skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doctors and lawyers can't do their work as a hobby. There are laws against that. But I can say from personal experiences that doctors talk about their work in their off-hours, usually in great detail, and over meals. Nurses, too.

Obviously, computer programmers can program anywhere, anytime, and it's legal. It's also possible to get a very early (as in pre-pubescent) start in actual programming, whereas there are, again, legal hurdles to becoming a doctor or a lawyer much younger than the median.

As for the rest of the cultural markers, I wouldn't presume to say too much, because I don't know that many programmers.
A large fraction of this user's posts recently have used inflammatory language. They have referred to people who disagree with them as "ghouls".
> Unfortunately these days banks don't extend large enough lines of credit for most growth businesses.

That has been a universal problem for growth businesses in the US going back to the WW2 era (particularly cash thin product companies that have to plow their sales right back into growth).

Phil Knight's Shoe Dog book has an almost unbelievable account of lines-of-credit hell (despite Nike's perpetual, extreme growth - basically doubling sales every year for the first ~15 years - they couldn't find any US banks willing to fund the growth; a Japanese import/export bank ended up saving them numerous times as several large US banks dumped their business).
I was referring to the semantic oddity of killing something twice. I suppose one could try to kill a zombie, which is already dead.
Replace that public record with a physical ledger, replace digital signatures with handwritten signatures, and replace proof of work with a requirement to write a haiku of sufficient wittiness and relevance to the lines on the page including the prior page's haiku, and you have a version of Bitcoin that doesn't even need computers.

You need something like a telephone party line, too, but that part can be skipped over; it still works if people sit close enough that they form a peer-to-peer earshot network.
>Were it offered merely as a factor which explained some subset of the gender imbalances in STEM, that would be more reasonable.

Yes that is a more accurate construction. For the sake of expedience I wasn't this precise, and left it to the reader to sauce out this more precise meaning, which given the format, I think was entirely reasonable.
Re: Uber, the US has more wireless broadband subscriptions per capita, according to the OECD, than anyone but Japan and Finland (basically tied with Sweden). Re: Netflix, we just broke into the top 10 on Akamai's ranking of average connection speed. On both metrics, we blow away the other big Western democracies (the U.K., France, and Germany).
Real mentors do personal, 1 on 1 sessions specifically with you. Books are great but a mentor is a step up. Usually the good mentors expect you to have already read all the main books in the industry.
It's certainly quite plausible that they compare their behavior with other engines, and then file bugs on those other engines if they find them.
How is that relevant?

And don't complain about votes, it is what it is.
Mathieu would be a good name for the newsletter! (Because Math-ieu)
I agree with what he says, but the tone and phrases used ("leftist bias", that CNN are "stupid on average", etc) are going to make sure that the people that need to read this will never reach the end, probably not even the end of the first paragraph.
> I think what's happening here is pretty simple: the people who have "writing more computer code" as their personal hobby are excited to feel superior to those who don't.

Wait, all of them? That's a pretty sweeping generalization. I think you should allow for the possibility that a substantial fraction of them do it because they enjoy it.

Also, often the sentiment goes the other way. Like:

- So, how was the weekend?

- Awesome! I've learned about this cool algorithm...

- Hey, what's wrong with you? Get a life, like, go see some movies or something...
It's not pure garbage, but it's not workable for Linus. Nothing wrong with that. Also, he's right in this case.
FENÔMENOS NATURAIS NA TERRA
What an absolutely fantastic response from one of the CockroachDB guys to the endlessly tedious naming criticism! (The only open issue on it also made me laugh.)
I'm sorry to say but... This check won't help with accidental incorrect casts. Typeof in typescript is a pass through for the JavaScript function, so it only returns what the JS version does.

A check for a string or number will work, but a check against a typescript object or something complex like a union type will just return 'Object'
I can't speak for the other party, but there are people who promote their ideology on the premise that any disagreement simply must, necessarily, be predicated on an immoral worldview. They explicitly state that indulging such people in an exchange of words is not "a conversation." It seems to have something to do with establishing themselves as gatekeepers of valid and invalid exchanges of words.
Subsurface was originally created by Linus. Its pretty likely that that he authored those commits.
It is a very long time in js world of things
Why they would loan longer than the warranty always puzzled me. There is a chance it may be not worth repairing by then.
> What worries me is that we learned virtually nothing from the mistakes that we made with JS.

Just out of curiosity, what did you learn from JS's mistakes? What would you like to see happen in place of WASM?
What I mean is, you can think of an AI system as a tool, like a hammer or a chainsaw or a screwdriver or a featherduster.

It's created with certain goals in mind, to solve a problem.

There may be side effects that are dangerous, but I don't see those dangers as being any different from any other tool.

The assumption seems to be that an AI system will somehow transcend the purposes for which it was built, or that we will seek to build a replicant, in the sense of literally reproduce a human in silico.

That goal seems kind of unrealistic to me, because it doesn't accomplish anything, because we already have humans.

However, people do all kinds of things that don't make sense--but then that is a problem with the humans designing the AI, not the AI per se.

I'm probably not explaining myself well, but basically I think whenever you create something (as opposed to it randomly evolving), it has a purpose. That purpose constrains the design and/or affords constraints. To the extent the maldesign comes about, though, that is a problem with the designer and not the design.

I guess I just don't see super AIs coming about and deciding humans are worthless, unless humans design them that way, in which case that's a human problem, not a design problem.

Humans are self-interested because that's how we evolved. AIs would come about because we created them to do something. If we choose to design them to do something malicious, it has to be a reflection of our malice, not the AI.

More directly to your question, the vulnerable server isn't the danger, it's the hackers who hack it. That's not to say that there shouldn't be security concerns, but to me it is a different use of the term "safety," closer in meaning to "vulnerability." People aren't talking about vulnerabilities or errors in AI, because that's just a computer bug-vulnerability problem. They're talking about AIs being a threat themselves.
It is okay to have your beliefs, but don't come outright saying your travel habits are better than others, some people want to enjoy comfort and luxury while traveling or otherwise and there is nothing wrong with that. There is a reason five-star hotels are in business just like there is space for crumbling hostels and camping grounds.

I say this as someone who's traveled a little bit on a minimal budget, there are good things about both and your posture is typical of condescending wanderlust travel bloggers(which these days come in troves) even if that is not your intention.
This actually made me try switching to Firefox again. There's some minor things missing, but for the most part all the features I want are there.
Wick: Bringing the Spirit of Flash to the Modern Web
Birtherism.

That is the sole datapoint a thinking, rational, ethical person needed to know to properly character assess Trump. If you still voted for him, you either liked that sort of blatant Nixon southern strategy 2.0 type of bigotry; or you're dismissive of it as a problematic attribute in a leader for this country.

And sure, Clinton necessarily must have been a fundamentally flawed candidate, hindsight being 20/20, to lose to that. But I put more blame on Democratic and Republican parties for sabotaging the Electoral College with party loyalists. Dead people would have done a better job, randomly selected people likely would have too, and contemplative people even more reliable. The two parties get way more blame from me for this setup to failure, than the people I think are deeply ignorant people in some form of denial for having voted for the Celebrity Chaos Clown.
Invisible Fences
Past discussion on Wick (8 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13244827
In a large corporation I worked for a long time, if EVP fires somebody on the spot it means that EVP is next to go. I assume this will be the case for Salesforce.
> Why would Chromium-based browsers be more susceptible?

From the linked discussion: "they may start “infecting” Firefox eventually, but that is not happening now"

So it sound like the developers of Instant Logic are simply choosing to target the most popular browser at the moment.
Andy Rubin startup Essential lands investments from Amazon
Linux is one of the few open source projects to with plenty of developers. They don't need or even want your help, especially if your attitude toward tools is rigid, and if you have nothing concrete to contribute.

Linus has said this a few times -- in general they don't actively try to onboard new contributors.
If it was censored I would hardly expect this post to be number three from the top...
Yes, perhaps you don't have to argue all of that. But Damore did. Perhaps if he hadn't made those assertions, his memo wouldn't be seen as particularly interesting or controversial.

But we don't have to engage in such hypotheticals. Let's consider the premise that Damore's memo is simply a call to debate based on science and facts. In my opinion, such a non-biased, open-minded essay would not include this kind of assertion:

> We have extensive government and Google programs, fields of study, and legal and social norms to protect women, but when a man complains about a gender issue issue affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and a whiner [10]. Nearly every difference between men and women is interpreted as a form of women’s oppression. As with many things in life, gender differences are often a case of “grass being greener on the other side”; unfortunately, taxpayer and Google money is being spent to water only one side of the lawn.

Only someone ignorant of basic facts and history would make this sweeping claim. And only someone ruled by his emotions would be unable to take a step back and do a Google search to see if anti-discrimination law has been used on behalf of men. Given that kind of massive error, or inability to recognize one own's ignorance, I don't think we should continue assuming that Damore's premises are factual or coherent in their arrangement. Which is why I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt in saying that it'd be better if he could have actual empirical evidence on the harm of Google's diversity programs. Just because his memo contains facts doesn't mean that it's truthful, if those facts are used loosely to further the author's emotional appeals.

edit: Fixed the formatting to show that [10], in the original memo, refers to a footnote and contains a hyperlink.

The footnote:

[10] “The traditionalist system of gender does not deal well with the idea of men needing support. Men are
expected to be strong, to not complain, and to deal with problems on their own. Men’s problems are more
often seen as personal failings rather than victimhood, due to our gendered idea of agency. This
discourages men from bringing attention to their issues (whether individual or group-wide issues), for fear
of being seen as whiners, complainers, or weak.”

The URL of the hyperlink (the text of which is "misogynist and a whiner"): https://becauseits2015.wordpress.com/2016/08/06/a-non-femini...

(Pretty sure "becauseits2015.wordpress.com" would not pass as a useful source on Wikipedia, but YMMV.)
Oh wow, the MAINTAINERS file is a work of art: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
There's git-appraise[0] which decentralizes issues and PRs by putting them as objects inside of git. It also features a webui[1]

[0] https://github.com/google/git-appraise

[1] https://git-appraise-web.appspot.com/static/reviews.html#?re...
Ask HN: What stuff can hackers license to companies?
Universal Basic Automated Food and Shelter
What about AI's fighting each other on Starcraft 2? Will that be interesting?
Here are a few suggestions https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7798748/find-out-whether...
Yep. There were several fake towers setup that would allow man in the middle attacks for phones / networks that were insecure.
Why Company Culture Is Important to Your Career as a Software Engineer
Please discuss the idea of universal basic automated food and shelter vs. universal basic income. More discussion here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/6sppn2/universal...
So what do you tell someone who does genuinely enjoy doing that sort of thing in their free time? Someone who isn't a workaholic but who, in the article's conversation, would sooner wrestle a cobra than ask a co-worker about romantic issues (especially considering the potential consequences,) and who doesn't know the difference between a bass guitar and a bassoon?

Should they be recusing themselves from the organization's social structures entirely, if that's a significant problem for others? There's probably enough seclusion outside of work already, but at some point you just start to feel like you're contributing to the problem by existing.
I'd say GitHub is not Aston Martin if GitLab is Nissan...
The saying is that the teacher will come when the student is ready.

For one thing, people who become masters want to teach. If there's anything more fun than using a skill you've mastered, it's teaching that skill. But most people are not open to teaching. Sometimes they just end up talking to themselves on Twitter, reaching an audience that can't quite understand them.

Proteges also offer another perspective on things. It's useful for mentors to bounce ideas off them, or even someone who can see things from a more naive, open minded perspective. Someone who has all these ideas but isn't yet cynical.

So mentors are actually looking for proteges, even though they don't advertise it.

I think all you need to do to find a mentor is to do things in a specific direction. Eventually you bump into someone who is impressed by your ambition and chooses to be a mentor.
You put it far more elegantly than I did.
Absolutely. Queries on 60TB of data can certainly merit more than one box. Hell, queries on 1TB of data can merit more than one box.

I have a workload that runs close to 1.2million TPS for hours at a time and needs less than 100 millisecond response times at the 99th percentile. That uses more than 1 box and sits (replicated) in RAM.

However, 5TB of data really _isn't_ that much on modern SSD's. You can fit a sizable chunk of that in RAM on a decent server, so you probably _don't_ need more than one box.

I have 5TB of data that needs to sit on an SSD is, to be honest, a really poor performance metric. If you are genuinely specing out hardware and a database a better statement would be:

"I have 5TB of relational data, with a pareto distribution for access, at a peak of 100K TPS". Then we can start talking about what solves the problem.
It's the same story as "rich dad poor dad" from Robert Kiyosaki. My dad is very detail oriented, not a risk taker and all about security and education. My in law is the complete opposite. Guess who made a lot of money in life ;)
While this is true, knowing someone set up a fibre channel network on the weekend is hardly a reason to call that person an obsessive wretch.

I know a very smart woman who's a professor of English literature at a university, and I know for a fact that she goes home on weekends and reads Sue Grafton murder mysteries ("M for Murder" etc.). This doesn't indicate that she's obsessive or wretched or has no life, and I don't think "are you reading anything at the moment?" would be an inappropriate question for someone in her field. Certainly we wouldn't want to force her to read all the time, and certainly we wouldn't want to force her to read Finnegan's Wake on Saturday morning, but for someone who wants to study literature for a living liking literature is important, and realising you don't might cause an epiphany.
Exercism – Level up your programming skills
Fuck Pai. More and more Americans are working from home. That alone is reason enough that we need fast broadband. I know he doesn't care about people and their needs but scum like him are at least usually persuaded by business arguments so I'm making one here. He's not a representative of anyone. He was not elected. It's not his job to decide what Americans want. The only way to fix this FCC travesty is to get rid of the pro business, anti citizen scum who appointed him.
Out of my sample size of 1, I didn't take either of my devices -- my work phone or my personal phone -- to defcon or Vegas when I went last year: they didn't even leave my home.

I bought a laptop at Staples, put Fedora on it, used it for the conference, and I only really use it for when I go to conferences and the like.

There is a mix of folks using late model phones and burner phones, but, there there is a lot of burner usage at DefCon/DerbyCon/BlackHat.
Richard Stallman Explains [video]
My burner phone, with disabled wifi, bluetooth, and data, was owned this year.
It's nice to be in a position of power. For unknown directors it would be "Coen Brothers land Netflix series" not "Netflix lands Cone Brothers serirs".
one year ago today I had to take a long uber ride, and the driver was excited that it was enough to cover his lease, and he could switch back to Lyft.
Actually, Netlify site performs WORSE using http2.

See the comparison:

https://www.dareboost.com/en/comparison/598b93730cf2aac95f75...
the country, genre, language is the reported country of the artist or channel. Not of the streams.
Regarding censorship, the post you commented on has already been flagged by the humans who "protect the community"
curls works for me; so does Firefox+NoScript and elinks.
It is indeed disturbing. Why should a web page be able to detect if dev tools has been opened? Isn't this a browser security issue?
Woah boy. Toxic masculinity and feminism as the solution? Assuming this is from the US, is this what's really going on over there these days?
I want to refute this notion that you have to work 24/hrs a day, 7 days a week. A lot of company cultures that are like that seem to be much more competitive and tends to favor young single kids ready to pour in late nights. I say this as a male, who is also somewhat young (late 20s), but I'm also married and I have a kid, and I'm a full-time software engineer who works remotely. In other words, I have a life before/after code, and responsibilities to take care that have nothing to do with building a fiber-channel network in my basement because at the moment I don't even have a basement. I think this is actually more indicative of the culture as a whole within a particular company and even its location, not necessarily any gender bias because a lot of people outside that bubble have similar experiences that have nothing to do with gender. That being said, it's just a weekend and sounds like watercooler talk. There are some nights that I feel like I want to hack on something after everyone goes to sleep, there are others where I just want to read a book. Humanity is a spectrum, it would be a shame to try and put people into relative boxes. It's worth noting that if you don't feel like you fit into a company's culture, it doesn't automatically mean you don't fit into the field at all.

STEM is a massively broad set of professions with culture dynamics and social influences that can vary widely from company to location. Let's not assume that one particular bubble like Google Mountain View is indicative of what all companies and professions in STEM look like.
Also, the move to WebExtensions is a move to a more secure extension model. Traditional XUL extensions were comparable to the extension developer compiling their own code into the browser. Yikes.

WebExtensions should be better sandboxed and have better permissions management.

You can't get those security benefits if you allow older XUL extensions to stick around. You have to sunset XUL extension at some point.
Actually the parent pretty much said that exactly

>No, it doesn't. It makes you one-dimensional and particularly poor at building products for others unlike yourself.

Translation - you are bad at your job

>The sooner the tech industry realizes that this sort of person is not an asset and that having too many of them around just drives others away, the better off it'll be.
reply

Translation - we should get rid of these people who are not assets
Most people _where_? In the USA or the whole world? What makes you think that USA is a better representative of the world culture than Finland? I'd be hard pressed to recall any place in the world where people hate Finns, while that can't be said about Americans...
It is important to understand development for Linux is heavily driven by a business need. There are more than enough companies (intel, google, etc) that would gladly contribute to Linux, since it makes business sense.
I see Lazarus pop up on HN occasionally. It's an IDE for FreePascal right? I guess I'll have to open the article again. How are the database drivers? I've been told they're ageing. Is there 64 bit support for Windows or only 32?
It's great you have your own opinion, but if you're going to claim that internet access and bandwidth did not improve at all in the past 8 years you should probably back that up with reputable data.
Such a powerful argument you make.
Ask HN: Google Voice and Google Fi Good Experiences?
I used Google Voice quite a long time ago and had intermittent calls.

I tried both forwarding calls through Google Voice and using Google Hangouts over wifi. Haven't used Google Fi but haven't exactly heard good things from friends.

Has anyone had recent good experiences lately?
>Both sides are guilty of this, anyone who believe one party is less in it for fame, power, and money, than the other is just as naive as those that voted in our current president.

This idea is not only false but also poisonous to democracy. If it becomes dominant then the US will be vulnerable to revolution. While I think an overhaul of the constitution is about time, a revolution is usually highly unpleasant.

If all democratic choices are equally bad, then you have two choices left: Resignation or revolution. This is kind of what Trump is about, I think: A lot of angry people wanted to see if they could vote for something else than the traditional two ideologies that they regarded as equally bad.
Lazarus is awesome because of the speed of the compiler, the fact that it has a GUI that works, and is OPEN SOURCE.

So one wonders WTH is going on with all the other compiled languages that have nothing like this? And no QT is not the answer, we need a built-in good enough GUI! =)
I'm a little confused what their case is, can't the company fire them at any time with no reason? I don't really know much about employment law, but that was my understanding.

Like if they went on stage and flopped, they could get fired. Similarly maybe they were too good. Or the boss was having a bad day.