skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He’s a Haskell purist and (for lack of a better word) religious about it. He’s written what he thinks is the only good book in what he thinks is the only good language, so that tells you a lot about how he thinks. He views the world with a very rigorous set of particulars around what is “good” and what is “bad,” and because others don’t agree with those very specific particulars he considers everything else “bad” or “lazy.”

I like Chris, and he’s clearly a smart guy, but he’s not a person that pedagogical lessons should be learned from.

The book he wrote is a good example - and I enjoyed the book and recommend it. But it’s full of him using big words because at times he can, almost showing off, not because he should. I liked the book, and am glad he teaches the fundamentals of the lambda calculus, but it is very particular to Chris’s style, and that makes it the best programming book written in his eyes, despite not being the “best” programming book objectively.
I would love to see, and be happy to pay for, an iPhone with an emphasis on portability and battery life. I really like my SE, but would kill for a remake in a similar size/capability, but with a battery upgrade.

These specs, and the features in the X seem to be about as far from that as possible.
What would you say is the takeaway point for this discussion?
I remember BASIC was the subject of regular derision from experts. Nothing helped me get interested in programming with such a gentle learning curve as BASIC. Where it lacked in every other area, it excelled in making programming accessible with immediate results.
Unless your startup is teaching programming via brain implants I'm not sure what your contention is. Yes, you need free time to develop new skills. They couldn't rightly be called skills otherwise.
I looked at your blog post on solving differential equations and it looks pretty attractive. I will install Julia and play around with this differential equation solver. At the moment R and python are awkward with differential equations, and I don't want to be married to matlab.
>> Xi greatly suppressed political dissent, online and off.

> But was that different from his predecessors?

Yes; I meant to say he greatly increased suppression of dissent

> Is there a place to read about that?

I'd start with the link above. The NY Times covers it occasionally, including a recent story about Xi's childhood home (AFAICT - I didn't read much more than a paragraph).
Relatively, we work in a pretty open/accepting industry. There are plenty of Fortune 100's that probably have a shit culture, but there are plenty (literal tons if you move outside the F100) where this wouldn't be weird.

I like to show up in a Skeletonwitch/Ghoul/Toxic Holocaust shirt every now and then.
> This isn't medical school where you need 8 years of education and experience before you can begin to practice your profession with a limited chance of killing someone.

Completely disagree with this statement. Being a doctor and being a programmer are similar in a lot of ways. In both fields unless you are a specialized expert focusing on the cutting edge of research you really don't need 8 years study/doctoral training. Most doctor jobs are like most programming jobs, the same old simple tasks day in and day out, diagnosing the flue for the 100 trillionth time, or writing a controller/view for the billionth time.

As a society, we've allowed a lot of bureaucracy to build up around the medical profession, which is one of the (many) reasons medical costs are rising and innovation is less that in would be otherwise.

Imagine how slow we would be to innovate and make technological progress, if we forced everyone who wanted to write software to undergo 4 years of bachelor schooling and 8 years on top of that of rigorous study and training before they could begin to write a crud app.

There's obviously a spectrum of expertise that's needed, and its a shame our medical systems don't allow for it. A sysadmin does not need a phd in theoretical computer science to keep his companies server's running at high uptime rates, and a family doctor does not need 12 years of study to diagnose common illnesses and refer people to experts, and a dentist should honestly be a regular trade job learned in an apprenticeship.
well, in these studies, we are talking about really low doses. so no, "trip"
I use a lot of R. The thing that drives me insane is when you create a function such as multxy <- function (x){x * y}, then you call multxy(6) R will not return an error as long as y is in the parent environment. That's pretty insane.
I think the content of the NASA press release that this article is based on is:

- that planet nine theory still seems to be holding up;

- Batygin and Brown have just spent a week at Mauna Kea looking for it.
Generally agree, and I see the 'empty area' you're talking about. I see it because I didn't experience it, and have taken years to really grok that there's a small handful of folks who start early. As much as I get pushback on it, learning programming is, imo, similar to learning another language, in that the earlier you start, the more natural it may seem. I started programming at age 9. It was really hardly 'programming' - mostly typing in code from books and magazines to start, but within a couple years I was writing my own stuff. I'm sure it was mostly crap, but I've been able to think about loops, variables, arrays, stacks, subroutines/functions and other concepts for... more than 30 years at this point. If someone 'starts' around age 17-18, then has a few years in school (while doing multiple other classes), it's little wonder they may not have as strong a grasp on the basics (missing semicolons, etc) as others with more experience.

> The result is not only magical thinking, but a belief that most/all software just magically springs from the void. I've had many conversations with people who never stopped to consider that all the stuff they use on their computer was actually created by people who thought it up and then made it happen - that it's a result of human effort.

I have to stop and remind myself that about cars sometimes too. There are thousands of parts on cars that all interact together, and people - thousands of people - all studied different areas to learn how to be the best at XYZ to build ABC which fits with 20 other parts to make everything work together when I press a button or turn a key. And... hundreds of others designed the machines that lets those other people build the parts they need. It's sort of crazy when you think about it! (shoulders of giants, etc).
Downvotes? Really? I've never complained about downvotes before, but this is rich!

Today's millennials aren't interested in understanding "federalism", which is one of the founding tenets of the USA?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalism
Both of your questions are answered in the short text. In the first paragraph he states that he is not the only developer and links a contributor list. Throughout the text he mentions funds would help purchase a new computer and help with his everyday bills (rent/food/etc.)
Spin current detection in quantum materials unlocks alternative electronics
> Teaching is not the problem. Anyone can pick up a free online book (I like to recommend SICP or HTDP) and learn everything they need to be a professional programmer.

This is very obviously false when you look into the data. It's as false as saying, "Anyone can get a gym membership and stay in good health." It's just not accurate or true, it glosses over a lot of things that should not be glossed over.
How to Get Pixel 2 Launcher on Any Android Device?
What that is would be an Oracle: http://www.oraclize.it/
It's probably not just you, but it's more than a trend. I actually found it because I already often turned down the blue on my desktop screen at night using its controls, before I heard of any supposed health benefits, and I was searching for a way to do the same on my laptop.

I can't say I notice if it helps me sleep better, but I definitely find it much easier on the eyes.
From the article, some folks are claiming that the firings were around attempts at organizing a union:

> Openly pro-union workers were among those fired this week. Some believe they were targeted.
HTML valid and semantic markup:

<form action="https://formspree.io/your@email.com"
method="POST">
<input type="text" name="name">
<input type="email" name="_replyto">
<input type="submit" value="Send">
</form>

Indirect FormData manipulation, misuse of `class`, ignorance of dataset:

<form class="dv-add-oneto:profiles:details"> <input type="text" name="firstname" placeholder="Please enter your first name"><br> <input type="text" name="lastname" placeholder="Please enter your last name"><br> <input type="number" name="age" placeholder="Please enter your age"><br> <button type="submit">Submit</button></form>

Yep! Sounds good to me!
Visual Basic 6 got me hooked in grade school... nothing more rewarding than being able to write a GUI app and short little games in minutes :P
Note how, in the PDF version [0], Dijkstra numbers the pages starting on zero (handwriting, upper right corner), but whoever created the PDF disregarded its message and did numbering starting on one (lower right corner). :-)

[0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF

Edit: Fixed link. Hacker News apparently doesn't understand the delimiting of a URL with "<" and ">". >-( https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#appendix-C
Depression is such a broad spectrum disorder (or put another way, a highly variable cluster of symptoms), that its hard to generalize in any way.
Julia's website has some benchmarks: https://julialang.org/benchmarks/

C is the leftmost dot, Julia is just to the right.
In my opinion it had pretty significant role in making it "valid" genre by proving that people will actually pay for such games.
That’s going to be one very rocky, veeeery frozen planet. Still, if it has moons, one of them could be geologically active if the orbit is right. Imagine a cryovolcano erupting, with Sol as a pinprick in the background.
One wrong does not justify another wrong.
Agreed. I'm learning math right now and similarly the hard part for me isn't memorizing the rules/properties but trying to build an intuition on how to combine these truths to infer other truths in order to solve harder problems.
Axios editor needs eyesight checked
Its something possible but it isnt guaranteed. There might be other explanations for the unusual orbits of transnetunian objects
> He’s also written what he thinks is the only good book in what he thinks is the only good language

I've no idea whether he thinks it's the only good Haskell book (do you have a reference for him claiming that?) but there is a sizeable segment of the Haskell community that considers it the best Haskell book. (I've never read it, personally.)
Yep, just wanted remind of this. In today's corporate culture, people can get religious about performance reviews and ranking top people, and confuse it with the truth. In reality they just tend to favor one set of social biases at the expense of another, often to their own detriment.
> I couldn't find a page which explained how to do high precision arithmetic in Cython or Numba, so I completely gave up.

When that happened to me, I wrote Sage (http://sagemath.org).
Years ago in the Economist I read about a study that has stuck with me since. According to a study of public company mergers, "Only a disappointing 17% of mergers had added value to the combined company, 30% produced no discernible difference and as many as 53% actually destroyed shareholder value." [1]

That certainly matches my impression. My subjective opinion through friends is that acquiring companies rarely fully understand what they've bought, and pretty regularly kill what makes the acquired company special. Not on purpose, really. I imagine an enthusiastic cartoon monster running around trying to hug people it takes a fancy to. Some it squishes to jelly, some merely end up bruised, and some it neglects or drops when its whims turn elsewhere.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/1999/nov/29/10
"...the majority of programmers are not developers."

Could someone please explain the difference between the two terms? I've always used them synonymously.
Funny you should mention IM... was in 3 different stores last weekend, and three different guys (upper 50's) had Iron Maiden tour t-shirts on.. Being in that age group myself I wanted to high 5 them.
Yes, it's a bit infuriating that bezels keep getting smaller while the physical phones keep on getting bigger (not just iPhones).
Regardless of the extensive science behind computer programming, I still consider programming a "creative" field. Yes, you do need sound engineering and be able to at least have a working understand some of the computer-science, but there is more to it than that. It also requires the creative ability, just like painting a picture or writing a novel. You need to be able to conjure ideas and take them from theoretical manifestations to concrete implementations. You need to be able to look at a problem and see the way to the solution, like a sculptor can look at a chunk of rock and see a statue.
Science never says never, but it does become so convincing regarding a given topic that reasonable people lose interest in them infinitesimal possibility.
Delaware's Odd, Beautiful, Contentious, Private Utopia
Performance in Netflix – Brendan Gregg [video]
That sounds like something somebody trying to sell me a $200/month Equinox membership would say. Sure, maybe some people learn better with mentorship or structured classes -- but those generally cost money and/or more time. The important thing is the resources are out there: it's an amazing thing that you can become a talented engineer entirely through self-study. How many fields can you say that about?
Free Collaborative Hiring tool
Because then it is hard to have a consistent and fair method of judging candidates.
It pretty clearly, in my mind, is the best Haskell book. There are really only a couple attempts ever made at writing a Haskell book, so there’s not too terribly much competition.
According to that JavaScript is faster than both Julia and C by a significant margin in iter_mandelbrot ;).
When she says I have a boyfriend
In my opinion that is the wrong question to ask.
The right question is: How fast will my code be. Numpy has been heavily optimised and is written in C and not Python.

Take a look at the link below, comparing a simple sum in different languages (among them Python and Numpy). The power of Julia is that there is no privileged code. Your code will be as fast as the base library.

http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/alanedelman/18.337_2017/b...
How to Add an OLED Display to Your Particle Device
Kernel threading does scale to the number of threads applications need these days.

What can be slow are context switches, but they aren't slow in absolute terms. The vast majority of applications, including Web servers, are perfectly fine with 1:1 threading.
That works great, thank you! I never realized uBlock could do CSS modification like that, though in hindsight it is probably a simple enough extension of how the thing works in the first place.
I, too, want a pony.
Hi everyone--developer of f.lux here.

I wanted to say that we stopped thinking of f.lux as a way to match a room about 8 years ago. We have been consumed with the idea that if the human circadian system is controlled by light, and if nobody knows what the numbers are in real life, then it is vitally important that we figure it out.

Our main effort since then has been about people and understanding how they react to light over time, and how technology can fix it. f.lux is intended to be a seed that will explain how all of our lighting can work better. It's a big project that extends beyond screens, and we think software is central to fixing the problem.

People who wake up at the same time need different timing and amounts of light, and it's not really about matching the color of a screen to a room. We've learned that almost every room is already too dim (during the day) or too bright (at night). And the trouble is that most people can't figure this out by looking around - they need some tools to help out.

This system that controls sleep and alertness is nonvisual, which means that everyone's intuition about what looks good might be pretty far off from what it does to your body. This certainly is borne out by the last 100 years of electric lighting.

Electric lighting has shifted sleep schedules by >4 hours, and people are not sleeping nearly as much as a result. We think this is connected to ADHD, cancer, type 2 diabetes, obesity, mood disorders, and many other serious problems.

So while it is true that other people have turned screens orange like f.lux did in 2009, the truth is we didn't do nearly enough back then. Our goal is to understand the biology and make something that actually works for a wide variety of people.

We have tried to address this question ("people, not screens") in little pieces, e.g., why we are making big changes to f.lux's schedule default settings on our "big update" page:

https://justgetflux.com/news/pages/v4/bigupdate/

But it is hard to talk about outcomes when nobody at all expects you to be thinking about them. Snake oil is not what we're about.

We have a lot of work to do -- apparently including a lot of writing and explaining, and I appreciate your support.
Teaching CS is hard but I think the root of it is our ability to teach people how to think. Learning to program is easy compared to the problem of learning how to think algorithmically.

IMHO this is because a lot of CS courses start at a very high level with very abstract concepts, which might also be because they can't afford to start with the very basics of "how does a computer work" due to the limited time available.

On the other hand, I think CS should always start with a book like this one, which truly does start at the basics:

https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softw...

A large part of why beginners fail is because they expect too much of, and don't comprehend, how the machine works. I believe that once they see how this complexity is actually the result of a large number of very, very simple operations, they will have a better understanding of what it means to instruct the machine.
Probably he is saying developers as professional programmers..
Visionary Mathematician Vladimir Voevodsky Dies at 51
> I agree that overly stable countries tend to stagnate when that stifles innovation

That's not what I said. I said autocracies stagnate; wealthy democracies are the most dynamic, innovative economies, in business, technology, science, culture and everything else. That's where the Internet, web, Facebook, the startup business model, financial engineering, bitcoin, globalization, open source, rock'n'roll, hip hop, electronic dance music, personal computers and smartphones, modern 'deep learning' AI, and almost any other innovation you can name comes from. It's where science, capitalism, democracy, universal human rights, and much more came from.
Just my 2 cents: It would be nice to start all the don't sentences with "Don't ..."

Unless one is already intimately familiar with interviewing, it's hard to distinguish the do and don't.
Why do we embrace the strictness and structure of these languages? Why aren't a line break and a semicolon equivalent?

Learning may be easiest in a scripting language like Powershell, where all libraries are loaded by default and semicolons don't matter. Errors like missing commas are often pointed out explicitly in the error message. The JIT nature of the console allows for very agile learning. For any given operation, there are usually at least 2 ways to do something. Variable types are optional and very flexible. Finally, the help system can auto-build a rudimentary help page for any function, even custom functions you've written with no help section, giving a basic idea of inputs and operation.
Ask HN: What time do you guys want to learn React?
I promised not to long ago that I would live stream turning UI designs into React components. Well, now is the time I keep to my word. I'm going to be live coding a landing page from start to finish. You'll learn about my setup, which includes Next.js, Express & more. I'll be answering questions to the best of my ability and showcase how powerful React is for landing pages.

So with all that being said. Can we vote on a time and day the HN community would like to join in on the stream. Especially if you want to see the setup process.

I have everything ready, so I'd like to start sooner than later.

Streams will be on Twitch - https://go.twitch.tv/creatorsneverxx
Performance is not everything, people are obsessed with it and it's a mistake.

- libraries

- community

- tools

Are much more important.
Ask HN: Weird Interview Situation
I'm a recent master's student CS graduate from a top 30 University in the states.

I've been looking for jobs and had an interview with a well known company that is dying. The interview consisted of 40 minutes of talking to me on the phone and didn't have any technical questions.

I thought this was going to be a first round of interviews, but they made me a very lucrative offer a week or so after the interview. They didn't offer to fly me out for a second round of interviews, and only spent 3 minutes on my website for my portfolio (I used Google analytics).

Should I be worried about the position? Something just doesn't "feel right" about the whole interview process. Even in googling the company, people have said that they have been flown out for in person interviews. It just seems very strange why they would want me and pay so much without asking technical questions. They didn't ask about much on my resume either, meaning I could have made about 75% of my resume up...
Sadism is more common than you're supposing IMO, but agreed that incentive based "evil" is probably more common.
Threads do scale. On Linux, O(1) scheduler solved this non-issue a long time ago.
It's just the fashion industry digging through the trends and fashions of the past 60 years for things to recycle. It doesn't have to make aesthetic or semantic sense; it just has to sell. Leaning on existing fashion from the past lends a certain sense of legitimacy to whatever trend they are pushing, so it's a tried and true tactic to reintroduce them — conveniently stripped of any social classifiers associated with it (but they do look great on Instabook).

That said, today's teenagers wearing Nirvana T-shirts may smell like teen spirit, but I doubt any of them has even heard a single song of that band. It's a bit weird.
Clickbaity title due to not making clear that it is purely about the interface to the library.

Lea Verou called an interface like this "HTML API", which standing alone also is missing the script context but is at least clear in that it is about the API, not the entire code: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/02/designing-html-apis...

List of examples http://markapp.io/
In my opinion, this is not about abandoning, but supplementing. Python is good at many things, as is Rust, as is Julia.

Stuff like the ODE library that Chris has, or JuMP (for mathematical programming) that Miles Lubin, Iain Dunning and Joey Huechette wrote, or a number of other packages are simply not available elsewhere. The Celeste project, for example, achieved 1.6 PetaFlop/sec of compute rate on half a million cores.

Programming languages are abstractions. Some abstractions are better for certain kind of problems. Many of the amazing libraries that are available in Julia would simply not be easy to do otherwise.

Think about it - if these were incremental advances and no serious community would ever form - then Chris would have never written his packages. Julia has seen over a million downloads. In my biased opinion, it is more than an incremental advance. I think the right approach is to understand where those advances are and apply it to the right kind of problems.

There is a balance to be struck between the two extremes of nothing new will ever get adopted, and everything should adopt anything new and shiny that comes out.