skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What basis do you have for asserting that their contributions are bad? That their open source projects and promotions to team leadership aren't signs of competence?

I didn't assert that. I asserted only that "contributions" are not evidence of competence. Competence isn't even always sufficient to make someone a good hire.

> That tells me the bootcamps have done a good job of prepping them to begin their coding careers.

I agree and said this in my original comment. I said that bootcamps are "teaching to the test" and prepping people to get past the hiring process.

> And who cares whether I (or anyone else) could have done it on my own?

The people who pay for a bootcamp and don't get their money's worth. It's not easy to part with $10k+ for most people. The top comment on this post is someone who felt that way.

> Could you have learned to code without taking comp sci classes? Probably, right?

Yes, and I did. I'm self-taught. But it didn't take me 16 weeks. I still look back on my skills a year ago and think, "Wow, I sucked a year ago." And I've been programming for 20 years.

> Bootcamps showed that entry level developer jobs at most web startups don't require four years of studying computer science.

They certainly don't necessarily show that. If you hire someone who needs months of training to be a productive, independent employee, that's not a success. That's evidence of a shortage of entry-level coders. I think that shortage is starting to wane.

> This isn't rocket science.

It's not rocket science, but besides being something that requires understanding the way computers work, it also requires learning and understand a staggering number of technologies. I regularly use CSS, and I can't even keep up with just CSS. There's too much to know.

There are also many layers to being a great programmer that people rarely get early on. Many people don't realize that readability/maintainability are the most important qualities of (most) code. Even if they do, they don't necessarily know how to achieve those things.

You seem to be suggesting that web programming is unique among professions in that experience is mostly unimportant and someone can figure it all out in a few months. Would you argue the same about plumbing, repairing air conditioners, accounting, or sales?

None of these things are rocket science, but they are things you can't just think your way through and understand how to be good at. It takes time and practice, like everything.
Can't read the article thanks to the paywall, but I'm not a fan of the underlying idea. If you think Trump's words of admiration for Putin are scary, then what is Zuckerberg's blatant fanboyism for Xi Jinping?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/china-s-president-x...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabetheconomy/2014/12/09/zuc...
Thank you both for your kind words!
Ask HN: How to get that desire/motivation/ambition back as an Engineer
This year has been awesome so far. I've done some great things in the DevOps arena for the company I work for. DCOS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, Packer, AWS, GCE, Azure, DO, CI/CD etc... On a personal note, I have three side projects going that are about half way done. I seem to have lost the burning desire to finish my personal projects and can't find anything to do at work in the way of advancing the company or innovating. How do I get that desire back? How can I work up the motivation to succeed? How do I get that burning desire to do great things? Am I alone with this problem? Any other software developers or engineers have this problem?
Both examples rely on geographic proximity of the employer.

Do they? Quickly unscientific, but the US appears to house only about 1/5 of the major animation studios[1]. I don't know what amount of Hollywood business that translates to, but it doesn't appear that even the majority of work (incl. TV and advertising) comes from local outfits.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animation_studios
Bitcoin has come a long way... 7 years ago I was writing perl scripts to cobble together a depth-of-market program that operated on the mtgox API. I would get excited scalping coins from $17-19 USD back then. No SEC/CFTC, no regulation, no anything, just good old fashioned auction market theory - combined with a sucker being born every moment and winding up on the other end of a mtgox trade. The sky was the limit, it was an exciting time if you were an oddball breed of programmer crossed with day trader.

Fast forward.... WTF is going on now? Regulated exchanges for bitcoin, dozens of btc clones, new exchanges being birthed/destroyed each month, and the dinosaurs of finance adopting it 10 years too late. It's a crazy mixed up world.
We have private offices, but central HVAC. Multi-zone cooling (independent of having lots of little, less efficient window/through-wall units) is relatively uncommon.

It's exacerbated (good word) by the fact that the large front office has mostly women sitting at low-power PCs, the offices are mostly men at powerful workstations (aka space heaters), and the HVAC ducts run though the office drop ceilings, meaning anyone doing physical projects in the central work space is the least cooled while our receptionist has been seen with a space heater.
The philosophical pillar you're standing on doesn't stop me from saying that this website is subjectively awful.
The challenge for these is the cost. First, you either have to drill wells that are ~500 feet deep or lay coils of tubing under your yard (if you have one) below the frost line. Doing either is expensive, though the wells are much more so. The downside of the cheaper option (the coils under yard) is that earth shifts, and the coils will too. I've had two separate friends install these (usually 4-6 separate coils) only to have the earth move and rip open a coil or kink it. Usually you have a valve for each one to shut it off so the unit can sill operate on the remaining working coils, however with each lost coil the efficiency goes down.

Also, the ground-source heat-pumps aren't cheap. They are in the $7-10k range - just for the unit - and not many people know how to repair them as they are a bit of a specialty item in the HVAC industry.
The recent shift towards DLC has changed this, though. The advent of day-one DLC and frequent releases of additional DLC have done a lot for job stability in the video game industry

Here's an infographic that explains it: https://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/0/5370/2147534...
The post I replied to literally says "Not for nothing, but ain't greenhouse gases only the short term problem?"

Do I still have to go through the imagination exercise?
I don't think that line of reasoning is completely wrong but I think it's often over-emphasized as some sort of durable higher truth rather than a simplification of very complicated social factors, and usually this tends to significantly under-weight the ability to change things — e.g. many Americans are used to thinking that we have a huge cultural lead for entrepreneurship but the popular opinion there hasn't adjusted for the degree to which Europe, Canada, Israel, etc. have closed that gap over the last couple decades.

In the case of China, I don't think there's any question that it used to have higher barriers to innovation but I'm not comfortable concluding that this will be true for that much longer given how many people are trying to change it. Every time I read one of Bunnie Huang's gongkai posts[1] it really seems like the view in 20 years will be radically different.

1. https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=20
Of course they will. Americans have turned on each other in their period of greatest economic vulnerability, basically self-destructing while the Chinese government gladly hands out 5x your research grant from elsewhere to do that research in China. America's running on desirability to high-skill immigrants and existing ecosystems, both of which are fading fast. NIH is halving budgets while China is multiplying them by 10. The West is fucked, I just wish I spoke Chinese.
They probably need to create a phone app that tracks guests, and then offer a discount for people to install it on their phones. It might be the best way to divide the customer base into various profiles that could later serve for computer simulations & models for when different events happen: ticket price changes, rides opened & closed, etc.
I concur with this - Amazon or other mainstream retailers are great if you know what you're after, and Amazon's recommendation engine is not bad. But many of my most valuable literary or intellectual discoveries have come from aimless browsing, where I was in search of something interesting to read but with little advance conception of what. I bought Godel, Escher, Bach with no awareness of what it was about because I'd noticed it lurking in several window displays and one day found a copy that had been misplaced in the sci-fi section. I figure that if a book is following you around you should probably read it, an attitude that has served me well so far.
American air conditioners running at full power, chilling the interior and dripping on the sidewalk below on a hot day always deeply trouble me. Maybe it's my european view on things, but for contrast here in Munich we aren't just building out a city-wide heat network, but we also have a cold network! Cold river water flows through the pipe network that traverses the city and large office building can get connected to it. This way they can save massively on electricity for air conditioning by having the water do the cooling instead. And then once the water has traversed all pipes, it simply gets released back into its stream on the other end of town, just as clean as when it entered, and only slightly warmer.
Idris is basically an eager-evaluated Haskell, with other niceties on top (dependent types if you want them; fixed String type)
Fat chance that happening, if anything we will see increased restriction on who is allowed and not allowed to "research" security limited to only government approved contractors that file for permission to do with the FBI
This is assuming that roles are static and unchanging and technologies don't morph. Which they do. The idea that negotiation costs are coming down constantly is fallacious and unrelated to a reality where tech keeps changing.
"1 line of Javascript" is a meaningless statement because 1000 lines can obfuscate down to 1 line
I wish I could share in your confidence. Have there been a number of bi-partisan congresspeople who have express support for EnergyStar and other efficiency programs?
Yes, Intel was supposed to be on 10 nm by now but they have fallen behind their roadmap which allowed AMD/GloFo to catch up somewhat.
I don't think anyone has been arguing against it's ease of use nor the ease of readability. Most people seem to be against it's ergonomics and intentional lack of features.
> fairly distant second

Gross bookings approximately half that of Yandex and more cities than Yandex doesn't sound like a fairly distant second especially since Uber arrived well after Yandex. Uber was doing better against Yandex than Lyft is doing against Uber. Approximately a 40% stake in the new venture and 3 of the 7 board seats appears to be a testament to Uber's relative strength against Yandex.
He just assumed the aliens would either kill or tax us.
And if you want to push money to your districts make sure it's useful.
Depends on the type of A/C

You can get ground source heat pumps that are 50 SEER, 5.3 COP (and they'll provide all your hot water, too)

There used to be a federal tax incentive of 30% of the cost, no max, but it expired at the end of 2016.
To be honest, I'm no fan of oil company CEOs, but I have yet to see anything bad from Tillerson as secretary of state. He seems like a pretty normal secretary of state, and almost like the only sane guy in the administration.
This is one case where the plural of anecdote is, indeed, data. But I am grateful to see a sibling comment cite a proper study confirming what we already knew.
>If that's what content creators want, isn't it in their right?

No, they have no right to control my computer
He is Hillary 2.0 and would be a disaster for Democrats.
Samsung’s Doomed Note7 Gets a Second Life as the Fan Edition
While it's not the best thing to do, it doesn't matter much as the efficiency of the systems go way way up when the outside temp is near the same as the inside temp.
Live FB ads for real cleaning Canadian business
Those signatures seem complicated to me because there's a pile of arguments and some of them are functions with extra annotations, not because there's generics involved. The equivalent signatures using interface{} (or maybe something more precise) would be likely just as noisy, if not more so.
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/is-your-thermostat-se...

The biological reasoning, as I understand it, is that men have a higher ratio of heat-generating muscle than women.

When I first moved to NYC, I was bewildered by all the women walking around with scarves and summer dresses; it was explained to me that this was a strategy to optimize being comfortable in the outdoor heat, and then having something to withstand the frigid offices.

(Personally, I'm of the opinion that one should acclimate to their climate, and folks who hate the heat wouldn't mind it so much if they didn't coddle themselves with AC all the time.)
I worked in LibTech for 6 years, and one of the things I was in charge of was the discovery interface. One of my biggest yardsticks that I measured the success by was how good the system was at serendipity - allowing people to look for nothing in particular if that's what they wanted, and just discover amazing new things they didn't know were on the shelves.
>"2. Is this climate change? Calving is a natural process and Antarctica is not breaking apart, but climate change can't be ruled out."

"Climate change" doesn't make specific enough predictions about this type of stuff to ever be ruled out, people could just keep coming up with ideas about X indefinitely:

Climate Change -> X -> Larsen C rift

A more accurate way to put it is that, up until now, all proposed ideas for X have been ruled out (I am basing this all on the comments from the MIDAS team about the ice thickening, etc).

At the same time I find it totally implausible that there is zero link between this event (or anything else that happens on earth) and the climate. So "no link" should be taken as shorthand "any influence due to climate change is a negligible factor".

Also, it is clear to me from reading the news and comments about this event that many people really, really want this to be linked to climate change. It is to the point that cognitive dissonance ensues when it is pointed out the experts are in disagreement with them. That is unhealthy.
I think this would be very useful for non-coders. For example, some days ago a friend of mine was struggling to get just the emails addresses from a list of names+emails he had in an Excel file.
Reminds me of a story by Derek Sivers [0] on the marginal time savings of biking at an all-out sprint pace vs. a more moderate (and more enjoyable) pace. A sprint gave him only a 4% time boost, whereas, as he puts it, "I could just take it easy, and get 96% of the results."

[0] https://sivers.org/relax
This seems like a really hard way to calculate square roots. Why not just use bracketing?

1. Pick a number HI whose square is obviously higher than N.
2. Pick a number LO whose square is obviously lower than N.
3. Choose a number MED which is roughly (HI+LO)/2.
4. If MED * MED > N, replace HI with MED, else replace LO with MED.
5. Go to 3.
6. MED converges to your answer.

Doesn't converge quite as fast maybe, but a million times easier to grok. I got to where the author got, ~87.8, in 8 iterations even with terrible initial HI and LO guesses (100 and 50 respectively).
"Researchers found the women’s average metabolic rate was 20 to 32 percent lower than rates in the standard chart used to set building temperature. ... Dr. Kingma said a woman might prefer a 75-degree room, while a man might prefer about 70 degrees, which Dr. Kingma said is a common current office temperature."

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/science/chilly-at-work-a-...
Just insulate the houses in the US. I am always shocked how badly built US houses that cost 600k are.
I'll take that in reverse order:

> And that's fine. I don't think you should give up your phone if you don't want to. But saying "I don't want to give up my phone, so Alexa is totally safe!" is silly at best.

I wasn't arguing it is safe from government. I honestly have no argument to reasonable assume it could be. I was saying that if the government wants to listen to me they can. But I honestly don't think Alexa makes it easier. It's already pretty darn easy.

However, to my other point I was making, arguing it is safe from capitalism (or perhaps safe because of capitalism):

That's not actually how the conversation would go.

You're only looking at one side. To get a change like that to happen at a corporation it is not enough to prove financial benefit you also need to prove that it outweighs the risk.

I most certainly, absolutely see that if you take the risk as 0 probability then there is money there.

A change that large would go through layers:

- Project manager

- General Manager

- Director

- VP

- Accountants and Actuaries

- Legal Council

- Back to VP

- CxO

Having done one of two of these myself and dealt with the companies that buy that kind of data at more than one point in my career I can tell you that the almost certainly the report from the actuaries will show:

"The risk to Amazon Prime membership, law suits, and damage to market confidence is calculatedly too high relative to the reward of sale of customer data"

And that is if someone doesn't kill it for ethical reasons. Or legal council doesn't kill it. Since while not a death blow, being fired for being the public face of an ethics violation is typically not a good career move.

It takes a lot to get even a good idea approved at a company that size. Takes even more to get a terrible idea approved.
Silicon microchannels can cool pretty much anything but they're expensive.
Trump seems to have proven that wealth is now considered enough of a virtue in its own right to qualify you for the highest office in the country, regardless of lack of political (or any elected) experience, policy ideas, general principles, or character.
> That isn't true inside Microsoft.

No, that was not intended as included in "the C# community". Hell, SPJ used to work at Microsoft (he may still do, but he used to).

> the people who work on C# are the same academic wanks that work on Scala or F#

I'm sure you mean wonks, but I liked the typo.

> C# has a different user base from those languages though, so they still have to be careful what they add to the language, and many language features are planned 3 or 4 versions in advance.

I have no issue with the evolution of C# rate or otherwise, only with a number of its users.
Regulate ICOs, but Consider Blockchain’s Unique Features: People's Bank Director
In the dashed case, k is going to be zero or one (a<b is true or false). This works, though:

int a=0, b=4;

while(a < - - - - --b) {
printf("b: %d\n", b);
}
It's just become a Stage 0 proposal: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pattern-matching
> Other than Southwest most airlines would not let you change your tickets without paying a fee, and this has been the case since quite a few years.

The new bit is you can't even pay a fee with the new basic fares--it's use it or lose it.
Bingo!

WFH = less traffic, less industrial building construction, less heating/cooling of empty spaces (offices at night, homes during day), less indoor lighting usage (homes are usually very well lit from outside light while most cubical jungles are lit by fluorescent lighting).

Wanna save the environment? WFH!
I much prefer my post titles to be spoilers, rather than clickbait. I waste less of my life that way.
Ah, I think the bit where generics is useful is in making sure the value types are consistent (i.e., that you're not building a query that subtracts an int from a string or compares a date to a bool). This still doesn't guarantee that the types will match with the database columns, but it is a step up from the non-generic alternative.
You can see the hi-res version in street view if you zoom in.

http://i.imgur.com/4raWafu.jpg
No, but that's what I mean as intentionally ignoring.
My general, hand-wavy understanding it that HN is not directly monetized. Instead, it serves various business objectives for YC and the company makes enough money to be able to afford to keep doing this without ad income or any of the usual other ways that community sites try to monetize.

I am not personally familiar with growthhackers.com nor Product Hunt.
All due respect to the Zen master, but taking fewer flights, driving less, and living in a smaller and better insulated house, or having fewer kids, will all be more effective than vegetarianism for the average American. A single transatlantic trip emits more CO2 than eating meat for a year.

See this paper on effective CO2 reductions: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541

I speak without bias on the subject, since I am actually a vegetarian myself. Going by the numbers, it's moderately effective, but not the most effective.
It's obviously John Cox.
How'd you do this? I would enjoy that
If that interests you, read more about S.R. Ranganathan, who introduced faceted classification and Otlet's work with Mundaneum and the Universal Decimal Classification. 100 years ago it was possible to search ~10 million records.
> The basic tradeoff is monomorphization (code duplication) vs. boxing (in Go speak, interface{}).

There is also the approach taken by Swift, where values of generic type are unboxed in memory, and reified type metadata is passed out of band. There's no mandatory monomorphization.
Ceiling fans reduce the need for AC, especially overnight - even gentle circulation makes a noticeable difference. Also, an attic fan that can blow cool overnight air through the building whenever the temperature and humidity outside are acceptably low might reduce the expenditure of AC on cooling down the structure. A small degree of automation would allow these measures to work together with the AC.
> Calving is a natural process and Antarctica is not breaking apart, but climate change can't be ruled out.

This is science's inherent weakness in the public eye: the pundits on both sides will make conclusive statements based on little data; the scientists, with all the data we have, only speak in chances, odds, and percentages.

It's not their fault, it's the correct way to speak. But both sides will spin this to suit their agenda, for better or worse, and continue to muddy the waters.
I'm a little afraid to do that - is it safe for work?
> I think that the author needs to learn about association lists. The constructor (define point '((x 1) (y 2) (z 3))) is as clear as any other language. Granted, (assoc 'x point) is a bit more verbose than point.x, but you could extend Lisp with the syntax ('x point) if it matters. Does Arc do that?

As a minor point, the values in an alist are just the cdrs of each pair, so your point alist would be written '((x . 1) (y . 2) (z . 3)); yours has each value being a one-element list. But anyway, if that level of verbosity doesn't bother you, you could just use a struct like the article mentions and write:

(defstruct point x y z)
(defvar *point* (make-point :x 1 :y 2 :z 3))
(format t "~&x is ~a" (point-x *point*))

The author claims that this is too verbose and therefore no one uses structs or classes, which is not at all true in my experience, and it doesn't look that verbose to me either. If the point- prefix really bothers you, you can say (defstruct (point (:conc-name)) x y z) and then the accessors will be defined without it.
No, because using `foo, _` you're explicitly saying that you don't care about the error.