skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'Coding in your spare time' isn't quite as extreme as having no life outside of tech. Hey, I code a bit in my spare time too, so let me clarify.

It's the people who don't do anything else but code that I've, in my experience, had real issues with - they might make great computer scientists, but as a group they're not very good in a team of software developers. Arrogance, problems cooperating with others, excessive nitpicking, 'engineer's disease', poor social skills...

I'm not saying you're guaranteed to have any or all of those problems if all you do 24/7 is code, but I've seen it one hell of a lot, and I'm perplexed why this type of person tends to be preferred over more well-rounded individuals. It's not like they're actually better at their jobs.

I'm not arguing for going through an organization and sacking everyone who codes on the weekend. But I strongly suspect that if interviewers didn't glorify the obsessive 24/7 coder, either deliberately or subconsciously as 'what a real developer looks like', we'd have both a much more diverse tech industry and a much more functional one.
>The big advancement in alphago is that by using deep learning it is able to evaluate different board-states without doing any search, using a neural net.

It still uses a Monte-Carlo Tree Search to get to the level where it can beat human pro players.

>Starcraft is real-time, there are tons of different actions you can take, the actions are not independent (pressing attack does something different if you have a unit selected or not), the game state is not fully known and a given state can mean different things depending on what preceeded it.

And yet StarCraft is extremely primitive as far as strategy games go. Most of the stuff you can do in the game simply doesn't matter, and the stuff that matters could be modeled at a much coarser level than what people see on the screen. Knowing how this stuff works, I'm willing to bet this is exactly how Deep Mind will approach the problem. They will try many different sets of hand-engineered features and game representations, then not mention any of the failed efforts in their press releases and research papers.

The choice of StarCraft as their next target reeks of a PR stunt. Sure, there might be no AIs that play at pro level now, but there wasn't any serious effort or incentive to build one either, and now Google will throw millions of dollars and a data-center worth of hardware at this problem.

As far as I'm concerned, real AI research right now isn't about surpassing human performance at tasks where computers are already doing okay. It's about achieving reasonable level of performance in domains where computers are doing extremely badly. But that won't get you a lot of coverage from the clueless tech press, I guess.
They should have done it before the memo went viral in such way as not to look like an endorsement of his (wrong) position.
Yes... and starting a couple of days ago, the media has been really playing up the NK threat.. a real change -- in the past, Kim would make threats, and basically be ignored.. but now the same threats are front page news.

So of course we don't have money for any of those things... we need to save it for NK.
It's fairly trivial to get a list of potential competitive threats:

1> New apps with user base in the millions and monthly growth rate in double digit %
2> Significant VC/angel funding
3> Positive press coverage.

This data collection doesn't require violating anyone's privacy and can even be outsourced to a third party on a monthly basis for a trivial cost.

So, why are there accusations about monopolistic behavior? MSFT was trying to block competition via illegal means, like incentivizing partners to use MSFT products, or going after the competition with expensive (bogus) patent claims, but FB is doing none of that.
> It baffles me that some people thinks Firefox is becoming a “Chrome clone”, it’s just not the case, it’s just plain silly to make such statement.

If you use a much narrower definition of "clone" than is typically used in this context, then sure. If, however, you use "clone" a bit more flexibly, and note the word "becoming", then it's a different story. That's not to say that Firefox won't be better than Chrome, and it's certainly not to say that it won't have any advantages over Chrome, but it is giving up some of its major current advantages.
Firefox is maybe 80% of the way there. Just like in the IE Anitrust days, firefox suffers from sites that do not design with it in mind.

Still better than Google Creep. Change to a search engine that protects privacy too.
You'd run "git format-patch" to create a .patch file with the diff of changes for a commit, and then run "git send-email" to send an email with the patch as the contents (optionally with additional comments). The recipient can then run "git apply" to apply the patches to their tree and push the changes.

For "private" repos, the recipient would be a specific repo maintainer/owner. For "public" repos like the Linux kernel, the recipient is usually a publicly-archived mailing list.
I don't mind affiliate links. I mind when ratings, scores, ordering of results are influenced by payment from the reviewed companies. Or companies get excluded because they don't offer affiliate programs.

Example http://www.top10bestvpn.com/ "Please be advised that the operator of this site ACCEPTS advertising COMPENSATION from certain companies that appear on the site, and such compensation IMPACTS THE LOCATION AND ORDER in which the companies (and/or their products) are presented, and in some cases may also IMPACT THE SCORING that is assigned to them." (emphasis mine)
So, do you believe women are biologically unsuited to be software engineers?
You think in 2025 we will be talking about children mining by hand in the Congo in horrible conditions to provide all those lithium batteries for that future? There is a price for everything.
Not many people know the relationship between oil and the US dollar.

The golden age of the US dollar was the Bretton Woods system, where every currency was backed in dollars and dollars were backed in gold. There was however no obligation for the Federal Reserve to accept audits of any kind to validate there was enough gold. Therefore the US could print money at will (and it did), until countries such as France started demanding the conversion of their dollars to gold.

To avoid the equivalent of a bank run at the Federal Reserve level, Nixon moved away from the gold standard and since then the US dollar has been allowed to float.

A less known fact, is how the US dollar has preserved its value in this current setup. The answer is: by having an exclusive deal with oil producers where oil is sold exclusively in US dollars. Since everyone needs oil, if you need dollars to buy oil, the dollar gains a relative value.

Having said this, it is important to understand that as energy consumers move away from oil, the US will need to find another way to sustain its currency or it will inevitably crash, along with everything valued in dollars, such as savings, wages, etc.
So, what's the age distribution of contributors to the main tree, and how does it develop over time?

This _might_ show a long-term risk for Linux.
Thanks for this! It's pretty cool and it's nice to have something to pass on to friends who are interested in subscribing to a VPN service.
Any reason that isn't prevented by labor protection laws, examples: sexism, racism, ageism, whistleblowing retaliation.
IME, desktop nightly hasn't ever outright crashed (less lucky with mobile nightly). Sometimes I notice minor rendering glitches on various sites, but I also have Servo's CSS engine enabled which might be doing it (it's not yet the default).
> If you don't do something because of a personal dislike, and expect others to cater to your culture and personal preferences, then the problem is you.

Are you serious? If Linus is a complete asshole and tells you to fuck off, and you don't like that, the problem is with you? How can you possibly defend that statement?
Indeed. There are over one billion cars in the current fleet.
Yeah I know. I explained myself poorly. The observable itself is lazy and cold. Wrappers functions, observers (like subjects) and operators can add a higher level abstraction to change that. It's easy to make lazy into eager and cold into hot, of course, but the observable itself is cold/lazy.

Observables can do everything promises can do, but the construct itself, while more flexible, is significantly simpler. Like, -way- simpler. And a lot of what they do and how they do it comes from how they're implemented at the very base (essentially a generic observer pattern). Building observables on top of something else would add tons of overhead/complexity for no reason.

The observable needs to be the lowest level piece and we build the rest on top, not the other way around. That is counter intuitive since they can do so much more: the abstractions on top are more like specializations of the low level construct.
The argument that counters this is that hailed rides will be cheaper than driving what you already have. You don't need to make a new purchase to switch.

Even if you have a recent model sitting in the driveway, you may choose to save money by hailing a car rather than driving your own.

I don't know if it'll play out like that, but the article is pretty convincing.
They connect on port 80 (HTTP instead of HTTPS) on startup. That's unacceptable for a privacy company.
I always think this sums it up well:

> Current state makes it very hard to mange/search/fork/open-issues etc
> especially for newcomers,
> please move the project to github so we can have nice disussions
> forks/prs etc goodness.

No. Never. Github is proprietary communications tool which requires
users to accept a terms of service and login. That gives power and
influence to a single entity (and a for-profit organization at that).

Contributing to unicorn is *socially* as easy as contributing to git or
the Linux kernel. There is no need to signup for anything, no need to
ever touch a bloated web browser.

The reason I contribute to Free Software is because I am against any
sort of lock-in or proprietary features. It absolutely sickens me to
encounter users who seem to be incapable of using git without a
proprietary communications tool.

https://bogomips.org/unicorn-public/20140801213202.GA2729@dc...
Ask HN: What are real Ruby on Rails alternatives in 2017?
What are the real alternatives to Ruby on Rails in 2017? When I saw “real” I mean, what frameworks offer a wide variety of packages/libraries, common integration with “as-a-service” offerings, and have an opinionated methodology for delivering high level web and API functionality rapidly?

I hear constant refrain “Ruby is dead” so much so that it reminds me of the situation with FreeBSD many years ago.

Admittedly I’m partial to Rails but also love microframeworks too... Sinatra, express, Kemal, iron, etc. but none of those seem to really offer a comprehensive opinionated toolset the way Rails does. There are things that are close but don’t satisfy.

Is there anything close in JS/ES, Kotlin, Rust, Go, Crystal, Scala or Java 8+?
I heard VPNs don't work on netflix anymore.
The poster is a bit making fun of this mindset; more employees isn't obviously better. But the "growth at all costs" mindset is real, and in that worldview rapid growth is a sign of success because you're building capacity to capture the market.

In reality the plan is everything because without a great plan more people means just more burn, and hitting the wall sooner.
I may have to try Firefox again once 57 is in portage. A few months back I switched to Vivaldi, begrudgingly. I really liked Firefox, but the speed issues were becoming unbearable.

Vivaldi has been a lot faster and mostly an alright experience, and I've watched many of the issues I've found for it get addresses in recent builds. Still there are many things I miss about Firefox, not to mention supporting that community and the browser I've used for well over a decade (including back when it was Phoenix, the original Mozilla and the old Netscape 6 that proceeded them).
Regardless of how you feel about _why_ PIA sponsor the organisations they do, it is surprising to see someone claiming they "perhaps put [their money] to better use" given their record of supporting foss and digital/online rights [1].

Additionally, the characterization as being extremely focused on the tech illiterate I feel isn't really the case either, they have lots of docs about how to use OpenVPN [2].

Thirdly, while there's no online free trial, at DEFCON and other events they do liberally hand out free trial cards.

The above points, as well as reading the commentary, leads me to believe that the author hasn't spent much time at all using or understanding the various product offerings, and the written review and star-score seem to clash with the high feature based score listed above. I can't speak at all for the other providers, but I don't feel like PIA at least has been well researched.

[1] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/companies-we-spo...

[2] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/client-support/

As full disclosure, I'm a unpaid volunteer for a non-profit PIA has contributed to.
I have used in the past, but do not currently use, PIA VPN.
Poorly
> I don't know what can be done about it within the HN format, though.

It's not the HN format. The nature vs. nurture [1] debate is one of the oldest in psychology. It's a spectrum, and we're not sure about a lot of things, so people discuss it often in the hopes that someone will provide research answering some new part this fundamental question of our lives. It's been going on for centuries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture
Good. Bloomberg estimates the transition will be a $10 trillion upside for those upgrading and replacing fossils[1].

It remains to be seen who the winners will be. Incumbents (Excelon, Shell, SA, etc.) have market share, but will have to strand trillions of assets and reserves. Newcomers (Tesla, etc.) have to survive the energy boom-bust cycle that early fossil went through.

My money is on the newcomers (my startup is one). The incumbents' shareholders simply won't let them strand assets short term to transition to new energy business models.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-16/investing...
Just saw that episode again recently. There's some logic to accepting less on purpose, yeah.
Now, I haven't got opportunity to read his note. Did he really said that? Or people just assumed?
I've seen people recommend this as a WebExtension-compatible replacement for TreeStyle Tabs, though I can't vouch for it myself: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/
But as a user, you're probably just going to want to know if there is an extension that does what you need. Are you worried about the underlying APIs if you're not a developer?
but muh bootstrap
Same here, it's why I switched to Vivaldi. I had to restart Firefox every day or so and it still lagged. I've read the other recent post on here that shows 100+ tabs has almost no startup burden in FF57 compared to previous builds. I should try it again.
Slightly OT: is that what a 'Discourse' page looks like? It's pretty awful: it will automatically update the URL as you scroll past each post in any direction, while breaking the Back button, so good luck getting back to the original post, since neither clicking on Back nor reloading the page will get you there. Basic UX failure.
I think I became uglier as I grew up. My point was that my popularity with girls was independent of my geekiness. They fancied me in spite of my geekiness because I was beautiful (for about 2 years, I lament their loss). Not getting girls didn't make me any more or less geeky, just less happy.
The Alt-Right Finds a New Enemy in Silicon Valley
> I was never going to like it enough to blow a weekend doing more of it for free.

This is how you get good at it. If you don't like it as a hobby, maybe it's not a good job fit for you.
But you can still have advertising, just not targeted and use tactics from the gaming industry to get people hooked on content.
Yes, this is similar to how I would like to handle issues: just an issues directory full of yaml-markdown files. That way, issues are a part of the same history as the code. They can be specific to a branch, they can diverge as different solutions are attempted in parallel, and they can be deleted and retrieved after resolution.
Are you seriously implying that IQ tests are a clean measure of a biological trait? Heritability for IQ ranges from ~40-60% That's pitiful.
it is used as a precursor in chemical synthesis, plastics and a variety of other products.

you're not going to replace that with solar.
Why are they less likely to get cited as much? Does your typical researcher have some misunderstanding about how reliable the original results were?
Fun fact. Afghanistan has huge lithium resources.

https://nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html
My recollection from a fairly lowly place in a startup many years ago, that it doesn't work that way. The quid pro quo then for taking the money was rapid growth.

I was busily scoping out systems to automate stuff so that we could scale, but the impression I got was that the VCs were very very interested in seeing rapid expansion of head-count because that was an important metric for them.

I remember having these weird conversations with me saying 'we don't need to find a bigger office, if we get this workflow automated, we can just go down the pub while the money rolls in'. Ah to be young and naive.
You've been practicing some serious selective reading in these threads.

When it's the Enemy, you seem eager to read between the lines for dark intent, but when an Ally says something like "poor at building products", "this sort of person is not an asset" and "having too many of them around just drives others away" you demand a precise, literal reading that somehow doesn't conclude that this is a call to fire, or not hire, the type of person described.
https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/issues/1224

Seems they have all the APIs needed for it at the very least approved. It's not like Mozilla just said screw everyone... Let's become chrome. They are putting in the effort to make web extensions viable for even the more advanced uses.
Actually, Microsoft was pretty much self-funded. (Except perhaps for some help from the Bank of Dad.) They eventually took a bit of VC mainly to get the outside advice.
> Not any reason, wrongful termination lawsuits happen, and companies usually have processes for firing people, reviews to document performance etc..

Actually, they can (with a few exceptions). California is at-will employment:

"At-will employment is a term used in U.S. labor law for contractual relationships in which an employee can be dismissed by an employer for any reason (that is, without having to establish "just cause" for termination), and without warning."

Or, as the Supreme Court of California explains:

"[A]n employer may terminate its employees at will, for any or no reason ... the employer may act peremptorily, arbitrarily, or inconsistently, without providing specific protections such as prior warning, fair procedures, objective evaluation, or preferential reassignment ... The mere existence of an employment relationship affords no expectation, protectable by law, that employment will continue, or will end only on certain conditions, unless the parties have actually adopted such terms."
I care about the direction of the project.
> Why the fuck does a software company need to be in the middle of big city.

> Live near your job

Hmm.....
There have been some good CPPCon talks on the subject of wrapping C libraries.

CppCon 2014: Lisa Lippincott "How to call C libraries from C++" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZO0V4Prefc - This is the first one that comes to mind
WebASM doesn’t have direct DOM access so I don’t see how ad blockers would work any differently than they do now.
Maybe worth looking at the proportions in other countries too, "pre-med" isn't the first step to becoming a doctor worldwide. I gather that Law differs a fair bit too.
> I rarely see doctors, lawyers, or most professions engaging in their practice outside work as a hobby

Doctors read through medical literature all the time.

I know plumbers who have fully decked out their house with incredible custom setups (e.g. hydronically heated walls), mechanics who work on their own cars on the weekend, contractors who live in fabulous homes they built themselves, and artists who work on their own projects during the weekend.

At the same time, many of my coworkers have interests outside of technology. It varies. A lot.

> (which might include sci-fi, fantasy, video-games, board games, certain types of discussions, and a lot more)

Hiking, sailing, martial arts, world travel, cooking, beer, animal rehabilitation.

> (which might include sci-fi, fantasy, video-games, board games, certain types of discussions, and a lot more),

Sci-fi and Fantasy movies have been mainstream for some time, and my non-engineering friends get together for board games as often as my engineering friends. Video games are played by 49% of Americans (Pew), equally split between men and women.

I've known men and women who have had cultural problems fitting into their teams, engineering and non-engineering.

Also in regards to the article, music is even worse than politics for % chance of finding agreement, if I brought up the latest \m/ concert I went to, I'd find maybe a couple of people in total who'd want to talk about it at my office! It'd be "how was it? Nice, ok, cool."
To be perfectly honest I'm not at all interested in "better permissions" for plugins when it comes with the removal of flexibility that you get for free. If I've got plugin-installing malware on my system, I've got worse problems than a rogue plugin.

Give me more useful over more secure any day of the week.
That was my impression also. A couple of years ago I put gpg2 in a script and whatever option I used would spawn a GUI window asking for information. I could not stop that from happening so I have stuck with gpg v1.x since.

Curious if that still happens with gpg2.
First of all, you didn't answer my question. Where is your research that brings evidence to support your prediction? Sociology in particular isn't very diligent in actually applying the scientific method.

Secondly, you're making an "argument from authority", which is an intellectual embarrassment. Scientific knowledge is not based on consensus, but on evidence. The theory behind climate change is not supported by the amount of scientists that "believe" in it, but by the evidence they bring forth.
can you link to or provide a little more info on the "boom-bust cycle that early fossil went through"?
Plastic production requires oil and improving power density of batteries doesn't help that.
Heating houses to a US standard requires astronomical amounts of energy that will be provided by fossil fuels because they are cheap per BTU. Sure we could design better houses and use more efficient heating technologies like heat pumps, but those are being adopted a couple orders of magnitude slower than electric cars are.
I'm hanging on until I can officially pad my resume with all the office-move stuff (network redesign being a big one), but the second another job comes up after that I'm out there.
Sure you will, but maybe later. Super cheap energy makes bio-plastics competitive.

Massive solar farms passively making carbon chains when the sun is up. The reason no one is talking about it is that the transportation transition is lower hanging fruit.
I'm not sure what you mean by results. If you mean the results of a thought process that does not go beyond predicting positive/negative correlations, then I see no point to publishing it.