skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you heard of the Norweigen gender equality paradox? In countries like Norway where gender equality is high, you see men and women taking on more stereotypical jobs (e.g. women as nurses, men as firefighters)

I think this is because when social freedom is maximized, biological differences are more able to fully express themselves. Conversely, in countries that are less free, men and women may be compelled to take on jobs they don't really want in order to survive.

Men and women have obvious biological differences that have evolved over millions of years.

Women as mothers have evolved compassion and emotional bonding to maximize the survival of their infants, which explains the stereotypical nursing, administrative, and care taking roles.

Men have evolved as hunters and warriors, where emotion is secondary to rationality, and at worse a hindrance in the brutality of war.

Since technical roles are largely divorced from emotion, masculine rather than feminine traits are better suited at a biological and psychological level.

I think we should absolutely strive for gender equality in a legal and social sense, but then we shouldn't be surprised if women aren't rabid about sitting at computers all day.
Excellent artícle. I was aware of MongoDB's problems as a document store, but I wasn't aware of how clueless was the company.
Do you think all sex workers are prostitutes?
Javascript without type info is nearly impossible to refactor effectively.
SocketCluster Pub/Sub Scalability Considerations
> I would say 999 is still the better choice as it is always the last stop on a rotary.

No, zero is. (It would not be possible to flash the line zero times, so a zero is dialed with ten flashes.)
Hardcore Container Debugging
Yeah I feel you, the management overhead is a big pain for many people at the moment, ourselves included.

There's a couple of improvements to this coming in the next two months: 1) a new transport (QUIC) which has less overhead, 2) smarter connection handling which closes unneccessary connections earlier, 3) more efficient announcements of who-has-what.
(possibly dumb q, pls be gentle)

Hmmm... What happens if the application crashes immediately after removing the work item but before it can do anything else? Doesn't this break exactly-once semantics... ?

i.e. wouldn't a complete implementation include a second table with "who's working on what" and a transaction that moves the records from one table to the either... and come to think of it, why not store both tables in the same place? I.e. don't delete records, just mark them as taken and include a timestamp so we can timeout and give the work to another worker?

UPDATE queue_table
SET taken_by = :myId,
time_taken = now()
WHERE id = (
SELECT id
FROM queue_table
WHERE taken_by IS NULL
LIMIT 1
FOR UPDATE)

Note: completion can be signalled by setting taken_by to NULL, or but adding another column e.g. completion time, which then enables computing stats on completion times.

For high volume systems, we eventually want to garbage collect but that's easy since we have timestamps, i.e. put a partial index on timestamp (WHERE time_taken IS NOT NULL)
and scan the oldest ones...
That's not correct. Facts are the opposite, women are kept out on many levels because of how they are often seen by society and what treatment do they regularly get along their career paths in the industry. Many research has been done on that, on many levels. What you describe as 'they simply aren't enrolling' is largely the result of keeping them out.
That's a good point. I was being overly pedantic.
>women, who have less power to complain about their behavior

The exact opposite is true. Almost nobody would take a man who complains about sexual harassment seriously. Just look at the night and day difference in response to teacher student abuse when the student is a guy or a girl.

I do not understand what world people live in where constant special concern is twisted into a lack of it. I mean, I do, in so far as it's just benevolent sexism masquerading as equality, but I can't wrap my head around those people considering themselves rational.
It said:

- Color extraction is hard

Color extraction? What does that refer to, exactly?
SuperMotiv Earn bits for achieving your goals Group up, Duel, Climb Leaderboards
"The paper has no obvious flaws that anyone unfamiliar with LIGO could point out. Therefore the best people who could assess it are the LIGO team"

What's the point of peer review, then? Why bother publishing detailed experimental reports and providing access to data if the team gives it the two thumbs up and no one on the team sees any flaws. Their word should be good enough.
There are many benefits to the transactional integrity you get when using direct connections to a relational database like PostgreSQL. Putting a queue outside of your db breaks ACID compliance and may result in silent conflicts or corruption when different services read and update the same data. DB transactions eliminate a bunch of the weird and dangerous corner cases you will get with data flows that are performed over multiple network hops having uncertain timing, congestion and reliability.

The performance and scalability of monolithic dbs is often better than people expect because the data stays closer to CPUs and doesn't move across multiple nodes on a relatively speaking, slow and unreliable network. Trying to add transactional safety after the fact on top of a clustered db/queue is a huge headache and you will never get it as good as transactions that happen inside a single server.

Of course there are concerns about scalability with a monolith. Manually sharding monoliths is a bit of work but it forces you to do your homework and find the natural and optimal sharding points. In a lot of cases, there are natural separation lines such as between groups of customers that you can use to shard and scale things up. Blindly distributing all data across a bunch of nodes has huge performance and reliability implications. A cpu's connection to it's ram and disks is orders of magnitude more reliable and fast than connections over the network. Unless you are building something like a social network where everything is connected to everything, you don't need things to default to run over clusters and over the network.
Progressive Web Apps Not Good News for Mobile App Developers
In fact, the complexity of your system has probably increased. I find the quality of software generally available under the GPL is inferior to that available under more permissive licenses, and in most cases that's due to huge amounts of unnecessary complexity. This may just be bias introduced by GNU, though. In some cases the GPL gets in the way of progress, such as the decable over GCC being able to export its AST for other tools to interact with - a feature RMS rejected on the grounds that it would make it possible to make nonfree tools that integrate with GCC.
I think "software developer" describes quite well what I do on a daily basis. Better than the "principal software engineer" that adorns my business card...

(which is still better than the "principal consultant" I had on my card in the early '90s when I was a mere kid - it made a grey haired banker in the city smirk a bit and remark "well, maybe when you have some grey hairs". At least I now have plenty of that!)
> is a personal choice

It is, in the sense, that your personality determines it. But you can't determine your personality. If you are born curious and independent, you'll probably find your way. You cannot chose your genes. This thing about immediate gratification is a lot about genes and environment. If you are born in an environment where only instant gratification is valued, and if you don't get the right genes, there is no chance, you can change your life by yourself.
So... what is Alice?
> Even if targeting base desires is your product design strategy doesn't mean it needs to be in a template for future founders to follow.

Call me old school, but I still think that JWZ post "Groupware Bad" is one of the most important in the history of blogging.
I tend to stick with the (intent of the) law here. I'm not an engineer, not in any jurisdiction I worked in.
Of course that you personally can't change the situation and you should take care of yourself first. Your are powerless to change a full community. The question is, should we do something collectively?

In a way, I think, this is precisely what the discussion in this thread is about.
You misattributed the quote:

""Competition is for losers." - Peter Thiel." -Michael Scott.

More seriously, I hate this quote, for so many reasons. Sure, it's great if you can do something no one else is doing and do it so well that no one can really compete with you. But there are plenty of people who compete with others and the world is often a better place as a result. It feels like people lose sight of the goals: not just becoming really wealthy, but perhaps serving the public?
If Amazon invests in their own self-driving fleet, the whole discussion is basically moot. If instead (and maybe more likely) there are a small number of carriers who have invested in big fleets of self-driving trucks and Walmart/Amazon blackballs any carrier who works with the other side they would still be limiting the supply side of the market and have to pay more.
Interesting point. However, perhaps the reason why you would just take it as a compliment, is because as a man, you haven't been in the position of being taken advantage of, or desired for purely sexual purposes by women in positions of power. I am making huge assumptions and generalizations of course, but as I understand, it is much more common for older men with power to "take advantage of" more vulnerable women, so women are instinctively taught (or learn) to be wary and incredibly careful in these situations to not give the wrong "signals". Whereas men, generally having no experiences with this dynamic, are more carefree.
It is a rather popular story, indeed:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20case%20of%20the%20500-mi...
Assuming that I can't get away with a web app, and need to install something native on the client side... is cross-platform support required?

If so, then your choices are:

1. Write separate native clients for Windows (in C#) and OS X (in Swift or Objective-C), and perhaps Linux (in whatever). It'll be hard to hire people who can work on all three, so you'll need more headcount and organizational/technical complexity.

2. Use a cross-platform framework like Qt, Wx, Gtk, etc. This will probably push you toward C++, which can be difficult to hire for. And you'll get constant complaints that the UI doesn't "look native enough" anyway.

3. Use Electron, and whichever JavaScript SPA framework is trendy this week. Have everyone on Hacker News declare your client to be "Flash for the Desktop", and be forced to re-write it with the next trendy framework two years later so that anyone will want to work for you.

4. Use JavaFX, and the JDK's built-in "javapackager" tool to create native installers for Windows, OS X, and Linux. Each of which includes a bundled JRE, with a size smaller than Electron. You won't be able to find a lot of JavaFX experience on the market... but Java developers are easy to find, and it only take a few weeks for decent ones to get up to speed with the framework.

Hell yeah, I'd use Java on the client side. None of the options are great, but Java's probably the least-bad.
I agree with you entirely though. That's the problem: the delta between the way capitalism is current running and how it should.

#LateStageCapitalismProblems
People say this mainly because of the brace-enclosed blocks of code being functions. However, that is really just a syntactic sugar for lambda (and can even have explicit arguments: (lambda (x y) ...) <--> {|x,y| ... }.
Extracting dominant colors from an image. In this case a screenshot. Since there may be loads of different colors (ie: gradients/photos). Knowing which colors are dominant is hard to determine.
In practice the Python language is so easy that you rarely have bugs related to types. And when you got it, you find it out pretty early.

Types are useful when you grow, but thinking that you can't do anything big and robust without it is ignoring all the people that actually do so.

Another thing is that the simplicity and power of Python leads to having a lot of libs that are actually clean and solid for a lot of stuff. If I need to create anything under 100000 vis/day, I'm 3 times faster than a Go or Java dev on the backend. Literally 3 times.

I also produce better results. With things like Django rest framework, I can get the same REST API, but all the edge cases will be way better handled, small error messages, multi type of auth, etc.

Those things exist because it's fast to code in Python. And yes, dynamic typing help with that a lot.

So yes, it's true I don't have as much code completion and I have to remember a bit more about the code, but it's an exchange I'm making.

When I want to scale up robustness, I use type hints with mypy and get a strong code completion on PyCharm.
Why NotPetya Kept Me Awake (& You Should Worry Too)
This hits the mark right on the head. Instead of ruining the shell with unnecessary complexity because it doesn't fit every use case, how about knowing when not to use the shell?
I agree with your opinion that the Apple Pencil offers the best experience (and I also own a Surface Pro 1 and 3 and a couple of iPad Pros).

Even the first Wacom stylus that Microsoft had for the first Surface Pro wasn't as good as the Pencil. When I got my first iPad Pro, I was angry at Microsoft for not doing as good a job as Apple did with the Pencil despite having many years head start. Honestly, wtf Microsoft?

Luckily for them I like just about everything else in Windows better than iOS. The only thing Windows has been missing for tablet mode IMO has been a dictation key on their virtual keyboard. That's why I treat my Surface Pro as a laptop. (I gave away the Surface Pro 1 and kept the 3.)

Microsoft is finally giving us a dictation key this fall though, so I will most likely switch away from iPad altogether if that works well. At that point the only thing the iPad will offer for me is the tight integration with Facetime/iMessage. I can't wait to have a full OS and real Chrome on a Windows tablet again!
Founder of disastrous Fyre Festival arrested and charged with fraud
"That's a damn fine coat you're wearing ..." ;)
I've always found it weird when people say stuff like this. Clearly your last team was bad, you even said the developers were less skilled, and time constraints were problems and yet you manage to blame tooling.

There's absolutely great test and CI tooling for JavaScript. The fact that you and your team didn't spend enough time to develop an expertise with them isn't the languages fault.
Good read

Some thoughts

How does one die on facebook? Can i die myself?

More and more it seems that we just cant rely or believe internet connected words. Too much doubt

From genealogy perspective a) did my ancestors obfuscate - is the letter my ggggm wrote about family during the revolutionary war true? And b) imagine 4-5 generations from now when they look back at all our data morsels and get totally confused
Common Lisp is vastly more powerful and better implemented.
I honestly can't think of many things that require more Hacking than writing a fast, compatible, multiplatform console emulator, followed by writing a How It's Made.
I see your point, but I think that complexity is key (and I think that definition 3 is far too over-broad, unless you require minimal complexity of the mechanism or pay close attention to the plurality of "controls"). The problem with categorizing anything with a sensor and actuator as the proper study of robotics means that very little is excluded. We wouldn't be impressed if a car salesman claimed that the automated dash-light dimmer is a "robot" (even if he had a well-researched semantic argument), and I don't think the term is applicable in this case.
Amazon is notorious for their awful treatment of workers. Just recently a local NPR station had a re-run of a story where (1) even when the AC broke inside the warehouse, Amazon wouldn't give them a break or let them open the door or windows to cool things off. A person eventually passed out. (2) They tempt and fake promise temp workers with good future outlook like better pay and benefits after they work for X amount of time. But then Amazon lets them go right before X amount of time is done. (3) Overall they overwork and are brutal with some warehouse workers.

I'll try and find the NPR link. But like someone else has already linked to 3 article, this isn't a special one off case.

If you're going to upset at how Walmart treats blue collar workers, a similar amount of anger should be aimed at Amazon.
How is this not restraint of trade?

> Restraint of trade means any activity which tends to limit trade, sales and transportation in interstate commerce or has a substantial impact on interstate commerce.

https://definitions.uslegal.com/r/restraint-of-trade/
Google Home with YouTube is amazing. I say play Gwen Bottle and get Gwen Stefanni sing Message in a bottle. Or say play One Love Peas and get Blach Eye Peas ad One Love concert. What are you talking about?
I can only talk about the situation here in Romania.

State health care is "free" (that is, everybody pays 6.5% of their income as health insurance) and of very poor quality. You have to bribe everyone - doctors, nurses, cleaning people - in order to get any treatment.

Private health care is somewhat more expensive; you can either pay as needed (which is what I usually do) or you can buy private insurance. The lowest private insurance I know of is $3 / month; the highest I have heard of is about $300 / month. The latter includes emergency surgery in a foreign country (Germany or Switzerland, their doctors are considered better).
> What physical and psychological differences cause more men than women to go into tech?

The question is too narrow. Since the number of men and the number of women is about the same, an imbalance of them in any particular field implies that there must be an imbalance the other way somewhere else. Almost all inquiries into the male/female ratio on tech just look at tech. They need to look at where the women DO go, not just where they do not go.

One possibility from the items on the list of psychological differences given was empathy. That list said women tend to have more empathy than men. I'd expect that to, at least to some extent, make fields that require high empathy to have more women than men. In addition, higher empathy may make women more likely to choose fields in which they can help people, even if the job itself doesn't have any particular empathy requirement.

Another possibility is that girls mature faster than boys, both cognitively and emotionally. The brain undergoes some major reorganization between childhood and adulthood, and that starts in girls up to several years before it starts in boys. The slower emotional maturing in boys may mean that boys spend more time in that wonderful stage where your brain is developed enough to start really getting STEM subjects, but is still largely a child's brain that is still focused on what is fun now and doesn't care about preparing to be an adult. It's that stage that produces your classic STEM nerd.
How to become one of the top property management companies?
> What happens if the application crashes immediately after removing the work item but before it can do anything else? Doesn't this break exactly-once semantics... ?

If the connection is broken the transaction would be aborted and the lock released. If the worker hit an infinite loop or something like that you'd use something like `idle_in_transaction_session_timeout` to set a transaction timeout and/or have a worker monitoring system in place to kill long running jobs.

The important thing to note is that a single DB instance and a client still comprises a distributed system. You still have almost all the same problems with 'exactly-once' semantics you would with a distributed queue. You should make all processing jobs idempotent and support retry regardless of the tech backing the queue if you want a system that provides effectively exactly-once semantics.
No entry barrier anymore with Portacle. Download Portacle, it's a ready to use CL environment, which includes Emacs, SLIME, and the SBCL compiler. Works great! Zero configuration!
Wouldn't matter, Amazon is already singling out all three with LaserShip and its own Logistics firm.

Did I mention how terrible AMZL is at their job? I spend the better part of a day tracking down a package marked as "delivered."
Its not very hard to make your intentions clear outright. Like other siblings have pointed out, it was the way that he propositioned her that was creepy and unprofessional. He appears to be leveraging the financial power he has to get the lady to go out with him, whether he realized that or not. (Strictly personally, my opinion is that he was fully aware of what he did. He seems like a very smart and determined person and its hard to see him not realizing this).

A better way would have been to make it explicit. i.e. "Hey X, now that we are done with business, I was wondering if you would like to meet over coffee sometime later. This will certainly not affect our professional relationship either way, but I think you're an interesting person and would like to know you better."

Some relationships though are just really dicey, like the one above. Its like having a relationship with your direct manager, since the manager is evaluating you professionally, and that's why its generally considered a bad idea.
Except they don't anymore. They laid off ~1,000 employees in the HQ, many of them in their tech department. (Source: http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/01/20/wal-mart-begin...)

Disclaimer: Some of the workers that got laid off in that department were friends of mine.
Did you not read the article? Alice is the name of a company, and also the abbreviated name of a court case (Alice v. CLS Bank) in which Alice, the company, was the plaintiff.
> Its fine to think whatever you want, imagine murdering your boss, having sex with the coffee machine, whatever you want

I sometimes have brain farts where I imagine some bad/evil/wrong/painful thing done by me or to me and for a short moment feel almost like it's real. For example, today I thought about stabbing someone's eye with a teaspoon I was holding at the time. It's unpleasant. If I imagine something like that happening to me for longer periods, I probably wouldn't want it.

> Unless you are being creeper and staring like a weirdo all the time then I doubt they notice.

If OP says they notice, they notice. People notice almost everything but consciously act on almost nothing. Sometimes they don't like their own reactions and pretend not to see. One can fall into the trap of trying to find signs of non-noticing only to constantly keep seeing minuscule involuntary signs of noticing. Sometimes feeling like you creep others out makes you behave nervously and actually creep them out.

Maybe it's better to be open that these things happen but yet they absolutely don't communicate any will for serious real-world consequences. Or dunno, ask some psychologist.
Maybe I misunderstand, but my iPhone seems to have this out of the box...? (Not the Wi-Fi to Wi-Fi one, but tethering to LTE via Wi-Fi.)
It is most certainly not fine.
Since the current president celebrates his past assaults on women with no consequences, and threatens his accusers, again with no consequences, and Cosby was recently freed, your thesis that mere accusations damage prominent men rings hollow. The exact opposite is true.

It is so damaging for the women involved (career, socially, and withstanding the barrage of slander, misogyny and distrust that they always seem to face) that it is very hard to step up and simply tell the truth, and you are part of the problem here, with your needless insinuations about false accusations and talk of a low burden of proof.