skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google is an example of the failure of being engineer led in my opinion. I think it's led to Google having institutional ADD and has left them with countless failed products and others that have been neglected for years (has anyone worked on Google Finance in the past 5 years? Probably not).

A lot of successful Google products were acquired (Android, YouTube) and others were able to leverage their dominance in search. But we also saw that approach fail when the entire company was directed at trying to beat Facebook. It infiltrated all their existing properties and employees were directly incentivized with compensation linked to the success of Google+. And yet all of that wasn't able to overcome Facebook's network effect. The go-to Google strategy for creating a hit product failed (and it also explains why they seem to fail at anything that has network effects or requires consumer affinity and brand: 8 messengers and countless failed hardware products).

Google stands a good chance of being the next Xerox PARC: good at science projects and technology, but destined to see others capitalize on it.

And it makes sense if you think about it. Google's origin story was 2 PhDs coming up with better technology in a market that was already defined and a business model that was already understood. They applied that technology well, but it was only possible because of the openness of the web. It feels very much right place, right time.
There's a few books on how to approach books and problems, e.g. don't strain on first seeing new material. Lara Alcock wrote 2 books on studying math which seem to have the same ToC, a lot of undergrad programs have materials on proofs and how to transition from high school problem solving: http://web.archive.org/web/20150319020039/http://www.maths.c...

Mathoverflow and math.stackexchange soft-questions tag has lots of mini-essays, e.g. https://mathoverflow.net/questions/143309/how-do-you-not-for...

and https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/617625/on-familiari...

____________________

For proofs, books by Polya, Velleman, Hammack etc

Prof Baez' reading lists for math and physics: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html
I hope that's not the lesson here. I was trying to get at the fact that understanding the fundamentals means understanding and exploiting the connections between seemingly different concepts and that learning and understanding merge sort is not time wasted and will come in handy in all sorts of situations.

When in doubt just remember this Feynman quote

“Right. I don’t believe in the idea that there are a few peculiar people capable of understanding math, and the rest of the world is normal. Math is a human discovery, and it’s no more complicated than humans can understand. I had a calculus book once that said, ‘What one fool can do, another can.’ What we’ve been able to work out about nature may look abstract and threatening to someone who hasn’t studied it, but it was fools who did it, and in the next generation, all the fools will understand it. There’s a tendency to pomposity in all this, to make it deep and profound.”
– Richard Feynman, Omni 1979
New Invisible reCAPTCHA – any takers?
I've been playing with this one for the last few days. For the "trusted" user, there is nothing they need to do (not even that "I am not a robot" checkmark). But, if Google's engine doesn't like you, you will get stepped up to a image reCAPTCHA. Anyone have any prelim results in production on how good this thing is? Still in beta ("real" beta, not just Google's long tail beta).

On a related note, with the v2 reCAPTCHA (i.e. the current mainstream one), with due consideration to non-ideal user experience, what are you thoughts on how well it does with bot traffic?

Hopefully, this new invisible reCAPTCHA will be better.
Or you can pass a reference to some object's method.
The PayPal Mafia
I'm confused by your terminology here. Doesn't "callback" usually just mean a first class function f you pass around - as a piece of data - to another function g, under the assumption that g calls f?

Ie

function f(...) {...}
g(f);

It looks like you're using "callback" to refer to "g" in my example, not "f". Is my terminology wrong, or is yours?

(This is a genuine terminology question, not an exercise in pedantry.)
The MBA thinks in spreadsheets and talks in scalpels.
Sounds similar to rammed earth construction? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rammed_earth
The SETL2 Programming Language (1990)
So strange to read about it as if it is something new. We had these things since 2010 and they are very popular in Russia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-café
Qualcomm makes a VLIW DSP called "Hexagon" used in their SoCs [1]. It's a pretty popular chip used in lots of phones.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Hexagon#Code_sample
Democratic elements does not equate to true democracy. There weren't enough safeguards. It took a motivated Austrian less than ten years to undo them and turn Germany into a totalitarian state.
You're both right, and that's the beauty of culture. The double sided sword yields both benefits and disadvantages. The irony is that America's historical appreciation of immigration (one of the best ways to mitigate cultural blind spots) has yielded a backlash against the lack of a cultural bedrock, and become a double edge sword itself.
Quite a bit faster, actually, depending on the dataset.
Hm, that doesn't work for me. (To be clear, I'm using the JavaScript version of the game, in case it matters.)
Show HN: AirText – Android Messaging for MacOS
If this is all about 2015 why is it new news?
Idiomatic F# code does tend to use pattern matching more than ad-hoc polymorphism, but objects are still very much considered fair game since the major value proposition of the language is its ability to leverage the .NET ecosystem.
Benchmarking boot latency on x86
I know some are ex BeOS people, but I haven't heard of anyone from QNX on the project. Apple did hire the founder of QNX not too long ago, though.
Yep! TBH I think it really says alot about the general failure of the US whistleblower statutes/protections that Snowden had to release information in the way that he did and has subsequently been so easy to vilify. IMHO ol' Eddy actually went about the leaking of classified info in a pretty responsible way with the whole Poitras/Greenwald "Big Trouble in Little Hong Kong." However you feel about the guy personally the import of his revelations is pretty undeniable insofar as it stimulated legitimate reforms of the systems he was criticizing (see: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275019554_The_Conse... http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-the-nsa-spying...) which seems to me to be the basic test for legit whistleblowing. So, yeah, I would give the little eccentric a pretty high clearance given his track record... I'd probably let him out of russia too.
ES is very good at storing and querying non-text data including geo data although there are exceptions such as numeric. Both PG and ES have their strengths and weaknesses. ES is great at search. PG is great at joins and constraints. Everything else depends a lot on the specific use case.
Show HN: Pillr – Automated property management for the landlord
Colin,

Curious if this opinion extends to something like an Erlang process or a BSD thread.

Thanks btw for all your FreeBSD work :))
> The anti ORM movement convinced only a few interested database users.

IMO this was because they were too dogmatic and ignored the things ORM's did better, focusing on performance that didn't matter or on issues that come up even when you don't use an ORM (n+1 in the architecture).

That said, I don't think anyone that hasn't learned SQL really don't understand their ORM either. It's one of the fundamentals that any developer should know before they ever write production code.
Which is funny because I could never get anyone, when I first started programming in C and everyone was raving about how great 'object oriented programming' was, to tell me what 'an object' actually was. When I started learning C++ I was somewhat disappointed to find out an object was just a struct with some functions attached.

(It's kind of like when people told me about "user defined data types" and I couldn't wrap my head around how you could create a new data type with all its associated syntax. Then when I learned that they were just bundles of existing data types, though 'oh is that all?')
I worked a a cafe called Zesto's while I was in high school.

From the outside, it looked wonderful. Really inviting. Wood booths. Just inviting.

We served a lot of speciality coffees, and had a small menu. Moosewood recipe soups, burritos, lumpia's, etc.

It started off doing pretty good business. Then the dentist(who was the financial backer) decided to hang out, and micromanage. After all he was a Dr., and let us know.

Sales were going up, but ge wanted more profit.

His first mistake was to cut back on portions. I never told him, but burrito buyers don't like small burritos. Plus--the cost of rice, and beans don't cost much.

He literally irritated all the workers with his presence. He treated the better/honest employees like dirt. The ass kissers were robbing him blind, but he just thought they were great.

Within a year, workers were stealing, and giving away food.
I went down with the ship, and bought the espresso machine in the chapter 7, or 13 fire sale. I still have it.

I learned I would never open a resturant, nor coffee house.

I learned you never cut back on portions.

You don't piss off the help.

There's a lot you just shouldn't do in the resturant business.

Raising prices is fine, if you increase quality, and portions, especially if your demographics are young people.

I always thought if I was forced to go into the food business, it would be a pizza parlor near a college. Cost of ingredients for pizza is low. There's a reason Papa John is a billionarie.

I do regret not opening up a place where young people could dance, and drink. The amount of money people spend in their twenties drinking, looking for that special someone is staggering. If I had what I spent in my twenties on essentially looking for a mate; I could retire.
It's not vague: it's not connected to OpenSSL. You do not need permission; you need to use an OSI-compliant license for your software.
Dapper is great for reads but it doesn't handle complex updates nearly as well, although I'd argue most of those are architectural/design issues in nature.
Invests it, and runs the university on the returns. Assuming a 4% yearly rate of return, then that's around $1.5B a year in money available for operating expenses. As a point of comparison, Facebook spends ~10x that (~$15B), Uber spends ~2x that ($3B), etc. Harvard obviously has additional revenue streams, but there you go.
https://streamable.com/iaedr
I really enjoyed the article.

Every time I read about Quantum Theory it reminds me about a story I read online some time ago. I can't fully remember it:

I think it was about a guy who made a Quantum Computer to answer any question in the universe by asking it to different dimension of himself. I think he uses it to win the lottery but in the end he mistrusts himself to answer the question "how to live a happy life" and ends up living an unhappy life.

I really want to re-read it. Does anyone know where I can find this story?

I spend weeks now to find it ... with no luck.
'Qc Na responded by hitting
Anton with his stick, saying "When will you learn? Closures are a poor man's
object." At that moment, Anton became enlightened.'

The cruel tutelage of Qc Na.
Both are valuable under the right circumstances. A language that supports both is stronger than a language that only supports one or the other.

In that respect, I think the koan is perfect. :)
Your definition makes a lot of sense to me. In pure programming languages, an object can appear when you run the code, but never before that. The pure description of the program cannot contain objects -- since objects carry state -- but when this description/code is executed/evaluated by the runtime system, a stateful object appears that you can interact with (e.g. a web server).

So, for pure programming languages, this "private state" is contained within the runtime system (out of reach for the programmer), rather than in the code itself, and the RTS applies pure functions to the state it carries, in order to reach a new program state.
Random fact that I learned recently, 20% of the North Korean population was killed during the Korean War (1950-1953). Mostly with Napalm. :(
Your definition of an object is similar to one that I’ve used[1][2][3], which is unsurprising since we got it from the same place.

But, now I define an object as any component with which you interact strictly by way of negotiation (as opposed to command and control), and I finally think I understand why Alan Kay says that the most important thing in OOP is the message passing.

Thus, statically-typed languages like C#/Java/C++/etc. are also capable of being object-oriented as long as you avoid setters and realize that some of the negotiation happens at compile-time.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8679224

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11967631

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11809477
In Nim, with its unified function call syntax, there is no difference between them, which is pretty neat.
The point I'm trying to make is that what you're describing as "fundamentals" aren't actually fundamentals; that it's a spectrum, and the "things that need to be known to excel" are not what they used to be. Maybe they never were those things.

There's a heavy bias towards the belief that CS, as it is currently taught, provides the "fundamentals" of software development and design. It does not, at least not as completely as the common belief seems to be. This can be reinforced by the current state of our interview processes. One has to re-prove one's understanding of such fundamental concepts, when the degree should, in theory, be enough, as it is in many other professions.

Conversely, a failure to understand fundamental CS concepts (invert a binary tree) doesn't preclude someone from being a successful software engineer (create homebrew).
Maybe it won't lead to more bureaucracy, but more freedom.
My grandfather was head of the main construction "trust" in Kiev and a member of the communist party. Thus he was head of all construction in the city. He was part and parcel of the system that all together constituted what really was rightfully called the Evil Empire. A true prison. Was he evil? No. For him it was his job. He had a passion for construction and building. But he did nothing to subvert the Soviet way of life, derived benefit from it, and most likely thought it was correct. Multiply that by millions and you get your average society, whether individuals are contributing to a Soviet Socialist State or a Western Society. You can't just run a country by fear. Many people must be on board, from the oligarchy to the top level beaurocrats to the mid level apparatchiks to the common man. Society is ruled by broad social currents. Mao didn't personally kill 65 million people. He and many other people set up an environment that manipulated common human features—cult worship, paranoia, herd mentality—and steered them in an evil direction. But the mob, the herd mentality was the grand perpetrator. And you'll find that common to all groups everywhere. That's why the Federalist Papers are so beautiful. Any group can slip from a civil society to a nightmare wreck.

PS Thank you from the recommendations. I've tried some of those and couldn't get in to them. Will try again maybe it's the right time.

PSS > However, it does not perform the role you suggest.

I think that depends on who's looking, and at what. The OP is what really got me. Can't imagine having an app called "Trace Viewer" on my phone. Really brought me in to that day to day. And maybe my perspective on NK is different because I was born in the Soviet Union, and despite leaving at age 5, that has been the backdrop to my entire life.
Comcast keeps reporting subscriber growth (almost 300k last quarter). People are definitely watching sports on tv, just not ESPN. You need more than one large, bloated, continuously failing channel to convince me that we're at the beginning of giant slide, but it's not like you will ever predict that anyway.
When Highway Community Church settled on taking over the failing Red Rock coffee shop in Mountain View CA in around 2007 or so (?) I thought it was an unconventional move and likely to fail. But such institutions aren't supposed to be rational ... what the heck. They wanted to provide an open community space and to engage with the greater community. And there were many coffee passionates there with expertise.

I've moved away since but every time I drop inn during a visit to work HQ I can't help but be amazed at how well they continue to do with Red Rock. A lot of people worked on the concept in the initial years without recompense.
Well, to be fair, "objects" as originally envisioned were not like C++ implemented it.

The guy that invented OOP is on record as saying that.
I have a Harvard MBA ('14, sec C), and where this whole argument falls apart for me is the idea of "The Golden Ticket". The author is confusing correlation with causation.

My MBA has had virtually no effect on my opportunities or employability. Heck, as an engineer and entrepreneur, it has probably done more harm than good. This is a consistent experience - with the exception of (perhaps) the military and overseas students folks tend to go back to their previous career track and trajectory.

Furthermore it's not really a very transformative experience. The ideals, priorities and abilities students bring to the program are generally the ones they leave with.

What HBS does well, above all else, is act as a filter. They really do a remarkable job at admissions, putting together a group of folks who are likely (by nature or nurture) to go on to have an outsized impact on the world.
I meant where to find non-vapid culture, not where to find drugs :)
I don't know enough about the implementation of Erlang to answer that question.
I'll be honest with you, I've conducted some attrocious interviews. It's taken me a long time, and a LOT of interviews, to get to the point where I feel like I'm not horribly butchering them most of the time.

I found that I really like the "pick one problem/question and go deep and/or wide" approach. The above example I can go anywhere from compilers (Q: "What's the smallest function a compiler could legally output given this code?" (I love this one :P)) to C (Q: "How is 'buf' allocated?") to static analysis (Q: "How would I statically find all instances of this pattern?") to exploits (Q: "How would I exploit this vulnerability?") to mitigations (Q: "Given a stack overflow, what can I do to make it harder to exploit for the attacker?"), etc. etc. etc.
Try https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-war-crime-nor...
I must be very dense today - what exactly is this? I'm a tad confused...
What do you mean by nicer? Not all drivers support range. Why is it better than an exclusion over an expression with two columns? (with simpler data types that the driver certainly supports)
High-school-me bounced off several Java and C++ books with their stupid "sally wants to buy flowers and john's flower shop" explanations of objects were before finally realizing, while using an OO PHP library, what was actually going on. Felt like people'd been deliberately obtuse to keep me from learning. "It's just structs with functions attached and a couple reall-easy-to-explain sugary features on top" would have been much better.
A Top Shelf Web Stack–Rails 5 API and Active Admin and Create React App
Oh, I stand corrected then!
Great read. Thanks for the link.

I often get the same energized writing vibe after a run. Though unlike the article emphasizes near the end, my 5 mile daily run is preplanned (obviously) and so leaves my brain able to effectively "dissociate" and enter that realm of creative thinking that often precedes our falling asleep. After the first couple miles, my body gets into the groove and I'm able to either serenely absorb my surroundings -- the geese and their Spring young, say -- or float around in that gooey reality between daydreaming and acting.

Steve Jobs was a particularly notable "hacker type" who enjoyed walks. So besides the article's writer bent, I'd say idle physical activity is a good choice for those who just want to think.
This sounds like saying our phone shows a demonstration of E=MC2. Not a great intro / not giving a lot of confidence to the reader when it starts like that.

In fact, it'd make Einstein laugh. His late life was devoted to unify the theories and asking quantum physicists to demonstrate the quantum theory in the real world or through though experiments. He'd probably still be upset today.

I, for one, am still waiting for the 'unified relative quantum theory' as well.
Callbacks only deal with their arguments, but almost every callback I see in the wild has a first argument "void * cookie" which immediately gets typecast into a pointer to the structure (oops, I mean object) being manipulated.
Really understanding this means knowing why a closure is a poor man's poor man's closure.
Ever heard of the Panopticon [1]? The NSA is a modern, digital, version of it.

There was a time when a person could go online to look up recipes or shop for backpacks [2] without thinking twice about it. Not anymore, Panoptes has eyes on us all. Our minds know this, and in turn, our behavior changes.

I realize that this isn't exactly what you're saying, and living under the DPRK is absolutely worse than NSA surveillance. But, there are unseen repercussions to the death of privacy that are often overlooked, or downplayed. Ahead of everything else, the NSA and the DPRK control our devices by controlling us.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/new-york-polic...
I will be forever grateful that an appendix to one of the Turbo Pascal manuals described exactly how objects were laid out in memory (including function pointers).
you can currently pick them up from aliexpress.
React Native and Drones at Airware (YC W13)
We're looking for React Native engineer to work on the front end of our iOS application: http://grnh.se/i5rxud1
The US dropped more bombs on North Korea than we dropped on all of Europe and Japan during WWII. Proxy wars between superpowers never work out well for the actual people affected, and we should not be so forgetful of that.
Sorry, meant "callback argument", a function argument to which a function can be passed.

In Javascript and Python, all functions passed as parameters to other functions are potentially closures, but this is not the case in most compiled languages.
This is a gross generalisation (by which I mean, I think you are wrong). My MBA set me up perfectly to quit my job and launch a startup. Maybe yours was designed to turn out middle managers. Mine wasn't. I had ten elective subjects and they were all towards starting and growing a service business. And the core subjects have proved an invaluable primer in many matters of strategy and day-to-day operations, ones in which I would otherwise be winging it.
There is a big difference between wasting time and doing nothing or resting.

I think the title is quite misleading as I doubt the majority of time wasting as it happens in the modern world has any good psychological implications:

A while back I wrote a post analysing Coldplay, Minecraft and my own previous start up in relation to "doing nothing", someone might find it useful: http://unratedtogm.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/doing-nothing-will...