skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do I program with more discipline and less emotion?
I'm used to being a hacker. I like doing 48 hour programming "binges". These were incredibly effective and I could often build more in those 48 hours than most people would build in a month.

It worked great when panicked, but as I get more senior and used to the heavy pressure, it doesn't work any more. I have a more comfortable life now and failing projects is not as bad as they used to be. So it's hard to dig up the emotion I used to hack long hours. Now I just end up staring at the code for 2 hours at 2 AM.

Besides, exhaustion kicks in and makes me less effective in the long run. And it doesn't scale as well with a team.

I find disciplined techniques like Scrum and XP appealing. I know I should start adopting them. But a part of me worries that my hacker spirit would die out.

So how would I go from being a code berserker to being a more organized, disciplined, professional programmer?
My general 'serious' search workflow is: try googling three different keyword combinations. Open all acceptable results in new tabs. I wont lose time for loading, I already wait enough. This generally creates peaks of 50+ tabs.

However i force myself to clear everything on startup.
Public companies are somewhat a democracy of ownership; they publish accounts and the board is accountable to the owners - the shareholders. Privately held companies are quite different, and there is a strong argument that they simply should not be allowed above a certain capitalisation - say $40m because they create an uncontrolled risk to the economy. For example; if five of the top 10 unicorns fail in the next three years due to Enron style lying this will implode the venture market choking investment for a long, long, long time.

But public company democracy is hugely problematic; modern shareholders think as a herd and work on 60 day time scales. Fortune 500 companies need diverse signals (and sophisticated risk management) and visionary management - creating processes, people and markets over decades. This is the model of the private market, but sans the potential for fraud and collapse.
> “When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb.” — Steve Haflich

As someone who works with C++ every day on my job, this made me laugh out loud. I think I'm gonna write this one on our whiteboard on Monday.
I studied under Wirth at ETH Zurich in the 1980s, so I got to interact with him personally a number of times. His class on compiler construction was particularly interesting. You could see how a philosophy of simplicity and clarity in syntax and semantics would translate to simple and clear compilers.

The downside of this philosophy was that aspects of interacting with a computer that were inherently messy tended to be swept under the rug: The original "file" and "string" concepts as described in early Pascal reports were simply unworkable, and combined with a marked disinterest in language standardization efforts (which I personally suspect stems from Wirth's involvement in Algol 68, although I have no direct evidence) led to each implementation rigging up their own ad hoc solutions.

As a consequence, even TeX, a batch program with no fancy demands on hardware, was not written in strictly "standardized" Pascal, but basically Knuth had to assume the existence of a number of non-standard mechanisms.
Perlis's Epigrams are my favourite.
http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

"When we write programs that 'learn', it turns out that we do and they don't."

I still wonder what he means when he says: "Everything should be built top-down, except the first time. ". What is different the first time that warrants not to do it?
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I saw such everytime too. These tracking params are to guarantee that the survey is filled only once by a person. But tracking is possible if email and the survey match is stored somewhere. It is all up to trust.
Jokingly, why not just boot into Emacs?

https://www.informatimago.com/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux...
USB-C is a connector, and has no effect on speed.

I think you're referring to USB 3.1 gen2, which would double the theoretical bandwidth to 10Gbps.
Many of these are good. I agree with joncampbelldev. The dynamically typed quote is quite snarky.

To that I'd reply: Statically typed languages are when you have to tell a computer that 2 is an integer and 'two' is a string.

I know this argument goes back and forth and never ends. And I'm not trying to start a flame war.

But I will say this: type systems occupy a space on a spectrum in my opinion, and the spectrum is imperative vs. declarative languages.

It's a conceptual spectrum, of course. And the difference is between telling the language exactly what you want and how you want it vs. telling the language what you want to get.

On one end you have C# as the avatar of strongly and statically and imperative languages. In the middle, you have something like Python that is strongly typed but dynamic, and at the far end, you have SQL, which is as strong or weak as you define your tables as well as entirely declarative. You can choose your own adventure with databases.

You have some bad citizens like JavaScript and PhP, but the conversation is really about the use-case.

IMO, strong typing is far more important than static typing. Because I personally can't stand silent errors. Weak type systems are the root of all evils. Anything that can fail silently is dead to me. Fuck you, <language>. Tell me if something broke. Don't just quietly do something I don't expect.

Which approach to use to me depends on the team and the size of the project. You can run with Python for small teams. You really can't for large teams. You really shouldn't use C# for rapid prototyping or small teams.

But you absolutely should a statically typed language for large teams.

Edit to put the sharp in my example of statically and strongly typed language.
> professors in the UC system have public salaries

Professors have public salaries because their salaries are paid by the public. I don't think anyone here is arguing against being able to know how much your employees make, that's kind of a given.
I find the linked quora answer pretty confusing. It claims Germans are "taxed to death", but argues from the amount of poverty as defined relative to the median income. This doesn't say anything about overall wealth, but says a lot about income disparity. The poor are by definition not "most people".
Ask HN: Murphy's Law
It seems that as I'm getting done with beta testing and closer to a date where I can finally go public with my web app, it is like everything is going wrong.

Just wondering if anyone else has ever experienced a setback or a bunch of setbacks right before going public or right after going public.
Want to guess how many audits Microsoft Windows "passed" before the SMB bug exploited by WannaCry became public? :)

That was one of the most heavily audited components too.
Why are jQuery tips such a bad thing?
Is there a reason not to have open salary information?

If any future employer or recruiter could see how much I'm currently paid (as in Norway) then that would place significant downward pressure on my salary over the long term.

Thinking longer term again, I think public record salaries combined with dynamic pricing, facial recognition and a cashless society is a combination of things most people should be worried about.
This would have been useful 4 years ago before we all gave up on Firefox.
Used to have a setup like this years ago but having a script that performs something heavy like image manipulation led to it being abused to ddos the server. You basically have to set predefined sizes but in that case you might as well render the images on upload and save all the versions.
Write a program that anyone can read. Haskell inevitably ends up looking more like a mathematical equation than the simpler constructs people are more used to finding in languages like Clojure.
> Is there a reason not to have open salary information?

Well, I have a reason. My company (a mid-size publicly traded U.S. corporation) would be ashamed, if my salary was public (they don't actually pay that bad, but I guess it could be better). You see, my company is quite emotional, and I kinda like it, so I don't want to get it embarrassed. But I do fully support the right to count your own money in public, yes.

Edit: I am just playing with framing here. You should have, at least, the right to publish your own salary (and perhaps start a movement of people who do that). And perhaps companies don't want you to have that right because it would make them look bad; although if it wouldn't, why the hell not?
I think it raises larger issues, because as far as NLP goes - yeah - making a classifier isn't hard (as the article states).

But what happens when an algorithm that analyze data objectively, presents a result that would be deemed 'racist' if it were released by a human?

yeah, this is useful in a corporate or marketing setting, but as we start to integrate more NLP tech into interpreting ML/statistical results, I don't think I'd want to inject bias and risk missing out on difficult yet important truths.

Tay was just a marketing gimmick though - the biggest thing I took away form it was that a major corporation can blame AI for a faux pas and nobody will hate them for it. In 5 years, the "someone who hacked my twitter" excuse will be replaced by "oops, our AI made a boo boo"
My favorite: "Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught not to. So it is with great programmers."
An innovative receipts app was published
Launching a new app on shopify called Syncify. Looking for beta testers
But C isn't the best example of strongly typed.
how was it? easy to read after a hwile?

I whished the downloadable font would be the "densest" setting, not just abc encoding
> The bitcoin network simply wasn't designed to be able to handle the kind of volume it is experiencing as more people are beginning to use the currency, and the 1 megabyte "blocks" of transaction data that get uploaded to the blockchain are full.

If you work in IT this is like a monthly meeting of the team. You ALWAYS hear "oh we are so suprised, it wasn't designed for such an amount of users/load/whatever". It's just not true. It's a show. And I really don't know why this argument STILL works. If you run 10 topics in parallel, 7 will report this exact reason. If you check them out closely 3 report that truthfully, but really let you wonder why management decided to put so stupid people on top of these projects in the first place. 4 actually have planned for this to happen, and where just not sure if they run into it this month or next month.
This is because back then cooperative was most popular form of enterprises in eastern block.
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Satoshi added the block size cap as a DOS-prevention mechanism (to stop blocks from being bloated with 'dust' txns and grinding the network to a halt). It was done without any real discussion and the value was probably whatever felt right to him at the time. If he'd made it 10Mb, we'd be having this discussion in a few years time rather than now.
If a 3rd party requests on your behalf, though. Just asking...
Y Combinator Mulls New Startup App–Rating VCs on Sexual Harassment
I'm glad to know that the FCC will crack down all businesses that use robocalls to harass people. I hope it won't just only be a sentence on the news. There have been so many complaints regarding robocalls and telemarketers that have been filed by people. I even read an article at http://www.whycall.me/news/my-4500-payday-from-a-telemarkete... about a woman who sued a company after being harassed with dozens of robocalls.
And if hamburgers were the current hotbutton topic, I rather imagine I'd find an article about potatoes and how they're used to make fries (and no mention of them being good for anything else) similarly annoying.

Potatoes are more than just a side item for hamburgers dammit! ;)
Session Manager does the same for Firefox (not sure if it's been ported to the new addon model)
Is there a way to read this decently on mobile?

I've tried Firefox reading mode as well as pocket but they both cut off large parts of the text.
It is more often about not having an opportunity to choose, and not about not being unwilling to switch to startups.
Sorry about that. Edited to say C#.
In my introductory programming class, we teach a few basic forms of chart visualization. By far, students struggle the most with Histograms. Even more frustrating, they love line plots and attempt to use them everywhere. Despite my explanations that you can almost always use histograms, and you can almost never use line plots! Yet they go with what they find more intuitive...
HP?
I really like the craftsmanship on these. As a collector of interesting vacuum tubes and spectral lamps, this is something I want.

I don't exactly understand what these are. the 'about page' mentioned it was some proprietary tech. Is is basically like an LED in a vacuum tube without the epoxy casing to absorb heat?
Thanks to put that in number. I was unsatisfied with the "not good enough" conclusion after reading it, but couldn't exactly say why.

CO2 footprint probably also is better than mentioned. Certainly, it would take 4+ year to pay back for it, but what would have been the footprint for those 4+ years using coal based electricity? It's not only "how does the system perform", it's also "how does it compare".
Harold Abelson — 'Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.'
this is the correct answer

Most places in most countries have noise ordinances, not to mention rental agreements that prevent that
You say you envy them but I'm not sure you really do. Working without feeling involvement or purpose in what you do is mind-numbing. Of course lots of people have to endure it, and some find solace in hobbies/family. But if you are the type of person who always feel you have skin in the game, I don't think you'd last a month in a position where you don't care :-D
This works for me:

(defun eshell/x ()
(interactive)
(insert "exit")
(eshell-send-input)
(delete-window))
Yes, I agree it is very reasonable to debate whether limit should be 1 MB or 10 MB or whatever. I don't think it is reasonable to say it should be unlimited, or decided by market, or such.
I wasn't talking about medical costs, I'm talking about benefits received while you're sick. This article is about Norway, and just like in every other Scandinavian country, after a while the state pays for their medical leave. That's a benefit, wether or not the actual cost of treatment was paid by the state or not.

The problem with doing that is, again, the social stigma. Why did you receive 3 times the normal average of benefits for a period? Were you a fuck up? It's comparable to the mug-shot websites in the US; if an employer sees you on that site, they don't care if you were ever indicted, what the crime was, if the officer was found to be acting incorrectly; you just had the bar raised for you, and this sucks if you were innocent because then there really is no reason. I can see the same thing happening if someone can see your unusual benefits, regardless of wether you deserved them or not.
> The whole "if you don't love working here, then you should leave" bit made me cringe. Easy for you to say when you've got a significant equity share in the company.

In this field, we can in fact move, so "love it or leave it" is not a hollow demand. People in some other fields are far more stuck. A military officer's career is over if he says no to the hierarchy he is part of. He may find work after the army or navy, but it will be very different work, effectively the start of a different career. We on the other hand can move pretty much down the street and do very similar work.
Yeah, the people doing the work usually know the most about how it should be done. Even without UBI, collective ownership is a strategy worth considering.
Presumably that is the raison d'etre for third-party companies offering anonymous lookups (of what is essentially freely available information) for a fee - whoever gets looked up receives notification that Leeches-R-Us, Inc. looked up their details.
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I think he's pretty much the definition of survivorship bias. And that he deeply misunderstands statistics in the same way that Malcolm Gladwell does.
https://github.com/paritytech/parity/blame/4c32177ef3f4521c6...
My thought? No.

Why? For one, I'm somewhat skeptical about creating ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) in the first place. The best argument I've heard on this front is simply the idea that if it's possible in principle, and if technological progress continues unabated, then it will inevitably happen on a long enough time scale. OK, I can somewhat buy that, but I expect that the longer it takes to create something like that (assuming it ever happens) the more we'll have learned about how to control it in the mean time.

I'm also skeptical of the whole "AI as existential crisis" thing because I haven't seen any argument yet that convinces me that it's likely that AI will do "bad things" even if we invent ASI one day. Arguments that anthropomorphize AI are entirely unconvincing to me.. the key word in "Artificial Intelligence", to me, is "Artificial". There's no particular reason I see to think that an AI would have any typically human motivations or desires or whatever. So I don't see the AI becoming a Bond'ian super villain out of greed. As for the "runaway paperclip optimizer" scenarios, those fail to persuade me as well. If it's an "artificial super intelligence", why would it be so dumb as to decide to convert all matter in the world into paperclips? I mean, yeah, our current AI's are pretty stupid, but they're also harmless. An AI smart enough to pose an existential threat will probably be smart enough to not pose an existential threat.

So if the AI is neither evil enough, nor incompetent enough, to be a threat, where's the problem?

Leaving all that aside for a moment, I think a more likely scenario is that we simply become over dependent on computers in general, whether they have AI or not, and that a computer mistake blows up the economy or something (we've already seen small scale versions of this kind of thing with HFT). How to address that is an open question, but I don't see more regulation necessarily being the answer.

Also, one other reason I don't think regulation is a useful idea: because it's probably impossible to enforce anyway. I mean, say they pass a law tomorrow saying "all AI's must be registered". Great, I sit in my home, working on my laptop, and I develop Samaritan. How's anybody going to know I'm working on AI, or that I have anything useful, up until the moment I unleash it on the world (purposefully or not)? To enforce this you'd basically have to be able to monitor all the activity on every computer in the world and be able to recognize a burgeoning AI. Color me skeptical.
Really? I'm not a fan of USB-C being yet another connector that's easy to snap off. I break a USB cable every few days, and sometimes a socket just gets torqued off a PCB. The other day I had a phone on the edge of my table and I bumped the cable from the top with my elbow. Snap! The big-old A connectors are much, much harder to break, especially if the case has a solid metal rectangle that holds the USB connector in place.

I still wish though USB connectors had some kind of rubber padding around them. Like the computer IEC power connectors -- no matter what you do it's virtually impossible to break cable or socket.

Even DB9 connectors were better. I never broke one in the many years I used them. Rock solid and you could even screw them in.
Well but 6.5 years sound s like a lot of the parts are getting replaced 1.x times which increases costs again.
Is there any published work along these lines?
[Slashdot] Orthanc, Open-Source DICOM Server for Medical Imaging, Turns 5
That made me belly laugh
I agree, but for whatever reason I've only gotten to know people in different settings. I am familiar enough with the person in the corner shop, but not so much with the supermarket or department store. I wonder why that is (perhaps because I generally get the same person at the corner shop?)
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Not a great article. Perhaps best to downvote until a better one comes along.

Things to consider, which most people can agree on :

- SegWit2X [ segwit feature, followed by 2MB block size ] is seen as a compromise worth taking to move things forward past the current impasse, by a range of people who dislike SegWit and think an actual blocksize increase is urgently needed

- There is an immediate scaling problem : The mean and median blocksize is converging on the max blocksize of 1MB, and transactions waiting to get into the block blow out on a daily basis to 20MB. This backlog of waiting transactions causes users to pay high fees to get their transaction to the front of the queue, and causes delays in processing/confirmation times.

- there is a less urgent longer term scaling problem due to the linear architecture of the blockchain itself

My personal viewpoint :

- if you are only processing 3 transactions per second, there is substantial room for performance increases

- SegWit may help slightly in alleviating transaction pressure, and a 2MB block size will help a bit more. Given the voracity of the debate, SegWit2X is a practical compromise we should adopt to move forward. The USD/BTC market seems to agree with this.

- We do need a schedule for block increases over the next couple years so all parties have certainty, and so it doesn't create renewed havoc every few months.

- blocksize is just the first of several engineering optimizations that could see transaction throughput on the same linear architecture increase over 1000x. eg. We have a 150GB full blockchain - it would be half the size on disk if compressed.

- Even if LN or side chains are the way to scale, and only 0.1% of transactions are 'settled' on the main chain, we will still need a more efficient main blockchain, because the growth of transaction volumes will likely be exponential for the next decade.

- some people think the blocksize is a fundamental part of the genius breakthrough in technology that is the blockchain, and so cannot be tinkered with. This is wrong. Proof-of-work, monetary supply, miner reward, chained hash of the blocks, longest block wins, distributed redundancy are fundamental ideas at the core of bitcoin .. but blocksize is merely a technical issue, an artificial limit that was there to make implementation simpler, and always assumed that it would need to be increased well before it became an issue.
That's like blaming Hitler for WW1, though. The OP is very much not an example of fight with USSR.
I use tree style tabs to group tabs by "context" (scala stuff, Haskell stuff, news, stuff to read later) and I get to 100+ tabs quite fast.

Then I close the whole parent tab and sub-tabs when I'm done with a particular context, or go through my to-read-later tabs to catch up and close them.
many government jobs come with publicly disclosed salaries.

Knowing what public servants and politicians earn passes the most basic of public interest tests. What I earn, however, doesn't.
Did they solve the routing problem? No? Then it's not ready.

Also, LN requires larger blocks if it wants to scale anything at all. You need to get your coins to and from it you know.
> needs windows :-(

Does it not work in Wine?
How do you know 2 isn't a string and two isn't an integer representing, well 0 of course :-)
Even the current linear architecture can certainly handle more that 3 transactions per second on modern hardware .. there is clearly a bottleneck.
How practical are these in a glassdoor world? There is no way an employer could track down an anonymous posting online and force you to relinquish your severance.
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