skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many personal attributes are normally distributed. Normal distribution is formed as a sum of several independent random variables with mean and variance.

There are reasons to think that productivity is multiplicative and not additive property, leading to log-normal distribution. Person who is hard-working × experience × motivation × single-mindedness × self-management skills × 2sigma IQ can get ahead of person who just has the smarts.

Prime example of '10x' programmer is Richard Stallman.

Extreme Pair Programming - Guy Steele and Richard Stallman
http://cycle-gap.blogspot.se/2007/09/extreme-pair-programmin...
The main reason NeoVim exists at all is because Bram Moolenaar refused to accept any patches for async support. People already did the work for him and he didn't want it.

So they decided to write their own text editor that supported async plugins. Bram got butthurt and didn't want to lose a large portion of his user base, so he added async support.

NeoVim's first public release (version 0.1) was released in December 2015. [0] And you can see that Vim development really picked up in early 2016. [1]

Coincidence?

Anyway, both text editors are awesome, and Vim is better off now that it has competition. The async features would never have come without the competition of a rival project.

[0] https://neovim.io/news/2015/december/
[1] https://github.com/vim/vim/graphs/contributors
You are correct, Naples will be the right choice for a workstation because I doubt Intel will lower Xeon prices much.
I really enjoyed the video presentation in the Do you speak Human? survey [1]. However I was expecting the survey to not present the information as black and white, yes and no. For many of the questions, I wanted something that was in-between. I'm worried that the available choices will affect the results.

It's a little worrying that people think an AI should "reflect your values and worldview." Maybe a more appropriate approach to modeling artificial intelligence would be how they are described in Iain M. Banks' the Culture series. [2]

> Although drones are artificial, the parameters that prescribe their minds are not rigidly constrained, and sentient drones are full individuals, with their own personalities, opinions and quirks.

1. http://doyouspeakhuman.com
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Artificial
I would truest the message "has been exploited" but not the message "has not been exploited". Who could state the latter with any sincerity? Intel could do state this only with confidence if they'd monitor every of their systems sold, which I sincerely hope is not the case. If you have vulnerable, critical systems you need to consider them being exploited. The bug was there for years and for all what we know at least state actors have been going to great lengths to exploit vulnerabilities they could get hold of.
Produces slow (I've yet to see one that wasn't pretty clunky), resource-hungry, non-native-feeling apps. Not a fan.

Also, bundling lots of different Chromes in apps which may or may not ever be updated feels like a security issue.
Actually it was an attempt to get better performance when the sizes of data increased drastically. Then of course it became a trend and developed some ideas by itself that are unrelated to where it came from.
Debian (albeit only stretch) has it.
Ask HN: Founders, how open are you to talking about mistakes you have made?
I personally despise the 'Do these 10 things and you'll be a successful entrepreneur' type articles, but I do really enjoy and learn from reading about Founders whom I admire and talk about mistakes they've made and lessons they've learnt. For me, I feel like I trust the words from someone better when they’re humble about something and are qualified to give advice on something – because they’ve made that mistake already and learnt from it.

So my question(s) to any founders here – would you be happy to talk about an event or a mistake that you learn from and offer advice to others just starting out? Would you have benefited from this before you started out?

Disclaimer: I've started working on a site to host exactly this, but thought I should actually do a bit of market research rather than assuming founders would open up.
I think it's worth learning NodeJS if you're interested in it. I have heard of PHP backend and NodeJS (building react, redux etc) stacks. So I suggest do both.
Nobody came up with a proper user interface for Ethereum, the semantic web, AI, etc.
I believe the original commenter was referring to a previous compensation structure which was over specified almost to a fault before we changed it. We were quite public with how it worked, so you can read about it here: https://www.cnet.com/news/silicon-valley-talent-wars-enginee...

From the article: "New hires get a base salary commensurate with their experience -- at least $100,000, and more than they were previously paid. They join with the promise, if they perform well, of automatic $10,000 monthly bumps until they hit $250,000."

We had attempted to find innovative and more fair compensation structures, but we abandoned the effort because those systems were hard to communicate effectively, which I believe is the root of the problem here.

Regardless, if my company advertised something and didn't follow through, I would put myself out there personally to follow up and make it right, as I've done here. I can say with 100% certainty that any offer from this post absolutely standard and falls within the range advertised.
This is currently true, yes. They're expressing hope/belief that this will someday seem unthinkable and strange.
Company known for outsourcing to add 2,000 tech workers in Indy area
Electron definitely isn't the greatest: it's inefficient, duplicative, and makes your app way larger than it needs to be.

With that said, IMO Electron is great purely for the reason that it opens desktop development up massively.

I've written native apps before and it has been a world of pain. Electron lets me use tools and skills I already know to spin up desktop apps. I know I'm not the only one who this applies to, and there are a bunch of apps that probably wouldn't exist if Electron didn't. It's usually a false equivalence to compare Electron apps to full native apps.

If the choice is between an inefficient Electron app, or no app at all, I'll take the Electron app any day.
Conciseness matters. For example, Einstein's convention for tensor notation - a lot of explicit sums are lost!
It just astonishes me how big the slack install is. It is like installing the latest video drivers from Nvidia or AMD.
In my experience, (O)RDBMS and SQL are very good solutions for most of the business cases. I know a lot of projects that jumped on the "NoSQL for everything" train and eventually migrated partly to a RDMBS.

I often don't understand why people try to avoid SQL by any costs instead of just learning and applying it properly. I don't understand those "we do SQL for everything" teams either.

RDBMS in conjuction with NoSQL solutions can be a very powerful combination. We do a lot of Postgres + Redis + CouchDB in my projects.
Game-based Swift coding lessons for kids
Having worked in VOIP for a good part of my career, there aren't actually that many hurdles left. The biggest one is IPV6. Once that is pervasive, then you have an easy way to get end to end connectivity without having use a central server to carry the content. This is really, really massive because no matter how big you are, the central server is just adding latency -- sometimes a huge amount.

The next bit is finding a good UX for doing audio setup. Right now automatic gain control is just broken. The vast majority of problems that people have (after having no audio at all) is that the audio is set up badly. If you want to see how good audio can be in a VOIP situation, take a few minutes setting up mumble properly and talk to someone. It's incredible.

Those 2 things will solve virtually every audio problem because most of the really pathological cases where echo cancellation breaks are initiated by those 2 things. However, for doing video conferencing where you have lots of people, you probably need a hardware solution. This hardware already exists, but it doesn't talk to any voip software that I know about (granted I've been out of the business for a decade). Anybody really serious about this market needs to build hardware (or better yet, pair with someone willing to build commodity hardware to open standards).

Video? It's really no problem. It can lag for seconds and it's totally fine. All of the serious problems are audio.
Yes.

Discovered this recently while working on a GPU-powered ray tracer, plugging my laptop in more than doubled the performance.
Or, in slightly fewer words: there's a reason ethernet, IP, and UDP packets aren't encoded in JSON. It's that when you have to encode a lot of a thing, and the encoding is relatively expensive compared to the rest of the processing that needs to be done on that thing, having inexpensive encoding is important.
The main reason is the object-relational impedance mismatch[1]. Basically, programmers like working with objects that have data fields. This is because most modern, widely-used programming languages treat objects/aggregates with data fields as a first class concept. But SQL isn't designed around objects with fields, it's designed around tables, rows, and result sets from queries. Therefore, working with SQL in most modern programming languages generally requires layers of annoying result-set->object or object->row plumbing/conversion code. (Not to mention the vagaries of type conversions.) Of course, these days, this problem can be substantially mitigated to a certain extent by clever ORMs, but an ORM is generally a leaky abstraction at best. Obviously, whether or not any of this bothers you will depend on your use cases and a lot of other factors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_impedance_mi...
Making tabs close faster in multi-process Firefox
Kind of. I started building my game using SQL but realized everything became so much easier if I didn't have to follow a schema. For example I like to add arbitrary properties to the player objects all the time. With MongoDB it's a no-brainer. I just add the property and save.
I don't know. Ruby culture seems to embrace a lot of what is usually called "black magic". This is especially true for Rails: It's a lot of "do what I mean", so I see your sentiment, but it gets really hard to track down how the idea works in detail because of all the magic stuff happening everywhere.

Maybe it's more like "Ruby makes it easy to communicate ideas, but hard to analyze them".
As I said -- just personal observations of software developers and engineers I cross paths with.
How not to mess up your scientific talk
Only having to target a single browser does make life easier for application developers. It's like programming for the web, but without the hassle of cross-browser compatibility.
Look at it from a product owner's perspective. I want 100% of users to have the same experience. Electron bundling a web runtime that gives the same experience on each platform is absolutely key to giving them the same experience. There may also be security issues to consider.
We have a couple of Polycom CX5000s too - the second one we had to source from eBay! We use Skype for Business for 100% of our voice and video communication, and have virtually no trouble with it.

Any problems in my experience stem from remote users' ISP bandwidth issues, or their inability to read instructions. No complaints about SfB.

I wonder if the author is using Skype for Business or the consumer Skype.
As a guess, SQL and noSQL are different tools good for different things and before noSQL people were trying to hammer their document-store shaped peg into a relational-database shaped hole.

To speculate, noSQL key-value stores became very popular because they allow you to model imperfectly defined situations, and to update that model quicker than in traditional relational-database type situations.

Consider the difference between writing some classes in Java, or bunging everything into a dict in Python. The Java solution could be more formal and well documented, but a pain in the ass if the model changes significantly. The Python solution is a bit more janky and probably sluggish, but can adapt quicker.

I think there are more people in things like research, self-teaching, iterative game dev, and exploratory startups that value the adaptability than there are in things like old school business consultancy for whom the underlying model might be static and well described.
Workshop | Software Engineer #1 | London, UK | ONSITE (some WFH not an issue) | £35-45k + Equity 1%-2.5%

Workshop is on a mission to redefine how people learn. We’re focused on building new products and experiences which give every person the opportunity to grow and improve themselves. We believe passionately in the power of leveraging modern technology to make learning easier, more accessible, more engaging, and enjoyable. We’re early stage but are excited about the future and have high ambitions.

We’re looking for driven, ambitious thinkers who care deeply about what we’re trying to do and who are looking to challenge their software engineering skills on a daily basis.

You’ll help us to develop our core app, with a focus on front-end development (we use React & React Native), however we like all our developers to be comfortable with the full-stack. You’ll be expected to be involved with all areas of software development, including backend and devops.

We're a team of 2 looking for engineer #1 (we're both engineers by background)

If you are interested just email me: dan@workshop.ws
Debian Stable (without a DE) only comes with nano AFAIK.
My father used to run a desktop publishing bureau that output people's print jobs onto film, which was then sent to printing presses for printing. This was for magazines, artwork for packaging, etc.

He had a Quadra 950 with 128MB of RAM, which required some pretty exotic SIMMs. That would be a pretty expensive machine in today's money. This was for handling Adobe Illustrator files with large embedded images.
I think this is where the perceived "ageism" comes in...
There's a separate line of processors for laptops typically, with Intel it's their U line, which have lower TDP and lower core count by default (i5-XXXXU have 2 cores 4 threads by default, a desktop i5-XXXX will have 4 cores 4 threads).

The prohibitive nature of battery powered devices has pushed Intel's processors to efficient low-powered solutions, but that's a big reason you'll see desktops simply overpowering laptops at the same price range.

Not to say you can never get strong processing in laptops though, they do offer the high-end HQ line which are high TDP mobile processors. Just that the default for Intel mobile processors is "gimped" by design to allow for efficient low-power processing.
Here is a script which speaks the AMT lingo: https://github.com/wentasah/amtterm/blob/master/amttool

It's clearly using SOAP, and looks like you can choose between HTTPS or HTTP.
The timing is probably not ideal, as the system is not yet fully functional, but there will be very interesting opportunities using the Galileo satellite navigation system...the paid version will have up to 1cm precision, which will revolutionize many GIS/navigation areas (and likely open up a lot of new ones)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)
I won't call it a normal nvme. Companies don't make/sell nvme SSD with such awful sequential R/W performance. On the other hand, its random write performance at low QD is not matched by any competitor.

It is $45 unit price is another interesting factor for me - I only need 16GBytes but I need 16GBytes each on many machines. I am not really aware of any other tier-1 brand nvme SSDs that are available in such size/price. ;)
You can see the statistics for each data set here (in GeoGebra)
https://www.geogebra.org/m/K8HCdE6X
ActiveSphere | Bangalore | ONSITE | Full Time

http://www.activesphere.com/careers.html

We're a consulting company.
Most of our current work is in JavaScript (React, Angular 2, TypeScript), but we have written code in Elxir, Go, Ruby, Erlang, Haskell, Scheme, Elisp, D3. We built a tunneling solution in Go, a Chat Server in Erlang, a Font converter in Haskell, a DynamoDB emulator in Ruby, a Remote debugger (in JavaScript, and Go), a Youtube annotation extension in JavaScript and more.

Some of our client and personal work is described here.

http://www.activesphere.com/hacks.html

http://www.activesphere.com/portfolio.html

The interview process usually involves a programming problem followed by a few rounds of telephonic/in-person conversations.
If you're interested, please do reach out to us at career[at]activesphere.com.
No, and Never,Since the Electron uses Chromium and Node.js so why not browser? Yes there are something browser could not do , and what I want to say is maybe there is stereotype. I have been using desktop software using web-gui in browser and they work just fine. there need something maybe a protocols that make browser more desktop, but this would never happen since it would give user too many power.

For now all the google-about things would always end up to benefit google instead bring convenient to user. Yes I just hate google, And what they bring to the web(For recent years only)

I think something like Electron should have been made but all I could find now is web browser or game engine.

There are already too many silly Apps on mobile platform, and Electron is just another that silly things in my eyes, since I'm just a stupid and arrogant user
I don't think that fits the legal definition of crimes against humanity, although there's admittedly a fine line between that and e.g. some of the famines in the USSR.
While it may be technically overclocking, the default ram clock of Ryzen boards is DDR4-2666. If you look at the right benchmarks you will see that faster ram can bring enormous performance benefits, even in games, which is an area where the contrary was claimed in the last few years. Some examples are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5ejBlynOV8 and https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/5agh8f/skylake_cp.... That's for Intel, but the same is true for AMD and Ryzen.
When Apple was struggling, Wired ran a piece[1] called 101 Ways to Save Apple. None of them were actually the right way, or the way that Apple ended up saving itself.

Twitter speculation falls into the same camp. Apple has enough money to buy Twitter, write it off as a total loss, and it would have no lasting effect on their balance sheet. Apple doesn't need Twitter. Twitter needs good management, and I'm not sure Apple can help with that. They can't even ship an iTunes that isn't trash.

[1] https://www.wired.com/1997/06/apple-3/
This is disgusting...
> is no match for an unreliable network with zero latency guarantees

UX is a disaster. At least they could display latency / packet loss charts for both directions. Volume gauges. Warnings on audio feedback or high compression.

We spend too much time asking if volumes and quality are ok.
I am a retrograde, grumpy, obtuse old curmudgeon, so let me bite:

No, it is a terror. Applications produced with it are bloated monstrosities, gobbling up hundreds of megabytes in both storage and RAM before getting round to as much as putting a checkbox on screen. Bundling an entire web browser inside your program in order to provide portable GUI functionality like what Tk managed more than twenty years ago without breaking a sweat, and at roughly 1/100 the size, yeah, sure, it flies. So did the Spruce Goose, sort of.

But then, I never took to js, I never took to Chrome, I never took to bloat as a way of life.

[edit: typo]
Stuff like fzf (https://github.com/junegunn/fzf) works nicer with terminal emulation.
> Mind you, one-way videoconferencing is becoming very popular these days in the form of "streamers".

Streamers are normally not real time, there's a large delay, meaning lots of time to buffer!
The only real issue I have with Electron, that I don't see brought up when it's discussed here, is the process model.

Last time I checked, each window in your Electron app had to run in a different process. This is a design that makes sense for a web browser like Chrome, but not for the majority of desktop apps.

If your app is simple enough to only need one window, this won't be an issue, but otherwise, I found it a major pain.
Ugly, bloated, poorly integrated and weird UI bugs, like scaling randomly failing on high DPI displays.

Only useful for web-only teams who have no desktop experience whatsoever. If you can afford to hire a desktop team, do it.
Show HN: Hand curated reliable nutrition trends,articles,studies,tips, and more
The efforts of Neovim team are well-intentioned and we are seeing it shaking the ViM development. (the previous major version from (7.0) 2006, before it (6.0) 2001).

We love updates after all.
Kotlin?
Python Devs: What would you recommend as an alternative to Electron ? I've heard of PyQT, Tkinter or even PyGTK but not sure what to choose ... Cheers
It is hype driven. Or perhaps driven by a failure to understand the subject, coupled with a natural tendency to look for simple, and ultimately trite explanations for everything.
Of course there are some people that are vastly more productive than others. In business they're called "rain-makers" in programming, "10x".

Whatever the case, these people are always outliers. Unfortunately that doesn't prevent teams from claiming that they only hire 10x's.

No one starts out as a 10x. Perhaps instead of focusing on who is or is not 10x or how many 10x's are out there, it is more interesting to explore HOW people BECOME 10x?

A more realistic view is that individuals are a moving target. Skill is something that needs to be nurtured, practiced and modeled by mentors in order for others to pick it up. Orgs that just stop at the fact that people are going to have a wide distribution of skills are doing a disservice to themselves and their employees.
> whereas a state-containing object cannot be present in Haskell code

This is somewhere between "not even wrong" and "false".
Out of curiosity, what are the titles of these shows? They sound cool!
The only one I use is VSCode. It's a great IDE-lite, but after a day or so it pretty reliably gets into a state where it's permanently and unusably slow, and needs a restart. I can't prove this is Electron's fault, but I'm inclined to give the VSCode team the benefit of the doubt. I certainly do not need to restart Sublime Text every day in order to use it.

And as an Old, I do believe there's a serious cultural problem, caused by the Web Rush, where the industry as a whole does not care enough about zero/low-cost abstractions.
FWIW, I didn't mind the overhead of Electron when I only used a couple apps built with it. Now that that number is increasing, I find myself having to monitor resources & battery life and selectively killing apps. I have concerns that this approach isn't going to scale.
> ... there aren't actually that many hurdles left. The biggest one is IPV6. Once that is pervasive, then you have an easy way to get end to end connectivity without having use a central server to carry the content...

I'm not really a networking pro. Could you ELI5 why IPv6 is such a magic bullet for VOIP?
I'm another happy user of appear.in

There are still many improvements that are possible but at the moment, it's the best service I've used for video conferencing.
> you can't buffer video calls

FaceTime's "pause" of the video is one option. Software on both ends should keep a few user-selectable "keyframes" and display them when they drop to only audio.
> Every office chair and desk combination seems to have the arm rests sitting too high relative to my shoulders

It sounds like an ergonomics problem. Try a chair with adjustable arm rests. And perhaps a keyboard tray to keep that down low so your arms can be roughly parallel to the ground.
What's the purpose of the Slack desktop app? What does it do that the web app doesn't?
Sure! Please send a resume to jzhen@thinknum.com