skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If he had the respect of his coworkers, I'm guessing "Rick" was really a 10x programmer, BADLY MANAGED.
You need somebody else who understand the project objectives and can put a limit to the development of "configurable" options.

>Rick’s product supported a dynamic workflow with over fifteen thousand permutations. In reality 99% of our use cases followed one of three paths. The team hard-coded the workflow. This removed over 30% of Rick’s work

That's a failure of the manager, not the programmer.
The good programmers, the ones who enjoy their work, will choose a complicated but beautiful path, will choose to make a configurable workflow whose configuration is itself configurable in LISP. It's the manager job to know that the workflow can be hard-coded and then avoid complexity by the love of complexity (good programmers love complexity solved by intricate and beautiful code). If not managed correctly, 10x programmers will choose the most complex, self-configurable solution where a hard-coded workflow will do.

TL;DR: It seems a manager failure. Top talent needs top management in order to focus great creativity in the narrow path of productivity clients will pay for.
DWIM (Do What I Mean) at the UI level seems a good feature to aspire to. The sanity check could (and should) be done using an independent method (say manually check a couple of things, or is that too out-of-dated?).
> didn't have any atoms

That sounds a bit weird...
Despite being primarily a computational scientist, I still keep a proper "dead tree" lab notebook. It's been invaluable, both in keeping my thoughts ordered, and also referencing decisions toward old projects.
Agreed. Like lighting port better :)
A digital clock in JavaScript + CSS
I do know what "source control" is but even when I wasn't working for myself, my boss made me still add this stuff, despite knowing at the end, upon saving, it would ask what changes were made.

We used something called "Source Safe" from Microsoft.

As for what's in the Notes and deleting it upon live production... that is the old stuff... in case the new stuff stopped working for whatever reason.

I guess we all have our own methods of doing things. Fortunately, I've not had major issues, though everything is backed up to it a server upon my completion of work for the day.
>Your team’s strength is not a function of the talent of individual members. It’s a function of their collaboration, tenacity, and mutual respect.

It's both. Don't fall into the trap that collaboration, tenacity and mutual respect will compensate for lack of talent. You still need to find talented people, just don't hire assholes or turn them into assholes.
What am I to make from: "while I know companies use tools to do their thing... I don't", if not that you're not using a version control tool?

It's not "genius behavior", but well accepted from people like Uncle Bob, that documentation should be in the names of small and focused functions, methods or classes, not in comments.
Thank you - that's very useful information!

I had been wondering how one was meant to provide meaningful error messages for code that failed to parse or failed to lex using the LR approach and looks like maybe the answer is "with difficulty", which is definitely a downer.
Absolutely not partisan. I would prefer if my (federal) tax dollars didn't help anyone affected by hurricanes. I understand my point of view is way outside of the mainstream, where all of the politicians compete to see who can appear more concerned.
F**K YouTube’s Censorbot
I have a cable that has the indicator on the wrong side.
> read up on NYT's Iraq War lies told on behalf of USG. This is how America works

TL; DR the New York Times unquestioningly published what the government told them, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction [1]. This reminds me of the faith Americans had in their government preceding the Vietnam War.

Saying this is "how America works," however, is a willful short-circuiting of cognitive faculties. It's how any trusting society works until it's burned. We got burned, again, and now the press is more critical of anything the government says.

I know a few reporters at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Catching the government (or anyone occupying a position of power) in a compromising lie is a prize they aggressively seek.

It seems like whenever articles critical of significant foreign governments come up on Hacker News, these sorts of comments materialize. Just because the American media is criticizing a country doesn't mean (a) the criticism is invalid, (b) it was directed by the U.S. government or (c) said organization isn't similarly critical of the American government. (It's still good to read multiple countries' newspapers, though. On the topic at hand, Der Spiegel and Le Temps have written extensively.)

[1] http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/
That is not interesting. If you are making the point that the rate of Clojure job growth is declining, it could be a data point in support of that hypothesis.

What do you think Clojure's absence from zdnet's list indicates?
> High childhood mortality, and adult life expectancy until the 40s doesn't necessarily have to be characterized as nasty or brutish.

> It was the norm for most of human existence

The second statement isn't an argument against the first. In fact the original 'nasty, brutish, and short' quote, I think by Winston Churchill, stated that it was the norm. Slavery and monarchy, not freedom and democracy, was the norm for most of human history. Epidemics and famine, not the CDC and obesity, used to be the norm.
Sounds like they graded him on feature completion rather than how he implemented the features. It's a one sided story though. I've seen projects fail due to constantly "rearranging the furniture."
Well, I think the "genius" deserves most of the blame. The company obviously shouldn't have allowed this guy to waste 2 years writing crap, but I don't think it's fair to say that the author of this article is "the problem". That's like blaming someone for hiring an incompetent builder to build their house.
I'm an old school surgeon... I like to operate without using anesthetics or sterilizing my tools.
Apparently the poli sci and anthropology guys aren't mixing with the history profs very much.

Most history professors I've known refer to the dark ages as the "so-called dark ages" because that time period served as proof-positive that you can have civilized society without the state.
In all fairness, it sounds like the author took over the project after it was already 2 years late.
I think another issue that may be worth mentioning is that a lot of the articles in the freeCodeCamp publication are written specifically to appeal to people who are not (yet) very skilled.

At least in this particular case, the combination of the red flags already mentioned by many together with the demographics of the target audience seems like a dangerous combination that promotes stigmatisation of "talents" and the idea of "if you can't become it or work with it, kill it".

I may be reading between the lines a bit too much, but the article appears to be exceedingly popular by the freeCodeCamp publication standards, and that, to me, is very unsettling for a story that I think is effectively "management turned mismanagement into a heroic triumph".
> does that arrangement in and of itself determine which country or countries will have the highest per-capita GDP?

Scientists and engineers, in my experience, cross-pollinate. As much as the dream of distance-less communication abounds, this cross-pollination exhibits geographic clustering. Defense research spending in Massachussetts and the Bay Area spawned Route 128 and the Silicon Valley, respectively.
Most CSV parsers include this feature by default. Basically you can specify in the setting whether to regard the first row as a special row for attribute names or not.

So the answer is you can just use CSV like you use, but just need to use the right parser and turn on the right options when parsing to auto-assign attribute names.
You need to seriously stop wasting time talking about this on HN and learn you some basic git.

https://try.github.io/

It's not hard. It's not like you're computer illiterate and don't know how to program.
I've been using Julia for a year or two now, and over that time my enthusiasm for the language has waned, not grown.

Here's the standard pitch for Julia: C-like performance with R/Python/MATLAB-like expressivity.

This is undeniably true. For someone coming from R/Python/MATLAB, you will be able to program as easily in Julia, if not more easily and more cleanly, and get much better speed.

However, what I've come to realize now is that you can get something similar from Kotlin, Nim, and Crystal, but those are much more general-purpose, and often are more consistent in their performance. They don't have the same numerical libraries at the moment, but they have a much bigger use-case target, and for something like Kotlin, a lot more leverage from the community.

Rust is a lot lower-level, but as the numerical resources grow (and they inevitably will) and layers of abstraction are added, what you will probably get is something very similar to Julia in expressivity but more extensible downward, and probably more performant. Rust has a ton of room to grow, and has many good role models from C (e.g., Eigen).

This also isn't even touching on PyPy and things of that sort.

I like Julia and still reach for it when I'm starting a project. Often it's worked great, but other times I have to go back to R or Python for some library that calls C, because the Julia library, while usable in a way that pure R or Python isn't, is still not actually as fast as C. Sometimes "on the order of magnitude of C" is not actually good enough, and you need C. Also, if you poke around for benchmarks that aren't posted by the Julia developers themselves, you'll see different conclusions about the real-world performance of Julia, so there's that.

I guess I read articles like the linked post, and I end up feeling like they're misleading. Is Julia better for data analysis than R or Python? Yes, almost certainly if you were starting from scratch and not calling any products of outside languages. Is Julia better than R or Python + C as it is in the real world? Not sure, because you still have to call C anyway at some point if you're being honest. Is it better than Kotlin, Nim, or Rust? I'm even less sure. If Julia wants to maintain long-term competitiveness, it has to reach out in the opposite direction of those languages, from numerics -> general purpose computing, because they are inevitably moving from general purpose computing -> numerics, and they are bringing a lot with them.
Everyone is commenting on the mismanagement angle here, which is very real, but I think it's also important to point out that the author is simply wrong about "Rick" being a genius if the descriptions of his behavior and work product are accurate. I think there's a huge myth about solitary geniuses who are assholes. I've yet to meet someone I consider really genius who is also a toxic asshole. Maybe occasionally you run into geniuses who are a little shy or socially awkward, but by and large the defining factors of the true geniuses I've worked with have always been a desire to share with the team, improve everyone around them and contribute deeply to the product. Their code is maintainable and other engineers totally get it and when they don't the genius is there to walk them through it, taking notes on how they can make it easier to understand next time. They hate the idea of being a dependency/SPOF, and they are extremely accountable for very real and obvious progress.

I've also worked with people genuinely like "Rick" from the article. It usually takes about a week to find out that they don't actually write any code or contribute to the team in any meaningful way besides making noise. People who are that wrapped up in their own ego cannot make meaningful contributions to their teams.

It lends more weight to the idea that there was a ton of mismanagement going on at this company that beyond the bullshit described in the article, the author still considers "Rick" to be a genius.
Sorry, I see now that I worded my phrase in a way that was likely to be misunderstood. I meant "rescue" in a metaphorical sense that people are getting financially rescued by FEMA assistance.
It was a long time ago that I contacted him but he didn't seem very interested in naming a price for one.
It's often a negotiation tactic. They force you to invest time into it, so that you wouldn't want to let go of the investment.

I usually walk away from anyone not announcing salary ranges, because they're also the most likely to negotiate hard.
> it is after all the definition of government

It's necessary for government (more specifically, at least for one context, a definition of sovereignty is a monopoly on violence and justice).

But the definition is much more than that. It's also collective decision-making. I don't follow the law - even ones I disagree with - and pay my taxes because I'm coerced, but because I believe very strongly in the rule of law, I respect the decisions of my fellow citizens - even ones I disagree with, and I'm proud to participate.
Does a planet need to have an active hot core?
Off-The-Shelf Hacker: Trends in Microcontrollers – The New Stack
Would you let your employer implant a microchip in your hand? These workers have
If I were in charge of the people on the project I would ask for the paper trail to see what kind of methodology was being used to make progress.

I would probably end up finding that there was none (or only a bunch of CYA paper trails), and fire everyone who was involved in that project.

EDIT: I once was recruiting for a project I was working on, and one of the candidates during a phone interview bragged about a poorly managed project they were on that "wasn't their fault". I didn't address it, but that's where they were sorely mistaken. Not doing anything when you know there's a problem (even if you don't know what the problem is) is not a valid strategy IMO.
Mult(A,B) = Exp(Log(A) + Log(B))
Maybe I'm punching in the screw with only my hammer here, but what's wrong with combining block- and flow style in YAML?

---
columns: [id, name, age]
data:
- [1, "Alice", 27]
- [2, "Bob", 26]
- [3, "Carol", 45]
Exactly. There is nothing inherently wrong with a single developer building an entire product, and I know a lot of very good "10x" developers who work mostly on their own and build great products.

The reality is that there really are a lot of 10x developers out there, but there are also 0.1x developers like this guy, who actively sabotage projects.
Would you be willing to talk more about your experience? I too am very interested in this process, but have yet to find one that is successful for me. I would love to hear more about your process.
Cryptominer scripts can just as easily be blocked.

Unfortunately this isn't true- it's pretty easy to proxy the request to coinhive through the web server of the main site. e.g. https://github.com/cazala/coin-hive-proxy

Site owners have incentive to run this proxy so they're not marked as a mining site OR to circumvent the 30% fee that coinhive collects. I don't think it will be possible to block mining in the future without blocking javascript completely.
Geth v1.7.2 (Urgent Update) Out Yes, Byzantium Hotfix. Please Update ASAP
If that's confusing.. you may not have the mental capacity to be using a computer in the first place.
QBasic
Do you understand that he is talking about Lacinia, which is from WalMart? Do you feel that WalMart is esoteric? Do you wonder why WalMart has decided to commit to Clojure?

A friend of mine offers the somewhat humorous summary of Clojure as "a library that makes concurrency easier in Java." And I suspect that is why so many large companies are moving towards it. These were companies that had a large number of Java programmers. Presumably the programmers often made mistakes regarding concurrency, and they were looking for a way to make it easier to manage concurrency. And so they switched to Clojure.

Interop between Java and Clojure is seemless, so a lot of companies that are already using Java can add in Clojure painlessly. Actually, I should state that more strongly, Clojure removes some of the pain of dealing with concurrency.

Lacinia is new. The first public release was just 6 months ago:

https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia/commits/master?after=...

The fact that big companies like WalMart are committing to Clojure, and then releasing their libraries to the community, suggests that Clojure is going mainstream.
Will AI Take Our Jobs?
Indeed, it's not a lot, but I figure, you earned it so you might as well collect it.
The author is not to blame for the problem of course - since the problem existed before his arrival. The author made the problem worse by implementing the wrong solution. The company was lucky to survive this misstep, and poor Rick was forced to work insane hours just to end up being fired anyway. Not a good outcome for anyone.

The company looks bad for mistreating a seriously committed employee.

Rick looks bad because the author decided to slag him off in a public blog post

The author looks bad because he's oblivious to what he's done and instead decided to shit on a really dedicated employee for the failures of the management team.

It takes some serious lack of perspective to post something like this on your public blog. Ugh. I feel sick.
> the scientific community has to come to a global consensus, or all countries must come to a consensus and enforce it legally

The scientific community isn't homogenous. Some communities are better organized than others. This is visible in their varying quality and journals' openness (e.g. arXiv).

The communities with strong nexuses with industry, e.g. oncology, would stand to enforce reproducibility the best. A grand bargain whereby pharmaceutical companies (and others who would commercially benefit from more-reproducible research), or even just the NIH, include reasonable standards as part of their grant requirements would move the needle forward. It would also help us troubleshoot what works and what doesn't.
Knowing how to rise to power while mostly staying under the radar, knowing how to consolidate power, and knowing how best to wield power are different things. The truth is, he's likely still rising to power; so what happens after the next Congress will be very interesting to watch.

Power is a great test of one's mettle and humanity, a test most fail historically - though I make no predictions about Xi.
In the US, it's not libel if it's true. Even aside from that, this doesn't actually identify anyone.
> Two words: washing labels.

Great Idea. However, I had to write software one time that had all the possible washing symbols as input. There were 30 or 40 possible symbols. No human could possibly know all of them.
Here's a nice hacked up version, note the mkdir -p that makes the directory if it doesn't exist. Also I changed the time from 24hr to more provincial 12hr w/ AM/PM Please be careful adding aliases if you aren't sure what' they're doing!

alias journal='mkdir -p /Users/insert_your_username_here_on_mac_on_linux_change_Users_to_home_on_windows_good_luck/journal/$(date +%Y)/; vim + "/Users/insert_your_username_here_on_mac_on_linux_change_Users_to_home_on_windows_good_luck/journal/$(date +%Y)/$(date +%Y-%m-%d).md" -c "execute \"normal! Go$(date +%r)\<CR>========\<CR>\" | startinsert "'
It's not that one is incapable of doing it. It's that one way is wrong and the other is right!
...and Reagan.
I think it helps to do only enough to be useful and not enough to be a productivity sink. I keep a general purpose plaintext file called notes and a handful of plaintext files specific to certain topics in ~/documents and that's it.
There will be material supply limits at some point in all this scaling.
I don't have problems with it, but I also never had an issue with Python's whitespace, or languages without semicolons, or languages which prefer to use begin/end blocks. I don't get why it's a big deal.

The one exception to that is when switching between languages. Sometimes one forgets which language one is in and a syntax error will result. Like using the dot operator to concatenate strings in Python or leaving semicolons off the end of PHP statements.
I've known Chris for a few years now. During this time I've asked him many questions, worked with him on projects (open source and otherwise) and I have never seen him act the way you describe it here. Moreover, I've also seen him talk to and teach people at conferences. He has always been very patient and helpful, encouraged people and nudged them in the right direction when they were stuck. Of all the teachers I've interacted with throughout my life, Chris definitely fits in the category I want to learn from.
Like someone else has mentioned before, I encourage you to provide constructive feedback to him directly, he cares about teaching and does want to improve.
Thanks to articles like these, it's easy to know what professionals and companies in our field we can avoid.

So many red flags from the author, I'm shocked that any of their talent stayed. What a joke.
One way he is more powerful is he has greatly restricted freedom of press and internet discussion, and use this to halt criticism of the regime and the opportunity for any organized opposition to arise. Nowadays people rarely say in public anything except what the regime wants it to say.
Right, so zero-based is wrong unless one is using a language close to assembly.
A lot of microphones and speakers have built in hardware low pass filters that kill anything above 15kHz
I made a throwaway just to say that you're incredibly retarded.
Not to mention it's absurd to include Amazon's $100 billion in retail business in the calculation.

How do Dell and HP (among others) get left out of Wintel? As others have noted, it's an article stacked to fake a point.

And why are they comparing a Microsoft-Intel partnership against GAFA, which is the exact opposite of a partnership.

It should be some combination of: Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Apple, HP, Dell from the year 2000.
Holy shit what? The last memories I had of interacting with you that could be related to what you're talking about:

- You talking to me about potentially working at your company

- Soliciting pictures of your greyhounds

- Congratulating you on either the pregnancy or the birth of your child

I checked out our shared Twitter history, we talked a fair bit in the past but I wasn't able to find _anything_ like this. I used this search: https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=kirin...

I mean this sincerely — are you _sure_ you didn't get me confused with someone else? I was definitely a dick from what I can see from the Twitter history and I apologize. However, I cannot remember and cannot find myself ever saying or implying something as horrendous as what you're describing here.

>This is where our agreement diverges. Many people will not or cannot engage the open source world.

Oh! Don't need to! People use OSS regardless of engagement with the wider community. I'm talking about stuff people do on their work hours like vendoring a library and upstreaming a patch. I'm not talking about off-hours. For people that are uncomfortable with or contractually unable to upstream a patch, knowing how to hack on the libraries you use is still a big improvement. Many don't!
Is this adjusted for inflation? It warps the data quite a bit if it isn't.
Hackernews is like if you filled Palo Alto up three feet with raw sewage.
Zealandia is named after New Zealand, which was named after Zeeland province in Netherlands, which is province with lots of water and islands.