skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will try to offer some empathy on the other side. I have no CS background, just changed careers and I am now a junior web dev. I spent around 3 months only studying css, html and js. Then went on to build projects using React. Most of them even using create-react-app. Why would I do that if I lack a lot of very basic and fundamental CS knowledge? It was a pragmatic decision to acquire basic skills to get a job. Now I have a job where I use Ember. Now I have pragmatic reasons to acquire skills in Ember and other skills like improve my code to readability and maintainability, understand architectural decisions of the product, learn design patterns, proper use of git, doing code reviews of others. I still have important gaps in my CS education though.

I'm self-aware that there are gaps and that these gaps will cost me in the future. But, right now, I will deliver more value to the company by filling other gaps. Not only to help my company but myself, giving me better prospects in the future.

I am now investing more time in learning javascript more deeply. I bought a good book to learn more about algorithm designs. I do have trouble finding a good resource on fundamental CS concepts for someone in my position. I don't believe lengthy academic books and MOOCs have a good ratio of important knowledge by time invested.

I have this impression that I am not the right fit. If you wanted to screen me out there is an easy way to do that before the day: ask for a CS degree with good grades. I think it will be a mistake, but maybe is the right thing for you.
I like ab as well. Simple and tells me if my app can handle a load. Exactly what I want to know. I do wish it was easier to see what the failed requests looked like though.
I guess this is why Google is doing the right thing by working on its own microkernel. Similarly for Grsec guys, who forked Linux.

Fundamental difference of opinions like these is why forks should happen in the open source world. I would like to see someone do a "LibreSSL" version of the Linux kernel, by cleaning it up of all the unneeded legacy cruft, modernizing its architecture, and making it more secure.

I imagine only someone like Google (for servers, Chrome OS, and Android) or Microsoft (cloud services) could take on such a project, but of course they could only lead such a project. They would also need an alliance of partners to support the project.

However, if they are committed to it and serious about making it way better from a security point of view, I could see many companies jumping ship from Linux Classic, especially in the automotive and IoT worlds, also also from web hosting world, and so on.

Alternatively, perhaps the large companies could start supporting Rust OS/kernels such as Redox.
There was a time where prescriptions were not required to be given to the patient. The patient had to buy glasses from the doctor. Glasses were routinely $100-$200 in 1980s dollars (that's what, $300-$400 in 2017 dollars). Now you can use your vision insurance to get your eyes checked and take your prescription wherever... It ends up being a pretty good deal. $50-$100 for the checkup and $10-$30 for really nice glasses online.
The Best VC Bets of All Time and What We Can Learn from Them
> Complain to the recruiter afterwards, if they bother calling you, but make sure you tell them that the particular interviewer was not good.

That would be a bad idea. The recruiter knows nothing about the OP, and probably not much about the interviewer. But the recruiter probably will be in better terms with the interviewer than the OP (or the one who is being interviewed).

So the end result would be that the OP will be considered not a good candidate because he/she complains the interviewer because it didn't went well, or at least, that will be how the recruiter is probably going to assume.
It may not be your mood: if your number is logged as having called several times already that day you might be routed through to a higher level support operator because that is a sign of a more complex problem.
There's more than one way to do it, but sometimes consistency is not a bad thing either.
1.2 million new housing starts in the U.S. annually, though.
> "this is still a great way to retire"

what is? having a home that's appreciated 4x over decades to liquidate or having locked in a home to live in?
Israeli here, supporter of equality among men and just rights for all.

Wikipedia is just reflecting reality here. Even in Israel, unbiased narratives are very difficult to find from either side. This is compounded by the self-hating Jew phenomenon [1] and the issue that many Palestinians actually _prefer_ living in a modern, Western democracy as opposed to the kingdoms and dictatorships which are the traditional Arab norma. So we have people on _both sides_ arguing for _both sides_, often using subtle trickery such as weasel words, unjustified quantifiers and adjectives, and selected elimination. Being a technically advanced country, this spills out onto the Internet and Wikipedia.

Personally, being involved in the situation, a _lack_ of such trickery on Wikipedia would raise more red flags for me than its presence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hating_Jew
I think one issue with Wikipedia is it started when people still thought anonymity was great. (E.g. look at Craigslist compared to more modern sites like Airbnb.) So it's harder for editors to be accountable or for their biases to be known. I think Quora's approach is better overall, where they allow people to select anonymous as an option.
Perl has a lot of crappy language design decisions (which make it "fun" and a tire fire waiting to happen in any large-ish codebase):

- interpretation of a variable (is it a list, a number, a string, a hash?) depends on the context in which it's used, and the context depends on, um, its context;

- pervasive global state (`$_` and friends);

- you can mess with compile-time operations, patch the language on the fly, e.g. during module imports;

- autovivification: a single read by key from a hash is enough to actually create this key; variables are a number and a string at once, but the number will not be computed until you need this variable in number context. Reading a non-existing key in a hash as a hash actually creates a new subhash.

- ties: you can override access to any variable by your methods;

- the built-in data structures are special, there is no sane way to emulate and extend them (but, as usual, for sure there are insane ways);

- the built-in `sort` takes a code block (not a closure with parameters), that has magic variables `$a` and `$b` appearing out of thin air. It looks like a closure, but it's not.

- features are often added in a convoluted way. E.g. there was a (now deprecated) feature that allowed `push` and `shift` to take a reference to a hash instead of a hash directly. How was it implemented internally? Basically by backpatching the error condition when the existing `push`/`shift` choked on a reference.

- the language design principle is "Do What I Mean" (where the "I" part varies). It's ironic that a language built "for human communication" by a linguist (what could possibly go wrong?) is harder to read and to reason about that programming languages built around logic.

On the other hand, if your business brings enough income to pay good developers with strong discipline, you can still have a big codebase in Perl and sustain it for years: it's better to have a terrible language and good engineers than bad engineers and a good language.
Going off on a tangent: I dislike standard sluggification algorithms; they’re far too fond of throwing away useful parts of the title, like small words in some or turning C++ into just c in almost all cases. parsing-c-is-literally-undecidable would be so much better as parsing-c++-is-literally-undecidable (but note that Amazon S3’s HTTP server has a broken implementation of + in file names that they refuse to fix; with that exception, using + in the URL is perfectly safe everywhere I know of) or even parsing-cpp-is-literally-undecidable (you might choose this manually) or parsing-c-plus-plus-is-literally-undecidable (a sluggifier might produce this).
I've driven in both. Rome is bad, but I would still say the roads are worse in Manhattan.
The company I worked for had an awful recruitment arrangement resulting in poor candidates. Company committed long term with a service provider, who at some point could simply afford to stop caring about quality or competence or even any number of available candidates. They were basically farting out once a week a CV of a person with embedded programming experience for a web development opening. It didn't help that we were trying to find short term subcontractors on below market rates (it's EU so the rates would be actually funny for someone from US or even London). Not fully aware of the whole process I was thinking "if this is what the candidate market has to offer, I could find a job within 3 days".

Well it happened that couple of months later I indeed ended up looking for a job... and... YIKES!
Conceal All the Problems in Your Roof with the Best Roofing Experts
"I'd much rather live in a world where people were just more happy to pay for things they consume"

As an "old" and grumpy gamer, I agree, but I think we are past that point. Nowadays I think new gamers are losing track of the fact that they are supposed to play to have fun, and see getting rewards as the only end-goal.

Recently Hearthstone (collectible card game) announced a free roguelike single-player mode, and the only thing many people in the community can think of is that the only reward for completing it is a minor cosmetic item, and that is not sufficient, that they should be better compensated for the time "invested" in it.

Mind, it is an attitude that is a consequence of the culture of microtransations and lootboxes that also Blizzard helped to establish, so it's hard to take the company's side.
Pardon my being naive, but I find it amazing how exchanges on StackExchange are always so high-level and civil. I know very little about StackExchange itself, how have they achieved that kind of quality?

As a follow-up question, why are all communities not doing the same?
Perl being a dead and disliked language has become a meme. But the community is still very much alive and a lot of cool stuff is being built with Modern Perl. http://mojolicious.org
This is a really interesting attempt, and it might work because of how well-known the game is already.

I got this game (on iOS) about 2 years ago, and enjoyed the progression, and found myself continuing to work on it in 30 second chunks a few times a day. Weeks, months, now years later, I still keep the game on my first home screen and at least once a day continue the progress.

I decided to grab some rubies, mostly to support the developers, spent maybe $25 over 2 years, and felt like I got the best of the deal. Balance is tough, it's been a long time since I've had any desire to buy more rubies. I pre-ordered after reading this article, happy to support their hard work.
“River of Gods” by Ian MacDonald (narrated by Jonathan Keeble), one of my favorite audiobooks in recent years, was my first exposure to this idea.
However, make adds little value in comparison to a "language-specific" build tool like SBT.

In SBT, I can add `crossScalaVersions := Seq("2.12.0", "2.11")` and everything will be (more or less) automatically compiled and published for both Scala 2.11 and 2.12. That's not something a more generic build tool can ever really hope to achieve.
It's the "designated asshole" archetype, the role can have a purpose in large companies in some rare circumstances.
It is just moving the goalposts. The formally verified contract is only as good as the assertions proven. Look at WPA2, it was formally verified against 'most' attacks.
I'm not the OP but I think its time someone takes the lead in writing a GAN book. GAN is to ANN, which is the most popular algo in field of "AI", if I may take the liberty to say so. GAN is to AI what hacking is to computing. Initially I thought Springer may release a special version directed on GAN's, but I don't think that will happen unless someone takes the lead.
> If you were living in Rome in 477

Then your civilisation was in a constant state of flux beginning at least in the 230s with the advent of the "barracks emperors". The "fall from grace" of the roman civilisation was a lengthy process with several changes not only to roman society but also to the tribes surrounding Rome (better organization due to trade- and military links to Rome; introduction of advanced metalurgy; christianity).

I bet, for the people living in that time period, as a roman citizen of the Western Empire, not much would have changed, except for some details in taxation and military conscription. Oh yes, and the dude you pay taxes to was now a military leader of germanic descent who called himself King, instead of a individual of the roman aristocracy, who called himself Emperor.

In retrospect though, this date can be seen as a definitive turning point with no way back to the days of the past. But only due to the fact that a title (Emperor of the West) was abolished. If anything, the West was 'comprehensively fucked' long before that date.
Had a similar experience with an organization I cofounded. An editor claimed it had to be bogus, that there was no way Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, NASA, and the Worldbank would ever all coloborate on a social good project. Eventually we prevailed, but the article had to be insanely over cited to the point I feel it’s hard to read now and after the experience I’ve not felt it was worth it to encourage folks to maintain it.
The total was $190. My insurance statement says it was $50 for refraction (coming up with the prescription, I assume) and $140 for the rest of the exam.
Ok then your definition is corporate ecosystem then? Perl in general is hardly the stuff of scaled soft eng. in a mega corp. It wasn't designed for that, but to empower an individual to be highly productive quickly. With that in mind the ecosystem is super healthy, even by your definition. I'm more shocked Python has managed to bridge that gap, but so did Pascal at one point so I guess designed to be a teaching language wins out!
Thank you, this is really good advice I hadn't really considered
Castle Game:The Unholy Society getting published and various engine improvements
Inside Priceline Group’s Diss of Trivago
Ask HN: Would you run your production SQL Server on docker?
I'm really interested to know if anyone is doing this, why they chose to do this and how they are getting on with it.

I've been thinking about this recently and what would be involved. Some of my thoughts / ideas are listed below.

Would need orchestration, probably K8s
Windows containers or Linux containers?
Possible to scale out reads by dynamically adding Always On Availability Group read-only replicas?
Licensing would restrict large scale outs
Ask HN: Why So Limited Options for Web-Based Video Editing?
I'd love to be able to do video and/or audio editing on my Chromebook.

I would have thought there would be a decent PWA that deals with offline files so you don't have to 'upload' them to work with them. It would be awesome to render and export in the cloud without having to do any local heavy lifting.

Anyone know of anything that already exists? Or is this not available for a reason?
I long believed that nuclear power was the only energy source cleaner than fossil fuels and scalable enough to meet the energy demands of the world. While that might still be true in some sense, I now believe that humanity isn't ready for nuclear power.

Besides the Fukushima and Chernobyl type issues with organizations skimping on design, there's still an outstanding problem of nuclear waste storage. The current nuclear power statistics haven't factored in a major waste storage incident because one hasn't happened yet. Until we've witnessed multiple lifecycles of nuclear fuel consumption to full waste breakdown, the safety stats could still swing against nuclear power. Maybe all it'd take is a terrorist incident involving nuclear waste. From what I understand, breeder reactors can vastly reduce the quantity of a power plant's waste and produce waste with a much shorter half life. This isn't widely implemented or shared because that technology can also be used to produce weapons grade material. I think humanity will be ready if/when we can sort out our differences without violence and greed/corruption are no longer problems for most large orgs.

Additionally, renewables seem to have better scalability today than they did in the 90's when I formed my initial opinions. Right now, the worst case situation with a renewable power source is probably a large dam bursting. That's certainly possible due to corruption or terrorism too. If the three gorges dam suddenly burst, that could take out most of Shanghai. For most other renewables, the potential worst case is much milder though.
Ask HN: Is it just me or is every normal Wordpress blog slowish?
Asking myself if I should go the hugo route or Wordpress route for a new blog and multi authors. I've compared several amateur (with amateur I mean many semi pro blogs which are not hosted by a big company) Wordpress blogs and I have the feeling they all feel slowish. I don't know the real reason but it seems like a mixture of bad image management, too big HTML and maybe also Wordpress itself (I thought it is fast with PHP 7 nowadays).
You can build Scala projects with Ant, Maven and Gradle, but for some reason, a language community often gravitates toward the language-specific tools.
Show HN: Deep siamese LSTM network to capture phrase/sentence similarity
I like it when we just assume things.

Someone mentioned Usenet archive from 91 when Linus was just the same.

Nice assumptions though.
I read through the white/yellow papers previously and I admire the grandiose vision. I was worried that this wouldn't actually come to fruition, but glad to see actual code getting pushed. This brings up a bigger question about what emergent tech could be built on top of something like this.
>It's ironic that a language built "for human communication" by a linguist (what could possibly go wrong?) is harder to read and to reason about that programming languages built around logic.

It's not like having a fascination with weird language quirks makes you have good taste in languages. Especially because weird quirks are the end of usability.
Ask HN: Tips for finding a mentor for a 'learn to code' startup?
Hey all!

I'm Per Borgen, one of the co-founders of Scrimba, a tool for creating interactive coding screencasts. Our goal is to create the worlds best coding course platform.

We've gotten a 14K USD grant to pay a mentor who can help us with advice on product development, marketing, and getting into the US market. The hourly rate is very flexible.

We're looking for a person who's got first-hand experience with building and launching successful online coding courses. Ideally a teacher and a developer.

I'd love to hear if people here have got tips for specific mentors or advice on how we can find potential candidates?
Show HN: Minimalistic Social App in few days
Maven is no longer maintained, and has many long-standing bugs that may never get fixed.
It's mostly bloat from plug-ins, and general bad practice when it comes to maintaining assets.
The earth isn’t flat. It’s not round either. Nor is it spherical. But we shouldn’t give up trying to describe its shape because no model will be sufficient. Rather, the earth can be thought of as flat, as round, as spherical, as elipsoidal, etc. The problem with flat earthers isn’t that they believe the earth is flat. Eveyone believes this. It’s that they approach knowlege as a fundamentalist taking the plain meaning of things without nuance or context.
I don't think the language design influence of Perl on Python was as strong as you imply. (Not that there's no influence.)

Certainly the influence on Ruby was larger.

Also, I seem to recall the Perl5 object model was influenced by Python.
everything will be (more or less) automatically compiled and published for both Scala 2.11 and 2.12

But, having to worry about minor version differences like this is a wholly unnecessary problem, and one that didn't really exist in the world that make comes from.

These days we build tools on top of tools to solve problems of our own making that just didn't exist 10 or 20 years ago. All the build tools, packaging tools, deployment tools, containers, blah blah blah. None of that crap is needed to deliver working software in the form of 1 statically linked binary + 1 text configuration file, which will suffice for any software in the world.
I agree that Perl 6 is the first readable version of Perl. It might actually be considered a nice language. Yet all the tools that are newly rewritten by our Perl guys are in Perl 5 because that's what they know.
An eye exam is more than just getting your prescription, though. They also screen you for eye diseases and assess your overall eye health, which the online services don't do.
It's not just you - I have always avoided WordPress because of this. I don't have any technical data to back it up, but that's how it feels!

Hugo/Jekyll is my default. Jekyll especially with the Github pages integration.
> Watching US situation from outside it's seems there's an urgent need for some kind of a bad guy.

How else would you justify all that Defense budget spending?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
Supposedly Jim Keller did work on that, besides Zen.

They simply stopped talking about their supposedly awesome new ARM chip. My personal guess is that they're reworking it, targeting RV64G now; Because why bother with ARM licensing.
Interestingly no discussion of what must be a similar crisis among less-educated men.
Almost all the people I worked with (developers, QAs and managers) have no idea that Linus rants occasionally.
It is a plain old rhetorical device: If your counterparty doesn't seem to pay attention to what you're saying, raise your voice and say the same thing again.

There are many other rhetorical devices, raising your voice is not the only way to counter inattention.

You may want to read Linus' earlier messages in the same thread, such as the immediate predecessor, just as an example:

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1711.2/01357.html
Why Are Dogs So Friendly?
Where's the evidence for this? This answer (https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070607071114A...) suggests slavery persisted long beyond 477.
Why would a more experienced interviewer not allow or discount a good rapport? I've spent my fair share of time on both sides of the interviewing table (or screen, in most cases), and have always sought to spend the first ~20% of the interview building rapport.

I think the candidate's ability to communicate about non-technical matters is important, and if you can put someone at ease, you're likely to get a more realistic view of their abilities.
See, this is the future I want to contribute to.
I read through the white/yellow papers previously and I admire the grandiose vision. I was worried that this wouldn't actually come to fruition, but glad to see actual code getting pushed. This brings up a bigger question about what emergent tech could be built on top of something like this.

[edit] For some reason my other account's comments go dead instantly, so reposting.
the "designated asshole" archetype

A previous employer had someone in that "role", I don't think he will ever be able to work at any company that employs a former cow-orker of his. It may be fun for a short while for a certain kind of person, but it's career suicide.