skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Perspective - does learning multiple programming languages engender more awareness of different perspectives than say, learning multiple foreign natural languages?

Different perspectives on problem solving, absolutely. There is nothing comparable in natural languages to the paradigm shift required when first grokking logic programming or term rewriting.

> Abstraction - does learning programming languages develop better use of conceptual abstraction than say, mathematics?

You can think about the theorems involved in writing a todo list or balancing your chequebook, but to actually do these things you have to think programmatically. That makes programming far more applicable to most people's lives.

> Precision and clarity - does learning programming languages develop better precision and clarity than studying philosophy and logic?

Absolutely. Philosophy is muddied by the imprecision of natural language. You can't lie or confuse your computer, it's a strict task master.
Heroku Announces Platform API for Partners
> Heck, even "electricity" includes the word "気" (spirit/energy).

People say this as if it means something profound, but it really doesn't. It's just energy. There's no Japanese belief that electricity is powered by little spirits or anything like you try to imply.
Mess with the car die like the cdr.
I am a DevOps Engineer by trade and title.

Here is my take on this:

It is a role - not something that can be done by OPS or DEV or SEC or what have you.

Allow me to explain my 2 cents worth:

- With the amounts of tooling (CI/CD pipeline, infrastructure monitoring, infra. provisioning, config. management, etc.), you do not want your DEVs or your full-time admins focusing on this bit at-all. It is good if they have some know-how (or even if they do the initial groundwork) but if your DEVs or sys admins are focusing on what 'entails' as DevOps -- then Houston, we got a problem. Because this means that DEV or sys admin or what have you is not focusing 100% on their role.

- Why is 'DevOps' getting so much flak?? How about titles/roles such as 'scrum master' or 'Agile Practitioner' or 'Product Owner'?

- I am not a noob by any means (~10 yr IT experience) and I am past the stage of getting excited by a job title. However, the 'DevOps' title given to a 'DevOps' guy is a correct move. AND, believe-it-or-not, it is a IT specialization -- just like 'cloud' is. Just because everything is a code doesn't mean you don't need a dedicated person who will not only preach DevOps -- but will also 'implement' DevOps -- and that fella should be called 'DevOps' -- just like 'Agile Coach' ;-)
That's kind of sad that you've given up on this project. I visited this thread to comment that I'm working on a similar project, but for Swi-Prolog (a statistical NLP module - it's my own initiative and about a month away from sharing with the world).

I think it's a big shame that traditional AI and computer-sciency languages like Haskell and Prolog have lagged so far behind the mainstream ones in terms of machine learning and as machine learning gets more popular I'm worried this will cause them to fall by the wayside even more than they have already.

What is it that's making Haskell bad at numerical computing? I would have thought it's not much worse than e.g. Julia or Python but even if it is, I always figured there's other benefits to programming in Haskell- otherwise we'd all be geeking over FORTRAN, I guess.

With Prolog the big issue is that statistical AI algorithms tend to go a lot faster with mutable, indexable data structures and those don't have a lot of support in Prolog. What is it that's really bothering you with Haskell? Could you give an example?

[Note: I'm a Haskell noob, but I should be able to handle code examples]
> Google has been doing this for ages without calling it Devops

Are you of the opinion that DevOps, like Agile, is a buzzword and money making opportunity? I had a brief stint in a DevOps-ish role and that was my conclusion.
Does my three day involuntary hold (5150) that became a two week involuntary hold (5250) and then an unspecified (and very probably illegal) wait for an additional 4 days, because "we're waiting for the doctor to release you" count?. (yes, I know, one data point is not an average). I saw that doctor exactly 2 times during that time, for a cumulative total of maybe 3 minutes, who was simply a pusher of the latest (at the time) SNRI. The nurses emphasized it was important to "show compliance" and take their drugs, even though they were wrong and caused serious problems for months.

Why? I apparently offended a psychiatrist when I insisted that escitalopram ("Lexapro") gave me mild/moderate visual disturbances (hallucination). "Lexapro doesn't do that!". Insisting it did, followed quickly with a (probably mildly rude) comment about observation-vs-theory and just-world fallacy only cut the appointment short and started the above stay. The paperwork was sensationalized fiction, with zero basis in reality.

After the first 3 days, the nurses commented every single day about how unusual it was to be allowed (by insurance) such a long stay. Private insurance would never allow the expense, but apparently their scam worked on Medicare.

I never generalize bad behavior into a stereotype. I'll assume your experience has been very different. I'm sure this kind of problem has a lot of variation. My stay was over 10 years ago, and I would like to believe your industry has improved in that time. It might be a good idea to look outside your normal situation with the goal of gaining a broader perspective. It is very hard to regain trust after it has been burned for legitimate reasons. That puts better doctors at an unfair disadvantage, which is unfortunate. This is why it's so important proactively find the "bad apples" and actually fix the situation before bad behavior becomes normalized[1].

[1] http://www.rapp.org/archives/2015/12/normalization-of-devian...
We have similar gartner/forester "analyst" expenditure issues. That said, for many types of enterprise software this is a cost of doing business - pretty much all our customers go to gartner/forester first to ask who they should be looking to buy from - if we didn't deal with these guys we'd never sell anything.

It's kinda distasteful how much these guys are basically "shake down" merchants you are forced to pay, but given in many industries there's literally no choice I can't call it a waste of money. It also never ceases to amaze me how many vapourware/unfinished features end up in their "reports" because they regurgitate whatever the marketing team has told them we do.
You might be surprised. I also find the reach of industry to be very troubling, and there's a clear incentive for profit. Many of us continue to push back, and demand better evidence. The erosion of federal funding for research is a concerning development, as it leaves much of the funding to industry sources, who are motivated by profit.

In direct response to these kind of concerns, the NIMH has initiated a totally new research framework to study mental disorders:
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research-priorities/rdoc/index.shtm...
> Also, I think it's hilarious/curious that the actual economist's response is buried in a thread.

> Internet message boards (yes, even HN's) are not kind to actual expertise

Would you elaborate on this, in particular what you mean by buried? I'm assuming you're referring to 'spangry's responses. Given the nature of threading and where 'spangry chose to respond, I don't see how it could be anywhere other that where it is. As of the posting of this comment, both of 'spangry's responses are the highest of its siblings. Are you thinking of a different model of threading or highlighting highly-upvoted comments?
My team (5 others) and I built an application that would help you revise or learn a subject by testing you about it, where that subject could be anything, from mathematics to Shakespeare.

It worked by scraping the top 1000 Bing results and then scraping several levels deep from each of the results to generate a "map" of knowledge. This in turn could be used to ask the user questions, generated fill-in-the-blanks, matchups & whatever else you could think up.

It worked after the five-day hackathon, which was truly surprising, but unfortunately, it used too much computing power so we never released it to the world.
An Abbreviated History of Design in Silicon Valley
Set numeric value with animation using NumericAnimatedLabel
What is really like..."lonely".

I don't buy it.

I know plenty of driven women and men that have strong romantic relationships. They understand that balancing your life is very complexed, but one quality that separates my friends who have strong relationships (from those who don't) is a strong ability and awareness to counter balance.
Three examples of it used in significant projects:

http://ironsides.martincarlisle.com

http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/sparkskein...

https://muen.codelabs.ch
"Best viewed in 800x600"
Announcing Kin, a Cryptocurrency for an Open Future
That's what I was thinking. I was reading the several about pages, and as someone who has never been introduced to any of these concepts, nothing really seems to describe what the software actually accomplishes.
Believe it or not, Bitcoin isn't actually transactional these days. A new feature called "replace by fee" was introduced that allows coins that were used in a transaction which is still in queue for processing (hasn't yet been included in block by the miners) to be spent in a different transaction as long as the spender pays a high enough fee to jump to the front of the queue.
Agreed, it seems like a lot of people think about devops as a way to make dev's lives better without actively harming ops. The article does have a section on getting Ops on board with devops, but it's much weaker than the previous section on getting Dev on board. Devops done right should really improve both sides, as it explicitly recognizes the tradeoffs involved with the added automation / processes / policies. I've been reading Google's Site Reliability Engineering book ([1], free online, highly recommend so far) and it lays out pretty clearly how to do devops in a more balanced way. Key points are:

- Define service level indicators (SLIs), metrics you can track to see how you're doing on the things your users care about: uptime, latency, security, etc. For instance, measure uptime as successful responses / total requests.

- Define service level objectives (SLOs) based on your SLIs, e.g. 99.9% successful responses / total requests (aka 99.9% uptime)

- Establish an error budget which controls your deployments. Based on your SLOs you can accept a certain number of errors (failed requests, outages, slow response times, etc) for a given period. If you spend your entire error budget, no new code can be deployed. The deployment shutoff has to be agreed upon in advance and it has to be a hard and fast rule, so it's not ops' fault that dev can't deploy code.

- If you reach your error budget, devs need to work on things to reduce error rate going forward instead of developing new features. It can be tests, monitoring and alerting, rollback process, or pretty much anything, but devs should know that they're doing it so they can deploy more code faster in the future.

I think this makes a lot of sense and helps to align dev and ops on uptime goals. Specifically, dev's ability to push code is now directly tied to service level, and ops is not shooting for 100% reliability. Dev can choose how to spend the error budget, so ops isn't dictating how they do things; and ops knows and expects a certain number of problems, so they don't resent dev every time they push buggy code.

[1] https://landing.google.com/sre/book.html
Actually, I would be more confident working with a GPL- or AGPL-licensed product, because enhancements are more likely to go back upstream.
I would say exactly the opposite is happening. While I can't comment on how many people are using out and out functional languages (like Haskell or Lisp), I would say that far more developers and modern languages are adopting functional techniques and paradigms than they were 10 years ago (even developers and languages that were traditionally staunchly OO, such as Java).
If a tie is really uncomfortable, you may be wearing shirts with necks that are too narrow. Ask a salesperson to measure you for correct fit.

If it's the flopping around you object to, get a tie clip or consider a bow tie.
While I agree there is some title tweaking going on, IMO the empathy you speak of needs to go in both directions, especially if you're a smaller organization. It really needs to be, as you say, shared.

If shipping shit yesterday is the only goal your developers have in mind, they really can't expect quality Systems Engineering. They need to recognize that Systems Engineering is very much Engineering in the same sense as development and sometimes it can be just as if not more difficult and intellectually demanding especially in the face of such social pressures. Everyone needs to be on the same page.

Hence the need for such a culture and probably for an elevated title. I speak as someone who's worked in both roles and who's never read The Phoenix Project (tbqh).
> Here’s a story: I worked for a company that let an influential person go at the 11-month mark — four weeks shy of a stock option vesting date. This person, a public figure, unsurprisingly spent the next few years publicly badmouthing the company. It would have been trivial to grant him the extra month of vesting, and if he’d left with his options intact, the company’s reputation wouldn’t have taken repeated public hits. Instead, management went by The Rules, ignoring real-world repercussions. Perhaps an ombudsperson could untangle the administrivia that makes troubled departures worse than necessary.

While the concept of an HR-ombudsman is intriguing, this doesn't strike me as the kind of decision the ombudsman should be particularly tasked with. For one, I've always associated the ombudsman role as one that investigates complaints without being beholden to the corporate authority, i.e. the thing that constrains HR to act in behalf of the company's interests.

The worry that an employee deserves special treatment because of that employee's connections/privilege does not strike me as a "complaint". Street-smarts, perhaps, but it's already the prerogative of management and PR to break the rules for public-facing real-world concerns. An ombudsperson being influential in bending the rules in favor of someone who is deemed important/better-than-the-average employee strikes me as the very opposite of the decision that the ombudsperson should be concerned with.
Yes, and no. Not creating a Devops position is just leaving the existing silos. The best way to tear them down is to put the Ops(DevOps) under the Dev manager. It reduces the code throwing, and gets rid of team politics.
Confessions of an Ex-Prosecutor	(2016)
'Thousands' of known bugs found in pacemaker code
Everest is actually one of the safest >8,000m peaks to climb. Annapurna and K2 boast 33.5% and 29.5% fatality rates [1]. Both are notoriously difficult climbs which require significantly more technical expertise than Everest.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-thousander
That is NoOps.
Ask HN: Design feedback for Moo.do 3.0?
Hey HN,

We released betas of Moo.do’s Mac and Windows apps last week, and now we’re working on a new design for the desktop apps. I would love your feedback on the new design direction.

Also, we just released the new Calendar pane last month, so we now have email, tasks, and calendar all working together in one app :).

Shot of old design: http://beta.moo.do/img/ss/oldDesign.png

Shot of new design: http://beta.moo.do/img/ss/newDesignMay25.png

Try a demo of the new design at https://beta.moo.do/app/

More about the app at https://moo.do
Same question I had, it looks like that's an accurate description. From the "Fedora" link on their front page, which this tool is apparently built on:

Fedora is a robust, modular, open source repository system for the management and dissemination of digital content. It is especially suited for digital libraries and archives, both for access and preservation. It is also used to provide specialized access to very large and complex digital collections of historic and cultural materials as well as scientific data. Fedora has a worldwide installed user base that includes academic and cultural heritage organizations, universities, research institutions, university libraries, national libraries, and government agencies.

As an aside, FOSS projects: Please think before overloading common names, like a popular Linux distro.

As a double aside: Think about your target audience. Most developers hear "repository" and think VCSes.
Pre-dating the manga GitS by a year, the Cyberpunk PPRPG from R Talsorian ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_2020 ) was a surprisingly well put-together and interesting world.

One of my favorite features was cyberpsychosis. As a gameplay element, it was an answer to "Why don't you just buy godlike cyber replacements for your body?"

But as a lore element, they bored down into the question. If you've got your neural processing running at multiples of human normal, or have a bulletproof body capable of lifting cars, then how do you relate to all the unmodified people around you? Musn't your relationship with them fundamentally change? And doesn't it seem logical that the amount of change would be related to the extremeness of your augmentation?
That's right. The most common polar orbits, sun synchronous orbits (SSO), are actually inclined at ~97 deg from the equator. This means that they're moving slightly opposite of the earth's rotation, requiring it to be more than cancelled out.

This means that polar launches benefit a bit from launching closer to the poles where the Earth's surface velocity is lower. However, in reality the difficult logistics of building an arctic launch site mean that this is rarely done.
Yes, tungsten has a density surprisingly similar to gold.

The original example in the grandparent comment would be expensive to counterfeit, though.
The Fullest Stack Ride
I disagree. Maybe, there's a couple of guys/gals around that can go up and down the software and hardware stack and know where issues may lie when there's a problem, but I doubt there are many.

As a someone that's been in the tech industry a very long time, I came to the realization a long time ago that I couldn't be the expert at everything. Can I dabble in Oracle, Windows, Linux? Sure, would I want to bet my job on how much I know some of these products in the time of crisis, hell No!!!
I'm pretty certain that I'm not the only Cambridge HPS graduate here.

It would be interesting to see some of the thinking behind current approaches to HPS being applied to development teams, both as teams and as part of the larger community of developers
Ask HN: How do you beat depression or total burnout state?
(Throw away account)

50-60% through building MVP for my startup - currently alone.

But I am going through a state of depression since last 6 months.
Reason I say this : I have noticed that I have total absence to any emotions.
Even when I get good news: I feel like I am not even close to feeling happy.

I find it hard to even get up and put good 100 lines of code a week in this state.

To beat blues :I somehow barely managed myself to do some weigh training this week and in the process have managed to sprain my back. More rest.

How to beat a state like this in life ?

Any advise is highly appreciated.
Nothing here is what I expected:

- a "repository solution" is not a thing for source control like Github. It's a CMS or a file sharing system or something.

- "Fedora" is not a Linux distribution. It's a previous repository solution software.

- this homepage causes more questions than it answers. No screenshots. No examples.
Especially for those with partners and children they risk leaving behind without them, or even that they abandon them for weeks on end training for and pursuing their personal goals. These endeavors always strike me as being very selfish, narcissistic, and egotistical.
What makes it worse is that programmers don't have an ethical code, akin to what engineers and doctors have. CEO says we need to track every user? Sure, boss! Show invasive ads up every user's orifice? Can do! Ship it, who cares if we wipe out some poor bloke's photos.

And as long as programmers have very big salaries (compared to the rest) and are in demand - they have no incentive to organize and fight for their rights and rights to not do unethical things.
He says 'we', but, reading the article, it's clear he's referring to a few multinational corporations. I am tired of at once having democracy subverted by them, and then be blamed for it.
I had a longer response written out, but my phone browser crashed and I have to go soon. This will be brief.

> externalized costs

Coase theorem and strong trespass law.

> Large scale goals with large public benefits but which come at high costs

Assurance contracts.

> public education system,

Private schools perform better across the board. If public schools didn't exist, I would expect to see more parochial and charity schools.

> public highway system

Replacing the IH system with privately operated toll roads is well within the reach of US investment banks, and it would be a safe bet. Plus they would be incentivized to actually do repairs quickly, unlike on public roads. Wins all around!

> public energy system,

Sure, this is a hard good to privatize due to line easement requirements. There are ways around this, but I think practically libertarians would agree with the government managing things like water pipes or electrical lines. This will become less of an issue in the near future as being off-grid on solar becomes practical for more people. (Or if we end up with small-scale community nuclear, like some are working towards.)

> Yet every market participant benefits enough that they are happy they exist.

If you think they'll still be happy after being made aware of how much they're paying (instead of it being obfuscated via taxes and respending) then there's no problem.

> armies

PMCs and military insurance. This would almost certainly be more efficient than the current bloated military we have in the US.

> disasters/disease

Insurance again.

> Would microsoft or walmart vaccinate everyone?

Does the government vaccinate everyone now? (No, they do not.)
Sorry about that! I was surprised to see the page deleted from Wikipedia so just quickly made a Strikingly website. I'll see how center align looks.
the key point i was trying to highlight, is that .. DevOps .. is really a Developer .. not a system engineer

a Developer that does extra stuff

there is a huge difference between a developer who does extra stuff, and a system engineer who does .. extra stuff

the barrier of entry to becoming a developer is a lot bigger than the barrier of entry to become an admin or system engineer
How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds   from a Former Google Design Ethicist
Is it a suprise that a short opinion piece doesn't explore the full depth of Africa's geopolitical situation?

You are right that Africa is a big, diverse place, and it is easy to overgeneralize. Sometimes it's easy to undergeneralize, too. Technically-minded people, like the typical HN user, can sometimes over-focus on specifics. I certainly find myself doing that a lot. This article, by focusing on an overview and making broad statements, has to "simplify out" a lot of specifics.

Also, I don't think that it's claiming that all of Africa's problems are all the West's fault. It's saying that if Africa, in general, wasn't blatently exploited then it could (eventually) take much better care of itself.
Didn't fix it for me, I just hit it at 11:55 EDT - still getting 500MB on initial load of the editor.
Swedish policy makers want end to IT vendor lock-in