skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's true, and not really your fault. The slippery slope of offtopicness is continuous but opportunities for snippage are discrete.

Thanks for the nice words, doubly nice after getting penalized.
> But are those people programmers? I mean if you show a 'real' programmer those people doing their job, will they really think they are doing programming or software engineers?

I don't know. I guess some programmers might turn their noses up at a graphical interface at the top level. But it doesn't matter. The result was always a working, maintainable, fast tool that achieved the desired goal.

If I built a machine using sticks and stones that could accurately predict the week's weather, how many people would care that I didn't use satellites? Probably the people in the satellite industry, but, if I demonstrate my solution is better, those folks will need to adapt or face loss of wages.

I was a CS major and went to work for an Ab Initio consultancy, not realizing they also hired non-programmers and trained them. It worked fine and we replaced Java consultants all the time because their code wasn't as maintainable or as fast as ours.

I'm not claiming that graphical tools will surpass Python, but based on my experience, I think they deserve a seat at the table.

> Are you sure that things like graphical ETL such as SSIS, graphical or automated reporting, and more generally database-oriented RAD tools are not actually fairly common?

I think they are common in enterprise, but the languages are often proprietary or don't have the level of open source support that traditional programming languages have had. I'm looking forward to seeing what will come of Luna lang [1] and stuff like 2D Syntax in the future.

You previously stated,

> Programming is definitionally limited to cryptic text. Anything that deviates from that, especially if it makes it non-cryptic or easy, is no longer a programming tool; it becomes a tool for lowly users. This detracts from the identity of programmers because that is tied to producing and consuming cryptic text.

But, graphical boxes on the screen can be thought of as libraries. We don't consider libraries to be tools for lowly users, just as we don't consider calculators or computers lowly. Things that make our job simpler aren't lowly, they're empowering.

[1] http://www.luna-lang.org/
No, TDD means that if there is a line of code anywhere that was not written to make some failing test pass, that code is by definition broken. ALL code must be against some test, else it's not TDD. And if you want to write code for which there is no test, you must write the test first, run the test suite to see it fail, and then implement the code that will make the test pass.

Anything else is not TDD.
Do you live in the US? Because where I'm from, our public libraries suck and not everyone has access to the internet. I agree that people with access to public libraries and the internet have no excuse. What I'm telling you is that a large number of people in other places of the world don't have access to even that.
> Besides, no one gets praised for this sort of thing...it's just something they're expected to do.

How do countries like Japan or Switzerland manage to keep everything relatively pristine?
I'm European so maybe I'm just proving your point , but I think you're severely overestimating modern medicine.

Most ailments get 'treated' alright, but the actual help you get isnt statistically better than placebos would've been.

Often, you get better despite of the treatment, not because of it.

Even something as basic as a broken bone just boils down to 'force patient to keep still while nobody does anything for weeks'.

.. heck, the biggest impact on healthcare continues to be personal hygiene. Most of the life expectancy improvements within the last 200 years can be attributed to that.
Police in Dubai have recruited a self-driving car that ‘scan for undesirables’
I'm not the most proficient Go developer, but aren't the two examples doing two different things?

In the first way, each branch allocates its own objectInfo struct. In the second way, all the branch exits share the same single objectInfo struct which I assume is implicitly initialized to the zero value by the compiler.

Functionally these are the same, but couldn't you achieve the same results without named return values by just allocating a single objectInfo at the top of the function and returning it?
I don't know why it's so shocking that the taxi drivers should not be masters in speaking foreign languages. I would find it odder if they were all well educated and fluent in three languages.
> You are irrationally focusing on just one aspect of toxicity -- an IARC group.

Yes, the only agency that has stated that it might be carcinogenic, the thing you have talked about. Perhaps the irrationally focusing and changing goalposts is you, not me.

> and there are many other ways in which pesticides are more harmful to eat than normal food in addition to one potential classification of carcinogenicity.

And? You have talked about carcinogenic effects, not other things

> You are also completely ignoring issues of dosage.

Me? Tell that to the IARC, they are the ones that doesn't talk about dosages.

By the way, do you know the dosage?

> Do you see where this falls down?

Yes, talking about carcinogenic effects like you did, it is silly

The first post, remember, the one talking about carcinogenic effects was you, not me.

> What were you spraying Roundup for? Given that it might be carcinogenic, unless you're using it for something extremely important (a use case I'm struggling to come up with), it may be worth discontinuing usage.

And if you talk about toxicity, do you know the relative toxicity of Roundup versus other pesticides?

Perhaps you're advocating for substituting it by toher things more toxic
Same for Quake. BSP tech came from the field of medicine, for example, and rasterization wasn't new. Quake just did it so much better than anyone else, along with a fun game. As with Minecraft.
Fixing it in the compiler will fix it for everyone, however, which is a big
argument for fixing it upstream.
The British did colonize more places. Places like Malaysia, India, etc., that aren't as prosperous and developed as Hong Kong and Singapore. Much of Britain itself isn't as prosperous and developed as Hong Kong and Singapore. Obviously it wasn't a case of the British simply building HK and Singapore. Singapore wasn't a very prosperous and developed place when the British left in the early 60s. It became so subsequently under local elites like Lee Kuan Yew. Hong Kong and Singapore were built by its locals, who were mostly Chinese but also included Indians, Malays, and others.
Has there been innovation in car brands? Apart from electric batteries, a lot of minor unimportant stuff.

Compare that to computers which have changed dramatically in a short amount of time.
People are working on "check engine tattoos" https://www.technologyreview.com/s/411770/the-glucose-monito...
> In Minecraft, the art is decidedly unrealistic, bordering on abstract. But, in return for that, the world is incredibly interactive.

Absolutely. But the flipside of this is that Minecraft has no story. It's sort of up to you as a player to do what you want and make your own adventure. Naughty Dog, on the other hand, is famous for their games' stories. I suspect interactivity and story are at odds. I also agree that the more sandbox-y a game is, the harder it is to make it compelling for a long amount of time.

I personally don't think one end of the spectrum is better or worse than the other. There are games with extremely limited interactivity (walking simulators) that I've had a blast "playing". I've also sunk a ton of hours into Minecraft.
The problem with games like Spore and No Man's Sky is not that they were 'risky', but that they were anticipated with the promise of being interactive but completely failed to deliver the interactive experience that was wanted. The games didn't have much gameplay, just canned 'rail-like' experiences in boring, repetitive environments. They pretended to innovate and produced the same old crap people already had.

But this all reminds me of another problem with modern game development. I have a certain deep love for tile-based, low-resolution old-school games. But most people seem to think that's entirely an artifact of nostalgia, rather than the fact that the world is simple and predictable in a way that maps beautifully to the control scheme. The world is not realistic, it's a grid. You control the world using buttons. That's a good relationship.

But every modern game comes out trying to pander to my nostalgia, and ultimately falls flat because what I want is a clean mapping, not some silly pretense of playing an old game again.

Too many cooks in the kitchen, and nobody cares what food is supposed to taste like anymore. They just know it needs "more ingredients."
This is really a Go wart, in my opinion. Go forces you into this pattern, because there's no other way if you want to use defers. So while it's true that it's a legit use of named return values, it's an unfortunate one, too.
Ill tell you what. Every single bulb is LED, tv plasma-> led, all appliances and fans upgraded to energy efficient, all HDDs->SSD, all lights on sensors, no heating used, no AC used, and my bills are bigger here in CA than ever. So if there is a glut of power I can also say that datacenters pay less than people in homes and its not cheap to charge electric cars, in fact, they are charging more per kwh and changed a lot of free charging stations to pay-for/metered. As a little guy in a brutal tax bracket its too bad all this energy progress hasnt helped out with the bills.
Neonicotinoid pesticides damage survival of bee colonies, landmark study shows
Thank you!

I don't believe any apps utilize these algorithms, and for good reason. The main problem is that SOTA is a very computationally intensive problem. On the example shown, a plain Dijkstra takes a fraction of a second (you can imagine A* is faster, and over time these have been sped up by a factor of millions, IIRC), whereas SOTA takes dozens of seconds to run. The difference increases quickly for larger networks and time budgets.

If you check out the paper I linked to, you might get a better idea of just how computationally intensive this process is. If I recall correctly, classical point-to-point pathfinding algorithms have even advanced to the stage that, with some reasonable (albeit clever) preprocessing, queries on very large networks can be done in a matter of milliseconds on mobile CPU power. Compare that to this algorithm, which takes dozens of seconds to run on a network the size of San Francisco, or at best in dozens or hundreds of milliseconds after practically prohibitive preprocesssing (e.g. 30 CPU-days and tens or hundreds of gigabytes are pretty normal) on a Core i7 CPU. It's just not scalable yet, which is why we've been working on it as a research problem (as have many other people).

Edit: There are lots of obstacles; the above was just one. Another one is that even the existing model assumes the same travel time distribution throughout the day, which is clearly unrealistic (you can imagine fixing this would blow up the running time even more). Yet another one is the problem of getting enough traffic data to construct useful travel time distributions, which means only a major company with existing data (like Google) could release an app that actually initially works with real data. Barring some kind of contract with a big company, everyone else would have to just release an app to gather data, and it would only become useful after a long time (if people are even willing to give away precise location data to random app creators).
Richard Russell’s XL Recordings Empire
Small aircraft industry, fairly famously.

Many of the most popular small craft (Piper, Cessna, etc.) date from the 1940s and 1950s.
I wonder how they can get away with this, and not be sued into oblivion.

On an amusing note, the pages barely load for me. Could this be the first time the HN hug of death took down a whole TLD?
Hacking Bitcoin Blockchain tonight
Tonight at 11.30PST we will be exposing our Bitcoin flaw on the block chain.
Consumers will eventually learn, as they always do. Try to educate anyone you meet that brings up .feedback. If anyone on social media talks about it, link them this article.
Do you feel bad for using any of the multitude of tax-payer funded services available?

Taxes are already pretty divorced from use of the services they pay for. People with more money than you have had more of it "forcefully" taken from them to pay for the roads, emergency services, and so on that you use.
> So, users are not supposed to confer that a page claiming to be by the makers of stack overflow, are associated with SO?

Yes, pretty clearly trademark infringement IMO. Confusingly similar, their websites purport to be run by the very organizations they're trying to extort. The disclaimer is IMO not sufficiently clear.

SO is humorously classified as a "local business". NYC HN-ers, could you drop by the SO offices and ask a Python question for me? I keep getting these `ImportError`s...
There was a war going on. Nowadays there isn't, really, unless you live where bombs are going off.
The US isn't heading toward "miracle treatments for the rich", it's heading towards "over testing, over diagnosis, and over treatment for the rich", all of which are linked to harm.

And single payer systems mostly don't prevent private treatment - you don't need it because the single payer is good quality and the only benefit you get from private treatment is access to ineffective experimental very expensive treatments and nicer hospital rooms.
I think it is still summed up with the statement "Cash is King"
I feel like a lot of deferred errors go unhandled because inexperienced devs don't know that they can.
What part of "I don't know" do you not understand? I never said that he was paid by Monsanto, I just asked about his background. Because he was making strong statements that suggested he knew what he was talking about. So I asked about his background. What is his knowledge base?

Which neither you, his buddy I'm guessing, or he, has answered. Why the heck not?

Whatever. I've taken this up with hn@ycombinator.com and I'm so done with this. I'm just about done with hackernews over this thread. It's disgusting that it has gone this far, this is not what learning from each other or seeking the truth looks like, I have no desire to keep going if hackernews is going to look like Fox News.

I came here to learn from the people here. This is not that. As my Dutch grandmother would say, you should be ashamed, you can do better.
The US has a free press. The current president is a governmental incompetant, and is using the office to enrich his family. The latest story is that even the major personalities in his own party are telling him publicly to shape up, admonishing him like a naughty schoolboy.

What will actually change in government to prevent Trump 2.0? How will it be improved? That's the saddest thing about this whole debacle, is that nothing will be changed to get rid of a bad president. No mechanisms will be added. Everyone will breathe a sigh of relief when Trump leaves (in whatever way) and then pinky-swear that "we'll never do that again" without changing the mechanisms to actually make it so.
Thanks for the reply. It seems a bit fragile and convoluted to me, but I suppose if you are used to it and are comfortable with the pitfalls it would be fine.
Summer Blouse in Rose Quartz
The US payers don't subsidise medical research for the rest of the world; they pay for the vast amounts of advertising that the US companies do to doctors and consumers.
TDD forces you to design with testing in mind, also known as construction for verification.

If testing gets in the way is because the design doesn't emphasize testing.

Then, if you have high coupling, you have high complexity and a stronger reason to test.
well, technically anyone with a stackoverflow account can claim that.
Ask HN: What are some good exploratory data analysis tutorial in python?
I am basically confused by the term exploratory data analysis. I think it means things we should look for in a new dataset. But most of the data science tutorials do a kind of hand waving job on it before immediately jumping to the 'exciting' machine learning part. I would like to find out some tutorials where the author is not dealing with a toy dataset, but showing how to handle a messy real-life dataset, and what to look for in that dataset before jumping on a possible future machine learning part. Mostly, my wish is to give the abstract smoky concept of 'EDA' in my mind a concrete framework to work from when I encounter a new dataset in future.
you mean 114 years after the Opium War? that was a pretty long wait.
Terabit DSL (TDSL) [pdf]
Hey Matt,

Thanks for your thoughtful post I really appreciate this.

I'd say I'm quite proficient up to step 5 when it comes to object oriented programming like Java / C#. I'm actually trying to get advice on developing an android application, or well, any type of tutor for when I 'just get stuck' in a certain situation.

I've looked at some of the JS stacks and it's all very interesting and I can see a lot of creative potential.
It sounds like he is a development machine, in a good sense. I wonder if he has ever blocks, like mental or creativity ...
Swimming in a chlorinated pool may turn sunscreen into carcinogen
TalksGoogle
Ick. In a way, it is a sort of corporate version of those mugshot sites.

I understand a lot of other scams. (Not condone, but I see the attraction of running it.) This one just seems like a lot of work to put into something that I really don't see the targeted companies choosing to go along with. Seems like borrowing a ton of grief - at the very least, they'll be hearing from a bunch of crabby lawyers.
> most devs believe they don't have time to refactor

Try asking them:

"if you had the time to do it 'well', what would you have done differently?"

(By the way, the same works for testing: "if you had the time to write all the tests you want, how would you test this code?")

You might be surprised.
I like merge sort. Average time may be worse, but it's upper bound is better and it is conceptually cleaner and easier to understand (IMO).
Yes, that is interesting thought; in fact, he even goes further and consider Aspergers as an advantage in this context.

This is more or less validated by the OCEAN/5 factor model -- low agreeableness and low extroversion might be proxy for not being influenced by the convention.
Please respect outstanding entrepreneurial achievements
Just that it takes extra space and that's sometimes a constraint.
If the author states that there are already a number of Hello World examples, why not spend a bit more time and create something else that's still simple enough?

As a self-taught programmer, one of the difficulties I found (before SO) was that the many articles one read up on would typically repeat what someone else said. This especially with new technologies.

I think if authors pointed us to an existing "Hello World", and then expanded on that, in the long-run, beginners would sometimes find it easier to learn fadter.
This is funny given the fact that in HK what school you go to largely depends on how much money your parents have (buy bonds issued by schools) and what is their occupation.

This is strictly prohibited in mainland China - a private school recently asked education level of parents on one of its admin forms, that became national news and that school got punished in days. Selling school bonds to effectively bar average families to access equal educational rights would be criminal offence.

If you like, we can continue one public healthcare - whether the residence of Shanghai has better access to public hospital or those in HK? Requiring people to wait months or even years to have surgery in public hospital would probably causing an uprising in China, but apparently that is okay in HK as the rich how makes the law can always go to private hospital.

Your definition of "rule of law" is quite different, that is all.
To the early adopter go the spoils.
Ahh, rural malapportionment. Introducing one-vote-one-value seems a bit less extreme than secession, but maybe that's just an ambit claim.
The only accurate sleep detection I've had from all the devices I've tried is, surprisingly, my $20 MiBand (both the original and the MiBand 2). I don't think it's a hardware issue, I'm pretty sure it's just stupid software.

The results I've gotten from the SleepCycle iPhone app - all the way back in 2009 - are more precise than any of those other fitness trackers. It used to rely on the uber-sensitive iPhone accelerometer but they "recently" switched to using the microphone for some reason.
We want to encourage you to contribute today on this #OpenSourceFriday to
> but it was clear to me that A was human

I believe you're thinking of a different project/article that was on the HN front page a week or two ago (but which I can't seem to find).

This article doesn't have any "which is human" bits (and the results here are a lot more impressive than the one you're thinking of).
Grand Theft Auto 5 CD Key Generator
I'm excited but I'm also cautious. I'm not sure that WASM has a slam dunk story in terms of many web-native concepts, for instance asynchronous execution. The browser APIs will likely lag far behind JS, and DOM integration is just one thing there - also fetch, indexeddb/localstorage, and so forth. WASM gives us some additional tools for the web toolbelt, but it will be a long, long time before it's mature enough to completely replace JS.

That being said, I hope I'm proven wrong.
> And say what you will about the implementation, but voxels were extremely rare until Minecraft.

NovaLogic games used them from 1992 on. Minecraft's gameplay may have been novel, use of voxels in a game was not.
It's funny because the difference between their current prices and the price people would prefer to pay is exactly their margins, per above.
I think that DOM manipulation should not be a part of WebAssembly, although the other way around may make some sense, where for example, the "window.wasm" property might be a WebAssembly module for accessing the HTML DOM (otherwise the module is not included and the WebAssembly code is sandboxed and cannot access DOM). If the WebAssembly module is loaded directly using a "script" tag in a HTML document, then it can automatically include the HTML DOM module.
I don't really understand what your post has to do with the one it is replying to, but I agree with you that lowest bidder RFPs are not capitalistic competition.

...but what is the answer? You can't have a free market subway system that throws any old traffic down the tubes like you can with roads. So there has to be some kind of centralised ownership. (indeed, the NYC subway used to be a system of independent private systems, and they all failed as businesses).

Personally, I don't see how the blame here lies with the usual tired party politics blame game. There are so many different factors at work.
You must be joking or have no experience beyond 1 or 2 people. The vast majority of the online population does not learn nor care about these details. The massive amount of scams that continue to exist and grow is evidence enough.

If people did something as simple as confirming the domain listed in the address bar is the site they should be on, we would see a major decrease in malware, but alas the situation continues.
Christopher Poole? The 4chan guy?
Sorry, for not making it clearer. I did mean to spell it with a 'u'.
>made to be hacked.

An oxymoron if I ever saw one.

I don't think there's any way not to get into the hardware part if you want to do something like this. If you are really opposed to hardware then might I suggest looking at some road traffic simulators and trying to simulate a self driving car? Might be a good place to start.
The MTA is run by the state, whereas the subway almost exclusively serves the city. That's a weird conflict that, AFAIK, London doesn't have to deal with.