skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or maybe people want to be allowed to talk about the charity they do because it's important to them and talking about it encourages other people to join in.

Painting givers who want to discuss as selfish narcissists, as you have, is unkind. More importantly, it means more people die preventable deaths.

A more measured argument than my own is at Giving What We Can: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2016/08/its-good-to-tal....
Linear Regression with Gradient Descent in JavaScript
Software that is free only for non-commercial purposes is considered to be non-free software.
It's funny that you think the airlines don't do dirty tricks.

What reseller doesn't buy tickets when you book? They get paid when you buy, why would they refuse to buy?
No idea, but just go on Amazon and buy a book on ants if you want to learn more about them. And you should. To quote E.O. Wilson, "If you're not interested in ants then you're probably not a very interesting person."
I agree completely. And honestly, it looks like the presenter is trying to brag about their knowledge of obscure C and C++ quirks through the voice of candidate #2.
Ask HN: Do most successful companies get big funding in their first years?
I was amazed at how much time and effort successful founders put in their businesses, and I'm mostly interested in the beginning of their journey (since I'm currently in that stage myself)

- Jack Ma: "In 1999 .. The team set to work building their own online marketplace .. By October 1999, the company had raised $5 million from Goldman Sachs and $20 million from SoftBank"
- AirBnb: Started in 2008, got into YC in 2009 and got $20k then soon received $600k in funding
- Jeff Bezos: Got ~$100k in funding from his parents during his first days
- ..

Does all this money help these founders being able to put +16 hours work days when they know they have enough money to "live on"? How important for these founders was to have so much funding for them to work so much on their businesses and free their minds from other basic needs (paying bills, ..)?
just use c++ dude
Risk tolerance has definitely gone down, but what’s the basis for assuming that the level of tolerance was right in the past, and today it’s too low?

Historically, the people investing in safety were not the people who were exposed to the risk. That created perverse incentives, where $1 in safety improvements that would save an average of $10 in human health or life would be rejected because the people who would pay the $1 would not be the ones paying the $10.

That’s still true, of course, but we at least attempt to make people do the right thing.

Regulators today aren’t afraid to assign a dollar value to a human life and reject safety improvements that don’t have a positive ROI. The standard value currently is something like $8 million.

I suspect that the parent wasn’t downvoted for callously making a good point. They were downvoted for baselessly assuming that the correct level of safety tolerance would result in injuries or deaths on this project, and doing so callously.
> 'there are no good startup ideas left in this technology era'

The low-hanging fruit has been thoroughly picked, 'tis all
It's likely that pay has gone up because tech workers are providing more value.

Consider an employee working at an investment bank 15 years ago versus today. 15 years ago, most value was generated by hoards of sales people and traders who cultured deep personal relationships with deep-pocketed customers. Today, tech people command a greater share of the wallet, and banks are making deep cuts to the ranks of sales people and traders.
so write a specialized GC for the task in C or C++.

C++ can always win!

JVM has hotspot? use profile guided optmization in C!

There is no escape!
Consensus in NY State Legislature
A multi-user, multi-tasking MS compatible DOS?
How does one start to address this mentality?

* The fixed costs of publishing a book dwarf the marginal price of each printed book. Those fixed costs are dominated by the salaries (or 1099s) of human experts.

* Like most products, books aren't priced from their (minimal!) marginal cost basis. They're priced based on utility and market substitutes.

* If ebooks were priced "too high", nobody would buy them. But in fact, so many people buy ebooks that they're putting bookstores out of business.

The "resentment" you're referring to is I think maybe mostly a creature of message boards.
My last job search (in Seattle) took me months longer than I was expecting. This could be ageism at work (I'm 48), but I'm still inclined to think that there's a more mundane explanation: The recruitment and hiring process for software engineers has gone from crappy to damn near broken. If ageism is a significant problem right now, it's possible that it is primarily a completely unintended side-effect of how were doing hiring in the industry.

I don't know for sure, but we need to be careful about looking at obvious problems and then simply assuming that we know the explanation.
Herb Sutter's recent tips are more modern (and the backlog is being updated).

Scott Meyers' Effective Modern C++ is a great successor to his Effective C++ book which spawned the whole "Effective *" snowclone books and covers C++14, though not 17, of course.

Actually, this blog post's content looks like a watered-down version of a tip from either or both of the above authors, though I'm too lazy to chase down a verification.
24 Phenomenons Explained for Everyone to Understand
I don’t think it’s the end of the startup era at all. It might be the end of startup hype ending on itself, with valuations not tight to reality and companies without business.
I don't understand your logic. Could you try to explain this using common legal concepts?

The constitution merely invalidates the referendum, it doesn't actually make it illegal. However, obviously it's criminal to spend public money on organizing an unrecognized referendum.

Given that the referendum itself isn't criminalized, it seems ridiculous to argue that simply by participating one would be violating the law.

It's also important to keep in mind that even the Spanish government has not attempted to argue that it's illegal to vote. This is just a meme being spread on online forums by people who mostly don't even understand the difference between the constitution and the criminal law.
Pretty much all mainstream languages use higher order functions nowadays, it really shouldn't be a foreign concept at this point.
Are you implying collusion?

Have you noticed the massive amount of money the competing car companies spend on advertising? Have you ever suspected collusion when you shopped for your own car insurance?
The US uses solid fuel rockets in ICBMs. Russia uses storable liquids which are highly toxic. We switched after some nasty accidents.
This is something I often thought about as a child. I didn't imagine self driving cars as they are being developed today. Rather, I thought about what it would be like if all cars were controlled by a common system. I would imagine cars all taking off together in unison from a stop at traffic lights, cars being merged together from two separate lanes without bringing everything to a crawl.

Maybe we'll get there one day.
Java desktop applications tend to be slow and bloated. Java server applications tend to be pretty ok if well designed.

For desktop applications you suffer some more from innate disadvantages of JITs and the common graphics libs. People experience Java when using eclipse and minecraft and so perceive it as slow. When a java server provided data fast to a wevsite, people don't know that is java.
Is there a good reason why we shouldn't club together as rich countries and fund a not-for-profit drug research body that does fund this sort of thing?

This already happens with major threats, there was Ebola that got solved quickly. Keep in mind that government resources are also limited.
You might also be interested in the story of SISCOG (http://www.siscog.eu/upload/GESTAO-DE-LISTAS/News/PDF/eclm-2...) - a massive transport infrastructure system designed in Common Lisp. I'm sure Clojure would have been chosen if it was developed today.
Hi, I went on and searched for a random clojure project in github, and have chosen some function which is of a small size:

(defn parse-seq [parse-el form]
(when (sequential? form)
(reduce #(if-let [parsed (parse-el %2)]
(conj %1 parsed)
(reduced nil))
[] form)))

without knowing really clojure i take it "[parse-el form]" are the arguments of this function. How is it possible with minimal effort to know what am I supposed to pass as parse-el and form? what are they?

https://github.com/tonsky/datascript/blob/master/src/datascr...
"Older developers of HN, what are your experiences?"

I'm 43.

When I was younger and first started out 20+ years ago I put in easily 50-60+ hour work weeks ,but only billed the client for 40.

I was young , hungry to learn, and loved the feeling I got when I accomplished a project or tackled something new and complicated. It was self rewarding. It was not a job or even a career , it was a feeling that wow somebody is actually paying me to do something I fully enjoy.

At 43 the only thing that has Changed is my ability to put in that extra time.

I was married young and in college as well, but with no Child. At 35 we had our first child and my father had a stroke not too far after that.

My responsibilities at home raising my Son and taking care of my older parents has consumed most of my free time.

While it has not impacted my area of expertise, It has impacted my ability to stay up to date with all the latest and greatest technologies.

Even when I was younger I always had a "learn as a needed" mentality and was able to quickly adapt. That hasn't changed nor my desire to learn new things.

However, what has changed is that I have become selective on which technology "I need to learn". I also can't afford the risk to take a pay cut to jump on a new cool technology when I'm making good money , in my current industry.

Having said that now I fantasize about retirement , but not to retire. I fantasize about that extra time and financial freedom to work and learn on the FUN projects I want.

I have always wanted to get into the robotics industry to improve the quality of life for elderly people and children. I love the software and hardware intermingling and actually seeing the physical result, versus just software virtual results on the screen.

Its something I fantasize enough about , that now I'm looking to purchase a new home with the space to build my lab (mwahahaha).

In regards to ageism, Yes , I have seen it and would say its far more prevalent then the other 'ism' in the tech world.

Luckily for me I don't really look like my age and can still pass for my 30's and have worked with the same clients for 20+ years, even after switching companies.

However on paper its another thing, and something I definitely worry about if I have to change jobs or clients.
There are still a few reasons to use C even to this day and I'd add that the page was last updated in 2007.
The main trick is to do an average of word embeddings in a given document, an idea I took from the youtube paper on recommendation engine [1].

I have a separated service that contains the word embeddings, generated with word2vec. The idea is to generate an embedding for the document by making an average of the embeddings of the words it contains, each having a coefficient based on the word's rarity (so, a rarer word has more weight than a stop word).

When saving a document, OpenVoyce is contacting this API and asks to generate an embedding for the document, then it only saves that in its own database (as a "cube" vector of 200 dimensions).

From there, searching for something new is just about asking for an embedding for the search terms and using `cube_distance()` [2] as sort function, it does not require pre-filtering since stop words are already weighted off (although, there is some filtering in the API as it ignores words it doesn't know).

It would still help to be able to define user specific stop words, though. For example, on Quuu's OpenVoyce, most suggestions are about adding new categories, so "category" should be considered a stop word, that's something I plan to implement.

I can't tell yet how it scales to million of records because we're very far from there for now (there are 4500+ suggestions and comments on OpenVoyce at present day). My bet is that if the amount of data becomes a problem, it may be fixed by reducing the number of dimensions of the vectors.

Oh, there's also something to know: the cube extension for postgres doesn't allow for more than 100 dimensions. This is something configurable, but only by editing a header file from the extension (that's the author's recommended method). I've detailed the problem and solution on my pg350d repos [3]

[1] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

[2] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/cube.html

[3] https://github.com/oelmekki/postgres-350d
> 2. a typical page load time is 10-20 seconds for many (most?) shops.

That sounds very exaggerated, are you quoting this range from actual data?

For a sanity check the first two shops that came to mind loaded in <3 seconds (guitarcenter.com, nike.com)
Decades ago, when Java was new, the VMs were not very good, and the comparison was with C and C++, it was commonly said that Java was slow.

But these days, Java VMs are vastly better and Java is competing with languages like Python and Ruby. The way things are today, the assumption is that Java is faster than its competition.
For a project a few years ago I chose to use apsw:

https://github.com/rogerbinns/apsw

It is a different wrapper for sqlite than the one in the Python standard library. As far as I remember, the stdlib one had some brain-dead choices with regard to concurrency and transactions.

There may have been some other reasons I chose it too, but I don't recall at the minute. The issue is that Python has this spec called "DB-ABI" which is supposed to make all databases look alike. But I don't want that -- I just want to use sqlite!

So 'apsw' is a thin layer on top of sqlite. I'm able to read the sqlite documentation in C, and be reasonably confident in what it's doing. But as far as I remember the Python stdlib version had a bunch of magic in the wrappers that was annoying. I might be mistaken but I think it parsed its own SQL? I think it had some sort of silly cache of parsed queries, rather than letting you simple store/control that in the application.

I think it also inserted SQL statements for transactions between your own calls!!! I just want the raw SQL to go to sqlite as I intended.

I definitely ran into issues where non-obvious flags to the API increased insert performance by 10x, and it had nothing to do with sqlite itself! So I abandoned it for a thinner wrapper.
Rust to WebAssembly Made Easier
Profile of David Hall, Founder/Velodyne, who designed the rotating LIDAR system
I linked a talk from Walmart that explains exactly how they're using Clojure. I don't think I'm misrepresenting anything here.
Burp plugin to find reflected XSS
Another thing is insurance which takes into account how much, where and how you drive. Smart car companies like Tesla are in good position to start offering these as well.
I love Home Assistant, by far my favorite automation platform. I couldn't recommend it more. At home we use it to automatically dim the lights based on the luminance outside, send us messages when laundry is done, activate and deactivate our alarm system based on who is home, turn the radio on in the morning when we enter the living room, turn off all lights in the house when we go to bed, etc. etc. !
Money as a medium, from McLuhan's Understanding Media, as an encouragement to think of cryptocurrency as a medial paradigm shift...

“Money talks” because money is a metaphor, a transfer, and a bridge. Like words and language, money is a storehouse of communally achieved work, skill, and experience. Money, however, is also a specialist technology like writing; and as writing intensifies the visual aspect of speech and order, and as the clock visually separates time from space, so money separates work from the other social functions. Even today money is a language for translating the work of the farmer into the work of the barber, doctor, engineer, or plumber. As a vast social metaphor, bridge, or translator, money—like writing—speeds up exchange and tightens the bonds of interdependence in any community. It gives great spatial expansion and control to political organizations, just as writing does, or the calendar.
There's no credible source for that quote: http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/15/bush-chirac-and-the-war-...
Atlas Informatics to shut down
There is a small portent here of something I think we should be cautious of:

> The space that is currently used for car parks could be used for something else.

We should be careful that this space does not uniformly end up being used for yet more skyscrapers and office buildings, but open space and parks instead. I feel like this is a major decision moment for ending up with beautiful cities or dark cyberpunk monstrosities.
The beauty of a fully automated and coordinated system is that vehicles would only stop at the end of a journey. Intersections would be a graceful interleaving of vehicles in all directions. This would conserve a lot of energy that is currently wasted on braking and acceleration, and the passengers have less frustration of being stopped when it is their strong desire to be _going_ somewhere.
I really don't worry about this as a 46 year old engineer. For me I still feel young and I still love tech and my age just does not factor , and for anyone who it would factor, I don't want to work for. I have always had quite a good positive opinion of my talents / knowledge (but not to the point that I am a narcissist arsehole) and that has carried me well.
VR/AR fits that bill. It's just that no one has nailed the form factor and hardware yet so that it can reach mass adoption.
There is no doubt these slides wreak of humble bragging and maybe even a bit of shaming, which isn't a good look. Obviously, there are important properties to programmers other than knowing obscure stuff.

That being said... It's still solid and I think the slides have many, many important points, both for developer attitudes and things to know about C and C++. A lot of these obscure quirks can hit you hard if you're not paying enough attention. The order of initializer lists is extremely painful and hits me every so often even though I would probably catch it in an interview.

If anyone takes anything away from this w.r.t. C and C++, I'd say the best thing would just be to always code with `-Werror -Weffc++ -Wall ...`
The recent past does appear very special but I wouldn't discount the near future either. e.g. the tech for AlphaGo was made by a startup.

In any case I took the piece at it's title's face value, where startups are nowhere near over. Unicorns shouldn't really factor into that.
I understand that to some degree, there always was and will be crappy companies. What I don't get is that great majority (say 95%) of companies I encountered in last ten years were all about 'earning on salaries'.

In the entire hierarchy of the company there has to be somebody that recognizes quality and experience over job barely done (or not at all).

I see companies that prefer gullible as make pretend role playing, there is no money and business is barely moving along but hey at least I am owning something.

Just don't get it I suppose. I did run successful company then sold it at its peak, but it was never about role playing while I was at the top.
It could.

Who knows if there was actually Vitamin C contained in what i bought?

But my experience still exists.

I took that stuff that has been sold to me as Vit C and had a lot less to suffer. Didn’t spend a lot of money, and didn’t have a lot of risk involved.

So what?

I tried other remedies before - as well ones that were organical stuff recommended by someone ( ginger tea for example which some believe in is helping a lot - but not myself ) as well as commercial products. I believed or at least hoped they‘d help in each case. But only this did with some - and i say 66% is not great, just some - reproducability.

With Herpes it‘s 100% were in my personal experience it removes a lot if suffering and bad feeling for days.
Well if it's eg a document with a diagram I usually write the document in markdown and reference an svg image.
Several women accuse tech pundit Robert Scoble of sexual harassment
One often ignored thing in this conversation is we often use the ability to carry more. I keep my emergency kit in the back (I'm part of a CERT team) as well as spare chargers and cables and stuff. I keep telling myself I should stock a spare change of clothes too. Obviously sometimes I drive with friends or family, load up my car with groceries, occasionally move furniture or computers.

The car is a relatively reasonable standard for covering an individual's regular use cases for transportation.
The real answer for the first example: compiler error due to fancy quotes (“” U+201C and U+201D).
I think each one of those platforms are growing rapidly. So what if they haven't hit critical mass yet? Each one has that potential. What are we looking at then, a few years before one or several of those become as big as mobile?
Notice that these are two distinct things; talking about a charity (even saying you gave) and telling people how much you gave. Sometimes you don't even have to say how much you gave because your name on the Harvard dining hall speaks for itself.

It's not exactly a secret that donating money is often about more than altruism or stopping "preventable deaths."

Even if you believe in the cause you're donating to in the purest most altruistic sense you should know that the conversation is tainted for any rational person living in the real world. No one but people either kissing your ass or trying to get their hand in your pocket is going to hear "I give 10% of my income to save lives" no matter how dignified you think that sounds.

Or as your link says:

>You can't have a good friendship if you hide your true beliefs or feelings, including about effective giving.

I wouldn't be a good friend if I didn't say everything I said above about the "10% donation" proposal. The question is would you be a good friend to someone who disagreed? Or are your friendships predicated on "when I share something I feel strongly about you either agree or are basically complicit in killing 40 people?"
There are some places where only the programmer can know that the undefined case doesn't happen (like integer overflow). But yeah, what purpose does it serve that the order of side effects in "a() +b()" is unspecified? I assume that's for historical reasons.
I think there is something to the notion that we have for the time exhausted the low-hanging fruit produced by smartphone market penetration. There are still plenty of good and potentially extremely lucrative startup ideas, but the untapped market potential will not come from taking advantage of mobile alone.
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Supposedly, this path is open to even non UK residents, since the processing likely happened in the UK.

"According to the UK Data Protection Act 1998 implementing EU Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC, any individual whose data is processed in the UK has the right to access it (Article 7), regardless of nationality. "[1]

[1]https://medium.com/personaldata-io/cambridge-analytica-demon...
The problem with a centralized system is that is a single point of failure. If the central system went out, things would get Very Bad, Very Fast.
I remember reading a data science research paper in the early 1990s that explained how Walmart had created a massive database containing all point-of-sale records. The data was stored in a relational database, and Walmart was mining it to be nimble with prices.