skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Measurements can be combined with things that are already irreducible. For example, in baking, a recipe using “one egg” and “2 cups flour” has to keep the “one egg” if it’s going to convert to metric; and given conversion tables that favor nice round numbers over exact amounts, this means the proportions will change ever so slightly. It definitely doesn’t matter in every case but it’s these kinds of issues that would prevent people from wanting to spend time just converting everything.

I am a little surprised that the U.S. hasn’t adopted more “low hanging fruit” though. For instance, street signs could clearly display kilometer distances and km/h speed limits, especially if the “km” was included on the sign (as it was in Canada during a transition phase).
If interviews measure your actual skills, why do working practitioners study for them?

Interviews measure a shibboleth with a glancing relationship to relevant skills, which is more based on expedient and clever solving of the toy algorithms problems you'll find in college than the actual quality of a developer's output. Different companies' interviews attempt to measure the same skills in different and subjective ways, yielding different results.

Centralization on an evidence-based standardized test for the "prove your skills" part of the interview process is one of the best outcomes we can hope for. Ideally it would be open to non-degree-holders. Include per-component scores so companies can choose which areas they care about more, avoid grade inflation so similar candidates are distinguishable, etc.
Pretty much, though I find reviews to be too easy to be gamed to carry any value what so ever. What I would love is for an expert mode that allowed me to filter/sort Play store results by permissions, last update time and release time. I have seen way too many results put apps from the early days of Android up top alongside stuff released the last month, with no way to tell them apart except by opening each entry in turn, and look for data hidden behind the description foldout.
Is web assembly going to fix any of these?
Algorithmic, data structure and theoretical CS are the main subjects that should get a lot more time then a single class for each (in my case).

That would allow a deeper theoretical basis but also time to link those to reality through concrete examples. But then, you'd probably lose more of the class...

You know, graduation quotas & all.. :/
Just a vanilla computer science program. I combined it with a math major. I think the program at my uni was especially soft; there were no math courses at all. I suspect it's a bit better at a 'technical university' (I do my masters at one). I think the electrical engineers at my new uni are on par with the computer scientists at programming (which is basically the one and only skill you learn in my CS program), or even better.
Simple, take their money and improve yourself. Spend time doing things that make you happy and content.
IMO:
Not only lectures but especially study programs are very inefficient (time, money, effort) and demotivating.
Except reading and writing, no skill and knowledge should be taught in advance. I should be able to acquire skills and knowledge and task specific certification whenever I want it or need it with the least amout of time, money and effort.
For a doctor, I see no problem to recognize was is beyond one's expertise and call another doctor for help.
The Future of P2P Crypto, Ad Blocking, Piracy, and Fake News
Show HN: Metamorphosis by Kafka (FREE book app)
I would open to advisory roles, part time or golden handcuffs (stay for a year) when you speak with CEO. Rounds are hard to get (despite Hollywood) and investors are super turned off by founders arguing. In startups, getting 0 is the norm.
Just because you're hiring allegedly [1] senior devs for $30/hr doesn't mean they couldn't charge a lot more, or that you just aren't exposed to the ones charging $150 because they avoid lowballers.

1. Yes, I'm skeptical, having worked with (or worse, after) a lot of overseas devs who charge in that range, or more. None were truly "senior".
Disclaimer: I'm a bit of a GA power user; although being on the technical side, I'm not really sympathetic towards the marketing uses for analytical data.

There's a tough line to draw between excessive and sufficient instrumentation for a given app, and a business will probably opt for more than less data. I'm not sure that's a moral argument against tools like GA, though.

Especially given one particularly compelling feature of Universal Analytics (GA's latest incarnation): you can definitely water down what you collect. (https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...)

Want to opt out of collecting advertising info? Say so in the UI. Anonymize/obliterate the IP/geolocation info? Override the IP field to a static value. Override the intrusive collection of User-Agent values? Override the ua parameter. Prevent collection of granular page info? Override the dl, dp, dt fields. Stop collecting referral info? Blank out the dr, cs, cm, cn, and remove UTMs/GCLIDs from the URLs you report.

In fact, you can even implement measurement protocol serverside – GA's ancient forebear, Urchin Analytics, actually began as a server-log parsing utility! (https://urchin.biz/urchin-software-corp-89a1f5292999)

Reduce JavaScript use altogether but keep it clientside? Implement a static GA pixel:

<img src="https://google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=UA-XXXXX-Y&cid=somevalue&dp=%2Fsomepath&ua=YourUserAgent&...">

Now, mistrust of a third party with said data is a relevant issue, but slightly different from the technical bones of this piece's argument.
Hello Everyone,

Here's a v1.0 release of this tool. Currently, the following features are available:

>Checks any URL from 20 locations globally.

>Provides loadtime/uptime status.

>Provides a screenshot

Here are the features in development:

>API.

>Adding 25 more regions.

>Fixing the ugly map.

>Adding pointers on the map

>Provide actual browser load time.

>Making it faster.

>Adding ReCaptcha before tests.

>Ability to provide report in all timezones.

>Cleaner screenshot fail when page is down.

Here are the features currently in the pipeline:

Downtime notifier
IP Ping

I look forward to your feedback, comments and feature requests.

Thanks!
the author here. if you have questions, here to help.
Working on the last year of my masters degree. I switched to computer engineering. Basically I was busy learning the things I missed during my bachelor.
Well this is why a free market is great, if you think all these companies are doing things wrong, start your own and outcompete them.
Every pipe is a recursive list of blocks, like a tree. Basically, a pipe has a starting block that produces the pipe output. To do that it calls the process function of its input block, which again run their input blocks, ..., the feed blocks serve as tree leaves.
Amazon employs ~350K people. You're going to see a huge variance based upon individuals, temperament, department, etc.
There is a lot of packages referencing single github repo, I am trying to "dedupe" most of them but it's not perfect yet.

Hopefully, it will get much better next week

package ericapi references nodejs/node repo
https://www.npmjs.com/package/ericapi
Absolutely, I'll send you a mail
Feel free to write me a check for the millions of seed money I'll need.
It's a processing task. You run it for a fixed CPU time. Wall time may or may not matter depending on the application.

You almost never take availability into account, but taking spot prices will increase wall time.
this is awesome! where can i hear more samples?
Chat as a Service (CAAS) Solutions
We are currently in closed-beta with our Qt/C++ based video application. Our users are requesting "text-chat" as a way to
communicate with other users.

Knowing the litany of "Chat" products that are out there, I'm not a huge fan of redundancy in communication products. I figure this must be a SaaS that completes my goals. Furthermore, many of these products are "mobile first" (as in they require SMS verification to begin using their service).

Things I'm looking for:

- I'd prefer not to maintain servers

- Must have a RESTful API or C++ SDK (we are not developing for Android / iOS independently) and we are not building a website (ie. JS SDKs are not very useful)

- Ability to add and remove users programmatically when they create accounts on our service.

- Security (obviously)

- Would prefer not to warehouse messages or be able to access them

Things I've looked at:

Open Whisper Systems "Signal" Protocol.

Pros:

- Known standard for secure communications.

Cons:

- Signal "Text Secure Server" code is unwieldy and poorly documented (https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Server)

Twilio "Programmable Chat"

Pros:

- Dynamic REST APIs

- 3rd Party hosted (don't have any servers to maintain and scale)

Cons:

- Corporate Service hosting (I know Twilio is better than most)

Thoughts?
Actually, I might be able to use the ram from my "old" laptop, which has just died a week ago, so I think I'll give it at least a try.
Thanks!
Intermittent fasting and high fat diet.

I don't exercise really at all but just changing how I eat and keeping my calories up during times when I eat I went from 215 to 170-180. I feel great when I keep my grains and sugars down.
I've read tons of things and Jason Fung seems to be the best reminder I keep going back to when I forget.

Edit: might as well mention meds and supplements.

Magnesium glycate or another high bioavailability version

5k iu vit D

Amphetamine 30mg 2x a day for ADHD

Clonidine 0.5mg at night for sleep
Assuming aliens treat newly discovered populations the same way humans have over the past 200,000 years, that may be a good thing.
I saw the title and assumed this was an attempt to make Finnish grammar even more difficult.
would it be possible to get this as plugin?
A simple file naming bug can crash Windows 8.1 and earlier
Use a open standard. Save it as an odt.
The American Civil War has sometimes been described as the war whose history was written by the losers, as there is a lot of southern revisionism that obscures the causes of the civil war.

Chief of the revisions is that the war was not about slavery but states' rights. If you actually go read the CSA's constitution, though, the fallacy becomes clear. The confederate constitution is virtually a carbon copy of the US's constitution (with the amendments inserted into the body of the text). The only major differences are the explicit forbidding of the confederate government from levying tariffs for industrial production and promoting internal improvements, and the very explicit prohibition of the disavowal of slavery. This should be a clear indication of what the states were actually concerned about (especially when you also go read the actual declarations of succession).

While you might take some of the minor changes to be indicative of states' rights concerns, there's equally other minor changes that suggest they didn't actually believe in them. There's no clause granting states the right to nullify federal laws, and the Supremacy Clause remains untouched, for example (perhaps because the southern states were miffed by northern states' attempts to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act). And the preamble states outright that it is promulgated "in order to form a permanent federal government"--which suggests that succession was not in fact permissible in the CSA.

The south seceded and fought the Civil War because of slavery--or, more precisely, because they realized that they lost the political power to force the northern states to accept slavery. So they decided to pack up their toys and leave the sandbox rather than be the minority.
On the typing angle, I'd argue the HN vs mass market point. Typing is still a skill we aren't born with. As much as it's now assumed in 1st world core demographics, there are a huge number of people for whom it isn't faster.

And if you've ever watched a grandparent try and use Windows, there are a lot of other metaphors they miss too.

I'm not saying NL recognition is going to be easy, but I am saying that getting there will be far more valuable than maybe the HN crowd assumes from self-reflection.
I don't think it's fair to say that computer science isn't hard when you openly admit that you didn't go into any depth in the topics. That's like me claiming the field of Mathematics isn't very hard because the bog-
standard calculus courses I took weren't very difficult.

Maybe we should be asking whether computer science as we know it is too broad of a field to meaningfully explore in a Bachelor's degree.
1+, want this in logic!
You're making many assumptions that really aren't justified.
I disagree with the fact that computer science degree is 'not very hard'...

It's way more difficult(if done correctly) than probably almost every other degree except physics, math, and maybe chemical engineering.

I don't know where you got your degree but I felt like I was challenged immensely in my curriculum..with algorithms, upper level maths, cryptography, distributed systems, etc. etc.... but I really worked 80 hours a week to try to get the stuff, even though I could have scraped through.

And taking the degree has helped immensely in industry...it didn't teach me any specific technology, like a bootcamp teaches a MEAN stack, but it made me fluent in the industry...so I am easily able to pick up new tech rapidly..which I credit years of studying computer science in college.

Which is the goal of college...to get you fluent in the world you're majoring in..not necessarily any specific tech, you're supposed to learn that stuff yourself, and it never stops.

As for the industry...that was a huge disappointment. My first job I felt like 'the best office worker'...it didn't have the revolutionary cutting edge feel I wanted.

My current job is way better, but there's a lot of shit jobs in the industry, because you work directly for business people, who typically have no higher motive than money, and you're basically the best paid worker in the 'Rat Race'....

Also, there's way less status than being a doctor, lawyer, or nurse. People dont even remotely understand what we do, therefore there's no connection for them to grant us status.
No math is crazy. Mine required multiple semesters of discret, probability/stats, and up to calculus.

My school was a liberal arts college, and still required a decent amount of math for the undergrad CS degree.
X86-to-z80: x86-to-z80 re-assembler
I second the recommendation for Naivechain. It is really easy to understand.

For me, reading the Javascript code of Naivechain made me understand Blockchains in an easier-to-understand way than all the tutorials that try to explain how to implement a blockchain!!
Pure CSS Modal Window
great idea, hopefully one day ;-)
Interesting, thanks for posting this. I take some care to plant 'bee friendly' stuff but have no interest in beekeeping and have never bothered to look up fostering non-honeybees. Now I will do this after reading your comment http://www.ecolandscaping.org/03/beneficials/attract-mason-b... and some of the links from there.
Maybe since the salary expectations are so much higher in SV/NY and Seattle* HR folks feel they have to be seen to be much more "rigorous" whether that is the case or not ("we had 100 applicants and hired the top 2")?

* = I picked the three big pricey "coastal" US places that came to mind, it's entirely possible we're talking about different places :-)
The most successful one-man business is not in software. I know of a successful mediator. He charges $18000 to $20000 per day and has always been booked for the last 20 years.

http://www.wqsadr.com/randallwwulfffeescheduleandpolicies.ht...
That's a very interesting notion, I didn't know you could use a GA pixel. That's a much better alternative to the full-blown JS tracker, thank you.
Ow, come on. I get the point, but it's well known that American education isn't doing too well on geography, and the media in the rest of the world is a lot more interested in the US than the other way around.
Grand Prix racing involves a 1500 pound car hitting a wall at +200 mph, with fuel. Death used to be guaranteed during the course of a season, but now any serious injury is rare.

Dismissing safety as impossible "because physics" is just silly. Technical solutions are the easy part. It's the culture change that is difficult.
It's not "for the sake of it", diversity brings insanely great benefits. Lack of diversity is likely why most software produced by this industry is, well, shit.
Show HN: pysecrets – Easy CLI and lib to encrypt/decrypt files with Python
Time Well Spent
What's interesting to me about that data is the high rate of biological and agricultural sciences grads, relative to all other sciences. CS grad rates seem to fall right about where they should on XKCD's Purity Scale [1] (if CS had been included in it). 2004 was an outlier for CS, but it has reverted to its mean since.

But bio and ag sciences are beating out Psychology, which is a bit of a reversal. Biology isn't easy, especially not any program with a requirement for organic chemistry. Could that be b/c the big midwest and southwest universities (Iowa, Texas A&M, etc) have large bio/ag programs to support that industry in their region?

[1]:https://www.xkcd.com/435/
Agreed. The existing search options are also terrible. In the same way that I sometimes have trouble telling Amazon what I want displayed, and fall back on the Top 10 sold list for that category.

Or even a "Has this app been updated since the release date of the version of Android I'm currently running?" option.
In the search engine context, the problem to be solved is that both French and English speakers are likely to type [cafe] and not [café] -- the French speaker because they might be on an English keyboard, or because they know it's not ambiguous.

In the search space, therefore, when you index the word 'café', you also index 'cafe' with a smaller weight. And when you see the query [café], you expand the query to ('café' OR 'cafe'-with-smaller-weight)

And you don't want to do either of this if the two words are actually different!

As an example of this in the wild, the ElasticSearch docs talk about the issue: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/...

PRECIS appears to be aimed more at figuring out if 2 usernames are 'the same'.
True, you can make it as difficult as you want. But generally, math, physics, and engineering programs are much harder.
Re: the choice of 2005 as origin, if you rebase on 2009, then CS degree growth looks on par with other STEM fields. Thus I think is's misleading to say CS majoring is "flat". At a certain end-to-end view it is, but that obscures that it crashed, and is now rapidly growing, not that it's been stagnant and unchanging.

In the early 2000s it was widely perceived as the economically smart thing to go into a technical field other than CS, especially petroleum engineering, chemical engineering, and similar areas, or maybe even better, a non-technical field like law. They had higher pay and were seen as more stable employment options. CS employment was seen by many people as unlikely to ever fully recover from the dotcom crash, partly because of mass outsourcing. So unsurprisingly, new enrollment numbers were low, and some departments at smaller schools even closed. Then from around 2005, CS began to be seen as a lucrative again, and enrollment has been steadily rising every year since then. Universities have responded likewise by reopening CS departments, hiring more faculty in existing ones, and increasing class sizes (so enrollment growth is actually considerably outpacing faculty growth).

This does not look to me like a market that fails to respond to economic incentives, but exactly like one that does respond. Maybe it ought to respond even faster, although if it did in general, the CS-degree crash of the 2000s might've been even deeper than it was.
easier to balance on top, but I think it's not a "building" any more than.
As did I! (It turns out to be about replacing individual curriculum topics--history, mathematics, and so on--with a more integrated learning style.)
Correct, including bugfixes. Usually, healthy projects do at least one minor/major/bugfix release every 6 months.

Also, if you are really desperate, you can lower/remove any filters on the top and get all matching results
I agree that Haskell syntax is incomparably clean, and that it works great for the classic simple program structures. But this laconism often makes it difficult to read.

I understand the power of point-free style, and it's quite exclusive to build pipelines. But it is very hard to read a function in that style if you're not already familiar with all the abstractions used.

The $ operator is a particular culprit ;-D Understanding a function depends heavily on precedence of operators. This is easy to do with algebra, because it uses few different operators. But in programming, where you have a huge number of functions defined in the program, it may be very hard to start reading a new program for the first time.
It turns out that there are easy alternatives to this, and some were posted in this thread (like Shariff). I have replaced all the social buttons with static alternatives, and soon I will be able to remove tracking as well in favor of GoAccess, so it's not as bad as it sounds!
Monument celebrates an unlikely hero: the anonymous peer reviewer
That's true, SocialSharePrivacy loads the script after they've been requested, which is the much better way to do this (if you're going to).
The grief factor of learning to code is on a different scale to every other major. One missing semicolon will take your whole tower down, and you realise this in the first day of practical exercises.

Even if you are of the opinion that CS is math, and coding doesn't come into it, you will hit a coding wall early on.

In fact, every exercise in CS has this problem. You add a new thing (eg inheritance), and it breaks. But not only that, it might be broken because of a banal little syntax problem.

And that's just what you consider code. If you put in the wrong compiler flags, it breaks. If you can't link because something needed rebuilding, it breaks. Want to avoid it? Learn how make works. Huge number of options, which you won't understand, because you're a novice.

Oh and learn git, too. And Linux. Just so you can hand in the homework.

Compare this to the rest of university. I'll use my own experience.

- Engineering subjects tend to revolve around a small number of vignettes. Here's an aircraft engine in thermo. Draw some boundaries, apply some equations. If you get it wrong, your tutor can still see if you were going the right way. Once you've learned the relevant points, it's not hard doing some rearrangements and plugging in some numbers.

- Economics essays are basically bullet points. Miss one out, you still have an essay. Which you can hand in without knowing git.
Because it's adversarial? Because not all men want to flex their muscles for women? Because it makes assumptions about group psychology that don't hold true? Because it turns an entire gender into a carrot on the end of a stick? Because people can be lazy or tired? Because you can get laid easier without expending energy? Jesus christ this is a stupid thread.
Would you mind to elaborate?
Could you elaborate on some of the things you learned from him? I'm interested in people that seem to be almost ruthlessly effective and competent.
I really kind of regret majoring in computer science because of this.
I agree with you. Computer Science at the appropriate school is a really challenging and gratifying experience.

I would also add that university in general, is more about approaching new and hard topics, and finding a good way to learn and digest them. In computer science you also get to do it facing fascinating topics like lambda calculus or the mathematics behind cryptography.
This reminds me of A Scheme Story, referenced at the end of PG's essay Beating the Averages.

http://www.trollope.org/scheme.html

http://paulgraham.com/avg.html