skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What formalism, if any, is the human mind subject to? Isn't our current conception of a machine that it will bound to some formalism in terms of reasoning? Are we so bound?
It might make sense to link to the repository with Jupiter notebook, https://github.com/mapio/programming-with-escher in the rendered output for the convenience of the reader. If the repository points to the rendered output, well Escher.
A nit: the comment about how the C preprocessor can't be described by a context-free grammar is followed by a comment about how # directives are sensitive to where they are in the line. That's actually a non-sequitur! It's totally possible for context-free grammars to be line-oriented, the "context" in this sense has a very technical meaning--it means that the left side of a production rule must have only one symbol (i.e. no context).
because it has horrible battery, no jack and cut out camera in display which could be easily fitted in bottom bezel?

you are better off with Xiaomi Mi Mix running Lineage OS than this joke
What does it mean that the commentator found odd? AlphaGo won, and the fact that the commentator didn't understand what it was doing doesn't mean there wasn't a purpose behind them.

You don't seem to be realizing that AlphaGo plays "oddly" like a chess grandmaster plays "oddly" against a new player. The "oddness" is that it's so good that we can barely understand its game.
Stick around that startup long enough and this a good set of things to do with your own code.
Does it? The article made it sound like Ford's main goal was to appease Wall St, whereas Google was focused on actually building the damn thing.
Well, deciding whether an array of arbitrary data is sorted can be done trivially in O(n). Sorting an unsorted array requires a much more complicated algorithm that runs in O(n log n) (or worse).

I imagine computers would be able to do quite well at judging a turing test heuristically. Passing it is quite a different matter.
Yes. I can imagine this to be common among all levels, but the interns I am guiding are mostly from HBO (between college and university level) and some MBO (college level). Did not expect it to be the case at university level as well.

I really do not understand why so many people want to get into IT if they are not really interested in it. Job security probably? Not for the money I assume as in the Netherlands the average salaries for even a senior programmer are pretty low. +/- EUR 20,81 an hour before taxes (+/- EUR 12 after taxes).

Sources:

https://www.loonwijzer.nl/home/salaris/salarischeck#/ (search for Application Programmer)

Anecdotal evidence of many programmers around me that I've met in the Netherlands.
Where did you learn ASO? Is there a noob 101 guide somewhere online?
Ask HN: Share your side project
I've always loved these threads...let's see what you guys are currently up to!
You're right, modeling the political effects is extremely complicated and I would agree almost impossible to do with any granularity. But we don't have to do that in order to know that the effects we can see happening are disastrous because even the best case scenarios of people calmly relocating are still a disaster, because the destinations are not prepared for the influx of population (think of the Syrian refugee criss but many, many times over.)
99% of the time chasing small fish when everyone else is chasing big fish, your going to starve or barely survive. because of costs to acquire customers.

Unless, you happen to be on the cusp of a disruptive technology change.
"Write this blog or your fired"
You don't really need collusion for this to work :)
Selfism – Live happily ever after
$5 in San Francisco does not equal $5 in some village in china. I'm sick of people assuming that these are the same. I'm not arguing against great wealth inequality, this is obviously the case. Just saying it is facile assuming that we can measure everything against the dollar (or whatever other currency.)
Mossberg did a lot of good work, but so did a lot of other columnists who didn't attain nearly the status he did.

Mossberg mostly has one guy to thank for the unique place he occupied in the tech media scene: Steve Jobs. For whatever reason, Jobs decided that Mossberg's take on Apple products really mattered, a lot. Mossberg was Jobs's stand-in for Mr. Everyman, and Jobs seemed to believe that if Mossberg couldn't connect with a product, then it needed to be re-thought.

His status as anointed deliverer of the final verdict on Apple's product line gave Mossberg a massive amount of influence in the tech world all by itself, but added to this was the fact that, as with so many other things, the rest of the tech industry slavishly followed Apple's lead -- at least, the rest of the tech industry's PR departments followed it. For a corporate PR flack, having Jobs's own personal oracle say nice things about your product was the ultimate win. It was the fat Harvard admissions envelope, by which I mean something like, "this achievement, while important, has a way outsized significance to a certain segment of the population who compete for it because they've all decided that getting this particular thing means You Won and have a higher status than all of your peers who haven't gotten it."

Interestingly enough, the passing of Jobs was followed by the passing of the positive Mossberg review as the ultimate prize in the PR world, and Mossberg's departure from the WSJ didn't help.

Am I ripping on Mossberg? Not really, more like I'm ripping corporate PR, but Mossberg certainly cultivated this situation (who wouldn't, though). I will say that it was a source of eternal frustration (and envy) among the rest of the tech punditry that Mossberg's reviews had this bizarre status with the PR departments of the companies we covered, sort of like "Harvard as the agreed upon brass ring that all yuppie parents have decided to compete for" no doubt occasions much eye-rolling at Stanford, Brown, Yale, and everywhere else. Nobody is sad to see that era pass.

As for Mossberg himself, Godspeed, dude. May your amulet never tickle.
The moderator problem: How Reddit and related news sites decline
I used to work on a messy legacy codebase. I managed to clean it, little by little, even though most of my colleagues and the management were a bit afraid of refactoring. It wasn't perfect but things kinda worked, and I had hope for this codebase.

Then the upper management appointed a random guy to do a "Big Bang" refactor: it has been failing miserably (it is still going on, doing way more harm than good). Then it all started to go really bad... and I quit and found a better job!
The reasons you can't be anonymous anymore
This is great! Less traffic, less people, and better rates on hotels!
They had a "feature poll" at a 1.1 event a while back, where one of the features you could vote for was "true immutability".

Can't find any links now that explain how that would work though. I just remember that it was completely different from C++'s const-correctness (which is what I assumed at first when reading its title).
KnockoutJS is hands down my favourite JS library of all times (it's a large part of why I build things in a structured better way (I was/am primarily a backend dev)), it's awesome to see that it has a modern future since I have quite a few projects using it and 'porting' will be a lot easier so thanks for the amazing work you are doing :).
That was the story with Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 too, and it never happened. Believe me, I bought into the ecosystem and was a true believer. And it never happened.
People.ai raised $7M Series A to build an AI for sales management
The original turing test contains no speech but works via text output, only judging conversational capabilities.
> It's no different than cleaning.

Except for the fact that you're operating a two-ton death machine.
The Virtual-Reality App That Turns Your Office into a Vacation Paradise
If a major earthquake moves your GPS co-ordinates enough to change your effective address I'd claim that you have bigger problems than getting your mail delivered. Houses aren't typically designed to change coordinates via the earth snapping beneath it.
What are you doing for network access? Some sort of dongle-based connection?
Big bang rewrites are needed in order to move forward faster.

A huge issue with sticking to an old codebase for such a long time is that it gets older and older. You get new talent that doesn't want to manage it and leave, so you're stuck with the same old people that implemented the codebase in the first place. Sure they're smart, knowledgable people in the year 2000, but think of how fast technology changes. Change, adapt, or die.
Sounds like the "n-tiered" .NET MVC code I work with that just has "n-tiers" over stored procedure calls.
Humans are not perfect sensors; there are changes we are sensitive to and changes we are not.

As a trivial example, if a speech synthesis system was emitting high frequency static, we wouldn't hear it at all, but would be trivial to detect with a microphone.

I fully expect software to be better at this than we are if there ever turns out to be a need for this sort of thing.
I did. I used Phaser.js and store.js for the web version and Cordova for the Google Play app.
But if you are unable to or stop being able to produce anything appealing to the world market, then you are loosing and opening your market is a really a bad idea.
I wonder whether P2P transactions would ever take off in North America.. my feeling is the entrenched system and the regulations that support it would make it very difficult, if not criminal.
It's a good idea no matter what other activities the OP decides to pursue. Having base income could open up many options.

There are lots of meaningful and rewarding ways to participate in society, including volunteering for charitable organizations, that do not require the highest levels of skill and competitiveness.
That was done for military strategic purposes, not simply for the lulz.
Except most of these profound visions from Mossberg are things that have been discussed in the tech community for decades.

Don Norman wrote The Invisible Computer 19 years ago.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/invisible-computer
What Is Application Programming Interface (API)? What It Does? – SuratNow
i just read hatespeech; not logical nor scientific arguments... very sad.
Why is non-school-medicine inherently non-evidence based? Yeah there's a ton of garbage out there, but I think it's been abundantly shown that incentives are screwed up enough that many mainstream healthcare providers will often ignore potential treatments or even conditions for which there is evidence (but for which they don't have a pill to sell you) or leading to it not getting studied enough to be considered evidence-based.

Classic example is fibromyalgia: family member of mine believed they had it and now has a formal diagnosis, but was told by multiple doctors that it wasn't a real thing and probably all in her head. Went to a chiropractor who dabbled in all sorts of stuff who ended up helping her manage it really well with some diet and lifestyle changes. Now I don't know how well those recommendations were backed up by evidence, but I was blown away at how a few months later there was a widely-advertized FDA-approved drug to treat a condition that according to at least 5 or 6 doctors in our town didn't exist (and they all suddenly recognized it and had fliers for it in their offices). It's amazing how suddenly the "evidence" came up the minute it had a marketable drug.
Do content marketing like a pro- 5 easy ways
British Airways left to count cost of weekend IT meltdown
I can kind of relate to that.

I wouldn't call myself a professional bullshitter, and I wouldn't still have a business after ten years if I didn't have substantive knowledge of what I do.

However, my cultural and family background is in the humanities. I spent most of my adolescence and teenage years on my programming hobby, like many people here I think, but the route to a tech career was a rather incidental one. My parents are philosophy professors, and I entered university with a political science major (switched to philosophy), before dropping out two and a half years later to pursue what was by then an ascendant tech career.

The discord between my background and the psychology of typical software engineers and business guys has led to amusing, sometimes infuriating cultural clashes over the years.

Nevertheless, I've got the comment more than a handful of times over the years that I really should have been a writer or do something involving lots of speaking. You can probably tell from this comment alone that I'm not a person of few words. As I get older, this has seen me enlisted to assist with marketing copy, résumé polishing, LinkedIn profile formulation, and a variety of other tasks that require putting a spin on things and drawing on one's facility of rhetoric. Some have said I'm a lawyer on the inside, combining the logical, left-brained, procedural qualities of a programmer with a knack for wordsmithing eloquent pleadings.

It's a weird space to dwell in. The real nerds think I'm a bullshitter half the time. The real bullshitters think I'm a nerd who lacks the social jujitsu to really hobnob with Visionaries like themselves. Beats me.
Kotlin is targeted at Java developers, for whom val is just a shorter way of saying final <type>.
Annotated algorithms in Python is now available for free
I like to overuse let for signalling mutable content. In other words, I only use const when the variable is read-only and never to be mutated.

Even by that narrower ruleset, nearly all variables end up being const. This way a "let" signals to the reader "watch out, something is going to be mutated here", which IMO is a more useful note to the reader than "watch out, this reference can be changed".
> In retrospect it would've been much faster to just rewrite Knockout from scratch.

That's most likely not true, but looking backwards it often feels that way. The problem is that you're now a lot wiser about that codebase than you were at the beginning and if you had done that rewrite there could have easily been fatalities.

But of course it feels as if the rewrite would be faster and cleaner. How bad could it be, right? ;)

And then you suddenly have two systems to maintain, one that is not yet feature complete and broken in unexpected ways and one that is servicing real users who can't wait until you're done with your big-bang effort. And then you start missing deadlines and so on.

It's funny in a way that even after a successful incremental project that itch still will not go away.
Sound advice.

re: Write Your Tests

I've never been successful with this. Sure, write (backfill) as many tests as you can.

But the legacy stuff I've adopted / resurrected have been complete unknowns.

My go-to strategy has been blackbox (comparison) testing. Capture as much input & output as I can. Then use automation to diff output.

I wouldn't bother to write unit tests etc for code that is likely to be culled, replaced.

re: Proxy

I've recently started doing shadow testing, where the proxy is a T-split router, sending mirror traffic to both old and new. This can take the place of blackbox (comparison) testing.

re: Build numbers

First step to any project is to add build numbers. Semver is marketing, not engineering. Just enumerate every build attempt, successful or not. Then automate the builds, testing, deploys, etc.

Build numbers can really help defect tracking, differential debugging. Every ticket gets fields for "found" "fixed" and "verified". Caveat: I don't know if my old school QA/test methods still apply in this new "agile" DevOps (aka "winging it") world.
Hi there,

I posted a thread about an hour ago about volunteers needed for a Hackathon my organisation is running this upcoming November.

I'm not sure if you'd be interested in this type of thing, but if so please let me know.
I found anecdotal evidence of this when researching nutritional medicine, as I followed the path of who researched what most academics career had switched track to either start a nutritional medicine company practising the outcome of their research, whether for profit or protection, or had joined ranks with a traditional pharmaceutical company to work on their own product, regardless of the path no further work was published to the public.
Root of the series of articles, https://magcius.github.io/xplain/article/
I have never interviewed/hired anyone, but the more I work as a developer the more I feel challenged to do it and invent techniques to detect liars.

One thing with science on the side of truth is that the simplest questions (such as "what's the difference between a boolean and an integer?") can have extremely complicated and deep answers that lead to crazy discussions about formal definitions or implementations on different platforms and etc. And these are the kinds of things you can only learn by actually learning them, and trying to bullshit their way through an answer will quickly paint the faker in a bad place.
Yeah, going out of your way to make sure everyone knows that your phone is just a communications tool is a louder expression of your personality than a bright pink Hello Kitty case IMO.
>Remember the Solyndra "scandal"

The rest of your comment rings true with me. Why the quotes on scandal though? It certainly didn't work out well for taxpayers. Half a billion in government loan guarantees gone.

Edit: Politics aside, Solyndra falsified information on their loan application, were raided by the FBI, and skewered in an IG report. It sounds like a scandal just on their part alone.
The Original “Enjoy Capitalism” T-Shirt Is 20% Off Use Coupon:HACKER20
People have been talking about it for a while, though there hasn't been much take up from big 4 banks with use cases from what I can see. End of day batch processing isn't "that" bad so it will be interesting to see if it gets the kind of legs some people are suggesting.
I read that as his point. Your CS instructors won't explicitly teach you how to run "make" and select a couple configuration options, but if you reach the end of your studies without having picked that up, you probably won't make for a very good programmer.
So, if you not have plans of putting a NVM SSD plus two GPUs on SLI configuration, with 16 PCIe lanes will be enough.
Looks like they think they're still winning regardless of the price and that simply bumping core count to be the kings and bringing the price back to the Haswell-EP level high (rather than Broadwell-EP crazy) will be enough.

What also shows that they seem to be confident is that they're further segmenting the market based on the PCIE lane count to push everyone wanting >32 lanes into the >$1k regime.

All in all, the cool thing is not the i9s and high core counts which you could get even before by plugging a Xeon chip into a consumer X99 mobo (though you'd have to pay some $$$), but the new cache hierarchy which will give serious improvements in well-implemented, cache friendly codes!
I think a lot of luck is involved. I have regularly dropped iPhone's from chest height to concrete and the only time I had any screen damage was when there happened to be a tiny stone where the phone landed. Not that cases can't make a difference but iPhones are pretty durable nowadays.
I gather those statistics only count for "confirmed majors". At my school this meant your first 2 years or so you were "unconfirmed" until you passed certain threshold courses. Namely Calculus 1, and advanced programming courses.

This allows them to inflate their graduation rates by weeding out people in disproportionately difficult courses.
To do this the way Dan expects, you either need to have two parallel type systems (like C++'s const - a bad idea, because you ultimately end up needing to write const and non-const versions of methods) or you only allow expressions of immutable types to be made vals.

Having immutable types as a first-class language concept is a good one, and much simpler to reason about, since it states an invariant that the compiler can check and that most programmers understand as a first-level concept.
A big bang rewrite will nine out of ten times slow you down, it will not accelerate things, and the most likely outcome is that not only will it be slower, it might fail entirely.

It's a complete fallacy to think that you're going to do much better than the previous crew if you are not prepared to absorb the lessons they left behind in that old crusty code.

So you'll have to learn them all over again.

> Change, adapt, or die.

Die it is then.
> There's a ton of Stupid Computer Shit we all know, mostly from messing around on our own time, that makes programming or doing anything else with computers much easier.

Thanks for clearly articulating this in 6 words: "Stupid Computer Shit we all know". This is something many people aren't willing to acknowledge (aka tribal knowledge gained from lots of trial and error).

It perfectly summarizes what pg tried to communicate in a 2013 interview [0] where he said founders who have been "hacking for the past 10 years" have an enormous competitive advantage over founders who haven't i.e. female founders when it comes to starting technology companies.

Unfortunately, the tech press [1][2][3] went out of its way to grossly misinterpret what pg was trying to say [4].

[0] https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete...

[1] http://valleywag.gawker.com/paul-graham-says-women-havent-be...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/paul-...

[3] https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-that-Paul-Grahams-comme...

[4] http://www.paulgraham.com/ff.html
Building houses is a "more-or-less one-time event" too by your logic. I don't see the construction industry evaporating any time soon.

In addition, as someone else said, there's a LOT of roofs left to install solar on.

On top of those factors, these systems will surely need some amount of maintenance and repair; the installation companies can do that too, since they're already experts on that particular hardware.

On top of that, solar panels degrade with age, and newer panels are technically superior, so just like people replace cars after using them a certain amount of time, people are going to replace their solar panels eventually (though it may be 25 years), so there's also going to be business in upgrades.
Show HN: Canadian Marketing Technology Landscape
Very cool! I can live without implicit returns. Thanks for the info!
I use venmo a few times a month; I guess this isn't really 'taking off' but it doesn't seem like the regulations are really the dampening factor; just that we have better alternatives.
> And because of that Microsoft will finally start succeeding on mobile.

Has been said so many times before.
Except I find I'm biased against an author when they make categorically false statements that are within the same realm as the primary topic.

> It’s getting hard to remember, but a decade ago — before iPhone — all our mobiles were dumbphones. We’d use them to call or text and perhaps play the occasional game of snake. But that’s it. That’s all we could do.

That's just simply unture.

Yes, on the one hand, it's a contextually small detail. Unfortunately, on the other hand, I can't help feel it calls into question the rest of the content since they couldn't be bothered inform them self on a basis point.

Edit: Blockquote fail
Left IT to go back to school and get my degree in Computer Engineering. Not a good choice for someone with little to no concentration / comprehension. Take all the stuff you do in (embedded/systems) software, then add in hardware design.