], you used to fight in the War on Plants..." I knew he'd gotten an early retirement from a police force a few states away.

He responded, "yeah, but they told me it was a gateway drug, and I believed them. Now it seems that plant actually has medical benefits."

Police are just as much the victims of the drug war as everyone else.
To be fair, the author did say:

> There are times when the passive voice is acceptable in technical writing.

> I also believe, as with adverbs, that removal of the passive voice would have been a net improvement for over half the technical writing I've edited. (That is, students abuse the passive voice more often than they use it well.)

The author himself is not against passive voice. He simply has not found that students have used it appropriately.

I myself was a bit humored by the way in which this article, while probably well founded, probably violates some of its own advice in that it is not backing up claims with data and facts, but generalizations which have come from personal experience.
Weird how they went down the path of charging money for the 'game' parts, as opposed to the actual materials parts. I'd gladly fork over $50-100 for a mandarin duolingo course with an option for traditional characters. I wonder if these volunteers making courses realise that they can make actual money off of high quality recordings of HSK vocab.
I don't mean to demean your programming experience or toolkit decisions in anyway. Egg on my face--it appears that's how it was received! Let me try again.

> I have found little to no use for advanced mathematics in 10 years of programming.

I reckon you use or stumble upon the algorithms often, perhaps all the time. Be it with Boolean logic, or network design, or optimal stopping, or fuzzy matching, or statistics in logging, or what have you. These principles show up often. My point wasn't you can't or shouldn't be able to code circles around people who rock out at math, but that maths education often fails to emphasize the logical methods of figuring things out from first principles over the already solved proofs, methods, or equations.

> Most academic types majorly overestimate the usefulness of math in programming.

To some degree, I agree here. If there are well developed libraries and mature paradigms needed (RDBMS, web dev, etc.) then there is little need for mathematical forte. Nothing wrong with that!
> Until elected officials lose elections as a result of cost overruns it will be prudent for leaders to divert resources to efficiently-voting public unions.

Why the focus on unions, which are very weak in the U.S.? How about public officials who give work to their wealthy, powerful allies and donors?
Why do we need to preserve access to so much work? The world already contains more than enough old literature for anybody to read in a lifetime.

There are plenty of other types of work that have always been lost - construction, acting, cooking, accounting, organizing things, well it's an endless list. Just about everything people spend their effort on won't last long or be studied by anyone after their job's finished, let alone after their death.

If a book was never popular then it's not really a part of culture any more than a small business's company culture is.
What do people think about writing explicit regression tests for bugs found through fuzz testing? I've tended to lean towards not writing them, depending on continuing fuzz testing to insure things stay clean. This may of course be somewhat naive, but I also fear cluttering my test suite with really obscure test cases.
Install woocommerce - you'll end up with 12-15 plugins off the bat.

Would you like to force everything to be SSL? Another plugin.
Do you want a contact form? Another plugin.
Do you want to disable the bizarre update messages from ignite woo that won't go away? Another plugin.
Oh, you want some slider-carousel thing on some page? Another plugin.
Caching? Another plugin.
Image optimization? Another plugin.
Some sort of 'maintenance mode' to deal with taking down the site for upgrades? Another plugin.
Social sharing buttons? Another plugin.

I could keep going, but perhaps you get the picture. And the argument could be made that 90% of these are not needed, and there's other ways to deal with the requirements. In my most recent excursion, I'd taken over a project from someone else, and this was it. Any changes to anything would require investigation, custom code, and still require some sort of UI to manage things, all of which cost time and money, which were in short supply, so this particular project kept going with dozens of plugins.

You want to do an upgrade to WP core? You've got 30+ plugins to test. Or... just click 'update' and hope for the best. Or test each plugin and upgrade process on a separate server. Again, back to relatively large amounts of time and money expended just to keep up with wp core to avoid inevitable hacking attempts.

I have another multisite install I was brought in on over the summer, with 165 plugins. It's just another version of 'crappy legacy software and undocumented crap with no documentation' which we've all seen, but it is also quantified by "number of wp plugins". No, not every site is using all 165. But there were/are > 40 sites, with various groups using various combinations - there's 0 good reasons for all of these to have been combined (over several years) in to one massive multisite mess, but it was, and it's taken many people far too long to unravel some of the mess to extricate some sites.

Yes, some of this is just a 'bad code is bad code' rant, but given the mindshare that WP owns, it would seem to be incumbent on them to raise the bar with respect to tools for plugin management (as just one example), give developers better starting code and samples and guidance for what's acceptable and what's not. A paid certification program which would vet code for 'best practices' would be something I think would help improve the landscape in short order (and no doubt has been considered by some over the years).
Instant messaging is a thorn in modern society
I'd be interested in a citation for this, if you have one handy. I've read that he wrote about this in a letter but I haven't been able to find it. The closest I've been able to find is (via WP):

> The word [orangutan] comes from Bontius (1631, Hist. Nat. et Med. Ind. Orient.) who claimed that the Javanese had informed him that orang-utans could talk, ‘but do not wish to, lest they should be compelled to labour’.

Dellios, Paulette (2005). A Lexical Odyssey from the Malay World. The Proceedings of the European Integration-Between Tradition and Modernity Congress, Editura Universităţii "Petru Maior", Volume Number 1, 2005, ISSN 1844-2048, pp. 460-463. http://www.upm.ro/facultati_departamente/stiinte_litere/conf...

Bontius's book looks like the sort of thing Descartes would have read, so I'd be interested in reading his reaction.
You must choose Google. They are "Too Big To Fail" and they are investing in important future technologies, most importantly AI and robotics. Meanwhile Apple is basically in the retail business.

Thousands of companies worldwide have built there SaaS products on Google services and APIs. Nothing can touch Google.

Who cares if you make a couple of thousand dollars less from the median salary if you work at Google? If you work at Google for five years you can write your own ticket after that.
Crossrail is not directly comparable, for starters, only 21km of crossrail is underground; Most of it's 118km length is above ground so the per-km cost of the below ground sections get averaged out over the above ground sections.

This section of the 2nd Avenue subway (it's just 2.7km long) is deep under Manhattan itself. To get a comparison on cost you would have to only compare only the section of crossrail running under central london itself.
The TPP extends copyright terms in other countries. The new president opposes that deal. So there's a bit of hope.
Well I think they will get rented by all of the ex-silicon valley folks who want a better deal.
TL;DR:

"In a recent study at Cornell University in New York, David Levitsky and Carly Pacanowski found that when study participants were given a light breakfast of 350 calories, their calorie intake later on was unchanged. In other words, a small breakfast didn’t make them eat more later on as has often been believed. Moreover, when they ate a large breakfast of 600 calories or more, they reduced their lunch calories by just 144 calories." ...

"There’s also research, detailed in Professor Kealey’s book, that people with diabetes do better when they skip breakfast and eat a larger lunch and dinner. "
I didn't read many things packaged as books in 2016, but I did read Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters which was interesting.
You mean Drawing on the right side of the brain? http://drawright.com/

I was wondering if there was another school of thought that I missed out completely till now! :)