skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "People don't appreciate how many things were quietly going right under Obama..."

Yes, but quietly works both ways.

- Fracking hockey stick'ed on Obama's watch. In the context of climate change that's unimaginable.

- Wall Street consolidated it's power (8 major banks down to 7) and there was no significant response. Not single WS exec was prosecuted after the 2008 crash.

- The usage of drones - built by the MIC led by the CIA - increased as a proxy for foreign policy under Obama. Those civilian deaths, of which there are plenty, will eventually come back to haunt the USA.

- Snowden happened on Obama's watch and the response... (editorial) I don't feel any safer, nor my rights any more protected.

- BLM was on BO's watch and plenty of influential figures have been critical of Obama's response.

- Flint MI happened on Obama's watch. A local issue perhaps but when the greatest country in the history of the world poisons its own with lead and the POTUS just gives another "that's not who we are speech" something isn't right.

Finally, the USA empire has been on the decline for sometime. Neither Trump nor HRC were going to stop that slide.

I'm not picking on Obama. He did a good job all in all. What concerns me is how willing the media has been not to paint the complete picture on some very significant issues / events. Things that will having a long lasting impact on the future of the USA, as well as the world.
That is quoting Greenspun's tenth rule

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule
Back when grsecurity was still public I would've said that using it with Chrome provided the best security you could get on Linux. Between the defensive mitigations it added through PaX and all the other little things (like making chroots actually behave like jails) it greatly increased security. This is without even using any MAC system.

I'm not entirely sure how things stack up now. In the past I never had much faith in the vanilla linux kernel.
Not if you want to live very long.
The ratio of explore /exploit depends on what your goals are. If it's just to bang out a PhD in applied ML then perhaps, but if you're in it for the long haul it's well worth it. It would unlock a whole bunch of research directions and catching back up to the field with solid math skills in hand would be quick. If you pay attention to the leaders in AI, they're mostly applied mathematicians in disguise.
I've been on both sides of the table and the reality is that high stakes full day interviews kinda suck - they're noisy and tuned for high false positives (if they're even tuned at all).

Sometimes people get lost solving a problem, or don't ask clarifying questions, or are just too nervous, drank too much coffee, or maybe just didn't get a full night's rest. For most processes - it usually takes more than one bad round but one bad round can rattle a candidate who can cascade.

I like to think i'm a decent interviewer (and interviewee - not particularly gifted at CS but I've run enough rounds to recognize most problem types) I've gotten offers from 'big 5' companies but have been rejected by some as well. One reasonably well respected tech company wouldn't even screen me. Just a vague rejection, 'not a good fit at this time'. Who knows why - resume went to a busy team lead who looked at it for 5 seconds and took a dislike to some word choice. Or maybe they were on a hiring freeze and the 'open positions' were just for show. Maybe the non-technical recruiter didn't recognize the technologies listed actually matched what they were looking for. Who knows. The process sucks. Everyone knows it sucks. Maybe 'of all the processes it sucks the least' Churchill-style. I think it's slowly getting better, people are getting more objective - less stupid brain teasers. As engineers we want things fixed fast (like a merged PR) but people driven processes move and change slowly.
When you go to China (or any foreign country in general), it really depends on whether or not you step outside the expat bubble.

Those that don't often have a very skewed viewpoint compared to those who do.

It would be like judging the entire US based on living in Silicon Valley your entire life.
How is that possible ? Await doesn't have this effect in python 3 and v8 is faster than cpython.
That's what I mean.

Success is one thing, but Amazon level success is completly different.
yet another LightSwitch. with better marketing
No, it's well known that humans cannot safely ingest the quantity of salt contained in sea water. In a normal situation with available fresh water it would not kill you, but if you were stuck at sea with no fresh water the 35g/L of salt you'd be consuming is way beyond the recommended upper limit of 5g/day.

Excess sodium in the bloodstream isn't pleasant: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypernatremia
Northern Europe refers geographically to the northern part of Europe, or in a narrower sense, to the cultural grouping of the Nordic countries, Baltic countries, and sometimes also the British Isles. (Wikipedia)
Are you sure?
I thought his first wife helped him only at the beginning, the GP talked about GR which came later.
It is definitely an autocracy, but it isn’t a dictatorship (well, they call it a dictatorship of the people). My point is that Xi’s power is nowhere near absolute, there are plenty of king makers behind the scene that duke it out with each other, Xi is just an obvious one.
Mathematically, something has to be the leading cause of death ages 25..44. What should it be? A leading cause may emerge simply because other leading causes were fixed, not because things are getting worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DistroKid
I understand that the scope of the business itself might be limited at the moment, but think of the tech it takes to achieve this ;)
Totally agree, upvoted!

Re your comment on "taste".. Anders Hejlsberg is on video saying his choices in compiler and IDE design come down to taste.

I think he's got good taste, so I followed his platforms from Turbo C++, to Delphi and C++ Builder, then onto .NET and now Typescript (Yes, I skipped J++). When you actually understand how he thinks and how the tools are meant to be used, they are incredible. He balances the tradeoffs to achieve fast performance in all aspects from design to compilation to great runtime performance, with actual simplicity and ease of use. I learnt so much reading the VCL source code..

Anyway I almost agree when you say >> I don’t think we’ve ever really had good taste as an industry.

But Anders' work shines through as a guiding light, when people really get it.
The OP is talking about the way lowest paid employees are treated. Of course paying everyone 200k is ridiculous, but they didn't even come close to suggesting that should be the case.
You are now the second person mentioning this in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15682260)

I really had this case where a 22yr old open-source contributing child-prodigy programmer would be rejected at the code-screening phase by a guy, let's call him "Jon". We had a phone call with three people: HR, Jon and me.

The reasons why Jon rejected the candidate were all a bit funny and I could not tell if Jon was serious or not. Also, Jon's Github contributions, pull requests and other things were rather shitty anyhow, but he was responsible for the first screenings so I had to listen to his feedback.

Jon pinpointed to some problems in the candidate's code which were more style and not problems. Other things had good reason (verbose try catch blocks). When I started to get defensive and mentioned that the quality of the submission is better than Jon's stuff on Github, HR stopped me and told me "We're not assessing John here"

Added it to the post.
Shouldn't we be more focused on which is easier to use though? Even if promises are slower, they probably aren't going to be a major performance issue, so I think if you find promises easier to use and less bug-prone, they are better regardless of preformance.
I think the main driver is there’s common ground between some of the engineers who are PPC fans and some that are Amiga/Morph OS fans. Amiga runs on m68k and PPC so this means they can get some more modern hardware for their platform.
Yes, it's great. Public availability of these tools means the exploits they leverage will be swiftly mitigated. They will be of no use to criminals, outside of the narrow window between disclosure and mitigation.

Had the NSA acted with integrity and disclosed these vulnerabilities rather than hoarding them, that window would be even smaller.
First of all, why don't you shoot me an email at info@jurymatic.com and we can talk further. In a nutshell, it would have been way more expensive and difficult for us to roll our own than even the high cost of a FlexiCapture license. But here's a reasonably complete explanation of the build vs buy analysis we did.

1. FlexiCapture makes pre-processing incredibly painless and training-free. Beyond the usual binarization stuff, we extensively use the built in auto-rotation and cleanup (skew, noise, speckle, etc.).

2. Templating is really the big win for FlexiCapture. I have not seen anything else with a template GUI that comes close to being as usable, robust, or simple. That's really important to us because we build a LOT of templates. I have a really hard time imagining having to code them.

3. FlexiCapture's template engine is super strong for the kinds of documents we work with, which is mainly complex repeating groups with nested structures. It's also really good at handling both photos of documents (e.g. mobile) and scans. One thing it also offers that I haven't seen elsewhere in a turnkey product or existing platform is the ability to define zones in purely relative terms without absolute positions. I don't know about Nuance but I've not seen any other template GUI that will allow you to spec something like "look for either this word or a two-line string containing these words in the upper left quadrant of the document."

4. There's a dearth of zonal ocr frameworks. Outside of ABBY and Nuance's SDK's, the only one I'm even aware of is OpenKM, and I don't write Java. The FlexiCapture Engine SDK is a terrible beast. The documentation is horrible, it's Windows only, and it's all COM objects.
I'm confused. SGML/XML is capable of representing arbitrary tree structures (with metadata attached to the nodes), is it not?

Somewhat of a tangent, but I like the name of the alegraic structure for binary trees: magma [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magma_(algebra)
They often do for the end-drops in to countries that have strong anti-drug forces. You don't want your competent people arrested, jailed or executed.
Already in Firefox 57 on Fedora 27
Um. You're telling me the party that had 7+ years to plan for the repeal & replace of ACA but completely failed at that has able leadership? Those who campaigned for the ticket was the cream of the GOP crop. They're not competent. How is Trump punching his way out of a wet paper bag a sign of significance?

I'm being snarky. I'm curious as to how anyone can see the rest of the GOP'ers that tried to get the nomination as being worthy or it.
You make a fair point. However, since I'm in Pakistan, I found one person I wanted to demo the site to that uses Windows XP :/

I was super surprised when that happened.
Euclidean field theory, explained with no maths
As a german, its nice to hear something like that since people here also complain about the quality of journalism going down. People are also complaining that public broadcasting (and having to pay for it) but I think that they are the one of the reasons we have good journalism as the set a standard which you will lose audience to if you report too much bias or show too much advertising.
Rents have been going up, but not as much as housing. An apartment that rents for 10k RMB/month will cost 7 million RMB to buy (about $1 million usd), that is just an insane rent to purchase ratio. We foreigners don’t need to buy anyways, and find rents even in Shenzhen quite reasonable. Anyone who bought after 2011, or maybe even 2006, will feel the pain, but at least it will be market based.

You are right that it will depend on if they take their losses themselves or force the people to take it. But they really can’t handle that much worker unrest, I’m sure they’ll eat it, or better yet, have a corruption campaign and get their political enemies to take most of the losses (then it will depend on who has power when the bubble pops).
The entire workplace culture of the US is tyrannical. Workers do not get to vote, you just hope for a good King or search for a new one.
It stands to reason that a rich person would know more about how to make money than a poor person, unless you believe it is totally random.

Similarly, if I was interested in an athletic career, I'd be interested to hear from a gold medal champion more than from someone who is out of breath going to the mailbox.
My time is valuable.

About a year ago, I interviewed with a couple of companies. One particular interview I thought went very well. They never got back to me so I kept doing interviews and eventually landed a job that I love.

About a month later that company finally got back to me and wanted to set up a final/offer discussion.

I told them that because they took so long, I wasn't interested.

I'm not going to wait around and hope you get back to me, my time is more valuable than that.
Some guys are just to stupid
Surveillance Cameras Made by China Are Hanging All Over the U.S
> I am happy that people get to learn a language like Python as their first language today. They can do much more interesting things, in a shorter amount of time, than they could in basic 40 years ago.

How much is down to the language and how much is that to do with the capability of computers then vs now. A fair few dialects of BASIC could manipulate the hardware directly but the capability of those machines were always quite limited. However with the hacker community going strong for retro hardware, you can now get all sorts of cool mods, like the WiFi addon I have on my Amstrad CPC 464 which allows me to even make HTTP GET requests, from BASIC. Ok I'm still limited by 64K of memory but that just forces you to think more creatively.

I'm not denying that Python teaches better programming principles than the early dialects of BASIC, but again how much of that is down to age given than newer dialects of BASIC can be structured very much like a typical imperative program. ie no requirement for line numbers, proper functions (though some dialects of BASIC have supported this since the 80s), etc.

Sometimes though, I think the simplicity of your environment can count for a lot. I remember reading an interview with a dance DJ turned producer who commented that he regretted buying lots of hardware when he was starting out as it slowed his learning curving (too much tech to learn in one go) and thus he would have been better off buying one synth, mastering that, then moving onto another synth. I wonder if programming can be like that for youngsters these days. I wonder if they get crippled by the vastness of the options out there and all the layers of the stack involved in even the simplest of "Hello world!" programs. Yet BASIC on the micro computers of the 70s and 80s offered a simple, no hassle, interface to that allowed our young imaginations to fly. I think we were very lucky to grow up in that era.
Amazon built their own crane back when no one had cranes. You can't just build an online book store today and expect it to snowball into any business you choose to build a new crane for.
>The power was out for days in some places, including mine. My phone battery died after a day, ditto the laptop's battery. My landline continued to function throughout.

In your case PSTN was the "stable fallback" but there is nothing inherent in the technology that makes this so. Your phone stations still need power, and if they don't have backup power they'll be dead as well.

Cables have a bigger chance of breaking if they're in the air, less so if they're buried. Of course, PSTN, power and fiber can all be both in the air or buried. There's nothing inherent in any of them that make them more "resilient". So if you live in an area where your PSTN is buried and your power lines aren't, it might to lead you to conclude that PSTN is "stable", in fact there's nothing about PSTN in itself that makes it so.

In a lot of places, cell towers will have backup power as well, and so will fiber networks, and your power network might be (should be, probably) buried and better protected than your other cables.
I don't think we should. I chose node over ruby because of performance. Those numbers are showing significant overhead for promises and async/await. That's a problem I don't want to inject into my latency-sensitive application.
It seems to me that using those websites(stackoverflow, linkedin, whatever else) for landing in jobs is a big waste of time for prospective employees because of how messy and quirky the hiring process is. Most of the people I know that have been successful at being hired by big companies had some kind of (living, breathing) coach to walk through the process.

Am I the only one seeing that pattern?
You're doing major mental gymnastics to perceive it as "just another way to badmouth" China. People made descriptive comments about absolute quantity of publishing and some observations about how well that correlates with national success. Neither the article nor the commenters here have denied that quality and impactful research is also coming out of China.
Hahaha yes, pre-buddy list in 3.0 for sure. I think it was mostly 2.6 days from what I remember.
You present a false dichotomy as your argument.

Reality is a continuum, not two simple poles of "mistreat your employees" or pay them $200k.
"In May, the Department of Homeland Security issued a cybersecurity warning saying some of Hikvision’s cameras contained a loophole making them easily exploitable by hackers. The department assigned its worst security rating to that vulnerability."

They are placed around military army bases and are the #1 devices used to spy on Chinese citizens.

Someone messed up when approving this
How many people are updating the hundreds of packages their NPM apps depend on? General advice is to pin them so they don't break your app daily, which is another way of saying don't update them..

Those packages are also of hugely varying quality, in a language that leaks abstractions for breakfast, and with minimal integration testing between all the versions of all the packages .. Platform frameworks such as J2EE and .NET are much safer by my analysis, although .NET has recently moved to a similar package potpourri.
I once hired a plumber to make some repairs around the house. Curious, and not knowing anything about plumbing, I watched what he did. Then I got an enormous bill.

Nothing he did seemed particularly hard, and since then I do plumbing repairs myself.
Are you really suggesting that writers changed hands during writing a single character? That sounds totally impractical. Also, that does not explain why there should be a different stroke order.
> Don't try to invent non-existent social norms.

That's how new social norms come into the world. Often, they get invented in response to technological change. For example, prior to answering machines being widespread, the norm was to never ignore the phone ringing. After, it became OK to ignore the phone if it was inconvenient to answer because if the call was important, the caller would surely leave a message.

Now there's a push to normalize texting to see if it's a good time before calling, at least if the call isn't urgent. I support this: it's a very minor imposition on the caller's time and reduces interruptions when the callee is busy, as the content of a text can be checked at a glance.
Scientific consensus has been reached for quite a while saying that exposing a 3 y/o child to screens actually impairs his/her personal development and has long term consequences.

Getting your kid off of youtube is probably a good thing.
Issue Mover for GitHub
I disagree; it's a focus of their existence that appears to be abandoned by the NSA -
and that's dearly needed right now.

From the front page of nsa.gov: "Defending our Nation. Securing the Future." The second point from their What we do page - "Defends vital networks". In the opening paragraph of Wikipedia: "The NSA is also tasked with the protection of U.S. communications networks and information systems". Etc.

For all the prestige of the TAO, who claims that the US networks are secure and well defended?

I read the news and see the nation's voting, power, media, and other critical infrastructure are all being hacked. Notably Equifax, a steward of all Americans most valuable information, was compromised in trivial fashion.

Our peers working at Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc are being attacked nonstop by foreign actors and they are rightfully being held to account by congress. But in my opinion the social networks are secondary compared to the primary infrastructure that honestly does not have access to the best talent should be aided by NSA.
This would’ve literally been my answer. Brilliant. I can’t recommend this answer enough.
Hehe the guessing game was my fist too, way before I even had a computer.

I think what we have lost from the old 8-bit computers and their BASIC, was the ability to instantly have something show on the screen, like the classic Sinclair Spectrum spider web:

10 FOR n=0 TO 31
20 PLOT n*11,0
30 DRAW -n*11, 175-n*8
40 NEXT n

(or something like that) That stuff got me hooked.
Why should Prolog be slower than CLisp?

It is true, there is some overhead that is inherent to Prolog programs, mostly due to logical variables. But this is a rather small overhead, and if you need this feature, you would pay a comparable price also in other languages.

Also, SWI-Prolog is among the slower Prolog systems: There are much faster Prolog systems available.

See for example the following benchmarks:

http://www.picat-lang.org/bprolog/performance.htm
It didn't touch on that, but there are these gems:

On raising kids: Jeff and his wife let their kids use sharp knives since they were four and soon had them wielding power tools, because if they hurt themselves, they’d learn. Jeff says his wife’s perspective is “I’d much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid.”

On choosing a romantic partner: When Jeff decided he was ready to settle down, his friends set him up on tons of blind dates. He eventually knew he’d found his wife when he met someone truly resourceful. “I wanted a woman who could get me out of a third-world prison” Jeff said.

I am a former military wife, so I am pretty can do, and I believe that not letting kids do anything in order to "protect" them is actively harmful. But I wanted my sons to reach adulthood having learned to be resourceful without losing any body parts to do it. I succeeded in both those goals.

Edit: I guess I am partly saying "How resourceful is his wife, really, if she isn't confident she can teach the kids to play with knives safely?

Slacker.
I'm not sure I agree, live coding, when polished and done right grounds a presentation. Without a live coding element "technical" presentations can quickly devolve into marketing where grandiose claims are often made that are devoid any merit. I think the real gap is most people underestimate how much preparation time must be invested in a live coding demo.
IINM there are several of these.
Agreed. If there's some non-related disease killing more people aged 25-40 than suicide does, the world is probably a more dangerous place than it is today.
You vote with your job applications. Tyrants don't deserve skilled people who work for them.
Emulating the MMU alone is quite a big issue...