skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't mind building codes and inspections so much if they actually protected consumers from corner-cutting builders, and if the cities that charge exorbitant fees for permits and inspections didn't automatically sign off on commercial builders' dismally flawed products over coffee and a pastry at the nearest Starbucks.

I've owned three homes so far and everyone of them has violated code in myriad ways, such as not having a speck of insulation in the roof, putting in little to no rebar in the foundation, not securing weight-bearing walls to the joists they're supporting, or finishing the shower surrounds with paint-on tar that breaks down and starts leaking in a couple of years; after the warranty on the home has expired, of course.

My dad was a builder when I was growing up, and the truth of the matter is that city inspectors become friends with builders, and they often times don't bother to actually inspect the homes they're signing off on, or don't inspect them frequently enough to catch when a builder is skimping on insulation, rebar, or nails.

Try to do something on your own though, and the city is there harassing you every step of the way. At least that has been my experience.
I'd like to learn to leverage collaboration and the societal politics of my field to help achieve bigger and more impactful projects. Being a loner is only going to get me so far, I've realized. (I'm a grad student.)
Mindfulness. JavaScript. How to have fun.

Not necessarily in that order.
> There is no suitable laser right now

This is a fine argument against this concept. But the article frames the scientists as saying it's not just unfeasible now but generally impossible. That's what I'm struggling with.
George Pólya: How to Solve It (1945)
The trouble with this stuff is it starts with sympathetic cases like the secret castle:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3044537/Farmer-given...

And ends with people burning to death in slums:

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/thirteen-deaths-across...

Building regulation is there for a reason, usually a good one, sometimes involving fatalities. Blithely disregarding it in its entirety is a non-starter. It would be nice if the system were easier to work with, but picking a fight with it so you can play the hero is not really to be admired.
There is one HN comment I come back to periodically for ideas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341288

I collected a list of videos from some business conferences I really like, you might get some ideas in here -
https://www.findlectures.com/?q=marketing&p=1&type1=Conferen...
I agree with the basic premise, except for the tooling bit. Yes, tools aren't everything and you shouldn't obsess about them. But just picking one and calling it a day is - at least in my opinion - a waste, if you havent even considered the alternatives. Curiosity also plays into the environment you use to develop: I've known a couple of people who would almost recoil from any tool that was not part of the IDE they learned a decade ago. This is not helpful.
So, if you can: Try what interests you. See what you like after a day or two.

For example, I like the *NIX command line very much, just because I can quickly improvise (at least temporary) solutions for a specific problem. This doesn't mean that it is a silver bullet, but it's helpful to know your way around it, and without some curiosity, I would never have tried it.

Also: You dont have to be an expert - you'll get good at the things you use most, which should be those that you enjoy working with. If it doesn't "click", you'll find something else that suits you. Sometimes it's just useful to have tried something for a day or two - even Vim becomes quite usable after a couple of hours of figuring out the basic control scheme.

Oh, and also: It's not unlikely the tooling you use will change over time, so clinging to a specific IDE is not necessarily going to help you. Maybe you'll work at a place that only allows certain software on some systems. In which case, knowing your way around the basic system (Bash, Windows CMD/Powershell) will almost certainly be really helpful at some point. So just try to be open for new things :)
JSAir has halted since ~early this month. Some good shows in its roster though. The final ep w Brendan Eich was rich.
C#, Tutorial – Object-Oriented Programming II – Codingeek
Thanks man! I'll check it in 2017!

Joking! I'm going to dive in it right away!
Somali. The resources for learning the language are extremely limited however.
The SRE Book (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920041528.do) has a number of chapters on load balancing that are well worth reading.

One thing that the book covers that I think this article glossed over was the fact that in sufficiently large systems there's never a single "load balancer" - instead there's many layers of load balancing systems at different levels of the stack. E.g.:

DNS load balancing -> high capacity network-level load balancing -> shared reverse HTTP proxy -> application server -> database (with a "load balancer" internal to the application server load balancing among DB replicas).
If/when it becomes a risk they must mitigate against (be that a financial or reputational risk), I guess they will.

Heck, until stagefright, Google didn't even release security bulletins. It was nigh-on impossible to keep track of all the vulnerabilities They only released security patches in new version releases. That wasn't good for vendors.

Now Google has pushed forward, and it's the turn of OEMs. They shipped patches to StageFright due to the massive bad PR (headline news in many countries, was a talking point amongst even the vaguely tech savvy).

Unless regulated or they feel they will lose money by not doing so, I don't imagine anything changing soon unfortunately. Qcom and other SoC makers are part of the problem too, since they try to drive chipset sales by only supporting older chipsets for a short time.
Where is that code, out of curiosity?
Learn to use radios on land, get into packet radio perhaps.
> Everyone understand JavaScript, so being exposed to functional programming there is not a big deal.

(GHC) Haskell and Clojure are pretty big languages, so it's not surprising that learning them requires a lot of effort, but are you seriously suggesting that learning JavaScript (all quirks included) is easier than learning Scheme or Standard ML (all quirks included)?

I've honestly tried to learn JavaScript (in depth, not just whipping something together by gluing libraries foo, bar, qux), but several parts of its semantics continue to baffle me. Like “this”.
For me, the benchmark is parsing a heterogenous data structure in JSON. For example, an array of inventory items. We get around this by shoehorning them all into a common structure, but in a dynamic language with a dynamic datastore we can store them and access them in a more native (to the problemspace) manner.
Much of the Amazon basin is covered in clouds most of the time. Landsat 8 doesn't have good coverage.
learning how to build a microservice architecture.
some deep learning!
This. I had no choice but to keep going, even if it was just for my cats.
You might struggle mixing mindfulness and Javascript. Or Javascript and fun.

EDIT: yhea fine this was a bit insensitive and mostly a joke sorry, I wont delete as proof of my mistake. Javascript it's not that bad.
Oops forgot to add the base condition to the recursion:

fn [] = []
Interpretation is part of every scientific theory. Many scientific theories that start exploring a new domain posit working definitions that and change and get refined over time.
I want to learn to drive and get a UK driving licence.
Echo is great for info that you need kind-of-right-now, but info that isn't detailed enough that you need to read it.

My favorite uses are:

* Flash Briefing: Weather and NPR news while I make the morning coffee.

* Weather: How cold is it? I'm about to leave and I need to know if I need a sweater or a coat.

* Set a timer: I'm cooking, and I need a reminder in 10 minutes, but my hands are dirty and my phone is on the table in the other room.
I made a smart home skill for my dorm room. I didn't have any wifi enabled lights, but I created a little IR adapter for some RGB LEDs around the room, and the TV. Ultimately, I was able to ask for the lights in different settings, control the TV (including setting the channel and changing inputs). I eventually want to make it able to control some simple aspects of the Chromecast like the Google home can.
Sadly this has also happened in America. With every regulation passed that takes more money from the citizens and goes to the government, we lose our liberties one at a time.
Like a lot of people, I'm drawn to the idea of functional programming, and I enjoy using the functional building blocks in JavaScript. What I struggle with is performance, and I bump into it all the time. The difference between overwriting an array with a for loop and using map() is roughly an order of magnitude. I use map() and other functional primitives whenever I can, with anything small and with any code that doesn't need to be fast - which is admittedly most code. But performance matters often enough that I can't adopt a single functional style even though I wish I could.

Will there be a time when going functional will be not just the fast way to write code, but the way to write fast code? Are there efforts to create high performance functional primitives that are easy to use and also outperform their imperative alternatives? I've used numpy, for example, and I wouldn't necessarily put it in the easy to use category. I'm hoping one day I can write straightforward functional code and have it not be so much slower than imperative code that I have to question which one I should use.
I want to write a real, hand-holding example for using GenStage and Elixir for a real tangible feature.

The official documentation sucks and does nothing to illustrate how to use it in a real setting. I've tried to understand what it does and how it works about once a month for the past four months but I still don't get it.

http://elixir-lang.org/blog/2016/07/14/announcing-genstage/

Hopefully I can understand it soon, and further cement my understanding by writing a real example for people to learn from. It sounds very powerful and useful but damned if I know how to use it lol.
Vim. I'm a notepad++ and PHPStorm user but I've gotten curious about the potential productivity gains afforded by the vim power user functions.
Pony! Seems like a very interesting language that doesn't get much exposure. Predictable GC, fine grained capabilities, actor model (concurrent by default), no deadlocks etc.

http://ponylang.org
And a Happy Hanukkah to you and everybody else!
They may seem difficult, but one upon a time cities burned. Fire was a constant threat. Thats why new york has so many fire departments. That new buildings have been built to codes for a century or more means cities as a whole are less flammable. The concept of large-scale fire spreading across neighbourhoods has almost slipped from living memory. Thats worth the extra costs.

The curse of any effective regulation is that the day after it cures the evil it was meant to, people start questioning things. Vaccines, pasterization, not spitting in public, rabies shots for pets ... all were/are life or death rules that many now disregard because they have forgotten history.
>I think that self-driving cars may actually increase traffic

Your assumption is that cars will stay the same form and shape after they become self-driving, which is myopic. Without needing all of the safety protection cars or three spare seats, cars can be far smaller and you can easily envision a sitution when we get a x4 increase in traffic density, meaning traffic won't be an issue.
If you have read his books, is this a suitable description of his definition of mind:

"After much discussion, they decided that a key component of the mind is: “the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within and among us.”"

Just between you and me, I don't think that is very spectacular. But it's been years since I kept up with readings in the theory of mind.
I guess it's not so much top-down vs bottom-up per se - it's just that some people stop after the top level. Yes, that's not possible if you start from the bottom, but then those people most likely would have gotten frustrated at the bottom anyway...

On the other hand, I guess someone reading HN is rather likely of the kind that likes to open the lid and find out how things work.
I don't think anyone anticipated the shift in online culture from "what goes online stays online" to the present day when people are actively scouring forums, mailing lists, archives etc for something to weaponize and brigade in the "real world".
I'm having to rethink my entire world view. I was operating under the assumption that lower-profile manufacturers like STM were (probably) trustworthy because they don't sell into the consumer market and so there would be more to be lost than gained for them to compromise their chips. I was hoping that the company would reckon that professional customers would have less tolerance for bullshit than consumers, and so if a compromise were discovered that could damage the company's reputation enough to put them out of business, so they would not take the risk.

But if what you say is true (and it sounds plausible to me) then you really can't trust anything any more. Even at 350nm, how do you know that the part you just bought conforms to the spec? You'd have to verify every single individual part. And given that someone has already demonstrated a hardware compromise using a single transistor, even a visual verification will not necessarily catch that.
And if there's one thing I've learned from reading your website, it's that sometimes the argument will legitimately be that the commenter is astroturfing or spewing an argument that an astroturfer would use. It seems increasingly likely that the discourse on your website is being attacked by brigades of users -- ones even with established accounts here -- who bring along intellectually dishonest argumentation that is motivated by political trolling alone. If those people (or the people influenced by them) can't be called out as brigaders and astroturfers, then I suspect many normal users here will increasingly be influenced by spurious arguments of the sort to which I originally responded.

Keep in mind that you are not making a neutral call by preventing me from calling out a commenter. You legitimize their arguments and leave it to others to find a way to call them out without raising your hackles.

Truthfully, the fact that I'd waste time on the matter is, I suppose, my own problem to fix in the new year...
How I Used My Mac to Beat My Dad at the NYT Magazine “Six for a Spell” Puzzle
There should definitely be an exception in every code for the case when you're doing it on your own land, with your own materials, for your own consumption.

I think code writers understand that, nevertheless it is too often 'conveniently' left out.
I think it's more that aggression and the instinct to protect ourselves are part of all DNA. We only have to look at ants being invaded by a foreign species to see that.

Also, since everything is based on the bell curve, out of 7 billion people, there will be people who are born with the perfect storm of personality traits to start a war, and with the right (or wrong, more accurately) life experiences will start that war. Hitler was a perfect example. Statistically it has to happen.

And we are only aggressive because, socially, we are barely out of the trees. We have the ability to blow the world up many times over, yet are consumed by petty intolerance. Our social intelligence lags our technical intelligence considerably. This is the most dangerous time in any civilisations time.
I want to learn how to even start a side-project. I've been out of university since 2012 and have done basically nothing in my free time CS-related. Every time I start to even think about doing something, that "why are you working while on your free time" feeling comes up and I immediately do something else. Not sure if it means I really don't love programming and Computer Science after all (entirely possible) or if it means I'm just lazy. My goal is to find out one way or another.
People doing random things in the middle of the forest where they were sure they couldn't hurt anybody else had led to any number of major wildfires over the past century.
I'd recommend checking out PlayCanvas (https://playcanvas.com). It gives you a pretty powerful editor app to build WebGL content. It's got a scripting interface, but you can create some pretty cool graphical scenes without writing a single line of code.
There's no need for this kind of uncivil, clichéd comment. Please be charitable when people are laying out their goals.
How to balance family life and work
Submitted two days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13243654

with (AFAICT) the exact same URL. Why didn't the dupe detector catch this?
I like to listen to podcasts when I'm doing something repetitive, like walking or running. I like podcasts that are educative, not so much podcasts that are about new features and don't explain things very much. I like to listen to them when it's a subject I don't know very well (like microservices).

* SE-radio

* Java Pub House

* Type theory podcast: http://typetheorypodcast.com/

* Data Skeptic has podcasts about data science algorithms: http://dataskeptic.com/podcast
You can argue that some ongoing tragedy of the commons also has externalities.

But is there such an externality in the use of water? Is there some side effect that doesn't involve the use of water itself? Isn't the tragedy, the depletion of the supply, the problem? That isn't external.
Trump's promised to reduce housing regulations: http://nahbnow.com/2016/08/trump-vows-to-cut-burdensome-regu...

Of course, he's made a lot of promises...
Related question: does anyone have any experience becoming a building inspector and what all goes into that?
> There's a reason not a single production imperative language supports GADTs.

Scala?

OCaml would also qualify as a counter example, although you cheated a bit by adding all these adjectives and you could argue that OCaml is not "production".

Haskell can easily do imperative as well.

I agree with you overall but I think you're drawing too strict a line between these concepts. Most of the guarantees you obtain from these languages do not even come close to "this will not crash" (this is very hard to guarantee in languages with no totality guarantee, i.e... most of them), let alone "this will terminate" (since most of these are Turing complete).
While I agree with your point, the "numerous Eurpoean pillow manufacturing standards" meme is based on a fabricated claim: https://youtu.be/iAgKHSNqxa8?t=273
Citybound: Christmas 2016 Announcement
Love this! I made a similar IR controlled "API" to toggle my in-window air conditioner on/off last summer.

Btw, I don't think the Google Home can actually control Chromecast. They advertise it but each time I've tried stuff like "Okay Google, mute my TV" or "Okay Google, turn off Chromecast" it's said something along the lines of "Sorry, I can't do that yet, but I'm getting better every day". I switched off the Google Home after 2 weeks back for the Echo, so maybe it's gotten better.
>"So, the OP is from the NYT in NYC and is about hating cars. So, from the decades of history, I'm not surprised or impressed."

Except the article is using Los Angeles as an example and the train picture and two of the women they spoke to in the article were Angelinos. This is is significant because Los Angeles has traditionally been an epicenter of "car culture."

Also since you seem to be implying an editorial bias against cars I will add that NYTimes has a regular automotive section of their paper, where they cover the industry and do new car reviews and quite decently at that. This article is from that automotive section.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/automobiles/index.html
Ask HN: New Year Project suggestions
I'm looking for project suggestions for the new year, something spanning 1-3 months.

This is what I'm considering, any suggestions would be appreciated:

1. Automated Stock Trading algorithms (Quantopian or other)

2. Arduino / Pi project (suggestions welcome)

3. Website/app: dating, music, photos, social, finance, etc. Suggestions welcome.

4. Data Analytics project using Machine Learning against a public data source (Astronomy, City Data, etc.)

Please share any experiences with such projects.

Thanks!
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

(you're welcome)
Good call.

You can be the best developer in the world, in a job that leaves you alone and lets you write code, and you might get several times as much done as another developer. Or you can spend a little less time writing code and have a few productive meetings and discussions, resulting in far more development than you could ever do alone. And you'll still get to write plenty of code.
They're a solved problem, solved by implementing fire codes.

Or, more to the point, as noted above, they're paid in blood. Each time enough people die in previously unforeseen ways, we come up with solutions in aggregate. Chesterton's Fence is apt here.
The folks who died in the 2016 Oakland fire were maybe doing something hazardous and illegal.

So...not really sure what you're saying...the codes that made that illegal have served their purpose?

Seems like an oxymoron, the reason there are fewer deadly fires is at least in part because things that are hazardous are illegal.
Chicago is hyper vigilant about those codes, and the electricity requirements for buildings in the city are much stricter than the suburbs.
Former google career coach shares a visual track what you want to do in life
I'm not sure what this is supposed to be, but I did not find it inviting to read.
Team Health Monitors and Why Your Startup Needs a Check-Up
My 2 cents on codes. As far as I'm concerned, every new shared dwelling should be required to construct for noise control.

My understanding is that substantial improvements in this regard can be achieved for 10% or less additional cost. And the resulting livability and healthiness (stress reduction) of the the dwelling is greatly improved.

Having had more than my share of crap neighbors. Please.
I 100% agree, but there are reasonable arguments against too.
Unfortunately in this case the house was sold on after the couples death. Guests, like new owners, also have a right to be save from structural issues.
No need for patronosing either.
«I’m not proud, but I’m happy that I chose Scheme-ish first-class functions and Self-ish (albeit singular) prototypes as the main ingredients. The Java influences, especially y2k Date bugs but also the primitive vs. object distinction (e.g., string vs. String), were unfortunate.»

So JS got ideas from Scheme, Self, and Java.
>Fleet maintenance will help, but after 150k miles on average, they'll need to be replaced.

What most people don't appreciate is that fleet use completely changes the economically optimal strategy for car manufacturing.

If you're selling cars, the dominant strategy is planned obsolescence. The fewer miles the car lasts, the more frequently the car needs to be replaced and the more revenue you make.

If you're selling mobility, the dominant strategy is durability and reliability. The more lifetime miles you can deliver from each car that comes off the line, the more revenue you make.

Tesla's stated goal is a "million mile powertrain."[1] I think their leadership has already anticipated this shift in the economic calculus.

[1] http://www.hybridcars.com/tesla-sets-1-million-mile-drivetra...
Undergrad researcher comes up with new equation in gaseous thermodynamics
I recently got this and am happy with it so far: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MYYCGKW
I should add that it's readable
With Vim, you're right, but that's also one of the most extreme examples.

I would stay start with whichever has a lower upfront learning curve, which in most cases means the GUI.