skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did general engineering in undergrad, and software engineering (not CS) for my master's, so I'm somewhat of an outsider to a "computer science" degree. But if you have 6 whole years to turn someone into a "computer scientist," I would expect that, in ADDITION to compilers and operating systems, they'd also have a healthy dose of physics, chemistry, and especially math. I mean, for crying out loud, the degree has the word "science" in it.

My freshman year physics class had us building computer models of the solar system from Kepler's laws, constructing vocoders by manipulating raw sine waves, and discovering the equations that governed op-amp circuits through experimentation and a little deep thinking.

At my last job, one of my first tasks was to take raw data from truck engines computers (a data point ever 300ms) and turn point measurements like "instantaneous velocity" into data like "how far as the truck traveled over the last week"? Trivial. By combining that with engine speed and fuel usage, you could also say things like "what gear is the truck in?" "Has the engine performance declined recently?" "What percentage of the time has the driver idled in the last month?" And roll all that data up into an efficient database, build a super-flexible API around it, and create a series of web apps to display the useful stuff that managers wanted.

Having a deep understanding of the physical relationships between measurements, understanding what the data can and can't tell you, being able to spot potential problems in a proposed project (for instance, something that relies on an impossibly accurate GPS in a subtle way) -- these are all things that computer scientists absolutely should be able to do.

Yes, they should understand their computers from the electrons on up -- operating system included -- but they should understand the world that the computers interact with, as well.
I don't know about CompSci research. However I do http://outcomereference.com/ which is just a side-project and read about 2-3 medical research papers everyday and the biggest challenge is open access to papers. It is possible to find the PDFs on various research sites but the vast majority is costly (avg $40 per paper). Not sure if there is free & open access for CompSci research?
'forcefully extract money'

I hate that sort of terminology, money only exists for you to trade because you are a member of a society that collectively decided it was a good idea.
I still dont think I grasp what your describing. The store isnt global. And you usually have domains on the store to namespace particular bits of state. But if need be, any part of your app can access that state if it needs to without having to dig down into your UI hierarchy which will likely change over time.

without wanting to sound patronising, but I wonder wether you're structuring things incorrectly.
Stopping a Process
Thanks for replying.

> If all your work has come through client references and
> personal networks, talking with clients and references is
> likely to be a fruitful path to more work.

I do that already. I talk to my past clients frequently - I do believe that they would recommend me whenever they get an opportunity - they've done so in the past. But it looks like I'm facing a dry spell right now for about last 2 months - which is a really long time for me. I think I'm wasting my time :-/

That is why I think building side projects which generate leads for me can be productive. Do you have any creative ideas for my side projects? I can build mobile apps and web apps.
First, second, and third, suggest a very strong path dependence. We keep using C++ because we used it in the past —just like Qwerty.

Fourth is also a kind of path dependence, but… come on, reasonable programming languages are simple (Lua and 1ML come to mind). Libraries and frameworks take time to learn, but a core language needs a couple days to be picked up, maybe a couple weeks for full productivity. Assuming you knew the underlying paradigms in the first place of course —no Haskell programmer learns Forth in a day.

Of course newer is not automatically better. See the mess we made of the web. Still, it is safe to say that nobody in their right mind would invent C++ today. As Rust is showing, we can do better.

Even so, I'm extremely wary of this "one language to rule them all". Why does the "right tool for the job" always end up being the vanilla version of some popular language? Where are the languages specialists that can tweak your language into something uniquely suited for your particular needs?

Seriously. We call in database specialists, network specialists, security specialists, OS specialists whenever the project has significant demands in those domains. Why are programming languages left out? We breathe with that stuff!
Foxconn is far, far more than just iPhones or just Apple.
This is very true. I'm living in a big European city in a totally overpriced apartment that was originally a "worker's apartment" (according to the terminology of the time) around 1930.

Really, the amount of work one has to perform just to be able to have a couple of square meters is amazing.
Thanks for your comments.

There was a lot of bitterness about the fallout from Iran-Contra... There was more context to the passenger's quip - my oddly-specific question struck a nerve, I guess.

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/index.html
We've had computers for 60 some odd years as well, but only recently are they driving cars for us.
Pet project: Microsoft’s cat, dog calendars earn big bucks for charities
I simply didn't state that it is a policy failure.

I said We should also start treating rising housing prices as a policy failure.

It's a prescription for what society should do, not an assessment of whether current policy aligns with voter wishes.

In the comment I replied to initially, rising prices are treated as a measure of economic success. Treating them as a policy failure would contrast with that current attitude...
I'd agree, and this is what I was hinting at in my comment as well.

Plain-text readability is paramount. But additionally, we need to be careful as to how visualizations are implemented. The visual characteristics of the final HTML document are really supposed to exist in the domain of the stylesheet applied to it.

The visualization configuration block in OP's example is perilously close, if not guilty, of violating the traditional separation of concerns we expect with Markdown.
East Palo Alto resident, here. Not at all surprised to hear this; our town used to be the last place on the Peninsula where non-engineers could afford to live, but those days are gone. See here for some history:

https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/10/east-of-palo-altos-eden/

Some reasons:

- Predatory lending resulted in a 35% foreclosure rate on single-family homes since 2008, half of which are now owned by people who don't live in town. More at http://archive.peninsulapress.com/2013/07/16/squeezed-by-the...

- Until mid-2016, virtually all of the high-density rental homes in East Palo Alto were owned by a single absentee landlord in Chicago, who was hell-bent on chasing out as many residents as possible so they could reset rents to "market rates" or (better) knock down the apartments and build condos. More at http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/02/16/exclusive...

- The price of local housing has jumped since Facebook opened their new campus, offering a $10,000 to $15,000 payment to employees who live within 10 miles of One Hacker way. More at http://www.reuters.com/article/facebook-benefits-idUSKBN0U02...

I'm sad to read some of the comments. "If you can't afford to live in your neighborhood, get the hell out" is a sentiment that will definitely come back to haunt you.
What a Hacker News Hangover Really Feels Like
Hah! Hell, I'd even give credit to the SQL answer, if it came with the rest. ;-)

The only thing I'd add is that you can probably come up with a pretty simple heuristic or three to solve the problem for the case of truly random gibberish, without the need for elaborate data structures. But yes, this would be the answer of a great candidate.
distibuted testing systems or whatever they call it are often based on a hidden setting in your cookies/cache, and may have undesired effects. Clearing them gives you another value for the setting, which means you will not be using the breaking behaviour of the previous trial. Its an easy way to keep the fact that you're in a possibly unstable environment away from the user.
Hi everybody, here is Alex, the co-founder of Creative Tim. Hope the information from this interview will help you achieve more with your current business or give you the courage to start your own business.

If you have any suggestions or feedback I would be glad to talk with you.

Best,
Alex
I have found the split has only gotten better with time. It used to be most package maintainers assumed you were using nightly/beta. The last holdouts I see are diesel and serde which have instructions for using nightly. Even then they realize no one wants to ship code on nightly so they provide directions for making a building using stable rust. Once the procedural macros stuff is stabilized they can stop.

I have been extremely pleased with the rust community and the rust maintainers.

And no I was not paid by them to say this... :)
This article is not about averages where outliers drive up the metric (like wealth or income), it is about defined cut points.

I'm still not seeing how that would relate to what he is saying, though. We are talking about the world, and the world getting better, which the data shows it clearly is.

And the "is" is important there, that's the current trend we have.
Eclipse embraces Java microservices initiative
Sometimes you want it to be lossy, but not most of the time, and yet there is no choice. I had a bug caused by that, that's why I remember it. Silent explicit type conversions are essentially unsafe.
A systemd WTF
Well, you do get an (expected time) asymptotically efficient algorithm for sorting the first k elements of an array by running quicksort without recursing on the last n-k elements. This is what you get in Haskell with "take k (sort xs)".

But, as you mentioned the constant factors involved are ridiculously high and this is not going to give you a practical solution.
I'm not the OP of the article, but I enjoy his writing and this is a followup to his article that made the front page a week or so ago.
> Modules are the answer, but it seems nobody cares enough to get them in the standard or, more likely, it's just too hard a problem.

Aren't modules especially limited with the mentioned problem of templates?
If I have a vector of a custom type, I still have to instantiate it in every file that is using this type, I don't think modules help much here, they reduce the amount of time parsing, not instantiating if I understand correctly.

We'll need to significantly change the way we handle templates in compilers to get significant improvement.
See the links at the bottom of your profile page: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=npankaj.
Google open-sources test suite to find crypto bugs
A healthy, somewhat fit individual can go 30km/h on a decent bike for extended periods of time. With a little tail-wind 40 is doable. 40 is also about the speed where most bikes' smallest gear starts to become uncomfortable. I find it strange that the cutoff is at 25 and not at 30-35. With the current limit an e-bike is not very attractive for active people.
Ebikes means my mum doesn't take the car all the time. She isn't fit and there isn't a way to go that doesn't have steep hills.

It might mean my grandparents were able to go see/do more things, if they weren't scared of them.

They are less useful for healthy, young adults, though they might get more people to ride if they made it unnecessary to shower when you were done (it is not a problem to shower at work if that place has a gym, you just don't shower at home, however it is annoying having to shower when you get home again).
Thanks for detailing it out. Really appreciate that. I will mostly be using the e-bike for daily commute. I was looking for something that is good battery life, cheap, comfortable, long life. Your analysis helps a lot in figuring out the a big part of it.
I can see how the Economist might be described as liberal by a European, but they are decidedly not left-leaning. I would say that they are right-leaning even by American standards.
Can we have some laws please for visual sky pollution, before it is too late?
I'd love to see one of these get combined with a DHT or a blockchain, or some kind of distributed data store. The idea being that it would let someone claim a phone number and create a DNS like system to map "phone number" to IP address for old style BBS systems.
The article brings up a lot of great points. Though people do need to be mindful lest they be writing a follow-up, "Why my project got forked, and I now sidelined."
C++ is often used in situations where a GC would have been perfectly fine. I'll go as far as to guess that most C++ projects are like this. In my little corner of the world, C++ is one of the most overused languages.
I'm not a purity zealot, I'm a correctness zealot. Working on real projects means working with people who are less competent than they think they are; I want to force those people to not introduce bugs, and I'm broadly indifferent to the mechanism for doing that.
Yeah maybe that's more accurate, depending on what you mean by globalism.
Sorry, I did not see your comment. Thanks for your input.

Yes, under development. I use it to make featured images for my blog posts.
Like CASE tools, not for lack of trying!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars
Greatest Health Tracker: 10 Greatest Exercise Trackers and Health Bands
> It's up to the professionals (ie. us) to make decisions on behalf of those who can't, don't, and won't be able to understand ...

I wouldn't stand for this in a politician, so I can't be surprised when people say they don't trust I.T. professionals.
I think the general frustration is not that X is being replaced, rather that practically anything the OSS world does quickly fragments over minor differences, resulting in a very inefficient division of already-scarce labor.

I believe this happens because there is no real unifying force other than good feelings. In a company, people are forced to make reasonable efforts to work together or they imperil their paycheck. In the open-source world, people won't volunteer their time to work on your young project if it doesn't fit their taste profile quite exactly. Since it's rare for that to happen, lots of people spend lots of time re-inventing the same basic stuff and very few people spend time working on the difficult 20% of problems that would yield an 80% improvement in overall experience.

We see this over and over in the open-source world, and it's not without its benefits, but particularly in core underlying components like display servers, it can be very frustrating because you just want everyone to adopt something and move forward. The delays caused by the fragmentation can impair things for years as driver vendors play a "wait and see" game and talented developers look at it and say "Wow, that looks like a mess, I'll stick with Windows for now".

Personally I think Mir is straight up power grab. Canonical said "Why should we be bound by what these Wayland dweebs say? Even if their stuff is great, we are the biggest desktop Ubuntu distribution and we want to be in control. We will make our own display server." It is frustrating on the outside, but I guess you can't argue that it's not in Canonical's interests, and they may indeed end up winning the war (though it didn't work that way with Upstart).
That's why I said "some combination of metrics" as an alternative to "clicks". In other words, yes, traffic will always matter, but there has to be better discrimination among kinds of traffic.

Traffic that's worthless to advertisers -- i.e. I clicked to your page and bounced immediately without actually engaging or really "seeing" any of the ads that loaded -- should be priced at $0.

Traffic that's worthwhile to advertisers -- i.e. I clicked to your page and stayed there for a bit, engrossed in the content and noticing the ads and getting a positive feeling from both -- should be priced somewhere north of $0.

I've been in this business on the content and publishing side for almost 20 years now, and I've seen very many attempts to distinguish worthless traffic from worthwhile traffic. As with the fake news/headlines issue, the above problem persists and is not amenable to a quick technical fix because it's ultimately a problem of incentives: publishers and ad agencies are strongly incentivized to maximize the percentage of a publisher's traffic that (by hook or by crook) can be classified as worthwhile to the advertiser, whether it really is or not.

Given that the ad agency supposedly represents the advertiser in the negotiation with the publisher over campaign pricing and value but is nonetheless incentivized to collude with the publisher because the agency gets paid based on the size of the ad spend, you can see how the advertiser is left with no one looking out for his/her interests and is at the mercy of an industry that pitches it "metric of the month" as a proxy for value.

You can also see why performance advertising platforms that offer advertisers tons of real-world data and transparency, i.e. FB and Google, are eating up the entire ad industry. It's just a better deal for advertisers than the publisher + agency model. At least, we thought it was, but now that FB has admitted to "accidentally" screwing advertisers with bad metrics, who knows...

Anyway, yeah, traffic will always matter. My only point is that in a world where revenue scales with any and all forms of traffic, no matter how worthless to the advertiser (and the user, in many cases), is a world where people will pursue traffic by any means.

Edit: Ultimately, though, if you're optimizing for "user got some sort of potentially actionable informational value from this" instead of "user got momentary emotional charge (i.e. the classic 'surprise and delight') and the advertiser got positive/useful vibes in the process", the answer has always been user-funded content. This was true in the era of print/TV/radio, and it's true today. Every ad-supported model will always optimize for emotional manipulation over any other form of utility to the consumer. For some types of content (i.e. fiction and pure entertainment) this works out great, and for others (i.e. news, reviews, investigative reporting) it will always eventually lead to disaster.
Awesome. May I ask which school is this? I am trying to find a great school/tutor for Salsa in NYC.
Thank you for the comprehensive response! I have a lot to learn but it's exciting.
Thank you, I got it!
In Microsoft world, they are available for a couple decades.
Yes, they help a lot with compilation time.
Hoping Wes will chime in here if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing that the technologies he discusses here will more or less take the place of a lib pandas.
The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source
Thanks for pointers! I'm basically below/at 101 with ML, but have background in computer graphics.

I was wondering if one could utilise ML for either or both of two things: object outline spatial/temporal (feathering can solve for motion blur) and better Chroma key.
Rust safety is ultimately a productivity boost.

For example, if I have a big string, I may create a hashmap where both keys and values are references to some portions to that original string.

Then, I may pass this hashmap to another function that will transform this hashmap into structs that contain reused portions of those string references.

Rust compiler will make sure that the original string is not destroyed or moved in any way in memory while this is happening.

While it is certainly possible to do this in C and C++, the development cost there is way higher. In C++, one would be sensible to stick to a slower version that copies and allocates data, unless he/she is really sure that the need for performance justifies the code complication.

Meanwhile, juggling the references this way in Rust is common and almost sloppy: the hashmap contains references to strings because it was probably created from iterator that iterated over references. The developer might not even need to notice it unless the string reference in result might be kept around longer than original. The compiler will tell about the type mismatch, and the developer will then create a new string from the reference, and then he/she will move on.

There is a similar story when such code needs to be refactored. The word "sloppy" still works here, but in a good way: offloading "being very, very careful" stuff to compiler is deliciously fun.
My goal is to deliver the same quality pandas user experience on 10x as much data. pandas works well on 1GB of data, but less well on 10GB. This has to change for pandas to remain a relevant tool in the future.

Awesome! Great to see such honest commitment. Pandas is already a great library, and I can't wait to see the progress!
Probably about 300-500 watt-hours of power and approximately 20 watt-hours per mile, so 15-25 miles.
> e.g from F# then what attracts you is that you will get the same safety guarantees (and perhaps a few more)

As a big rust fan, I wouldn't go that far. You can offload a lot more work to the type system in a language like F# or Haskell. Rust is very safe from e.g. a memory perspective (excepting unsafe operations), but there are additional levels of assurance you can get by aggressively forcing the type system to catch logic errors for you that you can't really do in Rust.

As for performance, I agree, although a more accurate description would be that it's much easier to get C-level performance with Rust code while you have to put in some more effort to get it in any high-level functional language.
- Docker
- Javascript
- D3
- Node
- Google Compute Engine
- Google NoSQL data store,
I can see Option and Result irking people who don't want to embrace a more functional (programming) mindset. They can be kind of a pain to deal with procedurally without the and_then, or_else, map and such. The new '?' construction will definitely help with this.

The appeal of exceptions, to me, has always been that they allow you to largely separate your error handling from your procedural logic since the catch block can usually go at the end of the method/function and can usually be written later. This means you can write and test code and then come back and handle error conditions after you've gotten the success path working. Option/Result force you to at least acknowledge the possibility of an error at the point when you're writing your logic. Whether that's ?/try!, .unwrap(), a match or writing in a more functional manner, error handling can't literally be an afterthought the way it is with unchecked exceptions.

I'm not arguing that this is a bad thing, and it may be a push in the right direction for many programmers. But it's still a push and many don't enjoy being pushed.
"[it] exposed deep flaws in many customer's traffic data" -- this probably is why nobody cared that much and it got buried. See my longish reply below. The incentives are such that only metrics that make traffic look more valuable are metrics that publishers and ad agencies have any love for.

I'm sure a truly great way of measuring a user session's real value to the advertiser has been invented and discarded hundreds of thousands of times over the past two decades -- invented because it seems needed, and discarded because it actually worked and holy crap most traffic is garbage.
Question - when the US, Europe and Japan were industrializing from 1880s through 1960s and dragged everyone into disastrous wars, did any other market complain about worker safety or abuse or pollution (the famous London fog etc.) and refuse to buy products?

When now other nations are going through an industrialization phase that's actually far more respectful of worker rights than the West's industrialization was, why complain?