skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After 30 years working in the field, I wholeheartedly agree: the low status of CS is indeed a huge problem among practitioners, though I doubt many 20-year-olds appreciate this.

Probably 95% of software jobs play a supporting role; the business' primary focus lies elsewhere (e.g. finance, military, advertising/marketing, health care, engineering, etc). That relegates CS and its practitioners to be a cost center rather than a profit center -- like janitors and accountants and HR -- never a star, at best a 'utility' player, a commodity. In almost all workplaces, software/IT is seen as 'the cost of doing business' -- a liability to be cost-minimized and outsourced as much as possible and then dissed by the board whenever 'players' enter the boardroom: professionals like MBAs, MDs, PhD engineers, bankers, lawyers, etc.

It's likely that the wiser more perceptive undergraduates have some inkling of CS' underclass status. It's even more likely that females and those with social and financial ambitions are aware of the limits inherent in any role where one must stick one's head inside a computer every day for, literally decades. Then at age 40-to-50, some 20 years before retirement, these software auteurs are widely regarded to be 'over the hill', and thereafter in decline until death lays them off at last. (And their job is taken by a 22-year-old.)

It's little wonder that CS doesn't attract freshmen the way honey does flies. Aside from its attractive starting wage, in too many ways a CS degree portends 2-3 decades of social isolation and indentured servitude, followed at midlife by obsolescence and oblivion.

At the end of life, is it possible that any programmer will ever look back on their days and shout, 'My greatest dream has been achieved. I have truly changed the world!'

IMHO, the answer is no. I believe THAT is why students are not flocking to CS programs. CS is not a road to significance.
I went for a slightly cheaper option ($950), with a slower GPU, less disk, but more RAM and better PSU and case:

- Used Dell T7500 (Xeon X5675, 48GB RAM): US$350 including delivery from ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-T7500-Home-PC-Xeon-6-Core-3-06G...

- Nvidia GTX1080 8GB (US$480)

- SSD ($100)

- USB 3.0 PCIE card ($20)
Ask HN: How best to model a government programmatically?
So I've been looking lately at the functioning of government and how it's basically just a bunch of rules (laws) with some state (time, elected officials, votes). I'm wondering if there's precedent for modelling systems like this programmatically?

For an example of the desired functionality, let's say you're an interested citizen who wishes to gain more insight into a proposed law - the model I'm talking about would take the current state of your government and provide you with the possibilities for that law to pass.

I understand this is a difficult problem and involves a fair bit of ambiguity (indeed there would be many outcomes from a model which would be 'let the courts decide') but as a starting point I'm interested in what people might suggest could be an interesting place to start; Prolog? Smart contracts?

Much obliged for any insight.
> The very fact that you must write (function sin), or #'sin, or use funcall is a way that it treats functions differently than normal values.

It doesn't treat functions differently from other values. You can say (defvar fn (lambda (x) (+ x 2))) and put a function in a value cell if you want, and then to pass it to a function you just say fn, same as if it were a non-function value. The distinction you're talking about is about symbols being treated differently depending on context, not anything about functions being treated differently from other values.
Of course, "the plural of anecdote is not 'data'," is the first thing I would say. I know someone who just went through the process to hire a half-dozen interns, some from top schools, who (frankly) would argue with you. There are a thousand possible reasons for this but I think the best course of action is to dispense with that, personal, line of reasoning.
Yeah, and 2x4 boards aren't as intuitive as 50x100cm boards.
Sorry, should have added a explanation.

The first character of 馬來 is "horse" and the second is "come/arrive". So I was sitting there puzzling it out until I realised that if I pronounced it in Mandarin, it sounded a lot like "Malay" - which is in fact what it means.
Oh, nice, I hadn't heard of Haxe, I'm now reading more here https://haxe.org/
You're correct, it really should be the 2nd way. The current form isn't really a problem per se, mostly just that the generated hashes are really long and make the output harder to read. I'll get that updated, great catch.

EDIT: code updated.
I don't have any other questions, but I want to reply to thank you for taking the time for writing up the response

thanks :)
> Languages often use '+' for both numeric addition and string concatenation

Perl uses . or ~ depending on which version you are using. It also uses braces for code blocks and postfixed ifs which prevents errors like:

if (x)
y
z

Instead of:

if (x)
y
z

It prides itself to being close to natural language yet still uses braces.
208.7 by 208.7 feet. Its not hard. Found it on Google:

https://www.infoplease.com/askeds/dimensions-acre

"The acre, by the way, was originally an English unit of measurement that described the area that a yoke of oxen could plow in a day."
Great column. And end of an era. Good luck to him.
IMO Giphy has raised far too much money to ever be a viable business.
The law comes about from many years of precedent based on various ambiguous circumstances, eg it's a bit of a 'bottom up' thing, i'm not sure if a 'top down' approach like this would work for day-to-day laws. Maybe it'd be better for things that don't change much, eg a constitution. Fun thought experiment though!
I like mercury https://mercury.postlight.com/

I've also had good luck with extensions built on https://www.diffbot.com/
Viewing this from the far remove of (southern) Western Europe, I am constantly amazed by these kinds of reports of emotionally charged political correctness interacting with rising polarisation (in this case, apparently racially based). Some might argue that's my White Privilege speaking.
What are the best alternative to skype app
Tech Digest 2017
Restate Your UI: Using State Machines To Simplify User Interface Development
Import/Export Products and reviews on your WooCommerce store
I can confirm that he does. He is a full time lecturer for 3 or 4 classes a semester and produces a staggering amount of material. He is careful to never repeat assignments and each one requires detailing the project, creating automated tests, creating all sorts of frameworks for them(eg, import this jar and pass the instance of your game logic to this black box and you'll have an interactive Swing application to play the game). He plans out his lectures thoroughly and has 2-4 hours of them a day. This doesn't even cover office hours or meetings.

I never really realized how much work a good lecturer does until I was a TA under them. I have so much more respect for people teaching introductory classes now.
Which is irrelevant to stripping subs from one movie at a time.
>then the government loses tax revenue.

Actually, this would not always be true. Yes, in many cases would, but it would depend on the elasticity of supply and demand. The total size of the tax incidence would be government revenue from the tax.

The idea is not necessarily to outlaw carbon emissions, but to set a tax equal to the economic burden the emissions place on the global economy.

But a tax such as this should be designed to be revenue neutral--which we as humans are capable of doing.

Even though these things are possible, economic policy is so filled with politics, and politics is so filled with corruption, that I have little to no hope it will change.
Democratizing quant trading
I teach at a (somewhat academic) high school, and we've noticed a massive shift in how students think about copying in the past few years - about half of our students think it's OK to share answers for an assessment where it will assist another student (i.e. classical notion of cheating). I'm very curious if this is a mind-shift in younger people that are just a lot happier to share things, and this is just a consequence.

The other thing to consider with this is that the assessment system probably needs to be overhauled entirely - which would be a good thing as there are plenty of other reasons why it's broken.
As a small company, you are barely affecting Google's targeting algorithms on your own.
Manuel Noriega, Dictator Ousted by U.S. In Panama, Dies at 83
For me, if I schedule something it immediately becomes a chore -- another to-do on the list -- and it depletes willpower from other things that I have to do. If I'm reading for work, that's fine. But if I'm reading for enjoyment, well, that kind of kills the point of it. I want something that refreshes me instead of exhausting me.

What I've found works is setting up my environment so that reading is easy and natural. The absolute most effective thing for me has been banning my laptop and tablet from my bedroom, and setting up my phone to charge on the opposite side of the room. I keep a book or my e-reader on the side of my bed and generally need some unwinding time before sleep so I end up reading before bed.

The other massive for me is audiobooks. I know everyone has their own opinion on whether this counts as reading, but as far as I'm strongly on the pro-side. I spend a significant portion of my day -- when I'm walking, driving, chores, exercise -- listening to either podcasts or audiobooks. I've read a lot more books than I would have otherwise, and it definitely reinforces the visual/normal/book reading habit as well. I particularly like whispersync when its available, and I can switch back and forth between reading on my kindle and listening on my phone.
Hedge Funds make 20% of profits. But first you have to raise a fund. On Quantopian, you can make 10%. Invest first, let others copy you is democratizing Hedge Funds and that is a big deal.
Redesigning TopBuzz – A Case Study
Name-dropping
Until you're working on something that can segfault/fail to null terminate a string/fail to sanitize user input, etc. And the compiler won't tell you if the semantics of your program is garbage either.
If you were to devote more time to MoonScript, what would be the likelihood of including Lua 5.3 compatibility?
Nakadi: Distributed event bus that implements a RESTful API abstraction
It doesn't have a good native gui story, but it does have a pretty good native graphics story - so it's a great fit for games.

It has the potential to be great for native guis if someone were to take the time to write the various bindings required, and probably a tool for building out the targets like the ones that exist for game/graphic oriented apps.
Checkout discord. It was developed for gamers but lots of people are now using it for remote pairing.
First result in google says Mexicans make 59% of illegal immigrants in U.S., per wikipedia - 62%.
Unpaid intern solutions
How does startup founders feel if instead of monetary compensation, you give interns equity?
Trying to solve the unpaid intern problem.
A few anecdotes from college (15 years ago now) regarding cheating/"cheating":

I transferred from community college, where we used C++. The new school used Java, but the C++ classes still counted as credit at the new school, so I was in upper division classes. I asked a teacher about it, they said "theres no way you can survive this class if you don't already know Java." I used one weekend to learn Java, and saw it wasn't much different. However, throughout the semester that teacher would continually say "I know there are cheaters in this class because I know some of you don't even know Java." Uhuh.

My first actual cheating encounter was also that same semester, after I turned in my first project for a class, a classmate asked to see how I did something. Ignorant me sent them my project so they could. However, we had a final project built on the first. After the class ended they admitted they never finished the first, and used my first project as a base for their final project. Lesson learned.

Someone offered me $200 to do a group project with them. Not really cheating, but their intentions were obvious. No thanks.

Of course, plenty of dead weight on other group projects. But nothing as overt as the above two incidents.
Tesla has had repeated success raising money by going to the financial markets, so, it appears that enough fools are willing to invest to sustain them until now and for a while longer.
If you have a great business idea, don’t talk to a VC
It's all 65c816 machine code, which is well documented. You'd run the ROM through a disassembler and use an emulator to find out what everything does. Most (all?) of the disassembly work has already been done though, as SMW is very, very popular to romhack.
The ONLY reliable way to count calories out is to wear a mask that measures carbon dioxide exhaled - this is what you see them doing in labs with a volunteer on a treadmill or stationary bike hooked up to what looks like breathing apparatus.

This obviously isn't practical for every day use but the data has been used to approximate calories out correlated with heart rate if body weight is known - several sports watches such as Suunto use this approach.
This is not the case: Prolog has several higher order constructs like the call/N family of predicates, maplist/[3,4] and foldl/N.

Your particular example of transitive relations is one of the most elementary examples that are typically solved in basic Prolog courses as exercises, when defining reachability: B is reachable from A if there is an arc between A and B. Transitivity can easily be defined by a rule, as you correctly mention. For instance, let us take your example:

fact(a > b).
fact(b > c).

transitive(A, B) :- fact(F), F =.. [_,A,B].
transitive(A, C) :- fact(F), F =.. [_,A,B], transitive(B, C).

Here are all solutions:

?- transitive(X, Y).
X = a,
Y = b ;
X = b,
Y = c ;
X = a,
Y = c ;
false.

Note that the operator ">" is not mentioned in the definition of transitive/2. Instead, I am using the meta-predicate (=..)/2 to reason about all functors that can arise, making this a quite general definition of transitive relations.

We can also reason explicitly about the relation, by making the functor (which may, or may not be defined as an operator) available as a predicate argument:

transitive(Op, A, B) :- fact(F), F =.. [Op,A,B].
transitive(Op, A, C) :- fact(F), F =.. [Op,A,B], transitive(Op, B, C).

Now we can ask queries like:

?- transitive(Op, X, c).
Op = (>),
X = b ;
Op = (>),
X = a ;
false.

and also in the other direction:

?- transitive(Op, a, Y).
Op = (>),
Y = b ;
Op = (>),
Y = c ;
false.

And we can also ask in the most general way possible, where all arguments are fresh variables.
Using Mopidy with Spotify and ncmpcpp
Ask HN: What is your sleep schedule?
And how consistent are you on keeping it over long periods of time and over weekdays/weekends?
Get the extension pinch-to-zoom-firefox-osx

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pinch-to-zoom...
> It got so bad the whole MechEng dept at my school got rid of homework in favor of problem sets that were solved in a given classroom, at a given time, with a TA supervising.

Sounds like the Khan Academy format. Which is probably a better way for everyone to learn, to be honest. Why spend hours going down the wrong rabbit hole only to get the wrong answer anyway? Might as well have a TA around to help guide your approach.
Trivia point: One of the co-authors of the piece, Jeremy Merrill, is a programmer-journalist at the Times (and previously at ProPublica); I imagine he helped with the code:

https://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/upton-a-web-scraping-f...

http://jeremybmerrill.com/blog/2016/01/flyover.html

http://jeremybmerrill.com/clips/2013/05/updating-dollars-for...
Become Totally Certifiable… for AWS
Commentary: Warning signs Silicon Valley cannot ignore
Mossberg: The Steve Jobs I knew isn't in this movie (2015)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gert_Postel
Esoteric Programming Languages [pdf]
Not to be rude, as I am genuinely interested in this area. But is there much more to it than adding a GA tracker and setting up the dashboard?
Your question is too general, and you'd have realized it if you built a toy model. You need to think about what your goals are with the model. If it's to build a replica government in code, then make a start and have at it, no special tech is needed. Just start encoding your data (eg. {"Jaywalking Fee" : "100.00"} into files your model can parse.

Prolog isn't the right tool here, there are no complex dependency chains to reason through, it's not really right for modelling uncertainty, which you will have to accept until you start caring about what parts of the model will need to be high fidelity.
PGObserver: Monitoring for your postgresql databases
These figures would make a good medium article.

Showing the longer term change is really cool.
I liked this one better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7baalgg9ZDE

It sound like it was from Reading Rainbow.
Holy shit, yeah. Last time I looked at those pages was like 15 years ago.
No attempt was made to measure the number of productive dropouts. I.e. authors bias was "count people with a degree."

Hypothesis, gedanken experiment. Award all hackers who are able to support themselves, not necessarily as developers, but having to do with computers, with a CS degree. The curve fills right in.
Another one gone. John Markoff retired this year, too.
> What's with the obsession with student assessment over student learning

Surely you don't believe turning in someone else's work for an assignment counts as learning. At some level, we do need to know whether a student has learned the material. We assign homework because a) it's more efficient than lab assignments b) adult students grasp concepts best by doing. We grade them because we believe more students will do the work that leads to learning, because the students themselves want high grades (well, employers and scholarships do).

I'd be happy to see someone try to teach an intro to CS course in a US flagship state school with homework optional, and grades purely based on tests. Would that meet your definition of student learning?
I don't know, I rolled my own search feature for a previous project just using mysql full text search with weighted results and ended up with something that worked way better than reddit's search function. Building the next google is hard but building a functional search feature isn't exactly rocket science, especially when you have reddit level money.
What does "startup time" mean compared to "usage"?
I'm not sure what's the status of Titanium / Appcelerator[1], which was one of the first frameworks to compile to the native platform. Had used it in a project long ago. It had its own share of issues and buggy tools.

[1]: www.appcelerator.com
So? Just maintain a GPS Offset Table :-P
TBQH, Management does not care about clean code so much as getting a project out by the deadline however unrealistic it may be. Clean code is very low on their list of priorities. Even among managers who used to be engineers it's very low on the list of priorities. They say they care about it. That's not the reality though.
How I managed to boost my apps downloads
if you know enough coding to break up and merge functions, you can also write fizzbuzz and therefore are not the type of person this article and comments are picking on.
It demonstrates a difficulty of formal verification. You can prove the program matches the specification, but how do you know the specification is correct?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
At my uni you had to have all electronic devices in your bag under your desk and have all supporting materials displayed on your desk before the exam. There were floor walkers who would go up and down the aisles constantly throughout the exam looking for signs of cheating. If you were caught you were expelled.

A neighbouring uni even gave students lockers and didn't permit bringing anything into their exams.

Exam cheating seems like an incredibly easy problem to solve.
> These people are paying millions for API keys they can't yet use?

Comparing API keys to tokens is quite weird. I don't think they have almost anything to do with each other.

In general the blog text is pretty bad. It doesn't differentiate very well between tokesn and cryptocurrencies. Tokens are usually not mined but are more like shares in a company. Also many of these ICO's are very scammy, investors should be cautious.
I'll be mildly amused if sites are forced to return to server-side log collection because enough folks have started using tracking blockers.

That's already available as a service from Cloudflare.[1] Since so many sites go through Cloudflare, they know what many large sites are doing.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/analytics/
Study: Walking Can Be as Good as Running
This made me inexplicably sad. I wasn't a huge Mossberg fan or anything and haven't read more than a handful of his articles (nothing against the man, of course). But I think it's hard to hear about this and not be affected, even if only a tiny bit. We're some 35 or so years into the era of the personal computer and it's basically at that point where an entire generation of great names in the industry have spent a full and productive career in the service of technology and are now stepping down... and in some ways, the industry itself is retiring (as he mentions). Times are a-changing and we must change with them, adapt or die.

So long, Walt.
Tokens ban be used to fund anything, including open source projects. However the general trend seems to be that token crowdsales are just used to fund more token crowdsales, as it doesn't really make sense to do the work when you get the money up front.
I didn't cheat once through a CS degree gained in the early 90's (as my sometimes shabby, sometimes ok results would show), but I was made hard to think about whether a certain incident was cheating or not. One of my final year subjects involved a group project; we had to develop a PDA-type collection of applications, so it fitted well with a group project. The 'calculator' guy never turned up to any programming sessions or meetings aside from the initial one - someone else ended up hacking together his app in the last day - and then 60 minutes prior to the submission deadline. Back then we had to put together a paper project outline and notes, and there were strict requirements for it's submission format; laid out like so, printed like so, index like this, bound like that. If this paper submission was a minute late, we'd be docked 50% (!) of our overall marks. Four of us were panicking, with < 1hr left to submit, our project unprinted and unbound, and us with no idea how to operate the required machinery. The fifth member, our 'calculator' guy, actually shows up, and then proceeded to, unassisted, blitz through the printing, collation and binding of the project. We eventually submitted a minute or two prior to cutoff, and got a good mark; without the 'calculator' guy, who did no programming whatsoever, we would have been in big trouble. I've always wondered if he went on to be the 'binder guy' or 'fixer' IRL after graduating.
Not for most people here, though

I doubt you have any data to back that 'most' up. There are a lot of people reading here and many of them are not like yourself.
I'd be interested in seeing that slideshow if anyone has it.
Motorcycles just add more speed to the equation,
and have to play in the same arena as cars.

aren't these two points a pretty big deal?
A Canvas Made of Pixels (2015)
The Future of Cloud Computing Communication in Australia