skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Perhaps it will be easier for them to get young talent in the coming years?

Dunno what kind of work happens up in Cedar Rapids, but it's a lifestyle sacrifice to be unplugged from the internet and mobile communication during work hours. If a significant portion of the work up there happens in secret labs, they'll absolutely have problems recruiting millenials. Especially software engineers, who benefit from online language references, stack overflow, etc.
Recently, thousands of users were duped into installing "АdВIосk РIuѕ" in Chrome. Every one of those letters is Unicode normalized.

(Hint: it's not just the I's masquerading as l's.)
I would love to live in Europe if there were any possibility of making a good living at what I do. Comparable level positions I've seen are in the $30-40k USD range for my six figure position in SF. I can't understand why developers are so poorly paid over there.
* Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo. Powerful anti-war story.
* Vagabonding, by Rolf Potts. Shaped my views on hard work and travel.
* 1984, by George Orwell. Brilliant and terrifying.
* The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle. Overcoming mental pain through consciousness.
* Planetwalker, by John Francis. Inspired me to walk and put myself into things more.
* Pure enjoyment: Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson), Ready Player One (Ernest Cline), Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons), Red Rising trilogy (Pierce Brown).

Honorable mention: The Water Knife (Paolo Bacigalupi).
Graal, Truffle, SubstrateVM, Sulong etc are really fantastic projects and I've been following them for some time. This talk is also very good, so thanks to Chris for uploading his notes.

I've done a few experiments with manipulating Graal graphs myself.

I do get a sense of slight confusion in this talk over whether Graal is easy to understand or not. It's clearly easier than C2 but this is not a high bar to reach and is not really related to what language it's written in. I'd say Graal is still harder to understand than LLVM, despite LLVM being written in C++, mostly because the LLVM guys really do believe in documentation and building an open source community. The documentation for Graal is sadly near non-existent. There are academic papers, usually undated of course as is normal for such papers, so it can be hard to know how fresh the information is. There are talks and blog posts, which are helpful but are often kind of repetitive if you've seen earlier talks.

What there isn't is anything like this:

http://llvm.org/docs/

LLVM has detailed tutorials, design overviews, descriptions of each pass and so on. This is one reason why LLVM tends to attract a lot of compiler research and has such a thriving community. Graal is good, but it's mostly done by Oracle and researchers from JKU Linz. I wouldn't say it has much of a community (check out the traffic levels on graal-dev for example). It doesn't even have a website or even a public issue tracker, which is a downgrade in understandability from existing Hotspot compilers!

Graal could give LLVM serious competition as a testbed for compiler research, but in its current state trying to work with it is just painfully slow. Even very basic questions like "how do I swap out this node in the graph" or "how do I insert a node in between two others" or "how do I enable assertions that will check if I mess up the graph" require you to learn by reading the existing code, which is hardly commented (most classes have no javadocs).

I used to think that Graal was like this because it came out of university research, so the developers were judged by metrics like how many papers they published. But LLVM has the same origins, so I guess it's really just a matter of project culture. That may prove hard to change.
Actually, yes. Learn some history.
The Land of Laughs
Debut novel and masterpiece of Jonathan Carroll.
I need to read this regularly to readjust my antennae, otherwise I might become a complete jerk. Yes, I know this doesn't make any sense.
I used to begrudge my friends when I was depressed and isolated (self-sabotage). Why weren't they communicating with me in my ways? They were, but not frequently enough to satisfy me. But in the end, them reaching out multiple times when I was available in only one or two spots, was very commendable and I appreciate the friends that did.

There has to be a middle ground. In this case, unfortunately, besides close friends or family who know something about tech, you will have to be the one to compromise and use their apps. Plus, I've seen getting people to move to your communication methods which are less popular usually leads to less talking. Not always, just something I've noticed isn't uncommon. I end up talking to people more if we just use FBM or iMessage or something.
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse for its portrayal of a spiritual journey / life that was not a ‘religious’ one.

This was a book I read in my early twenties that really helped me come to terms with a religious upbringing that no longer resonated with me, as well as a spiritual void in my life that needed to be filled. Seriously life changing stuff and so easy to read. Definitely the most accessible Hesse.

I’d be curious if this book has impacted anyone else similarly and if so what they took from it. Love this thread btw
Students in elite American universities (ivy-plus) come from the top 1% of all American students in their cohort, not to mention other countries. However dismal American performances in PISA/TIMSS and other tests have been, the top 1% of roughly 3 million students every year are still bound to be generally smarter and more motivated than the average Singaporean or Japanese student.
I don't want it badly enough to cut off my friends and family.

But it bothers me. Even if you don't have an account a determined researcher can learn entirely too much about you if the people around you use the service.
Defining rational thought and Socratic principles is pretty much exclusively within the wheelhouse of the humanities, I would think. Philosophy is a humanities subject.
Out of the Silent Planet, by C.S. Lewis. Wonderfully written, though not as completely fleshed-out as a modern sci-fi reader may be used to. Still stands on its own two feet, worth a try. My first sci-fi.

The Golden Bough, Frazer. Sublime, frustrating and intriguing. Changes your dreams, whether you immediately realise it or not.

How Things Work: The Universal Encyclopedia of Machines. My grandfather gave me this when I was 8, I still regularly leaf through the tea-coloured pages and detailed black-and-red drawings two decades later. It's a charming book, the kind of thing we have websites for nowadays.
> If we were a democracy, rich neighborhoods wouldn't have better schools.

If we were a democracy, you'd be able to have more choice in how your children were educated. Switching schools or otherwise opting for more innovative educational approaches would be much more viable.

People buy into school districts because that's, bottom line, the only way to have a say in your kids' education.
Perhaps this is a local thing; almost no one in advertising where I'm from comes out of university computer science.

Agreed on the generalisation though. I'd even wager that the "creativity of this discipline" idea is what is attracting new students to fields that aren't too viable after graduation.
Trustee From The Tool Room, by Neville Shute. Maker as hero. Adventures in the South Pacific.
I have struggled, and continue to struggle, with a lack of focus in my learning projects. My focus tends to cycle between some 6-7 subjects. In an effort to tame this, I have come to believe in the power of (a) concrete milestones and accomplishments, and (b) external accountability.

For example, I have wanted to learn Sanskrit for some time. Rather than pick up a book and work through it yet again, I enrolled in two correspondence courses that gives out certifications. I also have classes roughly once a week with an online tutor.

Similarly for Mathematics and Physics, I am preparing for and plan to write a nation-wide exam meant for MSc/BSc students in India as a minimum validation of my knowledge. I am also doing a correspondence course in BSc Physics/Maths from an accredited (in India) distance learning institution. Their assignments and exams, while easy, provide a basic timeline for my progress.

For Machine Learning and AI, I have completed several courses on Coursera and edX, but I found that even though I earned high grades in many of these courses, my grasp of topics - especially the theoretical side - wasn't satisfactory. I am re-doing some of those courses again, and intend to work through a standard text or two for the ideas to truly take root, but we'll see.

I am also interested in philosophy - both Indian and Western - and have read some material on it over the years, but I don't know what milestones are suited for it. I have considered writing up reviews of fields (such as ethics or epistemology) as a summary of my own understanding, but right now I don't have the bandwidth for this.

This was in addition to several other learning projects, such as Karnatic music and functional programming. For Karnatic music, I had a weekly session with a music tutor, and for functional programming, I forced myself for a while to commit programming exercises to github. I later quit both these projects to make room for the other learning projects.
Are you referring to their Open California dataset?

https://www.planet.com/products/open-california/

It's larger as Open California only has the datasets from Landsat 8, Sentinel, and Planet's own satellites.
Yeah for sure about the "too scared" to do any CLI or any other different sort of thing. I've had some Mac friends just copy paste homebrew stuff in. Without any knowledge of how popular it is or if they are for sure on the correct site. They just knew I said homebrew [cask] is good and installed it. They could've easily gone to a wrong site and gotten screwed over. Half these people are people into gadgets and electronics, but probably will only open terminal once a year on their Macs, if that much.
For better or worse, I mostly only do non-fiction books, and my favorite so far is still Zero to One by Peter Thiel + Blake Masters.
I think right now your only option is to get a sample of their DNA and clone them
There's a recording[0] of Gibson reading Neuromancer that I really enjoyed. His reading is very stylistic and might be off-putting for some people, but I think it captures the spirit of the story better than a dry narration.

[0] http://www.bearcave.com/bookrev/neuromancer/neuromancer_audi...
Presumably he means "not well connected or from the right family / caste". It's a very class-driven society.
Completely agreed. Webpack faces the exact issue that Grunt ran into which is these huge 'config files of doom' that end up as snowflakes which are hard to understand.

Rather, defining the build process entirely in code lets you step through the whole thing logically.
Ummm, maybe? There seem to be libraries for everything, but I do it manually. The constructors become "non-trivial", but not overly-complicated, and it pays off in simpler, more robust code elsewhere.

So my code would be something like:

class Foo:
def __init__(self, x, y=None):
if y is None:
x_ = x.x
y = x.y
self.x = int(x_)
if self.x < 0 or self.x > 99:
raise ValueError('x must be in range 0..99')
if len(y) < 2:
raise ValueError('y must be iterable, length > 2')
self.y = y

Soo...

You can say:

f = Foo(1,['a','b'])
f = Foo(1,('a','b', 3))
f = Foo("42", "bar")
f2 = Foo(f)

Calling int(x_) will take anything that implements __int__(), or raise ValueError. len() will take anything that implements the iterator protocol and has length >= 2, or raise. Calling Foo() on an instance of Foo will cause some excess copies, but it does have the effect of making sure you passed in something Foo-ish. Where "Foo-ish" means "has an x attribute that can be made into an integer between 0 and 99, and a y attribute that is an iterable of length >= 2". The above code lets some exceptions bubble up, but they could be wrapped in try..except to turn them into ValueError with specific messages. Note that this code accepts anything Foo-ish without calling isinstance(). Abstract base cases with isinstance() are a more suitable choice for complex cases of checking protocol conformance.

So whether or not the performance impact and extra code are worth it probably varies from project to project.
Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny. Great protagonist, characters and universe. Written in the 70’s but still holds up well by today’s standards.

Rumor has it that Robert Kirkman of Walking Dead fame has optioned it for TV.
I have been thinking of a knowledge system with two linked guiding principles:

1. Every element is owned by a person.
2. Every element has a “decay rate” or automatic time to be trashed.

I think this would make it a lot easier to track knowledge in organizations. When something becomes outdated, its owner can just let it die without having to go out and proactively prune every bit of old documentation. When a person leaves the company, his “knowledge items” can be flagged as “soon to not have an owner.”

Ultimately I’d actually like to build code projects this way. It probably seems insane to a lot of people to think of the idea of letting little pieces of the code base die and stop functioning, but the benefit I perceive is that our systems would always be tied to some degree to a human understander.
> because nation-states need a wake-up call: The world needs net-states in order to defeat the non-states.

Wait, what? Was this article written by a government, corporation, or other informational organism that has finally managed to achieve language? Why would an individual (ie a homo sapien) be interested in snuffing out the space of their own existence?
I don’t understand the downvotes. Can any of you guess why I believe letting them die would’ve been the right approach? Hint: personal experience.
I'm a big fan of doing fancy things on CI, so I'm always looking for cool ideas there. This talk seems to mostly be about tooling around dependencies, though, so your comparison to Rust is interesting: Rust's cargo is all-around wonderful IMHO and seems to support everything DO needed and built themselves (incl. multiple versions of dependencies, tooling for mono-repo workspaces, etc.).
You're both right.

Extensive practice is essential to getting one's self to the point where creativity can take over, where the muscle memory can 'meld' with one's expression of whatever emotions are being communicated via music.

There are certainly counter-examples, musicians who compose from day one, and don't really focus on melodic theory, running scales, and all of the other pieces of the neuro-muscular puzzle that go into making one technically 'good', and some of them do well.

There are those that allot all of their time to becoming technically proficient, pianists who spend endless hours working up Rachmaninoff's 2nd concerto, only to get so lost in the technicality of their discipline that they become cold and mechanistic, but, again, are so proficient that they find work their entire lives.

But true greatness needs both. You have to, as one artist put it, be able to 'forget' all that you have learned and compose and/or perform from the heart, letting all of that training do what it will naturally do, resulting in a transcendent expression of artistic grace.

That's what makes Campbell so accessible. He speaks and writes as though he is talking about the weather to his best friend, but his erudition provides such a solid foundation in the topics he expounds upon that one hardly notices that one is being educated.
I wrestled with the same thing recently, moving from Seattle-area to Santa Fe, NM to be closer to my in-laws. It only worked because there was a singular employer who paid approximately what I had grown accustomed to. I think it is going to work out, especially since my wife has better prospects than she did in Seattle, but there's definitely a risk working somewhere that has few other competitive employers in the area. I'm not sure what I would do if I decided I needed to change employers, beyond some sort of remote work.
For sheer engineering fun, R.V. Jones' "How I Won the War" (No, not really; it is called "Most Secret War") is hard to beat; it is the memoirs of Britain's chief scientist during WWII; hundreds of pages of one-upping their Axis counterparts - the birth of electronic warfare. Excellent read.
Or use type annotations and mypy/typeguard.
As a fellow alum, you summed it up nicely. I did my full eight years there, so I can't compare. But, what mattered to me was that I was always encouraged to question, always encouraged to excel, and always allowed to discover.

I think that mattered more than difficulty and speed, at least to me. Having smart people able to answer very specific questions and being encouraged to check their answers really helped with how I continue to view the world and to learn.
Yup. See: https://www.faa.gov/licenses_certificates/aircraft_certifica...

Looks like it's $5.

The FAA's philosophy, in a phrase, is "it's your funeral". In other words, the FAA only regulates airborne activity that is likely to harm others.
The Cuckoos Egg by Cliff Stoll

It's a wonderfully easy read about the early days of the Internet and hacking.
JavaScript bindings for OpenCV landed in 3.3.1
In my experience Rust works well as a C/C++ replacement. As a high level language much less so. Go is clearly the better choice for web apps and probably will remain so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics
I've always had a soft spot for Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Here's what I wrote about it:

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy.

Worth reading for the landscape descriptions alone, McCarthy transforms the American west into a hellscape of inhuman violence, savagery, and evil; and yet, it's a beautiful descent into madness.

His character of the Judge is as captivating as he is horrifying. Some choice quotes from him:

> "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."

> "War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god."

> "Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view."

> "The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos."

> "All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage."

Just be prepared for McCarthy's writing style if you decide to read him. He uses long sentences for effect; the long sentences where words seem to tumble over one another in an endless rush evokes movement and the distant horizon of the open desert as well as traditional oral ways of storytelling. His diction is also...archaic.
I used to use Trello but it didn't prove to be too helpful - it led to me thinking I was being productive just by shuffling cards around, when in reality I was wasting my time.

So I pretty much just wing it, and when I get a wave of motivation for something (compilers, frontend tech, blah blah blah) I just ride it. When I don't, I try not to fret too much.
> I feel like if all work was suddenly remote, city residency would drop at least 50% in a week. I hope remote eventually becomes the norm.

Could not disagree more. (Young) people move to cities for vibrancy, culture, and to be around each other.
May I join you in shameless plugging? My own obiwan:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/obiwan

It predates the MyPy syntax and, in my opinion, is a gazillion times prettier and my "pythonic". I'm not bitter ;)

It's "actively maintained" but I haven't needed to do anything in ages - it just works :)

PySchemes seems to have very similar syntax, but obiwan is also able to validate signatures in function annotations and is particularly good at validating JSON and msgpack APIs (the python code to validate an API is self-describing and makes excellent API documentation for other parties).
Thank you! I appreciate that!
I'm going to go out on a limb here and proffer that maybe the comment you've replied to was tongue-in-cheek.
> If you want to live in a democracy, sources of information matter.

How would it be any different if the NYT distributed the same material?
One of the greatest tragedies I know of right now is a complete ignorance about alternative tools for collective decision making. Even in conversations with well educated friends, I struggle to convince people that this is anything more than an obscurity. The deep reality is that many voting systems incentivize polarization. First-past-the-post is a source of the political us vs. them that is so vulnerable to exploitation in the first place!

Nicky Case made an excellent game/article about this issue. I encourage you to read it all the way through: http://ncase.me/ballot/
I believe you're referring to Dissociative identity disorder (DID), or multiple personality disorder (MPD), not Schizophrenia, and a friend who's a psychiatrist told me that in quite a few decades of practicing, he hasn't encountered even once such a diagnosis so he doubts it even exists outside of Hollywood movies.

As far as I'm concerned what matters is how many entities exist who display a behavior of a separate entity (at least to the degree that we acknowledge as being separate) - i.e display different personalities each with a cohesive structure and integrity. It really doesn't matter how many physical brains they share.
Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. The first time it was slow read, but I went back the book several times later in life and it has much to tell.

The Glass Beads Game by Herman Hess.

Several books by Steinbeck - Travels with Charley, Log from the Sea of Cortez.

The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo. A recent penguin translation is superb. Among the saddest and most memorable love stories.
Would you mind sharing who that employer was? Sandia Labs? I'm considering moving to NM for family reasons
"Paying people for their work sucks, what a drag. Undercutting their work so we can continue to profit more is a much better strategy."
I grew up 2 hours away and have never been. That's probably why.
The extra features are practically irrelevant. When you're spending other people's money, $995 a year for an "enterprise license" is pretty much a no-brainer, regardless of the actual benefits. It'd cost more than that for legal to check that a FOSS license isn't going to present any issues down the road. $995 a year is chump change, even if all it gets you is explicit permission to use the code in a commercial product.

It's extremely difficult for most enterprise customers to donate to FOSS projects. Small donations just aren't part of the normal corporate decision-making process. Very few people within an organisation have the authority to just give away money. Spending relatively small amounts of money on products and services is an utterly mundane part of doing business. If you maintain a FOSS project and don't offer an "enterprise license" of some description, you're leaving money on the table.
Haha similar. I had my own lab of skip dived kit in halls. I got told my lab assignment looked like something out of AoE. Couldn’t complain because it worked and had a cheaper BOM than they expected.
I really enjoy Jorge Luis Borges (hard to pick a favorite, just dive into the short stories and find out for yourself). Imagine an M.C. Escher drawing in story form.

I also have a strong pull towards adventure so books like Wind, Sand and Stars by Exupery or Starlight and Storm by Rebuffat are constant companions.

Growing up I loved books by Emilio Salgari, for a man who traveled so little outside of Italy he had an uncanny ability to imagine worlds and adventures beyond his doorstep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emilio_Salgari

I second Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!