skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did a project to help out a friends friend and got recommended. As soon as I've got a job offer I took it. I don't really think you can define job ready in any meaningful way. I guess you're good at it as soon as you've tested. This is the way I did it but I might be a fraud.

If you want to know for sure. Do a project for free or for a ridiculous low price. If you succeed you have one data point towards a somewhat reliable answer. Then again if it goes south it might to be some other factor as well.
This has been submitted many times already and already had active discussions, please check before submitting in the future!

Discussion with most comments here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13576921
Nothing was clear to me when I started writing the application. However, after years of running it in production, things did become much clearer, and indeed, a relational database is ideal.
Mediocre [blank] Doesn't Require Talent or Even Passion
This [1] is a pretty tongue-in-cheek article (the quip about anal sex was particularly funny), but given that his main point seems to be that gays are smarter than average, so they should have more kids, I just cannot possibly interpret the above quote (or any other part of the article) as advocating violence...

[1] http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/17/gay-right...
My biggest problem with SQL for systems with web interfaces is that it forces you onto OLTP, when your workflow is just "select data, show to the user" -> "user saves changes, save them in the db". Googling for "asp.net deadlock" gives 160k results.
The original NOTIFY also didn't have a payload (that was added in PG9) which made it much harder to know what you were notified about.

That one simple addition made pre-9.0 NOTIFY and post-9.0 NOTIFY completely different beasts.
> mention any publicly traded companies

How often did that happen in the past?

(Not paying attention, specialty of the house ;-)
I think it does hold for education, however, specifically higher education.

If anything, costs should stay roughly the same for higher education- like broadcasting, higher education costs about the same to provide to 3 people as it does 300 (something "micro-degrees" take full advantage of). The only cost difference is the building and personnel to mark tests.

What has changed are two things.

First, more jobs now need university-educated people (or rather, people with the mental ability to make it to university- the proportion of the population that isn't university material likely hasn't changed). The average job for an individual in the 60s did not require the applicant to have even finished high school (national graduation rate: 72%). The decline in those jobs increased the graduation rate; it had nothing to do with the quality of education at the time as you can see from the average test scores.

Second (and as a consequence of the first point), a signalling war in education began. Employers started requiring high school graduation for positions that don't actually require it, and bachelor's degrees for positions that only really require high school graduation and possibly some specialized training (the signalling problem, also on SSC: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies...). Education is still as much a golden ticket as it was in 1960, but the difference is that everyone has one now, so you must have one to be competitive, whether you need it or not.

The solution devalues it somehow; the assumption is that even without a degree graduates will be more competent than non-graduates. I'm not convinced that's true enough to avoid hurting a lot of people, but at least we can save those unfortunate enough to be currently stuck in the system and the people most invested don't vote.
Webassembly execution chain
hey,
can someone explain the execution chain of a wasm file?
does it compile to native asm and then run? or does it emulate?
what happens if you try to execute wasm code inside the wasm code?

thanks!
Nigerian Fine Continues to Haunt MTN Group, Expects to Report Significant Losses
And that is just fine. The idea is to highlight a topic for discussion, which this article did a great job of, as reflected in the discussion in this thread.
I vaguely remember someone saying the #1 doomsday scenario that keeps them up at night is complex systems collapse: that everything just starts to fail and no one knows why. Anyone have a link?
Pretty clever and effective message. I'd put money on this being shared by all my friends on Facebook in a few days.

Trump's last couple tweets have backfired and actually increased his targets' stock price though. You might have to flip the algorithm around if this continues.
Well in France any hamster is basically empowered to stop a project...

While we're guessing, this may just be due to the very special environment that is Manhattan. It's been a few years since I read about it, but I seem to remember that they had to fight some quite unusual challenges, including skyscrapers, the constant influx of water, and both granite and basically liquid sediments. Manhattan probably also has an insane amount od existing, badly documented underground infrastructure.
This is also why remote working isn't more popular.
Programmers are like art: you can't exactly pinpoint why a particular painting is good but you can usually still put different paintings in rough order of how good they are. It's never that one brush stroke that reveals the quality but the complete picture.

With programmers, there are indirect, subtle signs which may or may not give clues. Sometimes they only validate some good or bad aspects of the programmer.

I think that to really know the only way is to work with the programmer and see what works and what doesn't. Generally the team does have a good notion of who are good and who are just great, although a manager might want to use the information from that source with some grain of salt.

However, it's easier to pinpoint programmers which aren't good, or not completely good. The guy who doesn't get things done. The guy who breaks more stuff than he fixes. The guy who rewrites everyone else's code as the first step in any project or the guy who's always asking help from others for simple things. Or the guy who is actually a good programmer but always ends up doing something a bit different than what the important things to do are. Or the good programmer who is relentless in insisting he's right because "that's what the facts are" while completely ignoring social issues such as understanding that a dictatorian attitude doesn't fly well with other programmers. These guys still do provide some value but you can see these shortcomings from far away. Then there are the guys who actually produce negative values, i.e. taking away others' time merely by being employed.
For the specific case of public university tuition costs, this analysis from the UC system suggests the increase it is primarily due to reduced government funding, requiring students to make up the difference:

http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_quick.asp?i=1119

It also suggests that increasing administrative costs are not a significant contributor, but that there is some effect from increased student services.
Here's exactly what happened: https://gist.github.com/williamstein/fb31e07d4057232bd3a3e78...
7 ECommerce Trends That Change the Way You Sell Online in 2017
You can check that at https://twitter.com/Trump2Cash.
Actually not mediocre most taks do not require exceptional talent or passion regardless of the profession.

If you want to define it as mediocre fine but then 90% of things in life are.

I never understood the notion that developers are somehow special and need to be better than the average worker in another field.
When you can't find a clear answer... May be you asking the wrong question.
Create code is - in my opinion - a service, not a product...
If you keep paying a service like it is a product it will continue to be inefficient and open to opportunitistic behaviour.
What about changing the reward model then?
What you, programmer, get paid some fix price for expenses coverage and then a fee for each week (or month) you're software runs without a flaw? Or a fee that goes on as long as software keep working (with your eventual maintenance and fix help, of course).
This would make customer happy (he has a working programmer) and do reward more the best programmers.
The main issue of one-time assessment on programmer job is, in fact, that you not always discover software flaws immediately.. it takes time..
But see this, which says his tweets generally don't make much difference: https://www.ft.com/content/a962c1f8-ee44-11e6-930f-061b01e23...
Review of 10 lines: 10 issues. Review 1000 lines: LGTM. As the article says - even the best strongest teams and culture will fall in that trap.

Avoiding review fatigue has to be done some other way than merging smaller diffs, for example splitting changesets among reviewers so that person A reviews the backend code and person B reviews the frontend code etc. A meaningful feature of 1000 lines can still be reviewed in terms of 20 50-line changes, and doesn't have to be reviewed in one sitting or by one person.

You are perfectly right that pushing dead code and half baked features (that won't be used, so aren't actually in production!) is useless and adds no safety. Adding a new feature is risky, and adding it as 99% dead code and then finally adding the 1% code with the button that actually enables the feature in the UI doesn't help - 100% of the new code will hit production with that final change.
I really hope that this is a bot making that comment, and not someone asking me for a citation on why I think the author has used a certain wording.
I think the general point the article is trying to make is valid, which is that you should not stress yourself out trying to be a rockstar coder. Being good enough to achieve what you want to achieve is sufficient.
Excellent point! My counter-argument to that would be: How many startups/SMEs embracing Rethink really need full four or five nines availability?

I'd expect the costs of running that HA stuff is an order of magnitude higher than the costs of even a few days of downtime p.a.. And migrating from Postgres to something with HA once needed is probably easier than migrating to Postgres if costs are killing you.
A single Postgres machine holds all data? So you scale the database by switching to a stronger machine? Or do you plan to shard the data somehow?

Do you have any queries iterating over the entire table?
1973 Copernicus series ?
QR Codes / Barcodes for SQLi, XSS, CI and Fuzzing
Paraphrasing "as simple as possible but no simpler than that": ship as small diffs as you can but no smaller than that which makes sense.

Individual commits don't necessarily make sense in the whole. Submit diffs which make up a logical, conceptual block of new changes. Don't mix formatting changes, whitespace cleanups, or rearranging changes into diffs with real meat. Ship new prerequisite tools and new changes to utility functions or libraries first, then the meat: i.e. split general codebase upgrades and distinct features into different shipments.

Make it so that "git log" will produce a list of sensible steps if someone else reads the listing. Remember, 90% of programming is writing good code and the other 90% of programming is communication to others.
Yeah, or another way of splitting up huge models files is to convert models from a module to a package by making a directory models and adding models/__init__.py, models/foo_models.py, models/bar_models.py then doing

from .foo_models import *

from .bar_models import *

in your __init__.py
This is fun. However, does this bot perform better than a random bot? and if yes, how much?
Thanks for the insight! My experience is, admittedly, based on a limited sample size. I think you're right though, there is still huge variability for traders, and a lot of it is luck.
Win 10 was free.

It was a time limited free upgrade for people who already had a valid windows license. I don't think it it was free.
Elite universities do have extremely low professor:student ratios. At Harvard it's 7. That does produce quite a difference – it's a level where 1:1 teaching happens fairly regularly.

Your analysis seems to rely on the price being a function of demand. I'm not sure if that holds, considering supply in this market is highly flexible.
Of course not. It was hard for me 25 years ago when all I had as a child was a GWBasic book and a computer and I had to figure out everything myself without any help. Nowdays everything is on the internet in easy to digest form. It was a huge advancement.

Still, to get to the top is harder as it's shrinking relatively to the number of programmers...but it's not needed, especially for a well balanced life.
Nordstrom went up after Trumps rant, didn't it? But all in all this looks like a fun thing to do.
Yes, but I think it walks dangerously close to suggesting you can be a good programmer without talent or passion. Which is obviously not true.

You'll never be really good at anything you don't care about.
I think that a sufficiently motivated person could find a leaked list of bonuses from that firm and check for themselves if there were any new grads that made $1 million+ and also check how many such persons there were.
National Mortgage Servicing Conference and Expo, 2017
The UK also has problems with particularly expensive infrastructure projects.

They tend to cost magnitudes more in common law countries (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, NZ. This is generally down to the land and legal costs, with the dispute framework becoming much more expensive. Land and property rights are much more extensively protected in common law countries.
The Pioneer Ov Simplified Speling (1912)
That is what makes corporate jobs so interesting, where mediocrity and politics rule over quality and skills.
Perhaps there ought to be two axes: competence and interest. You may not need a very high level of competence but you sure do need a high level of interest to stay in this field (I wrote my first program 30+ years ago and still write code every day).
> I wish there was a good ML-style language for the JVM.

Scala?
Not a bot, just a regular reader of quality newspapers who cannot remember a single case of an article making that mistake. It's slightly disheartening to see how the collective mind has turned on journalists to a point where any and all accusations can be levelled against them and will be assumed to be true.
Perhaps, this was a technical backup, to help NSA recover their lost data, just in case.
Careful not to detach your own head while getting so up in arms over something completely meaningless.
Nokia gets deeper into the enterprise with IoT launch for the biggest businesses
I have no doubt that programming is a skill that you can improve on through practice. You don't have to be talented or passionate, but you should probably be one or the other. Otherwise, what's the point? Why are you a programmer?

I like Django and Jacob Kaplan-Moss's work, but the sentiment of On his Twitter profile, he describes himself as “not a real programmer” to show that he’s had enough of these kinds of misconceptions is false humility. He's not a blowhard but it's clear he's talented. There's no point in acting like he's not. Same with the Bootstrap dev. It may have taken work to get there but to cite authors of work like that and then use them as an example of mediocrity is contradictory. If mediocrity doesn't matter, why not cite mediocre programmers? Because nobody is using their code.

Similarly, DHH is clearly passionate. There's no point in acting like he's not.

I’m not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say “Yeah it works but you’re leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that.” I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

This mindset is acceptable, but someone else has to go back and fix your mistakes. That's a disservice to yourself and others.

A lack of care and/or mediocrity shines through in finished products. Have some pride in your work. Care about your users.
If many people use this bot, it will make Trump's comments actually effective, which is a pretty bad idea imho.

What about a bot which would do just the opposite?
Well it's not to complicated really. Just as you've stated it compiles to a subset of native asm. There's also a binary encoding, but that's basically dictionary compression of the source code with a fixed dictionary.

I'm not sure what you mean with execute wasm code inside of wasm code? But I'll attempt to answer the question from my understanding of it. Webassembly is a subset of javascript, where the parts that cannot easily be optimized. Due to this support for eval is not included. So no it's not possible.
Ask HN: How to start a business while working a 9-5 coding job?
Hey guys. My main issue is being able to start a business while working for a regular employer. It's something I've wanted to do for years but I can't find a single place that doesn't require a non-compete+IP assignment agreement.

The normal advice is to keep on with your employer until you grow your side business to profitability. That would be great if every single employer didn't shackle my mind with "agreements" that make it nigh impossible to do anything of value for myself.

I've roughly calculated I could save enough to quit my job with a year runway if I save for 3 years (a long ass time)! The other common advice is to get investment from friends and family, as if most people's f&f have 50k they're able to throw at anything let alone someone who's financially independent and outwardly successful.

So given that the HN crowd has a ton of entrepreneurs and business owners, how do you do it? There must be some way out that I'm not seeing. Are these employment agreements not really enforceable? Scare tactics like telling employees they can't talk about salary? Is investment easier to come by than it seems? Small business loans? I spent a few years of my life getting into a position where starting a business is reasonable minus the lack of money. I don't want to watch another three years go by before I can do anything about it.
Congratulations, I find it requires almost a daily fight to avoid being pushed into management positions and being able to keep doing technical stuff.
After having interviewed, code-tested and hired quite a number of developers I can say the premise of this story is complete hogwash. You may be able to program to some level without talent or passion, but the talented, passionate ones will always outperform the untalented ones.

Citing Kaplan-Moss, Thornton, Lerdoff and DHH does not make it true. That these programmers don't consider themselves talented doesn't mean they aren't talented. They actually are very talented and passionate. They just don't see themselves in that light. You can't believe what they say, you have to look at their work.

A lot of these comments they make is actually a form of virtue signalling. It's a way of bringing themselves down a notch so you feel they are more relatable.
Personality Symptoms of Pomsky
/r/economics   FAQ: Basic Income
IBM: How Smart Is Watson?
WireGuard: a modern VPN tunnel [PDF, slides]
Politics is a skill in a large group being political is more important than individual capability since you need to be able to work with others.

This isn't about corporations this is about cooperation at large scales.
I saw this and smirked internally of course, but noticed in the article itself they did refrain from trivialising the names of the inventors in this way, by referring them to Dr Yang and Dr Yin throughout.
PostgreSQL has a BRIN index's as of 9.6 which may make some forms of aggregation faster than SQL Server I believe. Would need to do real-world tests to verify that tho.
I'm sure the data is inconclusive for now.
Passionate! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz2-49q6DOI
I found the method I was taught at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_computing_square_ro... under the heading Digit-by-digit calculation.

It does not appear that this matches any of the methods tested. A long time ago I implemented it in assembly for integers. It should be possible to write a floating point version but my programming experience has been in embedded systems and I never needed floating point. I would need to study floating point representation but don't have much interest.
You might have a point about Postgres being faster than whatever NoSQL database, but there's really no need for all the name calling. Especially the "lazy" is very uncalled for in my opinion - there's just too much to learn, and too little time. If you're a 20-something (or whatever age, for that matter) and have to maintain the entire system of a single company, you're simply not going to be able to be a master of every part of the stack, or even know where you're making the wrong choices.
I like this. I think something similar for Theresa May and the GBP:EUR exchange rate might be a good addition.
Internet of Robotic Things-Advancements Helping to Stay Ahead of the Competition
I read it as the stock market betting on the constitution. Mr Trump is not allowed to impact Nordstrom negatively for his daughter's sake.

But most of the other tweets are about cases where he could harm them as POTUS.
Postgres hstore fills the key value gap quite well too.
How should they contact you?
CPython migration to GitHub scheduled for today
Background info:

https://snarky.ca/the-history-behind-the-decision-to-move-py...
Nether does writing, carpentry, art or accounting.

Programming is medium of expression. There is huge demand for bean counting jobs and that's fine.
Elizabeth Warren gave a talk about this about a decade ago (before becoming a senator):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A

For a family of 4 compared 1975 to 2005, all inflation-adjusted:

Median housing went up by 76%, median number of rooms only went from 5.8 to 6.1 (5% increase), and the house is older.

74% increase in median health-care costs for a family of 4 with employer sponsored health-care.

52% increase in spending on cars, but cars are cheaper; many more families have 2+ cars.

Childcare went from the median family of 4 spending $0 to being a significant expense.

Tax liability went up by 21%
Good programmers might not have a passion for programming, but they have a passion for something connected. Solving problems, delivering a quality product, the rush of seeing things work, the trance-like quality of "flow", whatever. There's something, though.

Programming something simple is easy, like assembling a shed in your backyard is easy. You don't need to be a great programmer/builder to do it, just an OK one. There's no shame in that. But other programs are the equivalent of a Formula One racecar, a skyscraper, a nuclear reactor, or an automated factory...

I think the claim of the post is true at some level; you can be a programmer without being good, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. There's nothing inherently wrong with being good and wanting to be better either, though. And the good programmers get to work on the cool stuff...
well mister your post quality is far below the one you complain about... ain't it a bit weird?