skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
India wants to move to biometric payments, http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/19/technology/india-cash-biomet...

"Amitabh Kant said that even electronic payment methods may be "totally redundant" by 2020. Instead, all Indians will need for transactions is their thumb or eye.

"Each one of us in India will be a walking ATM," Kant said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. That would represent "the biggest technological leapfrogging ever in the history of mankind," he added.

... nearly 1.1 billion of India's 1.3 billion people have already registered their biometric data under the government's unique identification program.

The Indian government is testing a payments app that makes use of that biometric data, coupled with portable fingerprint scanners that cost about 2,000 rupees ($30) each."
I don't think really anyone except marketing goons and the type of people that parrot marketing goons believes the "you can't see 60 fps" thing.
> I have friends in several startups leaving their jobs because they've been tasked with maintaining legacy…

It's better to not have such people working for you in the first place.

Maintaining existing software to focus on real business is just the kind of founders I'd want to work with. It's a part of being a part of a startup, and those who jump the ship too often do not leave any legacy behind.
The thing is, tail calls aren't _just_ about emulating iteration via recursion:

def foo():
raise ValueError

def bar():
return foo()

bar()

With TCO, the stack trace would contain `main` and `foo`, as `bar`'s frame would be overwritten by `foo`. This example is simple, but `bar` could be a 50 line long if-else chain of tail calls and when debugging you won't necessarily know which condition was evaluated.
When Banker's Talk about Bitcoin
> fundamentalism offers a sense of community and belonging

That's certainly an interesting point. I must admit I struggle a bit with understanding where these people are coming from, because as an atheist I don't personally experience a lack of community and belonging. I would imagine a forced "sense" of community being prescribed at gunpoint to be quite alienating, but I've heard enough people asserting it to take it seriously.

Maybe fundamentalist islam is just a meme whose time has come. Maybe the mindless, cruel herd is fundamentally more appealing to humans than individuality and free thought. In that case, we're not just seeing the pendulum swing here, we're seeing the transition into a new civilization: devoid of science and insight of any kind, yet wielding the tools of technology for maximum devastation.
There are many high schools like this in the U.S. that are state funded, both in very liberal and very conservative states.
In the UK its usually either 1 or 3 months. Depends on the contract.

In france; its 3.
> What happens to late bloomers? Are they forever cast down into a track of lower opportunity?

It's a good point, but it only argues for easy transfers into / out of the "gifted" track.

> What about the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level?

Only a good point if it comes from someone willing to live up to it. Would you willingly relocate to rural Kansas or inner Detroit for the social benefits of being around people who are on a different intellectual level?

> "Gifted" kids often come with motivated parents. Removing these children from schools will take their parents with them. [...] The worst schools will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.

Again this sounds very good on paper. But how would you feel about a very similar argument: people should never be allowed to move to LA, NYC or DC from impoverished communities. These are motivated people, and the worst communities will never get better if all the talent is sucked out of them.
> How does it handle differentiating different types of bread, which have differing carbs?

We don’t nail everything yet but we allow users to refine the predictions. So in your example we might predict bread and let the user pick the type.

> How does it handle a thick layer of butter or another fat put on the sandwich in the Avocado Toast example, which would presumably be below the visible avocado?

We don’t predict portion sizes yet. At the moment we give a sane default and ask the users to adjust it. The next time you eat the dish we bring back the past meal so you don't have to specify the details again. We’re hoping to start predicting some of those details once we get enough data from our users.

Thank you for trying it out and the feedback.
But they do. I went to a Dutch gymnasium at age 12. The smartest 5% of the population is admitted there. Did the concept of faster-learning kids and slower-learning kids disappear there? Hardly! There were huge differences in aptitude.
These societies' problems are certainly not recent, and they're not just due to drugs. For Appalachia, read _Albion's Seed_ or at least Slate Star Codex's review ("the sensibility is positively Orcish"); for Sicily, read Peter Turchin's _War and Peace and War_ (watch for the section on "asabiyya black holes"), and probably _The Moral Basis of a Backwards Society_. Both of these societies have been absolutely awful for centuries.
Unavailable in Australia. Weird, because this is the one way of logging food that doesn't differ between countries.
I think the point is that having some level of technical skills is important, but I don't think it alone will let you be a good manager.

Unfortunately, the article neither publishes the dataset, nor goes into it in much depth.
What an extremely toxic comment.
No it isn't. He's advocating for publication of data. No where does that align with a climate change "skeptic"
How  to Achieve Better Work-Life Balance in 2017
OSS over-the-air updater for embedded Linux: Why we chose Golang over C
4) The President and his staff are correct, despite prevailing opinion of scientists and media.
jesus. that's it. watched the movie 2 weeks ago, his face must still be in my RAM
The last two are essentially the same, differing only in window dressing, and the first isn't far right (while the Republican Party has made some selective rhetorical mods in the direction of minarchism -- particularly at the federal level over issues where they want states to be free to pursue policies more right-wing than there is federal support for at the time of the argument -- minarchism isn't particularly right-wing at all.)
I went to a "double academically talented" middle school, and got bullied there, more than in my elementary school. Nothing to do with "smartness" or "geekiness" - middle school kids are just horrible lol
Ask HN: Deep(er) tech predictions for 2017?
What do you think will happen in 2017 with:
a) Security?
b) Blockchain/bitcoin?
c) Dev tools?
d) Machine learning/AI?
e) Drones? VR/AR? IoT?
f) anything else...?

Thanks for your feedback!
I don't want a work-life balance.

Sure, the Swiss model is very attractive for a person in a certain phase of life with a certain attitude toward work --- one for whom work is something distinct from life.

Me? I want the freedom to pour myself into something I love. I'd rather spend 60 hours per week using all of my faculties to produce something worthwhile than to spend 35 or 40 hours just trading my time for money, doing something I have to force myself to do, even if I can go swim with the swans on my break.

I've seen people use the concept of "work-life balance" as an excuse to propose caps on the impact a single developer can have. These people want to live in a Harrison Bergeron world where my work beyond 40 hours wouldn't count so that they don't feel pressed to work more than 40 hours a week. I couldn't be more opposed.

When I'm doing something I love, I always think about ways I can do it better. When I'm doing something I hate, no amount of work-life balance will compensate.
In software it never works like that. Costs more to build it with contractors and then because you get rid of the contractors support is done by people unfamiliar with the code so support costs more, upgrades cost more because new contractors need time to learn the codebase or the old contractors charge more because they know the codebase.
It's usefulness depends a lot on how straight your teeth are and what kind of food you eat.
An official REPL is a good idea. There is an unofficial REPL for a long time (ten years or more?): BeanShell

http://www.beanshell.org/

Add bsh.jar and a little glue code and presto you have a shell into your application.

There was a Java-based editor, jEdit, which integrated with Beanshell. I could do search-and-replace with replacement programmed in Beanshell. Aah, these were good times.
A bit of background in case you're interested:

I'm an investor excited about all kinds of geeky topics - dev tools, security, drones, hardware, machine learning...

I try to stay close to the latest developments in tech to understand what can be achieved with the technology today and what and how can that be translated into good products.

Last year, I already tried to "predict" what could be the evolution of deeper tech in 2016. I failed quite a lot...
This year, I'm trying again... but I would love to learn from the wisdom of the crowd.

In case you're curious:

1) My review of 2016
https://medium.com/point-nine-news/reviewing-18-geeky-predic...

2) My 2017 predictions
https://medium.com/point-nine-news/18-geeky-predictions-2017...
Hack its genom? Grow kevlar crusted chestnuts!
There under the chest-nuttree, i betrayed humanity and it betrayed me.

Curious question- is there a law against CRISPR-terrorism?
I think the problem here is that Scala doesn't make any choices for you. Now you're busy having to do a ton of code reviews to make sure that everyone stays within the chosen paradigm, stuff will of course slip through and bite you, and there you are with one big nice mess. Plus, it's too simple to just pull in a Java library which doesn't mesh well paradigm-wise with what you have (or a Scala library for that matter). I've done a ton of Scala and I've been left with the same conclusion as I had waaaay back with C++ - too many potential solutions, too many pitfalls and ways to make a mess. I guess I'm a person that wants to make the language make the paradigm choice for me and then I'll happily stick with that. One reason I like a language like Elixir so much - the language made the choices, it matches the problem set I work on pretty well, all the libraries look the same, life is simple, I can just write code (instead of trying to understand a moderately complex build.sbt file which basically comes with a paradigm of its own).
Step one: Start a political party

Step two: Get in power

Step three: Make refusing credit transactions to patrons on grounds of "morality" illegal.
Not to mention its habit of making you reauthenticate repeatedly if your internet connection is less than perfect. It feels like every time you drop a packet Apple decides your session might be fraudulent.
I've never worked with embedded systems, so forgive my ignorance. Why is this any more useful than just writing c code, if all the code that actually interacts with the hardware has to be written in c anyway?
Firefox remains one of the browsers I use.

I sideload Chrome, Safari and Firefox on my work machine because we work with mTLS with smartcards and honestly none of the browsers work reliably (it's not a very high use case).

The biggest difference I notice to my browsing experience is when I switch over to Safari (Webkit). It's not that it's slow - it just renders pages slightly differently, whereas Firefox and Chrome seem to have aligned over the years very well on how to interpret stylesheets.

I'm never doing anything intense enough in the browser (besides maybe streaming a single video?) to notice significant performance differences.
Walking is great too, so long as it isn't a car
I mean, it's kind of weird to feel anything about what others do with their time.
I agree to an extent but I still see judgement here "mindless, cruel herd is fundamentally more appealing to humans than individuality and free thought".

Huge numbers of people today have no friends and no community. Read a book called "Bowling Alone" for an America-centric view of the problem but it's actually global.
If 100% of the Swiss GDP went to pharmaceutical spending it would still be less than the United states.

The benefit Switzerland gets from the US military is about trade. Without the US presence around the world there would be no one to export goods to.
Sounded very much like an Indian company. But I'd rather see OP mention the company name :)
probably memory swapping. on one of my inherited PCs, I recently realized I had been running with only 2 GB for over a year! I get the same black out from the OS (Ubuntu) with massive amounts of swaps seen from vmstat 1.
this keyboard looks beautiful.

but the design will collect dirty stuff, because the gaps between the keys are too large.
Okay yeah, anything you like that you think was designed really well I attribute that all to my friend Irene.

Definitely not my strong suit! I am always astounded by the designs that she creates and I'll let her know!
Yeah, that'd be expected (release of IP etc) however, if you're doing this out of a sense of duty to your ex-colleagues, and the business / management have shown a lack of respect for you up to this point, then I wouldn't be surprised if you see scapegoating.

My point was more that I've seen lots of problems attributed to the last engineer out of the door in the places I've worked. If liability isn't taken care of (sometimes there is a separate contract for liability & scope of work apart from the attribution of IP), and you're doing work to "do the right thing" then it may well be a case of "no good deed goes unpunished".
Considering the median salary in the USA is $51939, which is the equivalent of 5.1% return on $1M cash, I would say the plenty of people who consider that more than "upper middle class" are correct.
Thank you for trying the app and the feedback. We will add metric units for entering your details.
my mom would always tell me the same thing every time I came home from being bullied. That I needed to learn to deal with dumber people who might not like me.

She was wrong. Almost everyone I work with is of above average intelligent. That's the nature of a professional career: you're not randomly paired up with some doofus who just happens to share your zip code.

Even in the cases where I do interact with people of below average intelligence, it's perfectly fine and pleasant because adults are generally speaking not assholes to each other. Part of growing up is learning some social graces.

In retrospect, I have no idea where this idea comes from. Do people think that the idiot bully is going to magically get into Harvard and get a professional job?
Which makes sense, because even if a value is continuous and its rise monotonic, you obviously can't celebrate all the time.

Having some milestones to pause and ponder along the way makes sense.
As a computationalist, I believe it is perhaps when we have full understanding of the internal workings of the brain and how different components interact with each other to ensure the proper functioning of the mind in such a degree that it is possible to simulate one with behaviour indistinguishable from that of its biological counterpart then we can figure out exactly what effect THC can have on computations performed by the brain and how that would subsequently affect a person's health.

I always discover something new about the mind when I do marijuana. Or perhaps that is merely how it feels like.
Google and Netflix join fight against municipal broadband restrictions
Firefox is still great, and I actually appreciate their focus on a single useful product.
My experience with kotlin so far has been great. I've used it in personal projects, and am in the process of converting some microservices at work to it from java (the interop is seamless, so I'm able to do it incrementally as opposed to a full rewrite). People ask me what the difference is between kotlin and java, and I typically reply with "it's java, minus all the bad stuff". Variable types are inferred, map/reduce/filter are builtins and don't require going through a Stream, there's no need for Guava anymore since listOf() and mapOf() are builtin, boilerplate-reducers like data classes continue to speak to the whole "it's pretty much java, but how you _want_ to write it" mantra. It nails all of the little things that java has just missed, like in an if-block after checking a variables instanceof, you don't need to explicitly cast it to that type. There are tons of simple things like this that just come for free, and when you go back to java it's amazing how much extra, pointless boilerplate you need to write. I personally don't see any reason for me to ever write java again.
If you truly value your second point, then collecting outliers (at either end) into special schools is the way to go. This way, even exceptional students will regularly encounter peers who struggle more or less with various work than they do.

If you just throw everyone into a single school, it's more like not separating athletes into recreational and competitive leagues. The gifted would rarely face any competition at all and the strugglers would very rarely have a chance to shine.
What exactly is the difference between enforcing morality with law and enforcing no morality with law? Morality is an incredibly subjective thing between differing cultures, I don't think it has a place in the justice/civil law systems.
While this may be true, Coinbase isn't synonymous for Bitcoin -- the true "idealized" version is that you generate your own BTC transaction system (or use an off the shelf one?) -- not use a processor (ergo, not Coinbase).
P=NP to follow soon?
One of my in-laws is a geologist who works for the oil companies, and he tells me in that industry almost all the big executives are engineers. Since he's been in the news, take Rex Tillerson. His degree is in engineering.

Or take any of "the professions": law, accounting, medicine, business consulting, engineering firms. In all those cases you have "partners" who have moved into sales and management. Sometimes they are even still practicing too. Also I get the impression their management is more about giving expert direction to their team, rather than watching Gantt charts.

Also when I read Skunk Works by Ben Rich, it sounded like the upper management had come up through engineering.

So I don't think management-by-MBAs is necessarily the right thing for tech workers. The more you consider programming to be "knowledge work", the more it seems like managers should be experts in the field. Of course they will need to learn new skills---to lead, to manage, to design products, to sell, to hire, to budget, to read financial statements, etc.---but having that technical background seems very important.
Have you personally done this? I have been in this exact situation multiple times. The first time it happened I offered to do it as a favor since I felt an obligation to my old team and didn't want to burn any bridges.

Six months later when I was still getting calls I felt trapped. So then I finally told them that it had been six months and I could no longer help them without getting paid. Suddenly they managed to get things done on their own. We are still on good terms; I even meet for lunch or drinks occasionally with those same colleagues 12 years later.

Since then, I always offer to help for a fee while they transition. None have ever been upset by that approach since they are professionals; something that in hindsight I wasn't when I offered to do it as a favor all those years ago.

Some employers have taken me up on this offer some have not. That is the motivation though. I don't WANT them to take me up on the offer; I've just quit so I want to move on. I also don't want to burn bridges or leave anyone in the lurch.
I think it's meant as a diminutive. Also, economies have natural sizes that are not bound to geography; it's rather easy to compare them on any number of characteristics.
In Turkey, a big referendum on a set of constitutional amendments, unambiguously aiming to legalize one-man rule, is coming this April [1]. What surprises me the most is that about half of the population is either supportive or indifferent. They view rights and freedoms as abstract things that only the educated care about. But history shows dictatorships end up in wars and other troubles, which cause harm to people’s bodies or property too.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/world/middleeast/turkey-n...
Make of Jenkins your mothership (Part 1)
So you want to learn React.js?
Yeah, but it's a massive reworking of the FF internals, so it took a long time to complete. But I'm using it now, and it works pretty well.

My only hitch was needing to turn off some older add-ons. While Mozilla is still doing a slow roll-out, it disables E10s if it can't ensure your plugins will work. (One of mine was a HN add-on, amusingly.)

Most of the opoular add-ons are ready, though. To check, see: https://www.arewee10syet.com/
I know this is anecdotal, but I know a guy who used to be a very close friend. Was always pretty straight-edged. Good guitar player. Started hanging out with some weed smokers, started smoking, then he developed some kind of psychosis from the weed and now is on seroqil or however you spell it. Totally ruined his life and he's just not even close to the same person he was.

Weed plays with your mind and your mental state. I don't care if you use it, but please be careful. I have seen it ruin a very nice and good person's life. I won't touch the stuff after seeing that.
Ha! Laugh at fools.

Take stock. Pizza box and half a bottle of ketchup in the fridge.

Close tab.

Trust that Silicon Valley will come together and science its way out of disaster scenario.
Some guys in our workplace have been investigating Concourse CI and like it over Bamboo which we currently use.

https://concourse.ci/
It's not so anecdotal. The majority (70%) of gun homicides in the US are with (cheap) handguns[1]:

Total firearm homicides: 8,454

Handgun homicides: 5,782

Rifles, Shotguns, other: ~700

Which, with other stats, goes to show IMO, that "Assault Weapon Bans" are more grandstanding than anything else.

[1] - https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
It's an example from http://learnyousomeerlang.com
Sounds like the approach then was waterfall. If only we could apply the level of rigor and professionalism you describe to Agile...
Senior Software Engineer, Core
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We're a small team founded by Stanford and Palantir alums. Our users and customers span programmers across the world, influential open-source authors, and major companies like Twitter. We're working on technical challenges like scaling code analysis and search to every codebase in the world.

Stack: Go, TypeScript, React (with GraphQL), Docker + Kubernetes * Senior Software Engineer, Core: https://boards.greenhouse.io/sourcegraph/jobs/204608 * Senior Software Engineer, Growth: https://boards.greenhouse.io/sourcegraph/jobs/497073

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I do miss loving Firefox, which hasn't been the case since the 1.x days.

Then again, I think these days what I dislike is the Web itself. You can't have a lean, responsive browser like that and support enough of the "advances" of modern CSS and Javascript to render 99.9+% of the Web more or less correctly.
> Even weirder, str and list both have find, but list does not have index (a related method).

I believe you meant to write "str and list both have index, but list does not have find".