skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's possible to be aware that certain tools exist and have an idea about what they're used for, and yet know little enough about them to butt into a discussion and give any sort of fruitful, educated opinion about them.

My imaginary senior web developer knows more than a dozen languages. It is almost a given that one of these languages is technically sound and a reasonable choice for a given task, and that developer should be able to pick that language just fine. However, if there are other compelling reasons to look into other languages (for example because company wants cheap coders and think there's a large pool of cheap talent skilled in language X, or because the company needs to leverage the ecosystem surrounding language Y), that same senior developer is more than capable of doing a bit of research and evaluating these languages.

You almost sound like one of these interviewers who think that a programmer who can't implement a red-black tree off the top of his head and state its worst case insertion complexity couldn't possibly be capable of looking it up and evaluating the relative merits of different data structures -- and thus cannot be trusted to any position where he might have to pick an algorithm. Nevermind if he could implement two dozen other data structures in his sleep.

Over-specialization? Seriously? A programmer who's used more than a dozen programming languages is over-specialized because he can't discuss the two you want to talk about? The stench of elitism is only getting stronger here. You're assuming the worst of a programmer because his world doesn't revolve around the same things yours does, and you are assuming that despite their experience they probably will not try to or cannot educate themselves further.

Unfortunately I see this sort of prejudiced attitude everywhere... "I think this is important so if you don't know this, you can't possibly be any good." Such statements reveal a rather narrow world view.
> More apprenticeships would be better but there's also a tendency to overestimate their ability to solve economic problems that colleges failed at.

I'm the original writer and I definitely agree that they're not a panacea. But I would argue that they're a movement in the right direction, especially in the "college for everyone" world:

Apprenticeships are also an obviously good idea from the perspective of academia; anyone who teaches college students at schools below the most elite level knows that a large number of students really shouldn’t be in college. This was most obvious to me at the University of Arizona, but it happens across the academic landscape. I’ve been teaching undergrads for ten years, and it’s clear that many undergrads don’t know why they’re in college, don’t care about school, and are floundering in an academic milieu.

The debt students take to get degrees of dubious value, or, worse, to drop out after two years, is staggering.
What stops hiring managers and potential colleagues?
Most recently I asked if the recruiter knew the difference between Java and JavaScript, since he had just mentioned both of them.

"Uh, they're web technologies... in very high demand."

"Yes, but is there a difference between them? What kind of web technologies are they?"

Long pause.

The background silence changes a little, as though a hand were placed over the telephone's mouthpiece.

I can't hear the word in the conversation he's having, but it's clear that he is talking to someone.

The hand goes away.

"Java is a general purpose computer programming language with concurrent objects, and JavaScript is the script version."

Pause.

"Did I get that right?"
It could also be based upon patent rights, I know that employees get a 50% ownership of all patents, maybe that's part of it?
Remember LiveCoding.tv? This is why I think it failed
In my opinion, side projects don't have to ship. Some people do need to ship side projects, some people do not. It's important to challenge yourself with code, absolutely, but enforcing deadlines on yourself is usually just met with disappointment when you don't do it. Additionally, by allowing yourself to stop working on side projects when you want, you can focus on doing the parts of coding that you enjoy which means you can find your preferences and passion.

However, I do believe that everyone should be able to set up a server and a web page to show off the functionality of any side project they make (or an app). The best part about any side project is taking your phone out with your friends and showing it off.
Which makes it even a better (i.e. more hard-to-please) customer from Amazon's perspective.
There's actually a way to get that. Use work-hire tests.

Work hire tests are anonymous and unbiased. Either candidates can do the work, or they can't.

You have to set it up so that the work-hire test is all that matters, though, which ~nobody does.
Ring’s new video doorbell gets 1080p video and a swappable battery pack
Worse still-- past employment at the majors is seen as a strong "social proof" indicator by many including other employers and investors.

I saw an angel.co drinking game once. I think you had to chug two drinks for "worked at X" (where X is any major) being put forward as the sole qualification of a founder or key early employee. This is starting to edge out "went to X" where X is a top-tier school.

China is supposedly deploying their own horrific state-sponsored "social credit score" system, but we're doing it too. We're just doing it in a less centralized way. In a way that's worse. In China everyone will know of this system and its existence and I'm sure people will figure out so many ways to game it it'll become irrelevant. In the West people will remain blissfully ignorant as ours has no name or formal identity.

Ultimately I am still more creeped out by what our private sector is doing than what our NSA and CIA are doing. Neither is good, but the latter has some oversight and regulation. The former has absolutely no regulation or oversight whatsoever, and in any case the private sector is very often better at such things than the public sector is. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Facebook's data analytics are far superior to the NSA's.
While I agree with the OP's statement that most people work for the money because they have bills to pay, there comes a point where one can earn half as much as they currently do and stay afloat. Working for money less means/allows spending time, the only resource no one can get more of, doing things they love and enjoy. If someone does work they enjoy, or live a satisfying life (even when considered "toiling" by others) then money isn't that important or a driving force. Some people bust their butts now, while young and able bodied, for the possibility of retiring later on. Other people don't really think much about their life or have future goals or plans... those people's life's plans tend to be chosen and dictated by others. Whatever you (anyone) do it's just best to be intentional about it.
If you are systematically under-estimating (as most novice estimators - people tend to be optimistic) - then you can calculate how much you usually under-estimate and then adjust.
Show HN: Vue Paper Dashboard – Free Bootstrap Dashboard for Vue.js 2
Could be a case of peer pressure. They worry that if they are not quick to condemn they themselves will be condemned.
Emails are messy, siloed, opaque. Nobody in a team shares the same version of an email chain. No central source of truth means a high chance of not being on the same page. Emails have so many problems. Feel free to read through our comparison Twist vs Emails: https://medium.com/@hfauq/email-or-twist-why-twist-is-better...
As you have a newfound love for file polyglots, have a look at this talk by Ange Albertini, one of the people behind PoC||GTFO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdCs6bPM4is
Wow, this got buried fast.

But it is worth considering. Hrm, Seems like Holland is known for its windmills.

Vast lands in the midwest that are unsuitable for farming are being turned into wind-farms. This is controversial because it is subsidized so it's difficult to do a cost-benefit analysis.

Finally, if climate-change is an issue, we should also consider that wind take energy out of the atmosphere whereas the proposed alternatives put waste energy into the atmosphere.
Wars have a statistically significant impact on life expectancy for young adults (males typically) as well. You can see it in the cohorts aged around massive conflicts.
If you'd like a good insight into the mismanagement or corruption (interpretation is left to how gracious you're feeling on the day) have a read of The Monthly's article from a couple of years ago headlined "How network companies lined their pockets and drove electricity prices through the roof"

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/july/1404136800/jes...

For a country that generates so much wealth <sic> from digging stuff out of the ground and burning it (or selling it to other people to burn), the regrettable state of the nation could appear to the casual observer to be quite mysterious.
Yep, sticking plasters over problems describes it perfectly ;) Many refactoring attempts, but never completed, because JS makes it really hard. And yes, code quality is bad. Most of it was written by people who never wrote JS/HTML before, then it grew historically and here we are with this mess.

But besides TS being very helpful in a messy code base, personally I would also always start a new project with TS. For me the benefits greatly outweigh the minor annoyances (I really see them as minor)
Here's his logic, so you don't have to subject yourself to that "article" -> solar and wind contribute very little to global energy at the moment. Energy demand is growing at 2% per year. Therefore, wind and solar won't contribute a significant chunk of energy ever. Therefore, let's invest in gas.

Dumpster tier reporting. On a side note, does HN blacklist any sites for being chronically bad?
The trick of entering a dummy username and password, which is then modified in the post request sounds a whole lot better than playing clipboard roulette or messing with the DOM.
Web of Lies
The Ozone Widget Framework is horrible, you have to build your application sets to function standalone as well as in a modular compatibility with other widgets. Things break frequently and for the longest time Silverlight was a requirement too (well after it was canceled). It was absolutely horrible when I used it.
Ben Thompson(the author of stratechery) is a smart guy, but his free articles, even though that they seem deep, do lack domain/technical knowledge. I've noticed that on the subjects of self-driving-cars, car-sharing and now on logistics/delivery/e-commerce - notice how abstract and detail free this article is.

But actually, that could be a great content authoring strategy: create a really good, smart name for yourself. write articles that the smart people of the internet like to read. give them the wrong answer, they will be forced to correct you. collect replies(including those from you your closed forum) and grab the right answer. publish and charge.

Don't know if that's the strategy. But it could work.
I want to emphasize the Tooling is terrible and non-free

It is really hard to get a young programmer excited about programming FPGAs when the tools are archaic, buggy, proprietary, and non-portable. The higher-level interfaces (C abstractions etc.) are also lacking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseconomies_of_scale
How to Increase Your Self-Discipline
Our species is hardwired to mix among multiple social groups, each having different norms and hierarchies. We have positively proven that we evolve over time by allowing repugnant minorities the ability to publicly speak. Out of 100 reprehensible social opinions, one turns out to be the next Martin Luther King, Jr. Our perception of something as being "good" or "bad" for public discourse is notoriously fallible and broken.

The things I say in a social group of former college buddies and the things I say in a group of the local clergy are two different things. That doesn't make me two-faced: it makes me human. In fact, the ability to converse and trade with drastically different social groups is probably the essence of humanity.

Yet our current overlords that program the internet are convinced that the entire world should run as if it were just a huge version of their favorite social group. Joe tells racist jokes? Maybe we let Joe continue, but we definitely ought to score that. After all, Joe could offend somebody -- and then they would be mad at our platform, not Joe.

We are instrumenting a terrible evil on our species, even more evil than the security and surveillance state, if such a thing could be possible. SkyNet has finally attacked, and because there are no T-1000s leading the way the vast majority of the population doesn't even know it's at war.
How Millennials Killed J Crew
Hi guys, I'm Alex, one of the creators of Vue Paper Dashboard. It is released under MIT License, so feel free to play with it and use it in internal/commercial projects.

We want to improve it so any feedback will be highly appreciated.

Thank you,
Alex
My first thought when I saw https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1000/1*zI94S5XizoB4WickR... was "looks like email"
We already generate ~6% of all our power in the US by wind power, which is incredible considering that modern wind turbines installation really only hit its stride in 2010 or so. Of course much of the world is behind the US–we lead the world in a lot of things. This is a silly and unthoughtful hit piece. Advocating for natural gas as a cleaner source than wind power is borderline idiotic. Dumpster bin article.
At least they merged / are merging IAD and SID, less confusion more chaos! https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/natio...
Before you waste your precious time one should consider that the author has quite the history of writing contrarian articles related to climate change and renewable energy that are poorly researched and/or flat out wrong. The author also has no real experience in the field.
We number with BCD in honor of the HP48 calculator's floating point implementation, which matches decimal rounding errors. 0x0A, &c., are reserved for special issues in the future ;-)
You better watch out
You better not cry
Better not pout
I'm telling you why
Big Data is coming to town

It knows when you are sleeping [0]
It knows when you're awake
It knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake.

0: https://medium.com/@sqrendk/how-you-can-use-facebook-to-trac...
It's like any other thing in capitalism. You'll have a contingent of folk that won't do the work, based on ethical reasons, and you have folk that will, for financial reasons.

Anecdotally, the few folks I know that work for data collection companies are all "tinfoil hat" types. They have flip-phones, they have no online presence, they smile like a Cheshire Cat when you ask them about it and you generally get the impression they've just decided to categorize it as "us" and "them". :-\
> It's a comparison between people aged past 5 in both populations. It's not that unfair.

It's not like for like. The comparison they use is life expectancy at birth now versus life expectancy at 65 in 1850.

If you use the correct comparison i.e. life expectancy at 5 for both, it's 54.6 in 1841 and 79.4 in 2011. I link to the ONS source is a separate post.
Isn't that 'power capacity'? And since wind turbines don't often run at capacity, its a greatly inflated view of the situation.
It's not like he crunched the numbers wrong.

Nuclear has massive bang for your buck (both figuratively and literally) but we ignore it in the first world because we cater to peoples' mostly irrational fear of it and there is no money to do it right in the third world.
Oh dear, looks like I really need to get my dad to redesign his website
How Do Artificial Neural Networks Learn?
Making it to 40 only increases a males life expectancy by around 2.25 years to 78.53 and that only jumps to 81.5 at 60. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html?bcsi-ac-a36e4bd...

At 70 you only have ok odds of hitting 80-90. However, even at 85 the odds of hitting 90 are only ~50/50.

PS: Yes, there are plenty of people who will see 100+, but that's mostly because the initial pool is so large.
I don't think there's any risk of that. As I pull out my favorite quote for the last few months:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

Very few people in the upper echelons of society (like highly-paid Silicon Valley engineers) truly believe they're doing something wrong, or could even be convinced they are doing something wrong. Above a certain level on Mazlowe's hierarchy, people have selected where they work in part because of the mission. They have bought the company line because in part, the company line is what they're there for.

People at Google don't work there because they really love advertising and really love putting banner ads in front of people. They work at Google because they believe they're 'making the world a better place'.

And good luck convincing anyone that their purpose in life is a lie and that they're part of the problem. I've convinced exactly zero people so far.

I mean, I'm sure Uber employees feel they're empowering people to work for themselves and helping people make a decent living who might otherwise be stuck unemployed. Maybe it took that many blatant scandals and fiascos for Travis Kalanick to come to terms with the fact that he wasn't making the world a better place?
I agree but I must also point out that in some parts of the country not being a Trump supporter could have serious social consequences. The entire country is not San Francisco.
Guns kill nearly 1,300 US children each year, study says
I was able to use Python + Arrow to convert single files into Parquet.
Anything with about a centimetre of firm foam is fine. Yoga mats, work mats, etc.
Future energy: Will buses be run on fuel generated by coffee waste?
I am pretty sure the code is reusing IVs for AES-CTR[0] (i.e. the encryption is worthless), because it doesn't specify an IV and Node seems to derive the IV from the key.[1] This seems like a massive footgun in Node.

I don't think their scheme results in different keys for each site, but I could be wrong.

[0] https://github.com/HainaLi/horcrux_password_manager/blob/mas...

[1] https://nodejs.org/api/crypto.html#crypto_crypto_createciphe...
There was an estimate of the cost of keeping up with demand using wind - and the back-of-the-envelope numbers were discouraging. 2TW per year, and wind power takes a huge investment in the towers to produce relatively tiny amounts of watts.
I guess if your system is compromised then password security becomes gravely threatened, no matter how secure the password manager may be. The only partial solution I can think of is to have the OS sandbox every application from every other.
C/C++ REST API frameworks benchmark
Where Is Our Sun's Twin?
While this is funny it misses the point that life is a journey and not about the end result.
> My smart watch ... spams me mercilessly until I block apps and if I block enough apps I may as well have a cheap dumb watch.

Definitely block the spammy apps. It makes a huge different to the smartwatch experience if it's only buzzing for things that really are urgent. Once you tune the notifications, it's actually calming - not only because you're not being interrupted as often, but also because you're not constantly thinking "is there something that needs my attention". If there is, the watch will let you know.
I don't think this is a huge exaggeration. This falls directly into the "it's funny because it's true" category, down to the last sentence. I've had far more interviews that went like this than I care to admit. Most of them (mercifully) end at the phone screen and I don't have to haul myself into an office for more of this treatment.

For an industry constantly whining about the "shortage of tech talent" we treat tech talent pretty horribly while we court them. It's like a guy complaining there aren't enough good women out there, starting a date by pulling out a tape measure.
Hi HackerNews,

Here is a benchmark that I have done to compare C/C++ REST API frameworks. I hope this will be interesting and helpful for you (-:
Computational Propaganda Worldwide: Executive Summary
My company is looking at using Mattermost, but I have the same qualms, since it honestly won't be much better (if not worse) than using our standard enterprise Lync/Skype for IM.

We have an internal reddit-like forum with a "like" model (no dislike/downvote) but it isn't utilized to make work happen. Email is still the way to go...which to my understanding, that's essentially exactly what doist has recreated.
Free as in beer is a term for Freeware, you can use the software for free but you don't have access to the source code.

It's like if someone was to give away free beer, you just have beer you can't make more, or modify it into something else.
Bleach has been used in bombs around the world, should I not use it because there's a chance it's been used for (perceived) evil?
Also, where before one could mark1 eyeball what the bootup was trying to do, and reason fixes from that, now one have to rely on an analyzer to tell what the sequence will be. And if said analyzer can't be used, what then?

And similarly the journal format is something that can only be read with the journalctl tool. plain ascii you can throw just about anything at.
A Chance to Win $1000 Ad Credit for App Developers
In the context of the publication, "PoC" additionally stands for "Pictures of Cats". https://twitter.com/fbz/status/876554986569711616
Look man, you can have any browser you want, as long as its Safari.
"Free as in beer" is a phrase (loosely coined by Richard Stallman) to indicate that something does not cost money. This is as opposed to "free as in speech", meaning that it comes with no restrictions.
"I just write raw SQL that serves JSON directly back."

I'm surprised and intrigued by this. How do you get your query to return JSON? What percentage of your code actually works like that? How business logic heavy is your SQL? This is super interesting!
You just described the Victorian condition. I wonder if we're on the verge of a digital neo-Victorianism.
"As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips."
Imagine your company has a mailing list that goes to everyone (it probably does; most organisations do). In a small company it's fine for anyone to send to it but it's quite annoying and unnecessary so the use of it is discouraged by company culture. As the organisation grows there's a point where the email administrator restricts who can send to it because it would be actively damaging to the email infrastructure if too many people used it, and it'd annoy a lot of people.

Very few people abandon email because their organisation has a mailing list.

Slack's @channel is exactly the same thing albeit on a smaller scale. If it gets too distracting just tell people not to use it so much.
Republican data firm leaks 200m+ voter records
Government Spyware Targets Mexican Activists and Their Families
I'm getting a vibe that many commenters skipped the first sentence of the final paragraph because they were too preoccupied being angry that someone dare insult the economic efficiency of green energy sources.

the author states:

>And let’s put some of that burgeoning wealth in nuclear, fission and fusion, so that it can take over from gas in the second half of this century.

He's advocating for nuclear power. From a pure numbers perspective it makes a lot of sense.