skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They are very destructive eaters.

This view is a really shortsighted. Yes, they do eat a lot, however

a.) there are species of trees that actually rely on elephants eating their fruits and then disseminating the seeds in their dung. There are also species who depends on this dung for one reason or another.

b.) I remember reading somewhere that something like 80% of animal species in the region are directly or indirectly dependent on elephants (because they might depends e.g. on trees that depends on elephants).

Calling them destructive misses the mark because they are just doing their ecological job. They are sometimes referred to as "gardeners of the forrest", check out for example this video http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140114-elephants-the-fores...
There are two ways to look at this: it could be the environment, or he may have a rational reason to come to this conclusion. (Many developers are indeed slower than they could be.)

Now, my major background task for 2016 and 2017 is trying to analyze how to become a better developer with myself as a guinea pig. I'm still putting things together, but "faster in the development environment of choice" is one stumbling block. These are the major issues I've found:

1. Being fast or slow only has a minor correlation with good code, but there are confounding issues. Good code takes different habits to write than bad code.

2. People who are fast at coding have an ingrained series of patterns on which they rely. They slow down when they are pulled out of their element, as can be expected. As such, there are meta-skills that contribute to speed, but a large portion of it is having a series of reliable patterns to solve the problem.

It turns out most tasks are the same on the surface. Spend time getting those patterns at heart.

3. Fast developers have a deeper knowledge of the libraries around them. We underestimate the overhead of research, even with google.

Spend some time exploring the corners of your libraries and frameworks and languages. If you work on the front end, you need to have the ins and outs of the client memorized.

4. In general, fast developers may not realize it, but they're methodical in how they approach problems. They have an internal checklist. Develop your own internal checklist.

5. Because they are fast, they have more confidence in developing tools that speed up the general issues that slow every developer down. (setting up environments, test data, and the like.) Laziness, it turns out,b is as much an byproduct as a cause. If you are slow, the ROI on developing tools might indeed be outside the timeframe of efficiency. Work on getting faster, and you will see more opportunities to consolidate your work.

I'm still working out the solutions of how to teach this in a generalizable fashion and how to back this up with research, so don't take these as gospel and I'd be particularly interested in fast programmers who have alternative perspectives.
CART's Top 12 Blogs for 2016
No, you said that "political strife has been the root cause of famine for over a thousand years." Which is not true - in a low-productivity, pre-industrial economy, inherently near the subsistence baseline, food shortfalls (and consequent famines) are frequently caused by weather, pestilence and other non-political-strife events. When it takes 8 or 9 farmers to feed themselves and one non-farmer (and year-to-year food storage capability is very poor) then even a 10% food production decline is a crisis.

We absolutely have not had "enough food to feed the world for centuries", nor the means to transport it. In 1800, worldwide GDP per capita was barely above $1000 USD (current, PPP), and by 1900, just over $2000. The supposed surpluses simply did not exist. Ship transport was still relatively inefficient, and overland transport was extremely expensive in a world where ~80% of people lived in small rural communities with no paved roads between them, and even where roads did exist, they were of poor quality. The food surpluses and easy transport we see today are really quite a recent development, well within the 20th century.
Well I guess "Fritzbox"-Routers do not work in the US. (At least some modems, might not work with all providers) But if they do you should probably look into them since they are stable, extremly stable and getting updates for at least 5 years if you buy the new product line. https://en.avm.de/products/
It seems like academia needs a "20% time" thing like Google. You can get a grant for doing cyclotomic fiber bundles in a single dimension, because it's mathy and publishable and not too far from the mainstream, even if the likelihood of this being The Grail (or real in any way) is low.

You can't get funding to look at something completely off the cuff. Even 100 years ago Einstein couldn't have gotten funding to investigate some idea that distorts distance and time. I think 20% time to investigate whatever crazy idea you want would be beneficial to making more substantial progress in the real fundamental problems.
You're being down voted because you keep repeating a claim without evidence despite both evidence to the contrary and acknowledgement of the utility of tail calls.
Err, AMD is down 55% over the last ten years. The total market up 65% over the same time period.
The claim isn't that forty hours a week is anything special, but that the flexibility to move around your hours to get a day off is.

Pretty much everyone I know, including the white-collar six-figures professionals, would consider that a pretty great perk. With the possible exception of other people in tech, for whom flexibility is more common.
When we got accepted into YCombinator back in 2011 (Mailgun), I remember PG looking at our Thinkpads running Linux and asking something along the lines of "what's wrong with you?", with almost [1] all YC teams using Macbooks.

I wonder if it's the Valley culture? There is no way a Macbook can compete with a proper Thinkpad [2] for programmer productivity: the keyboard, the UltraNav, the swappable batteries (you can fly around the world with a x260 + spare battery), a nice docking station, upgradeable storage/memory and a trouble-free Linux distro. Plus, they don't burn you with ice-cold aluminum every morning.

The gap is huge! If a Thinkpad is a 100, the prev. gen Macbook Pro would be 60 and everything else lingering in misery under 10.

Full disclosure: I am 100% Macbook right now because Photoshop/Sketch, the struggle is real, I miss everything about Thinkpad, hence this passionate comment.

[1] Another 100% Linux, 100% Thinkpad company was http://www.acunote.com
[2] Properly configured, i.e. IPS, Intel graphics, etc.
The size of the power brick should be less of a concern with the 2016 models since it appears to use regular old USB Type-C Power Delivery. Even if the Lenovo-provided one is not to your liking, you can just use another one.
Is it as slippery as Apple laptops?
If you want a maddening read, Google for "Transparent California salaries" + your city name (I won't link it because they have some of anti-adblock thing going on now) [1]. Many public sector employees have wages that are more than competitive with the 1% of the private sector; after you factor in the incredible benefit of a pension and early retirement, it's not even on the same order.

One problem with government that is usually true is that it can grow, but it can't shrink. This applies to cost, workforce size, and benefits.

We're at a strange turning point right now. Pensions in the private sector have all but disappeared. Pensions in the public sector are alive and well because it doesn't need to be self sustaining, and by running huge deficits it can steal the money it needs today from future generations.

It's pretty obvious that cities and states should start eliminating pensions, but the beneficiaries of those same pensions are the people that need to do that. I'm not holding my breath for the right thing to happen here.

[1] Sorry if you're not in California. Your state/country may have similar open information.
Well, a 4-day working week is a decent benefit, one that many civil servants wouldn't get. Even though its balanced by longer working days, in a lot of places, those longer days would simply be unpaid overtime.
The problem is that what they get is unsustainable. The public is on the hook for paying those pensions for decades. Which means there will be an ever-increasing pool of public retirees that that taxpayers will have to fund.
Given the premise how can you you possibly come to the conclusion that the cause was the water.
Ask HN: Is there a recommended SSD-only Windows laptop on the market?
I'm located in Canada, and work at a research hospital in Toronto. We have a number of companies using Clojure in town, and run a meetup. As part of the meetup we're also running a Clojure workshop, so that helps a lot.

I also found that hiring students for junior positions from university works great as well. They don't have preconceptions about how to do development, and usually have easier time picking up new paradigms than devs who've been working in a particular one for a long time.
The JVM is usually used for long-running application because the warmup is so slow. Were it not so slow, it would be used for things other than servers.
Michigan, in a nutshell.
"Any provision in this Agreement requiring Employee to assign rights in Inventions does not and will not apply to any Invention for which no equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information of Employer was used and that was developed entirely on Employee’s own time, unless (a) the Invention relates (i) directly to the business of Employer, or (ii) to Employer’s actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development"

My employment agreement doesn't have this clause and my employer made it very clear what I do in personal time is also owned by the company even if it does not relate to the company's business :( so by that standard this is lenient.

I've been at this company years. In hindsight I wouldn't have signed it but I'm stuck in it now.
A large chunk of the Thinkpad user community is pretty fed up with the ultrabook spec that Lenovo is shipping on its flagship models, namely the inability to effectively customize and modify to use. I keep an X201 alongside my late 2013 rMBP simply because I can use expresscard and a dock and ethernet without carrying around a stupid dongle. I understand they are trying to chase Apple's market, but expect them to fall flat with products like this. I can stand to have a few extra mm of thickness to actually have a usable product.

51nb (chinese forum) has been addressing the need for upgraded specs in the old chassis with things like their Thinkpad X62 https://imgur.com/a/As6On#uHTzOer (you can find the boards on ebay)

There's no products that fit the old ultraportable form factor. The T5xx series is great but can't be lugged around easily.
From reading the report, I didn't think that he made 120k $ debt just to make the sale; rather he financed his second startup with credit card debt, and used some of the AR sale to pay back the debt.
Drugs are biologically and psychologically addictive. Stuff like ivory have social appeal. The only reason they are valuable (like diamonds) is because others think they are valuable. So having celebrities decry them hits them directly at their source of appeal unlike drugs. This doesn't affect the bs medicinal market directly but if it reduces the value but keeps the cost high anyways (thanks to additional penalties) it may make the medicines less appealing to those who are price conscious. Of course this is discrimination against the poor and could be a genuine issue if they had real medicinal value but since they actually don't it's much more defensible.
Sure. In this particular setting, having both https and pgp is definitely better and a third layer would be even better, though I cannot think of one. Successful transfer from https Ubuntu mirror says my package was not tampered with during transmission, but nothing about the validity and integrity of the package itself. The Ubuntu project most likely does not have absolute control over the various mirrors available to users, so pgp verification provides a further assurance that mere https cannot.

If I had to chose between https and pgp, I would pick pgp. The OpenBSD project has a similar scheme (called signify).
https://www.google.com/amp/bgr.com/2016/11/22/macbook-pro-20...

If they are projecting a great 4th quarter with only a 2-3% drop off in Q1 2017, it's a runaway hit. Q1 is death for computer sales.
Why not just ask him rather than derive it from first principles?
I like to print things out because it makes them very concrete. I can literally see the whole code base I need to become familiar with. It's very useful for working in legacy code bases, or when trying to reverse engineer what is actually happening. The place memory (e.g. remembering that a variable was defined on the bottom of the third page of the printout) helps to situate you.

However, I'd say it's only worth it if you need to do "deep reading" of convoluted code, or if you're in very unfamiliar territory. Also, it doesn't work when the "printout" becomes too large—a full printout of a 30K LOC project is about 600+ pages. No way you're going to read all that!
> That puts him in the top one-hundredth of one percent of all public pension recipients in California.

If Johansen is unrepresentative of the average, it would be nice to give some stats on what the average actually is.
Few CEOs Bought Their Own Stock in ’16
Do something like this in skype: {code} printf("Hello World!"); {code}
Like many of you here, I've also had buyers remorse with the iPhone 7 (Plus). I see everyone talking about putting the dongle on their headphones and leaving it there. Maybe my car is old fashioned, but I use my phone to stream spotify when I drive, which means the dongle stays in the car connected to AUX. I dont want to spend $10 on an extra dongle because that is fucking stupid. Not just this - but, like a fan boy, i purchased their new Macbook Pro with nothing but USB-C ports. The keyboard sucks, the touchbar is worthless to me (a sysadmin) and the trackpad is overkill. They removed the glowing apple, which doesnt affect my work but everything that was signature about the laptop has been stripped out. Do you know how stupid I look plugging my yubikey into a dongle into a USB-C port? I am a creature of habit so I just assumed that I'd get over all these changes but they are seriously impacting my use of the devices. It is not as easy to switch back to my iPhone 6 Plus but it is very easy for me to use my work macbook that doesnt have the gimmicky piece of crap they call the touch bar. The only positive on both the iPhone and MacBook is the battery life. Once they come out with something comparable that truly lasts as long, I'll switch away from Crapple.
Jumbo-gardeners: How elephants affect weather (2014)
> Personally, I find a lot of bashisms a nice affordance at the command line, and tend to avoid them in scripts meant to persist

Oh, my bad: I haven't said this explicitly. Thank you for pointing this aspect
out. Though the article is about scripts, so this context was somewhat
implied.

I don't mind the shell-specific syntax either, if it is for a command at hand.
In fact, I quite often use what zsh offers with globbing, and sometimes
special redirection. I just hate it being used in scripts.
I don't think I saw this mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but another consideration is that, in his position, you have to do all of the sales and marketing yourself. Getting those 6 weeks of paid consulting work may require months of networking at conferences, cold-calling potential clients, making presentations and blogging to keep your public profile as an expert in the field up to date, keeping in touch with industry acquaintances, etc. $30k/week consulting engagements don't just fall on your doorstep, at least not until after you've spent years of work building up a reputation in the industry. Particularly when you live in Japan, and probably have to fly back and forth to the US on spec regularly to meet people, conference, etc.
Ya, I don't think most people think past the surface of this issue, but than, most people don't think at all.

On a side note, unemployment rates are at a low, so we relly don't need to worry too much. If you look at the charts: https://www.google.ca/publicdata/explore?ds=z1ebjpgk2654c1_&... you see that it really was all due to the recession. Now that the economy has recovered, jobs are back.

All the talk of outsourcing, automation, and all that doesn't seem to show in numbers. Even full time employment is up: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/full-time-empl...

I wish our society valued data driven decisions a little more. Successful businesses do it all the time, why not politics?
It's possible that it's unenforceable/unlawful anyway, depending on your jurisdiction.
I think everyone working on this is well-aware of this problem. It's obvious that there can't be widespread adoption without self-piloting technology. The danger to passengers and people on the ground is much too great, and the burden of getting a pilot license is also too much of an obstacle for most people. There are other considerations such as requirements for frequent routine inspections on flying vehicles, which many people couldn't be trusted to fulfill, which also suggest that a self-driving-uber kind of model is really the right solution.

Shameless plug: my blog post from last year on this topic: https://pointersgonewild.com/2015/09/15/all-hope-is-not-lost...
Forget electric. That's just a gimmick that allows these companies to say "in five to ten years because batteries." Prove it. Make a gas powered one to prove your concept. The simplest flying machine is probably an autogyro. Automate that for point to point transport, show the automation, redundancy, and safety for urban use. Solve those real issues and then we can talk about fancy designs.
I think the commenter who stated that it is likely should cite their source. If you make an assertion like that, you should back it up.
most people who work under 40hr/w want to work more

I suspect that they want to earn more. Most of those will be in low-pay, hourly-paid work.
Haskell really is a pretty nice imperative language sometimes.
(I realize this is rather tactless, but I ask in the interest of fairly weighing the risk/rewards of startups/consulting vs. big tech)

Is it fair to read this to mean that patio11's net worth is < 250 k$? (Based on the fact his liquid assets were negative prior to the sale of AR, and said sale netted less than the price of a house in Tokyo, median price: ~250 kUSD.).
T470 != T470p.
Do we actually want flying cars? They are probably less efficient because you have to overcome gravity, they are probably going to be pretty noisy, falling out of the sky and smashing into the ground is a new failure mode, ...

Flying cars are certainly a nice gadget, but do we really need or want them? I can only think of two good arguments for flying cars, entering the third dimension if we run out of space on the surface and maybe being able to get rid of our current infrastructure, i.e. no longer having to build and maintain roads and railroad tracks and the accompanying infrastructure.

In metropolitan areas it certainly looks a bit like we are running out of space on the surface but I am actually not sure that we are not just pretty bad at making use of the available space. No longer having to maintain a large piece of infrastructure seems actually the more convincing argument to me.
It's perfectly possible to make money recruiting by matching exactly what your customers want, but at that point, you are exactly like every other recruitment firm out there. What separates you? Asking people to do awesome CTFs doesn't really help of success at CTF doesn't line up with success at passing your typical Silicon Valley interview.

Anyone that has spent time working outside of firms that hire this way (which includes stockfighter's founders), realizes that the technical interview today is very expensive, throws away a lot of candidates, stifles all axis of diversity, and ultimately it's not really all that predictive of on the job performance. A CTF is not an ideal predictor either, but I'd argue it's better.

Stockfighter found that their best candidates by the CTF were receiving terrible ratings by the companies they send them to, because they lacked the shibboleths required to pass the interviews. They'd only have success if the company filtering after being presented a candidate was minimal, and then they saw that yes, the job performance of the candidates that were good at the CTFs were at least as good as those that came through the traditional recruiting process. Apparently there wasn't enough appetite for that kind of process, and thus, Stockfighter made no sense as a company.

That's a pity, because I share their view that technical interviewing is broken. I just don't see how we can systematically improve it without the kind of data that you can only get at huge companies that hire thousands of engineers a year.
The article explicitly mentions liberalism (democracy) as a reason famine is becoming far less frequent, so the fact that the world's leading communist dictatorship is threatened with famine doesn't contradict the article at all.

Or perhaps you are one of those cynical people who think all forms of government are equally bad.
The concept on anonymity in the future for these pensioners will go away whether they like it or not.

Instant facial recognition will present pensioners (& others) to everyone.

I can see where citizens charge them more or demand they pay for public services - or spend their money on the tax region from which it was sourced.

Legislation wont bring change but people will.
My wife was working for an insurance company until September. Despite being one of the most efficient workers, and having full time coworkers retire, she remained a temp her whole time there. In fact, they stopped hiring full time for many positions because new software systems were in the works. Software devs occasionally came and shadowed my wife to see how things worked. I secretly hope their profits have been hurt by treating employees like they're disposable, but I doubt it...
> I don't find anything nuanced taking massive group of people and repeating they are all doing or have done bad things.

At no point did I do that. I said that privilege it not an attack. I said that it doesn't imply that you are doing bad things.

All it means that there's a good chance that the particular aspect of your identity may have given you a leg up over others who are identical to you in all other respects. That doesn't mean you've done a bad thing, it's just something that's worth recognizing. It doesn't mean that you're universally better off, either; like I said that's the point of intersectionality -- you can have some privilege due to one aspect of your life which is completely eclipsed by another aspect of your life, e.g. not living in the U.S.

I can't understand the first half of your comment at all. Tending to agree with sho_hn that you're basically trying to be offended here.
I would dare say that there have been millions of people whose lives have been affected very badly by the Marijuana laws, however I didn't look up the incarceration statistics, so if you feel the need to correct that number, no problem. Doesn't affect my point at all.