skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems to be hype from MBA types who've lost the technical knowledge. Or perhaps never had it.

What is blockchain? It's a way to create a global ledger without trust.

What do you need to track your pork chops? A ledger.

What is IBM? A huge, trusted, corporation.

Does anyone think if IBM operated a bog standard database of pork chops that the users would not trust it?

Every few months I'm reading these articles about using blockchain, which is pretty clever, for something that doesn't require it.
Iteration is not Design
The culprit is neither China or Mexico, it's automation [1]. To say anything else is to deny reality.

You can accomplish far more today with the advances in robotics and logistics than you could 30 or even 20 years ago.

This is an example of a brewery working at full capacity with a total of 6 people per shift. If this brewery was operated 35 years ago it would be 600 people per shift.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tLim5pkfOw

So how exactly are you going to stop these owners of capital that are so rightfully praised in the United States? You have entire cities that will offer free electricity, massive tax incentives, and looser regulations for what? A couple hundred jobs? What about the tens of thousands of people that are out of work? Are we really going to subsidize hundreds of thousands of tax dollars for jobs that barely pay $15/hour?

I don't know what the solution is but I do know it will require massive amounts of tax dollars and it won't be the poor paying it.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs...
Effectively all the black tar heroin comes from Mexico or did for the last 20 years: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/opinion/sunday/serving...
Amen.

I work at one of the most well-reputed software product companies in the world. We pride ourselves in hiring the very best, and try to do so through an interviewing program that simulates real life coding instead of an academic whiteboard situation.

Even amongst smart people, the bar for software quality is shockingly low. You will find ostensibly senior people again and again who given half a chance with espouse all day long the importance of high quality code, well-designed abstraction, separation of concerns, and good testing.

You can then let these people operate for a few hours by themselves and examine the result. In all but a few situations, it'll be a pile of mud that's designed counter to every one of the values they talk about. Often they're not aware of this, but it's also very common that they know it's sloppy, and don't really care. People don't do what's right, they do what's easy.

In a corporate environment, there is never a structure to identify the developers who are most likely to write good and maintainable code (it's too subjective) so that they can be put into a review capacity, and even if there were, there just isn't the bandwidth to review new additions to the depth that's required. In an ideal situation, many patches would be returned to author essentially asking for a complete rewrite, but that's difficult to justify given that building strong relationships inside the team needs to be considered.

The result is that all software developed in industry trends towards bad over time, and it appears to be as absolute of a universal constant as entropy. You can find localized exceptions, but they're often only temporarily good as eventually more people contribute more features.
You have to compare comparables situations : what could have been done different with the same resources involved ?

Having an educational system is a sign that the society is wealthy and can afford it, but doesn't mean it's the best use of resources involved (thus it might have a bad ROI).

You said education was overlooked where you come from, was there an educational system there ?
I completly agree with the need to communicate and program with other people. From my experience, computer science degrees severely lack this communication trainning. You do ~2 small group projects per semester. The group splits the project into parts and everyone goes and does it's own part alone.

There is no teamwork, source control, tests nor anything like that.

I seriously hope other universities do it differently and I just attended the wrong one.
> Extensive and opaque 'telemetry' being sent back to MS which cannot be completely turned off

How do you turn off the telemetry of your smartphone apps or web sites that you use?
Recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857887
Of course not. Early Java was comparable to today’s Go in many ways, and Generics is part of that.
Works with Firefox on Android. Nice!
The Decentralized Startups
I expected people in this problem space would transition to Rust. Interesting decision staying with cpp.
Sadly, in my experience addiction is often fed, if not caused, by pain avoidance. This in no way is meant to reflect on your particular situation, but I just want to point it out for the benefit of those who struggle with addiction and opt for it over alternatives.

My personal struggles in this area, in hindsight, were not primarily fed by a desire to satiate a craving or desire or need, but rather much more by a fear of future pain.

Ideally, this comment shouldn't lessen the struggle of those who have to deal with pain, but it should increase our empathy with those who struggle with addiction, because I'm willing to bet that in many if not most cases, there's a crippling, intense fear of pain underlying it. How rational that fear is doesn't really matter.

I've seen people with a legitimate need to alleviate pain succumb to addiction. I've also seen people who 'should' be fine succumb to addiction because of less-visible, mental anguish. It seems to me both cases, and the usual murky area in between, deserve study, empathy, and solutions.
Backers have been getting regular releases for about 3 years already if not longer.
College Student Made a Dating Resume and It’s Kind of Incredible
Almost all high-scale infrastructure tooling? Are there many databases, parallelism frameworks, indexing systems, or machine learning frameworks in go?

I’d be interested if you can name any fields where non-Google go projects dominate. I only know of containers.
Actually, I came across a paper recently which did find long term opioid use effective. I'm on mobile now, but if I remember later I'll post a link.
Linux distributions work fine with UEFI a Secure Boot[1]. Maybe even better than with BIOS and MBR, because now, there is no excuse to just overwrite the MBR. OS Installers are supposed to just add an entry into UEFI boot manager.

[1] Secure Boot comes into play only when 1) you use distribution in SecureBoot enforcing mode (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora) and 2) want to build your own kernel modules. Then, you have to enroll your Machine Owner Key into UEFI and sign your modules with it. However, building kernel modules is not something that grandma is going to do. For normal use, all the mainstream distributions come with a signed bootloader (shim.efi).
And as usual, all for nothing. The site makes 43 separate GET requests and transfers 562KiB of data over the span of 8.25 seconds to load ... wait for it ... 3.7KiB of text.

And the site is solid black text on a solid white background. This article would have literally been better as a link to a .txt file on a static file server. The modern web is really such a disaster.

Although I would have then missed out on this gem of a comment ( www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3203#comment-1733204 ) -- and I do mean that sincerely, no sarcasm. Seriously, I can't stand places that make you call in advance either :P
Very little people who have tried errors by value or Either monads (they are basically the same concept in some sense) think that exceptions are better. Exceptions cause your code to be non-linear. Also, it makes them seem like something exceptional (pun intended), whereas you should really carefully handle each error and decide what it implies.

Also, just something I noticed after almost two years of Go. Thanks to library quality I usually end up writing much less Go than Java/Scala for similar applications.
Yes, DX12 is very similar to Vulkan but the major difference is Vulkan is present on most gaming platforms except iOS, so it makes sense if you have to choose one of those two you will choose Vulkan.
It isn't hard to imagine that spotify needs to recoup the costs lost by having to please the labels. My point was that I'm paying a fair price and Spotify are relaying a fair share of that.

Now where the money actually ends up seems to be up to the labels.
Can't agree with this one enough. I'm currently battling through a project full of people that are too smart for their own good and too stupid to realise it.

I had a huge argument today with someone that wanted to wrap a certain type of higher order function ("foos") in another higher order function with a particular name ("fooGenerator()") for the sole purpose of differentiating it from a different kind of higher order function in the same file ("bars").

I lost the argument. It turns out using heading comments to seperate groups of similar functions, or god forbid splitting up the 400 line file into multiple smaller ones, is too confusing and prone to errors by maintainers ("What if they put a new foo function in the section for bar functions!")
He mentions reviewing papers and grant proposals, which are part of your professional obligations if you're a professor. You're not obliged to do so for any particular journal, but you're absolutely expected to do some, and "cold calling" people is normal.

It would be as if part of your job required code reviewing open source projects in your area of expertise, even where you hadn't previously contributed.
Maintaining context in chatbots
Someone please remind me why the hash is not a type definition so the representation would only have to be changed in one place.
I work with (among other things) batteries. As I've gotten a bunch of emails about it, I suppose I am "the battery guy" here.

Li-ion battery energy density grows in spurts. Realistically, there have been a few major improvements, with very small incremental improvements in between. For example, in 2001 we were at 180 Wh/kg. In just a handful of months we jumped to 260 Wh/kg, then to 280 Wh/kg as manufacturing processes improved. In the last 11 years, however, improvements have been maybe a few Wh/kg per year, and there have been literally zero improvements whatsoever in the past four years, by anyone.

Eleven years is a very long time, especially for something that everybody just assumes is constantly silently improving. And it's not like the battery industry stopped investing in growth: there are absolutely insane amounts of money invested in battery R&D, since whoever figures out how to make a cheap, energy-dense battery will become absolutely infathomably rich and make Madoff-level growth look like US savings bonds.

Bonus fact: nobody really understands lithium-ion batteries. One production run might have substantially higher or lower capacity. Some batteries might explode. Some batteries are high discharge and some are low discharge. The "explanation" for all of these things is 'heat'.

Imagine that happening to any other industry (for example the auto industry.)

- "Why did my car just explode!?" "Heat"

- "Why does this car last a tenth the lifetime of this car?" "Heat"

- "Why does this car go a thousand times faster than any others?" "Heat"

- "Why is this entire production run of cars not working?" "Heat"

People say "heat" for two reasons: 1) because nobody understands li-ion batteries and 2) because yes, the real answer does have something to do with heat.

Batteries are one of the most important industries and critical to every company on HN. But the state of the art of batteries is putting together random metals with a bunch of random chemicals and watching which ones don't explode.

Imagine talking to the CEO of Boeing: "We just did our millionth test, engines made of cheese and wings made of coconut shells. It crashed during takeoff, of course. We haven't had any improvements in over a decade, but we're sure we'll get there eventually - we've spent billions on research so far."
A Ticking Evolutionary Clock
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "mobile learning"?

Do you mean development for mobile as a platform?

Do you mean the ability to learn on the move?

Something else entirely?
Could you explain your point about line numbering?
Just double tap to zoom?
Isn't Vulkan AMD only though?
4 years ago I got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in my early forties. The hospital staff showed me how to manage my glucose with long acting and fast acting insuline.

As a programmer I'm good with numbers so everything was pretty much under control but I started noticing that I needed less and less insuline up to the point that I needed no insuline at all. This was about a year ago. At that same time I had some new physical health problems and it turned out I had celiac disease as well. Bummer :(

One side-effect of 'untreated' celiac is that carbohydrates are less well converted to glucose and so my glucose levels stayed normal without using insuline. Unfortunately it meant I was not cured from type 1 diabetes.

Now that I am on a gluten free diet my insuline usage is back to normal and I stopped farting as a bonus :)
Also came to my mind. But Leipzig also attracts many young people because of its affordability. Many things that are true for Berlin now are also true for Leipzig; it is very hip, rents are rising and there's a lack of living space [1][2].

[1]: http://www.taz.de/!5368403/ (german)

[2]: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/535299/umfrag...
I personally think a more likely explanation of this move is that they are nowhere near completion and need a good 'technical excuse' for pushing deadlines way into the future.

Then everyone begins debating the technical issues rather than the timetabling and funding issues.
Saying you care and actually trying to implement policy to help who you care about are two entirely different things.

Seeing what the GOP healthcare plan and proposed budgets are, they do not care about rural communities. They say they do, but their voting patterns are entirely at odds of what they preach.
No data exists for that because the definition of illiteracy depends too strongly on the axe being ground.

Everything from 1% to 66% illiteracy has been attempted to sell to people.

It does seem that illiteracy clusters with various citizenship status, racial and other demographics, simple age distribution of a geographic location, and socioeconomic level to an extent that if you successfully filter those effects out you end up with a boring flat line at 100% literacy when ends up meaning nothing. The largest factor is literacy graphs and maps are basically a restatement of immigration data.
What does "carry" mean in this context?
For anything you want to learn in your life the best thing you should learn:

Learn from the Masters, do not seek advice in random people on Internet.

It is called "modeling". Pick your masters-mentors carefully.

For example we have people in my company that could do the work of tens or hundreds of people just by themselves because:

-they are incredible experienced and smart.
-they know regular expressions, know how to automate everything.
-they understand good design, and understand people as well as computers.

Just living around this people you will start modeling them, and doing the same they do.

But people also model bad behaviors just by proximity. Fat people use to have friends that are fat, and family members that are fat. The same happens with smokers or drug addicts. You pick from your surroundings subconsciously.

For example someone here recommends you to not use vim, use an IDE. Well , the masters I know either use vim or emacs a lot. They can use other tools like IDEs too, but instead of depending on someone else for automating the stuff they need they use to make their own tools.

Remember that no big company like Microsoft, Apple or Google are going to make your life easier for making your software multi platform for example, but for your company it could be essential. On the contrary, if you only use their tools your life will be miserable if you go against the interest of those companies.
Not to mention you can only buy controllers from intel, and we are talking $50+ a controller, its totally insane.
I'm actually using Laravel Forge for my PHP projects and I love how they take care of everything. Maybe I should just use Forge for my Node.js projects as well? I suppose I just need to open up the socket port in nginx.
It's been nearly 10 years since I've had to deal with recruiters but I remember asking about DOC requirement and basically it was because they edited my CV before passing it onto the client (particularly to cut out any personal information so that the client could not contact me directly). RTF was easy enough the generate though, so it wasn't a big deal for me.
Agreed, but I'd take this into a different direction and argue that code generation - as it is often practiced in Go - is a Clever Thing (TM).

A language like Haskell lets me write extremely complicated code, but it also lets me concisely express the constraints I want in the form of types without getting too verbose. Go lets me do neither.
Why don't you ask Linus, I'm sure he will calmly and respectfully explain the answer while apologizing for the trouble :)
This is 100% my recollection of my 2 months of Scala.
I purchased a newspaper, it had ads - which I couldn't disable.
I purchased a magazine, it had ads - couldn't disable.
I purchased a book - an ad for another book in the back.
I purchased a movie ticket - an eternity of commercials even after I arrived "late" to the show.
I purchased a cable subscription - still scads of ads, no way to get rid of them.

So taking ten seconds to deactivate ads in an OS isn't really the kind of outrageously onerous burden you're laying it out to be. I agree to the extent that it seems like a pointlessly minuscule revenue stream in comparison to the ill will that it generates. And it was deceitful to sneak the ads in after people had already upgraded from Windows 7 instead of making their intentions clear from the outset. Microsoft would probably generate more income with an option to permanently disable the ad experience (and telemetry) for a one-time fee the way Amazon does with their low-end Kindles.
Perfect storm.
Service Discovery and configuration (Consul, etcd), Monitoring (Prometheus and Influx), non-container cluster management (Nomad), databases
(CockroachDB), messaging (NATS, Jocko), Terraform. Other than that, I think everybody noticed the frequent posts "xxx database written in Go". Also, most high scale computing companies now use Go for their infrastructure parts.

EDIT: You can also check out all the stuff the CoreOS team puts out.
fedwrfc
Pluto’s Defenders Prepare to Fight for Its Planethood (Again)
Chesterton's Fence is a brilliant insight. Funnily enough, I learned it reading some interview in a fashion magazine. They talked about what made different designers styles is the fact that they didn't break fashion 'rules' haphazardly, rather that people should only break 'rules' they knew the purpose for and why they wanted to do so.
Dresden too...
Funnily enough, Discover Weekly almost never works for me. I like the overall service Spotify provides, but the discovery features don't really cut it for me.

As an example, I usually don't really like most music that goes into the house, techno, electronica or even dubstep directions. Most songs I find to be horribly repetitive and lacking in good buildup/melodies. However, there are exceptions I can enjoy very well (say the Soundtrack to Tron Legacy[1] or a few tracks from Overwerk).

But after listening to stuff like this, Spotify keeps recommending the other kind to me, which I just find tiresome.

I've got the same problems with other music directions (Tool and Rishloo vs. countless rather dull prog rock tracks, or black metal recommendations after listening to In Flames/Dark Tranquility).

The whole artist radio does the same for me. If I start it up, it's because I'm interested in more similarities than "well, it's ordered in in the same genre somewhere"...

[1]: Yes, I'm aware that has pretty much nothing to do with what Daft Punk usually do, but that's frankly the reason I like it.

Edit:

An interesting thing, come to think of it, is that Spotify never recommends classical music to me in their "Discover Weekly" list, although I do listen quite a bit to such recordings. I wonder if this is because they realized that "Classical Music" as a genre is mostly not good at all (I don't know how many people who like Vivaldi's music would also like Arvo Pärt's works as much, but I doubt that they're in different internal genres in the Spotify database).

Other explanations could also be that such recordings don't make enough "buzz" or that the attribuition to specific composers is more difficult (since the performing musician/orchestra is usually included as "artist").
From the article: Oh, Skype no longer lets me log in either.

Funny, I've had the same issue. Between legacy Skype passwords, Microsoft accounts, and what not, for a period of time it became almost impossible to log into Skype. It has improved, but the reset process was designed almost as a maze to help shed all but the most determined. I was not determined enough and eventually gave up and forced Skype contacts to reach out to me via WhatsApp/GChat/Signal/Duo/Allo/FBMessenger. Anything but Skype.

Side note: Same thing happened to Wunderlist after they too got purchased by Microsoft.
The problem you elide is that switching from A to B, as the US has done, can take a lot of time.

In the transition, you drive the usage of illegal drugs through the roof and spike the number of deaths. It's possible that these behaviors, once prevalent, take generations to switch out of, by which time, it's entirely possible that our formulation of drugs will be better.

So even if B would be better now, it's possible that our transition from A to B is pointless (the problem would have solved itself in the same time) and leads to a worse outcome than just remaining with plan A.

This kind of secondary analysis is usually totally missing from these debates, but is what is actually driving the harm of the opioid crisis.
That one is more likely to have been on purpose, like the "555" telephone numbers. That movie is from a time when using IP addresses directly was more common, and they probably wanted to avoid problems in case the number they chose was in use for something. Nowadays we have RFC 5737, one of its networks being already available in RFC 3330, but the film is from half a decade earlier.
I am far from elitist. I enjoy both camping, and the 5star hotel. Each has its own benefits. I am discussing the people whose idea of "Nature" is a park.

Paved/defined paths rule (and keep us safe) and I wish more and more people would go for a hike instead of rotting away in front of a tv watching GoT ;)

Sunset: try Aigiali in Amorgos :)
Funny thing happens when Us accuses Uk of spying
s/education/higher education in liberal arts and business/g. Next time you need surgery, you probably don't want your doctor to have been self taught.
Working at underpaying, unfulfilling tech jobs. Probably ones which require a simpler skill set than they currently possess. Also, they are typically living outside the usual tech centers, and couldn't afford to move on the salaries being offered.

I'd like to see salaries raised if only for the "a rising tide raises all boats".