skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think some JavaScript developers feel a sort of stockholm-syndrome attachment to the features of JavaScript that make it unique.

We've been hearing for so many years that our bread and butter language was terrible, so we told ourselves that other people just hadn't spent the time to take advantage of the less commonly understood features of JS (not unique, just lest common among popular industry languages like python, java, etc). This leads to people claiming that prototypal inheritance always better than classical inheritance (everyone else who uses classes are just misguided), or that JavaScript is "functional" just because it has first class functions.

I used to feel this way about classes too. Now that I've started using them at work I feel like there is a great desire to justify the amount of time that has been spent hacking on prototypal inheritance to behave like classes.
My Holy Grail: Connect Excel with LINQPad
Hmmm, isn't deep learning starting to pick up for genetics? No idea if it is actually is, but everyone in DL seems to be talking about it, I thought I'd ask someone actually in bioinformatics :)
That's a pretty radical claim to make based on one data point without specifying the parameters you used or any other context.
This, I have very rapidly found myself writing code which only very occasionally uses something fancy and otherwise generally opt for the most plain, boring and straightforward code. Internally, I describe the code as idiot proof.

Putting it more kindly, my litmus test for my own code is "will a 5 year old understand this?". In the many instances where I have since returned to my code to maintain it, I am often grateful for every less minute I spend reunderstanding all my own code.

To use your analogy of engineers being like authors, as a teenager, I would often find every excuse to use some exciting sentence structure or long word - doing so made me feel authoritative and clever. But once reading more, you find that some of the most powerful, and clever, writing is concise and plain.

Be Hemingway, not Nabokov.*

*not to say Nabokov wasn't clever.
You personally have made 4 of the last 6 HN submits of their blogspam articles. Why are you trying to drive undeserved traffic to their site?

And why defend blogspam sites in general?
Beware: The website asks my mobile browser for permissions to take pictures and video.
Yep. I'm terribly confused why the programming "trade" doesn't have this.

Various orgs have attempted to build one, but they're all so easy/rote that they don't actually deliver on that "minimal competency" promise, so nobody cares about the associated credentials.

A real test of this would most likely have to involve a live, observed simulation of real work, so it'd be somewhat expensive to run the testing centers. But a credential that actually meant something would pay for itself, because it could be earned in place of other less-specific credentials that cost a whole lot more (e.g. a college degree.)
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/a...

You may need to Google that article title and click through to read it but it outlines that even at $7 each way the price wasn't high enough so now it's $10 each way (not $8 as I stated.) Even so, the $3 price hike has done little to ease congestion.
> Also, there's a TON of crazy people riding, literal homeless crazy people

This is pretty true. I'm an occasional metro/bus rider, and I'd guess I've been on more rides where there's someone with a clear mental health issue than rides without. And while most of those occasions it's benign, something everyone can ignore... for enough of them it's been intense enough people on the car/bus have been clearly uncomfortable and it wasn't clear confrontational behavior wasn't going to escalate into violence.

I could imagine some people would decide never to ride again.

Enforcement is probably only part of the puzzle, though. We have the same problem with other public spaces (say, libraries) because we don't have any coherent or effective policy for dealing with people who are suffering from mental illness. Perhaps not coincidentally, there's no straightforward market-based solution to that problem (to an even higher degree than traffic).
Indeed. I have worked in assistive technology consulting, and it is very difficult to keep up with all of the "upgrades".

It is clear that we value shiny bullshit more than being accessable and inclusive.

And nobody can even make the case that cutting off more and more people from the web even benefits us.
yup!

I'm creating a small virtual machine based around the idea of associative memory (read: tuplespaces). I'm going to use it to write a ton of declarative code for smaller devices and for some of my own projects.

the opcodes are still in a state of flux, but a partial implementation exists in Python, with the intent of porting everything to C and getting a spec up. you have operations like 'match', 'exists', 'assert', 'retract', mathematical operations...

...oh, and no callstack. ;)
Currently doing a lot of tech interviews. This was hilarious to read.
You mean the USDoHS email storm of 2007?
We do support that. Hit the 'Edit' button in the lower right corner :)
That doesn't explain the photos of the car's aftermath.

I mean, it's just as likely people pressured his family to say this (either organized crime or the government .. really the same thing).

It's not dying because it's highly suspicious and the narrative doesn't fit, the news reports are conflicting and much of the evidence is gone.
There's a middle ground between buses and rail: building defacto rail lines by transforming far-left lanes and middle dividers into dedicated bus tracks and semipermanent bus stations.

Urbanized (Gary Hustwit, 2011) highlights the TransMilenio bus system, which serves the city of Bogota. It specifically covers elevating the experience and status of taking the bus by adopting positive aspects of rail systems: covered waiting areas, dedicated transit lanes, more reliable service. Except it's less expensive to implement and more flexible.

TransMilenio bus and station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Av_Am%C3%A9ricas_Transmil...

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransMilenio

With so much road already laid, LA is a perfect candidate for a system like this!
Drupal for Project Managers: free online training this Friday
The road congestion theory is a backwards rational -- someone was trying to come with reason for why medallions should still exist and came up with it. There's no way that anyone in 1937 had congestion in mind when they were creating the taxi medallions; to call it a "major" reason for why tax medallions were created is completely absurd.

To cite road congestion as being part of the "spirit" of why taxi medallions were created leaves me with the impression of someone being disingenuous.
Because of how Google handles the NDK experience.

Using C++ on iOS or UWP isn't as painful experience as on Android.
Nintendo tells Switch users dead pixels are their problem
I'm not saying it's a good task, I'm saying that people failed it despite we were thinking the task is trivial.

But still, I'd expect Java developer to know that Java strings are immutable and that you can't treat them as character arrays. It's totally OK to not know how toArray method is called (toCharArray). Assuming there's a kind of "reverse" method is a bad idea - even if there would have been one, it would clearly be not what we ask. Same for "I'd use StringUtils.reverse(...)" from whatever package. I won't mind if you write a.length() for array or a.length for String, this does not matter much. Knowing a difference between a byte and a char is, however, quite important in my book.

The "usual" solution is to str.toCharArray() and then iterate this array to the middle, swapping i-th and (length - i - 1)-th characters, then new String(array) with the result.

For this solution you only need to know fundamentals of the language and vaguely recall that there was some method to convert string to a character array.

Bonus points (figuratively speaking, there were no actual points) were for: writing test cases, checking the argument for not being null or showing how to swap two characters without using an additional variable.

Do you think IDE would help much? I don't think so. IDE would have helped you with the unimportant part (how was that toArray() method called exactly). But you'd need to know how to use a cycle to reverse an array. You need to know what the difference between a byte and a char is (in order not to choose the getBytes() method instead toCharArray()).
I fully agree, and I never said anything else.
Email-id?
There is mention in the blog of the creator about window size. It can be configured down to 4KB to it can operate in low memory environments:

http://fastcompression.blogspot.com/ see under "Custom window sizes" section
"To fix traffic, we need tolls"

Tolls are just a form of paying people to go away (if you don't take the toll road, you're paid by getting to keep a few dollars in your pocket).

It only reduces traffic for you if you are one of the ones that didn't go away.

If the toll discouraged you, then the traffic problem isn't solved for you; you're taking a bunch of non-toll roads riddled with detours and intersections.

We can't call that a solution to the traffic problem. That's like saying, "we can reduce congestion on this ethernet switch not by better firmware and protocols, but just getting people to stop web surfing and watching videos, and go do something else".
Note: I think you meant wikileaks not Wikipedia
Audible breakpoints in Xcode
People will use free highways until they're at capacity. Throwing more public transportation at the problem does increase the number of people that can travel down the freeway, but it won't reduce traffic because any car taken off the highway by a driver switching to public transit will be replaced by another driver taking up the commute.
The anti-vac crowd might not be idiots, but they're selfish as hell (free-riding on herd immunisation while not willing to accept the (very very tiny) risk of vaccination to their precious child).
How about Parasitic Inheritance? http://www.breck-mckye.com/blog/2014/05/why-i-prefer-parasit...

You can get rid of "this" and all it's problems, and the code is even cleaner.
Article says, exercise alone is not enough to lose weight. Well duh. That's like saying driving your car is not enough to lose gas, because you keep filling it up. People who say Oh you just need to exercise more don't realize that some people eat a mountain of food every single time they eat. People will likely use this clickbait title to sit on their ass and drown themselves under a mountain of carbs or if they're "trying to eat healthy" a vat of beef.

Lets clarify things. If you're not exercising that's a problem. You should be exercising, it's healthy. Do not worry about if exercising is going to make you lose weight or not. If you're not controlling portions that's a problem and it will make you fat. Exercise will not fix your 3000 calorie a day diet. Don't think that because you're eating 3500 calories of beef a meal that you're going to lose weight because it's not carbs. Do not expect a restaurant to give you a normal portion because the average american restaurant gives you a personal food trough. Do not expect to lose weight by eating normal meals but then snacking literally all day long, or drinking calorie rich beverages all day long.
FrontEnd, BackEnd, Fullstack developer
Location: Chicago, IL
Remote: yes
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Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, Python, Javascript, React, Html, Css, TDD, Git, SQL
Resume: https://resume.creddle.io/resume/409xopoip4r
Email: anca.ciascaiu[at]gmail[dot]com
Please see my projects listed on linkedin: linkedin.com/in/ancafodorciascaiu/
Looking forward to talking to you!
https://status.slack.com/2017-03/c0923f37c54988ec
Become the messiah to the robots hoping once they realize they don't need humans that they would still need their human messiah.
I agree with both comments, especially the faq language. Often times, lightheartedness in the tech space comes across condescendingly. A simple explanation here would suffice...and if it is truly magic, I'm all in.
It also probably shouldn't (warn)

if(Foo* a = GetAFoo()) { /* Do something with a non-null foo */ }

is perfectly valid code.
Why do you hate communism? Is there a legitimate reason?
While I get where you're coming from with cynicism, any deployment of chemical weapons by a belligerent is almost certainly a war crime under several international accords, most notably the Geneva Protocol[0]. As someone upthread pointed out, their production is also the subject of several more. All the NSA/CIA disclosures we've seen thus far are not, themselves, war crimes. The international community, with some exceptions, came to the consensus that chemical weapons are not a good thing about a century ago, while offensive hacking is a much more recent development (obviously) and basically the wild west right now. Comparing chemical weapons to offensive hacking simply because they're both big government naughties is disingenuous, to say the least.

My bar of cynicism is a little higher when you're talking about the United States discretely stockpiling mustard gas versus taking down a smartphone, you know? (Maybe I, too, am irresponsibly naive.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Protocol
Ask HN: You make more than £150k/year in London, what do you do?
Self-cleaning potty pad system for small dogs/puppies
There is no inherent morality, positive or negative, in obeying the law; the law is not meant as a moral authority, but a social one. To be consistent in your logic, you would have to argue that helping slaves escape their condition in 1800s America would be morally wrong, as it would be breaking the law.
I think that's probably true, but discussions and studies around cognitive bias have been going on for ages, just not necessarily in an accessible way, or in the mainstream.

That is, unless you are in marketing, advertising, or public office - then its probably your job to exploit all our irrational foibles for profit or power.

Either way, I think its important to get a better handle on just how rational we are vs how rational we think we are - and on ways to push us towards the more rational side of things.
Show HN: Mental Math Game for iOS
I read an interesting explanation for how lying developed in humans: when we became capable social creatures, lying to others would be a quick way of gaining an advantage, so it would be selected for in the individual. However, a culture made up of liars would be less trusting of each other, and so at a disadvantage. In this way, we evolved to give off signals, and feel guilt, when we are lying.

However, it remained useful to lie to others, and so we evolved to be able to still do so. If we first lie to ourselves, trick ourselves into believing a falsehood is true, we can then spread this to others as if it were true, and therefore without consequences. In historical societies, it seems this was the right balance between generally telling the truth to others, while still being able to lie when it is important to do so. I wonder if it is time for the balance to swing the other way again, and for lying to again be selected against.
Sure, so when the police come to help you we should charge you a per-visit fee. It will be small, something poor people can't afford but rich people can afford easily, like $50. If you can't afford it, they won't go after the criminal who hurt you.

It's not regressive because charging someone to use something (like police services) is not a tax, after all.

The very point is that right now roads are paid by taxes, which are progressive, and people are suggesting replacing them with fees, which are regressive (without some additional scheme to account for this). A better solution would be subsidizing all public transit so it is free, which is progressive, not regressive. But will never solve the problem because it only incentivizes the poor to use transit.

If we stop subsidizing roads or make public transit free/cheaper then roads will be for the rich only, and public transit I'm sure will have millions poured into it and flourish. The government is, after all, historically very responsive to needs and pain points that are only felt by the poor and minorities.

We need to provide funding for transit first. We need to get middle-upper class people riding it, people who vote, are white, donate to political campaigns, know powerful people, etc which specifically means making it fast, efficient, reliable. Look at places like DC and NYC and SF/bayarea where middle-class businessmen take transit because it's the easiest, most efficient method and is fairly reliable.
I'm the accidental maintainer/guardian/dungeon keeper of a bunch of scary code at work, which happily does:

if (false != aBooleanVariable)

I still can't parse that without stopping and thinking (and sometimes cursing the original author). To me, with booleans, this can only sanely be written:

if (aBooleanVariable)

Code with literals is often worse than functionally equivalent code without; literals are complexity. And I hate literal comparisons with true and false for booleans. Aargh.
When the language featured prototypal inheritance as its main workhorse, it was stupid to try and hack classes together simply because you couldn't wrap your head around prototypal inheritance. That's like if I started to use python and instead of using classes I hacked together a prototypal inheritance system because classes were too outlandish for me.

Now that the newest versions of ES brings classes out of the box the point is moot. Use the one you are comfortable with or the one your team agreed with.
How do you feel about interviews for roles where it's required to keep a cool head under incredible pressure?

(This is a serious question. It describes a lot of the security incident response work I've hired for.)
You might also like Deleuze & Guattari's schizophrenia works and also this kinda oddball-but-eventually-led-to-buzzfeed paper: http://www.datawranglers.com/negations/issues/96w/96w_perett...
I expected some science, however it's just subjective rules backed by nothing substantial.
I suspect DL will have a limited to modest role in the actual search / alignment part, and a lot more to do with the analysis part. This includes medical diagnosis, identifying regulatory patterns based on high throughput expression data, such stuff.

Not necessarily in comp. genetics / sequencing.. / the DNA stuff..
Sorry but for years the mantra was for a gaming pic to invest in a i5 or even an i3 and spend the extra money in a good GPU. But for some bizarre reason suddenly everything that is not performing as an i7 7770k is a "bad cpu for gaming". It's ridiculous.

Hell in 30 million households there are 8 jaguar x86 core gaming machines active now with an IPC that is probably (I assume) atrocious.

I build my i7 4770 4 years ago and the sad part is that it will probably still take a lot of time for it to become a bottleneck in 90% of the games.
When will Google be back to China?
A few quick thoughts on the topic of ISOs, to give you all a little extra context.

1. Visual Studio 2017 is a huge product, because we support so many types of development: from Android to UWP to C++ to Unity to Linux. If we were to still offer a 'full' install, it would come in at over 50GB. That's one huge ISO image!

2. We surveyed hundreds of people during the previews and RCs, and people told us that they had historically used an ISO for two reasons: (i) because they wanted to download once and create a network install for enterprise deployment; (ii) because they had a shaky internet connection and wanted to be sure they'd downloaded successfully before installing. A single monolithic ISO isn't the best solution for either of those scenarios - it's just the one that people are habituated to over all these years.

3. For the former (enterprise deployment), we have a full administrators' guide that provides detailed guidance on how to deploy the product: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/visual.... This includes PowerShell scripts, examples of using the installer to create and update a network cache, descriptions of how to deploy Visual Studio in a fully offline environment, and so on.

4. For the latter, we've worked really hard to improve the robustness of the installer. The componentization work we've done means that the smallest install is one-tenth the size of Visual Studio 2015, making it far more likely to succeed. And other typical installs are smaller too. We download VS in small packages that are more likely to succeed, and we use multiple ways (WebClient, BITS, WinInet) to download those files to minimize problems with AV and proxy software. If you want to download first then install, you can use the offline guide to cache just those pieces that you need, which we've just rewritten for RTW: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/create...

5. Because of the nature of our product (rapidly updating, lots of third-party components), an ISO is problematic. We don't have the rights to redistribute several large components (including Android), and others update on a rapid cadence that often includes critical security fixes, meaning an ISO image is incomplete, often outdated, and potentially insecure. Most customers assume that an ISO would support offline installation, but that's not true. And so we fear that offering an ISO will just creating more disappointment.

Lastly, we're listening to requests for an ISO and paying attention to the feedback we're getting; at the same time, we're hoping that this is the release where we can gently move forward to a new model that better supports delivery of developer tools at a fast, well-maintained cadence.

Hope this is useful context. And again, we're listening :)

Tim Sneath | Visual Studio Team
Actually for the small town I'm in, muggings occur at night between 12 AM and 3AM. My office is down an unlit blind alley. As a result I carry a flashlight and a gun. Should be fairly good at defense. Also train to draw quickly for both. Light stuns; shot stops.

For the gangbangers, they don't really like to involve civilians in a gun fight. They save that for only the most extreme circumstances in territory protection/expansion. Honestly, not too afraid of them. A woman would benefit from a revolver in that situation. That's what my wife carries: Ruger LCR. No hammer so easy to pull from a purse (which is carried crossed over her). If she can't pull from the purse, she'll fire within it (taking the flash burn over rape, for example). In this instance the revolver will operate without catching the purse like a semi-auto would. At that point, they'd most likely run given the noise and possible loss of their friend.

As for the crazies, the point isn't to prevent them from being crazy by themselves. That's their right. It's to defend yourself if they turn that on you. When we go hiking, I carry a gun knowing the gators don't care. Doesn't mean it's useless.
I'm 100% behind heavily weighting work sample tests. However, your system seems to minimize the value of non-coding skills. If the interview loop doesn't really matter, how do you answer questions like:

- Can this person communicate a technical concept to another engineer?

- Can this person communicate a technical concept to a non-engineer?

- Can they explain how the code they wrote works?

- How do they respond to technical feedback?

I'd argue that a good half of what makes up a good senior engineer is their non-technical skills. I won't claim that onsite "interview loops" do an amazing job of evaluating this, but it doesn't seem like work sample tests evaluate it at all. If your onsite loop doesn't really matter, how do you test for this?
Scala 2.13 roadmap