skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be honest, I didn't find the extra "things" that my university taught outside of my Computer Science program to be of value. I took two public speaking classes, multiple business courses, and plenty of other general education courses. You can sit in a classroom for years and learn theoretical ways to be better at public speaking or how to grow a business, but that won't make you a good public speaker or successful entrepreneur. The experience of running a business or speaking in front of a large crowd is what will force you to improve those skills. If you never have to run a business or speak in front of a large crowd, then those theories are quite useless.

The issue I have with the requirement of a college degree that so many companies impose is that the degree proves nothing other than that the applicant can go through a long drawn-out process of getting a degree. It says nothing of their competency. I've interviewed multiple candidates for software engineering roles that had a bachelors or masters degrees in Computer Science, and more often than not, they can talk for hours about theories behind programming concepts or data structures, but when given a fairly trivial coding challenge, they fall flat on their face. When I graduated college, I was one of those people, but luckily I recognized that quickly and spent countless hours learning new languages and frameworks until I felt I could build a fully functional piece of software by myself.

In my experience, I often prefer candidates straight out of a short vocational computer science program or self-taught programmers to work on my team. Going 4+ years before actually putting concepts into practice is way too long. There are plenty of unaccredited programs that only take a few months and often churn out much more competent candidates than a four year uni program.

tl;dr: People spend way to much time talking about doing things rather than doing things.
It's not like there is a shortage of Integers, you know...
Right off the bat, I see multiple instances of str* functions where strn* functions should be used. I'm also wondering about this variable "server" which seems to have an unknown definition. There are lots of gotos, and many other deferred high-quality conventions, such as explicit parenthesis in comparisons, re-ordered fields in comparisons, chains of else ifs, where a switch would be preferable.

I also see lots of prototypes (all?!) defined at the top of the file instead of in a header file. They could be made static.

Also, the generic type "int" isn't a good idea because it can change, it helps avoid porting problems to specify the size (int32_t, uint64_t, etc.)

And the memcpy()'s should be changed to memcpy_s().

On the bright side, the comments are quite good and plentiful. Refreshing!
FWIW FB Live wasn't a released product in Feb 2016.
«Personally, when traveling abroad, if asked where I'm from, I generally say "Washington DC", not "the US".»

Yeah, I've met people like you. The problem is, this asks from your interlocutor of awareness for internal USA geography knowledge. On the other hand, many of those "from San Francisco" or from somewhere alike expect you to be just "from Europe" instead of "Germany" (or any other national state with its own cultural identity and external policy, for that matter).

P.S.: Try "Franconia" or "Thuringia" instead of "Germany" and see how many bells that rings! Mind you, these are broad regions, not merely cities.
The millennial side hustle, not stable job, is the new reality for grads
Composition and Interfaces in OOP World
I don't think that's true if you learnt it properly the first time. I can still solve a quadratic equation, and I learnt that more than ten years ago and definitely haven't used it since.

I think there's a general rejection of knowledge, and software development has a continue cycle of reinventing the wheel because a large number of developers have no formal training. This something we are now celebrating instead of looking down on.

On the front page today there's separately a 'America needs to reject degree qualifications' and 'How do we get a certified certificate for developers'.....
>As an easy example, there are many that are more overweight than I am that know nutrition better than I do. That said, it is does seem somewhat logical to question health advice from clearly unhealthy people.

Using your easy example with OP's logic, a 100-pound overweight person trying to lose 100 pounds by throwing up and taking dangerous diet pills should also discount the advice of a physician who've never lost 100 pounds themselves or successfully helped a patient lose at least 100 pounds.
>Although Cloudflare recently suffered from a widely-reported security incident, their response was impressively fast and transparent.

Really....seemed like they massively downplayed to me.
A White Dwarf and a Black Hole in a Tight Orbit
cool, but what does sandstorm have to do with cloudflare? then again i don't quite get what it is... some kind of file/app sharing thing.
Religious persecution is a thing. If you're a normal adherent to the state-sponsored by-far-majority religion of a country, claiming refugee status via "violent religious persecution" is a stretch. If you're a rare adherent of a state-persecuted tiny-minority religion being violently exterminated with the tacit (if not declared) approval of the government, then you are exactly what refugee status via "violent religious persecution" is legally recognized for. Kind of hard to discern the difference without asking someone their religious affiliation.

ETA: Legitimate refugees, people actually being violently persecuted by the state for some aspect of their minority status, are unlikely to get proper vetting regardless of the quality of the vetting process, and 'tis quite humanitarian to take them in if they can be reasonably identified as such. Those not so persecuted are in the best position for their state to provide proper vetting, which if their state can't/won't provide proper vetting then we need to halt their immigration until reasonable vetting can be established. This has NOTHING to do with religion per se, especially when the allegedly discriminated-against group has over 5x as many members in other countries who can apply for properly-vetted visas without any difficulty.
Does it matter if they stop visiting the site? Considering that they are using resources without giving something back in return?

Buzz. I block ads but I also post links to articles on social media that are then followed by people who do not block ads.

I have a couple of areas of focus where I am exceptionally knowledgeable and people who have anything more than a passing interest in those subjects check out links I post.

Or, I guess, the website could shut down completely.

The tragedy of the commons.
In 1993, there was a legislative attempt to limit CEO pay by capping the deductibility at $1 million (the company could pay more but it would not be tax deductible as a payroll expense). That $1 million number was the average CEO compensation at large firms, which ought to tell you all you need to know about the effectiveness.
Mention "unions" or "professionalism" or anything that involves giving the actual value that a developer produces to the developer and the story will disappear very quickly. Maybe that's because of the mods or maybe it's because of the flagging by readers who have the pro-state-capitalist argument so ingrained in them. Whatever it is, it biases Hacker News in a bad way.
GHC compiles haskell through about a million different IRs and abstract machines, until eventually reaching Cmm, which is effectively a similar idea to LLVM IR (A very simple C ish imperative language). Any benefits to be had, should be fairly straightforward for the GHC folks to use, which should be cool.
I dealt with that very issue in my comment - "it relies on abbreviation conventions that different programmers may not use consistently".

Different programmers at different times follow different conventions, no matter how overwhelmingly obvious they are at the time. Changing adds to the already huge burden of context switching.
I think it's more accurate that both the extreme right and extreme left are the parties of authoritarianism, and the center is about freedom. Leftists want to police what you say, what you think, how you earn your living, and who you associate with. Rightists want to police what you believe, what you do with your body, what substances you inhale, and how you travel. Both sides would do well with a chill pill and the idea that people could be or believe differently than you without being a threat.
Such a Great Country, Such Nasty Bigotry
Starting a react-native project next month. Will it have any impact there?
>but it's outsourced to a janitorial services company.

Who outsources to a temp agency to cover absences and increases in demand
But then they wouldn't be able to do research either.
Three questions:

How much have you had to pay beeminder?

How do you make payments (escrow, credit card, PayPal, etc)?

Is it a non-profit?

It seems like this would be a great opportunity for a non-profit. Although it may reduce the incentive a bit. I expect it will be psychologically similar. Especially if the non-profit overhead is something like 10%. You are effectively losing 10% of what could have gone directly to your non-profit of choice.
Making a case-insensitive password checker is trivial if the passwords are being compared in plain text, but requires a bit of forethought if you do it with hashed passwords. In particular it's impossible to add this feature after the fact if you already have hashed mixed case passwords in your database. So the likelihood that passwords are unhashed goes way up.
If I were to blame one group, it would be the loan industry. Though I wouldn't fault them for it or say it was intentional (at least at the on set).

First you become forced to make loans easier (it only take a quick glance to see them taking sure and comfortable bets, combined with a little social Justice a statistics the govt. Mandates unsure bets). This open the flood gates of who can get loans, people apply in great numbers (combined with culture, and people not realizing what they're getting into). Which leads to a huge glut of college grads no one knows what to do with... With market pressure the students go for lower and lower positions. Which becomes the new baseline qualification.
I'm not sure I buy your example. If you save the time in the local time, then the time zone changes, the stored date will now be wrong. If you convert to UTC, and update your time zone tables when the time zone changes, then when you convert back the time will be correct.
It's so important to the discussion quality on Hacker News that users comment civilly and substantively, which is why we bring ourselves to repeat it so often. They're related, too: unsubstantiveness leaves much room for comments to be read as uncivil, even if they weren't intended that way.
It does. Just because the info is now in the public domain doesn't change it's classification level. Bizarre, I know. But it's because the classifying authority is the one responsible for changing it, and until they do it's still at the original level and all the classification and need-to-know rules still apply.
Why is it an illusion if you have the source ? You get the source, build it, sign it, and flash it. You can't verify that CPU will only accept your signed firmware and not something else under special circumstances, but you can't verify those sort of cases in hardware anyway. The CPU is a black box at the end of the day.

Edit: Disabling becomes a special case of flashing in this case. Actual hardware disabling will likely never happen because of all the people who use the functionality. The best you can hope for is flashing whatever you want (including nops)
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Which part of my comment do you disagree with. I specifically mentioned that I and others appreciate the work the mods are currently doing.
No, because there are no blanks, adding either of those words would change the meaning of the sentence in a way that I don't support.
Free Giveaway Marketing “Scam” on LinkedIn
My comment was aimed more at tsomctl and moomin than at you, to be honest. Say "MUMPS" and people will fall over themselves to cite The Daily WTF, as if it were all there was to be said on the matter.
I think it is telling that the second nephew was a cook. When I think of learning a trade I imagine fitters and turners. And here in Australia we do need more of those skills -- but the chances are that service sector jobs will be more abundant. And some -- like cooking can take the most successful ones a long way.

That said, I would like to see aprentices rather than interns at my big software company.
"how I taught myself physics in one year" links pls
There's no consensus on that, compared to other areas where there is consensus that immigration, as a whole is either a net benefit or, at worse, neutral. There are, however, individual cases where native born individuals will suffer losses. The answer is better access to retraining.
I had the same feeling.

Coming from ExtJS and Ember, React felt rather simple.

But Redux is a whole nother story :(
Disclaimer: This is my startup.

We're building Jell (https://jell.com) to tackle this problem. We have 2 sets of core functionality: OKR tracking, and "checkins" which can act as a daily/weekly/monthly "standup".

You can add plans/tasks to your checkins (and mark them as complete), and link these items to your OKR's.

We've seen a lot of companies have success with our tool (many replacing daily standups with it). We'd love feedback.
You're working on it.

Give it some time.
Their FAQ is here: https://www.beeminder.com/faq

1. You set the payment amount, but the default is exponential. (Edit: didn't read your comment thoroughly enough the first time to know you were referring to the OP, not the general policy.)

2. Payments are done via credit card, although Paypal support seems to be in the works.

3. It does not appear to be a non-profit. It looks like a business where Beeminder's living is made off of people paying when they fail their goals.
Unfortunately the assertion that you control which LLVM version you use isn't always the case. Debian 8 stable is still using LLVM 3.5, while homebrew on OSX and archlinux typically track the latest stable version (currently 3.9). Crystal, the programming language I work on, has to work on both versions and a few in between. (We're dropping support for < 3.8 soon though). Sure, we could bundle a LLVM version with the language, but that has several disadvantages, including size and extra work to build and distribute the package securely.

That being said, the changes are typically minor, and while the bindings are a little bit too dense on {% if LibLLVM::IS_38 %} for me [0], it's certainly not hellish yet. However the LLVM debug info generator is a different story... [1]

[0] https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/blob/c60df09b5082918...
[1] https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/blob/master/src/llvm...
...this...is...false...
Show HN: icanhazdadjoke – dad joke api with slack/alexa integrations
1) thats why "or whatever" followed 500k, it was an example number.

2) 500k taxes over 4 yrs is not the point, the point is to match (or even over charge for) the marginal systemic costs of that person entering the country. Not just a fee for applying for the visa but all the infrastructure and social support costs.

3) Actually there is kind of an entrepreneur system in place anyways. And they allow upto 10k per year https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-through-job/gree...
The answer is simple. Make it generally illegal to ask or provide information about your college education as part of interviewing for a job. If there's bona-fide occupational requirement for specialized training, allow certification by exam - the Fundamentals of Engineering exam or what actuaries go through are good examples of this.
There's a five part blog series on performance improvements in VS2017 (then codenamed version "15"), here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/10/14/imp...
This has been done before, though by who eludes me. I've seen it here on HN a few years ago.

and it is absolutely a good idea, as long as you include validation and QA abilities right along side train/predict.
I used to work at Epic, where this language is used to implement much of the leading healthcare system in the United States. Many people there encouraged me to refer to it by different names like "M," "InterSystems Caché," "Caché," or even to my surprise "C."

I'm very, very happy to not be using this language anymore. After my first year on the job, I read some JavaScript code, and I nearly wept at how comparatively beautiful it was.
Eh, I see it differently. I think Walmart gets blamed for those trends and no one thinks about what the world would look like with those same trends and no one like Walmart to serve certain purposes.

There are 7 or 8 billion people globally and in my lifetime we went from being mostly agrarian to having more than half of all people living in cities. These are unprecedented global changes. We have nothing to compare them to.

And people keep bellyaching about overpopulation and global warming and THE SKY IS FALLING, meanwhile, people are living longer...etc.

I fundamentally don't agree with some of the assumptions behind accusations that Walmart is evil and predatory. That doesn't mean they are a white knight or have room for improvement, mind you.

Best.
My first ever internship in software engineering (in 2012) was in the MUMPS world! I worked on a project for a contracting company building an automated testing framework (in python) to interface with and allow the VA to refactor their massive VistA EHR that was entirely written in MUMPS.

The fact that the system works at all is total magic to me, with hundreds of subsystems and millions of lines of code, all with the same shared global variable pool. I remember having to spend a few days digging through hundreds of pages of kernel documentation (it has its own kernel!) to simply find out how to write to a file..

What you can remember seems largely correct. I think commands and syntax were case insensitive, and variables were case sensitive too? All kinds of insanity like that.
Get your facts outta here. Can't you see people are trying to force a perceived threat based on their feelings here?
What if all inheritance was collected and evenly distributed? - at a rate of X assigned at birth based on existing pool to be awarded at age Z or by medical need... In general, people do not value governmental transparency so we always have corruption that would subvert this, but it's the solution that I would select (in some fashion).
The really big announcement came about six weeks ago, when Kenton announced that Sandstorm for Work was open sourced and not anymore a product that is for sale.

If you didn't follow that link in the first paragraph and didn't hear about it already from some other source, https://sandstorm.io/news/2017-02-06-sandstorm-returning-to-...

IMHO this is all really good news, because people who were on the fence about Sandstorm before can feel more free to commit resources to developing it, without worrying that Sandstorm the company is going to come along and make decisions against their interest, or try to make their work proprietary, or leverage it for the company to make more profit at their expense. (Not that we thought those things would happen...)

They would certainly have less time to work on Sandstorm if they were not able to go right out and get full-time jobs, once it was determined Sandstorm the company was out of money! IMHO there is nothing but good news in these announcements.
I bet you'll think differently when installing LLVM –2147483648.0 !
Muslim engineers are also more likely to become extremists than other muslims.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/1...

The authors posit a couple of potential reasons. I'd also add a tendency to see the world in black-and-white.
That's nifty; I was looking for something like that just a few weeks ago for a work demonstration! Ended up doing https://gist.github.com/fuglede/ad04ce38e80887ddcbeb6b81e97b... instead.
This is an important aspect, for sure. A similar concept in spirit that a colleague has worked on is the cross-flow turbine. It can be made easily and cheaply by cutting up pieces of steel pipe and welding them back together. There is an organization called Remote Hydrolight that supports the building and maintenance of these for power across rural Afghanistan:

http://www.remotehydrolight.com

For micro-hydropower in Europe or the US, I believe we are still running into the environmental issue. I understand in most countries, it is illegal to build hydropower even in small streams, and even if you own the land, without a lot of red tape and approval from environmental authorities.

But I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong! I hope your father succeeds in this!
> Sandstorm is still an independent company, under control of Jade and myself.

Whenever I hear that I'm subvocalizing 'for now'. How do you see this in the longer term?
In a vacuum, you're right, and it would be difficult to convey all the context that might sway you such that this anecdote is indicative of the structural problems in the education system. But this is just one of millions of anecdotes on how the system as a whole is largely concerned with anything but education.

The accounting machinery is needed to get money to all the schools sure, but when that accounting machinery becomes the focus of 40% of admins... You're not running an education system. You're moving money around that happens to educate...sometimes.
One finance class? Unless we are talking about someone majoring in finance, I don't think one class will get you very far. Look at the classes required for the finance major at USC, for example[1].

Uhh... ok, if you want to do finance for a corporation or similar, great! I don't see much there about managing personal finances... do you? Perhaps if we had more personal finance and less about leverage, in the USA at least, we wouldn't have the crazy debt problems we have. Perspective.

Real world is managing both personal and professional. College isn't great at either.

[1]http://www.marshall.usc.edu/faculty/fbe/curriculum/undergrad...
Try the web infographic version here: https://aka.ms/vs2017infographic
I think the point is that if you store local time, and have a decently maintained time zone handling library, the library will adjust correctly for before/after the switch, but only if you store in the local time.

Of course it can't happen by magic, and you rely on the authors of the timezone libraries (a thankless task in itself), but if you remove a dimension of your data, nobody can ever help you.
Hello,

I am the creator of https://icanhazdadjoke.com/. As the product is closing in on it's 1000th Slack installation, I figured it is about time I start to tell the world more about it.

This project was a silly weekend idea that I had that slowly has grown organically into over 900 Slack installs (with about 300-400 Slack interactions per day), and over 50 Alexa installations (with around 10 interactions per day) without any marketing.

For those interested, the tech stack is:

* Python/Flask (http://flask.pocoo.org/)

* Flask-Ask (https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask-ask)

* Elasticsearch (https://www.elastic.co/)

* AWS S3 (https://aws.amazon.com/s3/)

* Caddy web server (https://caddyserver.com/)

* Cloudflare (https://www.cloudflare.com/)

I am happy to answer any questions anyone might have about the product.