skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it doesn't really matter. Programming is not a physical impossibility for a vast majority of people. Like I could train for years and never be able to bench press 400lb because of genetic limitation but learning to program doesn't have that limitation. Learning to program like most skills just takes time, effort and dedication. I think if you fail at it either you weren't as interested as you thought or you may have been trying to learn a language that just didn't vibe with you.

Programming also seems like the only profession people just assume they can pick up in a year. No one wakes up and says I'm going to quit my job and become a doctor, or a professor, or lawyer in 3 months to a year. If they are making that type of career switch they go in with the expectation that they will have a lot to learn and it is going to take more than a year of concerted effort. Not everyone is going to become a software engineer at google or apple but there are plenty of well paying programming jobs.

Sorry for the long post I just get frustrated when people want to look at others failures as a gage for their own capabilities. Believe in yourself and put in the work, the results will come.

“He who who says he can and he who says he can't are both usually right” – Confucius
Maybe sacrifice is not a perfect choice of words on my part, but what I mean is some parents chose to sacrifice consumer goods and instant pleasures so their kids could have it better in the future. You are correct that something is lost here and something is gained, but to be frank I have no other word that'd be close to what I mean.
In practice, how much of my code is going to be run on an 8-bit CPU? Zero. I'd rather have the clarity and consistent behavior of explicitly typed ints than pre-optimize for something that will almost certainly never happen.
Make the language easy to use without any mental burden? But you do realize programming is not easy, especially when you're aiming for high performance. How can you make a language easy to use "without any mental burden"? Programming is hard, programming well and with performance in mind is even more so. Some things you just can't magically make easy.
MIT OCW Algorithms, 6.006, which is linked to elsewhere in the comments covers DP if I remember correctly.
The Front-End Web Developer Spectrum
The negativity is unwarranted.

Are you venting your anger caused by yourself not being special? But why would you? We are all like that: nothing special really. The ones who are special are by definition exceedingly rare and there's nothing wrong in not being one.

What's important is that "nothing special" does not equal "nothing of value". The OP sounds like he doesn't know, yet, where his value lies or how to advertise it to people who could hire him. That doesn't mean he's worthless as he is now.

In any case, your comment is very unhelpful and it sounds like a personal attack rather than an advice.
In my experience, google results are better in incognito.
Just a nitpick, but SmartPost is FedEx, and SurePost is UPS.
Drinking Chai to Savannah: Reflections on Identity and Power in the South
Not sure why youre being downvoted. Every time someone ships something to me in brown paper it gets ripped.
Also, as far as the $1k-2k PC thing goes, I think that a lot of people (especially early adopters) will already have a decent PC so the cost of a nice GPU instead of a more modest one is a lot less than the cost of a whole computer.

That was my experience when messing with the Rift dev unit I got a couple years ago. It was more an excuse to buy a new video card than a need for a whole new computer.
What does an economist's perspective have to do with real life markets? :)
A metaphor according to dictionary : "A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.". If you don't consider time to be transferable, talking of it in terms of a currency is exactly this.

> People tend to consider the first way to be unfair

Time and money are linked, so I see both ways as the same. I disagree with the above, some people thing this, but I have no idea what %.
I like the feel of San Jose for a dev conference. I've been to a conference there, and it was a pleasant environment.
Makes me wonder what the best options are for cheap phones and laptops that can be used while traveling.

Also, does having saved passwords in a computer (for servers, email, GitHub, etc.) mean that CBP could use those passwords to search computers inside the United States? Or is their search power limited to information actually stored on the machine's hard drive.
I also wonder if this will have an impact on the camera market as I'm sure there are more like me who no longer own a separate photo/video camera.
How did you get an architecture team assembled? How does it help people make better decisions?
I mean, I don't think it would really be ideal for the government to be seizing property for a pittance left and right either.
Here's what I want to know: what happens if I just spike my phone on the ground?
An Inside Look at Why Apple Hasn’t Revolutionized Television
Ask HN: Best web resources to teach coding to middle school students?
I came across Code Combat - a fantastic resource for teaching coding to the age group I work with (6-8th graders). We're looking to expand into other aspects of technology (networking, databases, etc). I was hoping someone here might have some ideas for web-based learning materials/resources.

Thanks in advance!
Why is your age on your resume? That's unusual and it seems to be hurting you; everyone here on HN mentions it.
There has been a lot of improvements in boring. [1] [2]

[1] http://www.lexpose.ch/2013/02/gotthard-base-tunnel-inside-sw...

[2] https://www.herrenknecht.com/en/products/core-products/tunne...
Ask HN: What to Do After “The Elements of Computing Systems”
I'm in a self-teaching cycle right now. Currently working through this book and I'm really loving it. Any thoughts on what to pursue after completing it (e.g. books, exercises, roles)?

I was using HackerRank to learn, but then I encountered some sections that don't allow me to continue/reverse once I've answered a question wrongly too many times, so that's on hold.

I'm interested in pursuing CPU design and implementation as a career someday. Side question: Is CPU/Chip designer as lucrative of a career as say a "10x Software Engineer" or "Full Stack Developer"?
I built an app to straightforwardly share notes&questions with schoolmates
The USPS is basically a spam service as it's core business model, somehow that's acceptable, so having an employee steal isn't that surprising.
Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas (2011)
I'm not the OP but I'm curious what do you see as the logical hole?

There is social value in disagreeing with someone who claims to have the objective truth. It's not so much about being right as it's claiming to have the truth which socially, emotionally and culturally is related to power.

If you don't want a person to have power it doesn't matter if they're right or not. All that matters is the fact that having the truth means having power.
Thanks. That what I am looking for.
You can program with "performance in mind" in C and the big difference will be that the problem itself will be the obstruction, not the language.

In C++, you fight with the language first and then face the problem.
Also, the difference between cell-phone VR and something with full positional tracking is huge. I can't really deal with Daydream/GearVR for more than 30 minutes but I can use even my Rift dev unit for hours. I'd imagine the retail Rift or the Vive would be even nicer but I've not used either for extended periods.
ML-as-a-service offered by many companies (Microsoft Cognitive Services, Google Cloud Prediction, IBM Watson, etc.) are fairly similar. They're great out-of-the-box for some domains, say English speech recognition. For others (text/image), they’re fairly easy to get started with (don’t need much training data, no managing infra, etc.) However, they are mostly black boxes and set a slightly low bar in terms of quality. Anyone doing serious AI will hit the limits of what they offer fairly quickly.

The DL community is awesome in its openness and contributions. Our goal with FloydHub, in contrast to the ML APIs, is to provide the tools for data scientists to effectively leverage this. We want to solve the engineering hurdles that come in the way of doing some cool science.
Show HN: Video Game Soundtracks
Yes and no. The US is rich enough to where, yes, we could raise taxes and fund infrastructure better.

At the same time, some forms of infrastructure have been over-built. We've demonstrated a massive preference for (wide) roads over walking/biking/transit, and it turns out supporting mostly single-occupancy vehicles as the default transportation mode is extremely expensive.

For example, take this blog post analyzing why a poor area of town is a better revenue generator than a more affluent area; part of the reason is that the older, poorer area just has narrower roads, which reduced upkeep costs: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborh...

It should go without saying, but having low-density design throughout our country drastically raises infrastructure costs. The roads needs to be longer (and wider), you need more miles of pipes, and electric wire, and fiber, etc.
Correct. This isn't the first time it's happened. This happens all the time. I've been a victim of this several times. Of course my items weren't nearly as expensive but it was still within $500-$1000. At the end of the day, you just claim an insurance and move on instead of wasting countless hours on the telephone and doing postal office visits.
AFAIK, storage hardware was always rated in 10^9 while storage software (file sizes, etc.) always used 2^30 [1]. So the cloud is just continuing this problem.

[1] recent versions of OS X being the exception
Unless you call hacker news social media then you can definitely do it. I do it. I just call or text the people I care about when I'm thinking of them.

Nothing is needed from social media.
There are probably thousands of instances similar to this (not necessarily having to hand over your device) where US citizens are at the mercy of law enforcement simply because we don't know what are rights are, and because often law enforcement either doesn't know or doesn't care.

Civil rights often tend to be only as useful as our knowledge of what exactly they are.
I'm the author of this Mux blog post and would love to take any questions or comments, as well as suggestions for future posts. Thank you for your interest!
I suspect there is serious corruption and/or significant mismanagement in SF USPS. I've read many other experiences of people having trouble receiving packages from them. I personally had one or two cases of them not delivering stuff because they didn't feel like it.
Do you think the average user would? Their feedback is valid regardless if they spent the time to convert the units.
Show HN: OpinionFirst – direct democracy platform
No. First, as others noted, it creates suspicion.

Second, you can't trust devices after authorities have messed with them. Maybe they're backdoored.

Best option is to carry only inexpensive devices, containing no sensitive information. If they're searched, just throw them away later.
I tend to think of functional Programming as an idiom. Sure some languages make it harder and some make location based programming nearly impossible...except that once you're on the web making remote calls to REST API's even the most functional friendly languages can't do better than a saying the value is the warning-warning-could-be-anything-type...which means that from a functional perspective a function that calls a REST API always returns the same value regardless of input parameters or it's not a function.

And that's ok by me. Because the idiom of functional programming is a gestalt of figure and ground. The ground is knowing when to explicitly use place based methods -- Under the hood, so long as we have computers based on the Von Neumann architecture everything we do ultimately gets distilled into place based computing that mutates values. Functional programming is just a way of abstracting over that when it is productive to do so.

Functional programming, like object oriented programming, is a set of clever abstractions not magic. There aren't functional programming computers (or object oriented computers) that are different from imperative mutating machines.

Anyway, I guess the point is that functional programming shares quite a bit with test driven development. It's more a matter of programmer behavior than language. And thus my advice is to start writing functional code in whatever language is at hand: functional programmers who use PHP write functional code in PHP.

Of course it's always fun to play with a new language which is orthogonal.

Good luck.
React and Redux Sagas Authentication App Tutorial
If they have the password they can search it...
Lead Your Digital Transformation Through IT Operations
Hi guys,

Thanks for reading!

We've been working on this platform for quite a few years already. It was launched a couple of months ago and are already reaching a great amount of people in the Ukraine. I've joined quite recently as a product owner and would love to hear your feedback!

OpinionFirst is the central platform for modern worldwide democracy and democratic decision making. Your vote gives you influence. It helps citizens, employees and members, involves communities, and facilitates the decision making process! OpinionFirst can be used to support proposals affecting your neighborhood, hometown, province, country or your groups/teams. Policymakers will listen, it is decision making as it is supposed to be.

Let me know what you think!

Thanks,
Arjen
This happened to me crossing into Canada and to be honest I really wasn't expecting it. I had tons of very private pictures and messages on there stretching back years. I really didn't want to turn over my password so that 3 border agents could look through all that stuff in some back room, but at the same time I knew there wasn't anything illegal on there. Anyway, I was with my partner and didn't want to ruin her vacation as well so we just turned over our passwords (under threat of detention if we didn't).

In any case, if you find yourself in this unfortunate situation (you shouldn't - you should travel with an empty phone when crossing the border, or at least wipe it before crossing then do a restore over icloud later), here's something you can do: Before going in (if you have an iphone), make sure you have a strong alphanumeric passcode. Enable auto-wipe on 10 incorrect passcode attempts. Then, turn the phone off. If CBP then asks to turn your phone on and wants your password, appear eager to comply, but give them an incorrect one, and when that doesn't work, admit that you had just changed it a few days ago to something more secure and that you may have forgotten it, but don't worry, you always just use the thumbprint to unlock the phone anyway and volunteer to open it that way. Always appears helpful. The phone still won't unlock because iphone requires passcode entry after restart. If they ask why you turned the phone off, just say that's what you normally do when entering border control. Unless you're under some kind of serious suspicion of some kind at this time, they're unlikely to detain you for forgetting your phone password, and even if so, it's locked with a strong passcode so there's no much they can do anyway.
Well, although I don't want to be harsh and strict on someone who just asks us for some advice, I must be honest that my opinion of his design skills match more closely to the posts above than to yours.

The designs shown are not compelling enough for me to recommend, hire or work with OP if it were for his design skills. And somehow that is in fact what he communicates as his biggest skills.

Then again, maybe my opinion, or the amount of attention I paid when reviewing his work, is not representative of (even a part of) the companies OP is applying to.
For non-native English speakers:

“I could care less about $THING” and “I couldn't care less about $THING” mean the same thing. Each means that the speaker does not care about $THING.
Apple 2017 Q1 Summary and Historical Data
Edison and Tesla both changed the world. Tesla (and Ferraris) are responsible for the invention of first viable AC motor, without which we would rely on DC for our grid.
>Currently, Acela takes 3.5 hours NYC-BOS

Which is the same time it takes by car, and only an hour less than it takes by bus, plus the train costs a lot more.

Pretty embarrassing situation, IMO.
>"Tossing CVs down an HR portal (to nowhere) isn't a way to find jobs. You find jobs by knowing people."

No you can find jobs by applying for positions on listing on Indeed, Simply Hired, or direct listing on companies sites. It happens all the time. Yes developing a network is also good but that is not the only way to find a job as you are implying. I've gotten my last 3 jobs without "knowing people."
First thing, change post to an Ask HN.

Second thing, add more detail ;)

Add more detail about your interests, previous projects and skill sets.

How much free time?
10,20,30 etc hours per week?

How long will this free time last? A month, a quarter, a year?
My issue was resolved via the exec customer support team after e-mailing Jeff Bezos. Worth a shot. Amazon is many things, and being great at customer support is definitely still one of their best strengths.
> Tracking is useless, they like to mark packages as delivered well before they actually arrive, and sometimes they just plain give the stuff to the wrong address.

USPS marks stuff delivered before it arrives here at work. They seem to just run through all the packages and flag them when they put them on the truck. Had it happen with one from Amazon just yesterday. At least I've always received them. I have more trouble with Amazon not putting everything in the box they're supposed to.
Yep, DHL is typically cheaper for international than UPS or FedEx. For shippers to save even more cost they do the last minute with USPS. This is available for every service. Tracking does show up for USPS. If you paste the FedEx SmartPost or UPS Innovations tracking # into Google, it will direct you to the link for USPS's tracking.
Why do people seem so obsessed with privacy on the net?

I mean, I get that privacy is important. I would not like the walls of my house to be transparent, for instance. But that's the thing : they're not, and this law would not change that.

What I mean is that I, for better or worse, make a clear distinction between privacy in the physical word and privacy online. I basically don't consider anything I do online "really" private. The only reason I assume nobody knows what I do there is that I presume nobody cares. And if I really wanted to hide what I'm doing I'd use TOR, GnuPG or something like that.
Yoda Is Now a Real Estate Agent?
Facebook’s new job opening posts poach business from LinkedIn
I believe the government should apply eminent domain to key technologies that promise wide-scale advancement for society. Technologies like CRISPR are far too powerful and have far too much potential to be confined to control by a single entity.
> The current best practice for border crossings --- really anywhere in the world --- is simply not to carry anything you're unwilling to unlock for Customs.

Or, to simply stop traveling to countries that refuse to play nice with the rights of foreigners. The whole idea that this sort of thing is even anywhere near acceptable behavior revolts me.
And in terms of speed, Racket is generally quite a lot faster than Python. I remember the days when rhetorically people almost assumed that poor execution speed meant higher-level abstractions that translated to greater developer productivity. Slow execution practically became a fitness function (I'm looking at the commentary during the early days of Ruby and Rails here).

But with Racket you've got high-level, comparable-to-Python abstraction combined with way better performance today, and even better performance tomorrow. Plus as a bonus, the typed story is good.

EDIT: In summary, even if performance wasn't your objective, you're still punching well above comparably high-level languages like Python.
Stop / Start / Continue Question Set
I have experience with Objective-C, C#, and Python and I'm currently learning C++ for a course in "Advanced C++" at university. I'm using "C++ Primer" by Lippman et al. and think it's quite nice. It might be a bit to basic, especially the first few chapters, but I kind of like the exercises in each chapter.

Have anyone read it and know how it compares to the books recommended in this article?
This post is sarcastic and the site is some kind of a parody, right? RIGHT?!
SUBJECTIVITY WARNING!

I struggle to trust the motives of anybody who is so certain of so many things. Especially one who acts so impulsively. He's clearly very bright, probably brighter than most smart people, but he's not brighter than all smart people. Yet he frequently presumes to be, even boasting of being a "nano-manager". He has definitely bought into his own hype.

But when you have billions in the bank, I guess you can get away with that.

Bonus round: He's also surprisingly thin-skinned and petty. Oh, and he stuffs his boards with family members and cronies.
Abandoned warehouses that are being renovated into office space, people who have struggled to get where they are today, success stories, personal loss and tragedy, you know, the human factor. A lot of people like places with "character", where character is defined as "not perfect".

I've never been to San Jose so I can't comment on it, but I've been to Pittsburgh and Detroit. They have character. Those cites are more human than many actual humans I've met.
> This just seems _incredibly_ invasive.

You could leave out the 'seems' and it would improve the comment.
Congrats, you've established probable cause and likely done nothing but break your screen and mess up the phone casing.
How does DuckDuckGo make money and, if not confidential, what's revenues?
For me, that's the standard argument about C++ having unnecessary complexity.

You don't keep learn new stuff because C++ is super, uber, powerful. It is because it is not designed well and there are far too many dark corners.
I feel any parent with a teenager who's tried to monitor her Facebook account can see where this is headed.

This policy is incredibly ignorant of how online communities work and where communication is going. The only thing I can see happening is terrorism-minded individuals actually creating and maintaining clean Facebook profiles as a smokescreen. That's an easy win and great distraction as communication moves to non-centralized, encrypted, expiring messages.
It cuts both ways though. I am sure there are even more useful services out there that you never heard of because they didn't have enough money to market or distribute their product. The VC route and bootstrapping each have their advantages/disadvantages.
OP here.

I think if a company is coming to my college for offering jobs, it's highly likely that I'll only be offered web development positions. Unless I do something else to prove that I can do well in other fields as well.
I would hate to have to deal with such things in my job as an engineer. And I'm not talking about C++. (Well, ok, maybe I am just a little bit.)
I see both of those issues on both sides of the fence personally, just for different reasons.

I live in Southern USA and there's a lot of agriculture here, a lot of the farmers I know are conservative and anti-GMO. But I think they're mostly against it because of all the food patents and monopolies. Most of the left-leaning people I know are more against it because "we need more research/we have a poor understanding of nutrition".
That's a paddlin' (detention).
What about smart pointers from c++11 onward? Seems like there are less reasons to have code seg fault these days.