skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a fallacy which says "if I understand the steps which got me here, than I understand where I am." Or "If I understand each change that has been made to a system, then I understand the system." This is simply not true. A myopic understanding of each change does not equal an understanding of the system. Human memory is simply not good enough to remember all of the previous bits of code, and comprehend whether a change won't happen to interact in a bad way.

With lots of testing, yes, you can incrementally build a working system that you don't understand. But by myopically staring at diffs all day, you'll only get farther from the truth of how your system works.

The major refactors that I do, are because I've come to the realization that my data model was not correct. A realization, that often happens multiple times during a project. My utility functions are still useful, but I have to rewire everything. There is no meaningful way to do that incrementally. Why would you even try to do that incrementally? It's like, if you have a salamander and you want to turn it into a horse incrementally. Of course, most of the RNA is the same. But testing and code reviewing the steps between salamander and horse seems to me like a waste of time.
what do you mean Hollywood 2.0? like the digital or virtual nature of the production of AoB?
There is No News
Whoa, very cool post! It's interesting that "small but novel" languages can be formally proved. Do any mainstream languages have a sound foundation like that? If someone is interested in creating a new programming language, is it worth getting up to speed on proof writing and using that to build the language? It's not really a topic that comes up in the Dragon Book or mainstream general compiler study, AFAIK.
Yes, Rails helps developers make good upfront choices to the structuring of their application and database. The DB layer and structure is going to be a bottleneck well before the programming framework is (I think this is true in any framework). I enjoy that Rails makes it easy to do things like take care of N+1 queries, do associations correctly, etc. That isn't exclusive to Rails, but it is really good in Rails.
From someone who doesn't use Rails day-to-day: It's still about as relevant as it used to be before, for the same reasons it was relevant then.

In summary: If you need to get shit done fast, it's a good bet.

It isn't as hyped as it used to be 5 or so years ago, and if hype cycles are relevant to you, you likely already know your answer.

As to whether you are asking whether learning it would make you unemployable, by no means. RoR is still going strong, at least in my country.
Interesting, this resonated with me. I'm a "conservative" from the view of modern liberals (strictly speaking I'm a classical liberal or libertarian- I support gay marriage, the end of war, the end of drug wars, the elimination of income taxes, hard money, open borders freedom of speech and gun rights) ... and I will openly admit that the primary motivation for many of these beliefs is a feeling of a lack of safety.

I don't like humans being abused, physically or mentally, and I feel that happens way too much in our society, and all of those positions in one way or another are attempting to end abuse.

I know many liberals feel their positions are based on similarly wanting freedom (at least when I was a liberal that was my motivation)... which is why I think the great divide is largely due to wedge issues being shoved down our throats.
That's a different argument from Net Neutrality. What you should argue for is that localities cannot interfere with IP traffic via franchising the rights to provide telecom/cable services.
Looks like it's Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. I personally never use exit features though, I always switch to the terminal I launched the session from and press Ctrl-C.
I you prefer readable proofs, try Isabelle or Lean.
Semantic markup has more uses than just consistent presentation. For example, most of the BSD's use mandoc rather than groff for rendering which allows you to do more detailed searches with apropos. Note that the linked article refers to the mdoc macros. These aren't especially new and are very well supported but the man macros are still more common. If you dig into the details, the mdoc macros have many advantages.
The lack of competition in cable/telecom is purely caused by local rules.
It’s so fast to spin up, deploy, and iterate on a rails app it’s insane.

As stated, it depends on your context and your goals, but if speed matters to you, it’s hard to say rails is not a top solution.
This is a great point. Congress is abdicating its responsibility to enact proper legislation and allowing this issue to be decided by the whims of whatever the executive branch wants (which is subject to change every 4 years). We need certainty with regards to this issue, and this is not the only example of congress abdicating its responsibilities (war, healthcare, immigration, etc.).
I work with traditional RDBMS & and old hierarchical linked-list DB. The linked-list has great performance with super speedy Fortran, but it is a major pain to retrieve any information. Having to write complicated pointer commands is tedious at best. Select * is such a luxury.
The hunt-and-peckers will still be hunting and pecking on an ABC keyboard, at least the typists don't have to. Also, the first adopters of smartphones probably did have overwhelming keyboard experience, so I can totally see how we got here. Fortunately in phone land the default is just that and easily changed by anyone who thinks another layout would work better.
WordPress Reflective Pingback DDoS Attacks
FYI, Bargh (the author of this editorial) has been pushing these sorts of priming effects for a long time. Many of these (most famously the "priming people with elderly-related words makes them walk slower" study) have not held up under subsequent replications.

Clearly this doesn't mean that the studies Bargh is describing here are similarly flawed – but he has shown a strong resistance to admitting his mistakes, and so I'm less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt here, particularly when the original studies aren't linked anywhere.

Further reading:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/01/1...

http://andrewgelman.com/2016/02/12/priming-effects-replicate...

http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-he...
Merely knowing python does not a data scientist make.
As always with these announcements from academia, I’ll remind people that it’s going to take years before we can industrialise this process.
Yes. Rails has by now certainly crossed into boring software territory – arguably a [positive thing](http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology) anyway – but it remains an excellent choice coming into 2018:

- Out of the box, Rails has close to unbeatable developer ergonomics, tooling, stability, and ease of use

- Lots of high quality, large companies use it (GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, Square, Twitch) and have by now figured out how to scale it, often sharing and open sourcing their efforts, e.g. https://github.com/Shopify/identity_cache

- If your product front end is simple, Turbolinks can be an excellent choice (find me a faster, more bug free product than Basecamp)

- If you prefer to use a more modern JavaScript solution on the front end like Ember or React, Rails API is a perfect fit

- The Ruby ecosystem and community are both very high quality
This is interesting, but doesn't feel like anything new, at least in retrospect. Fear is a well-worn tool in the conservative political playbook.

Where this is interesting to me is in the possibility that fear generally drives a swing toward conservative attitudes, regardless of the alignment of the politician that wields it. In that case, left-leaning political campaigns could be self-sabotaging by engaging in dirty pool or attack ads. If this dynamic described in TFA is really repeatable, you might see a campaign that doesn't attack and just cranks up the optimism to 110%. Whether that's viable in this modern world is up for debate.

There has definitely been an element of this at the core of the Obama, Sanders, and Clinton campaigns, but on the outskirts you continued to have attack ads and fearmongering over the GOP candidates (or over primary challengers).
Remember at this time the block size has already been increased up to a maximum of 3.7mb physical blocks. This is a large part of why there's discussion about what 2X means-- as commonly people think that the bitcoin block size is only 1mb but it's a 1mb "weight".

The 2x project would have doubled this to a 2mb weight but a 7.4mb physical block theoretical max.
Developers would rather die than spend a dollar on any product, no matter how better it is or how bad they will suffer.

That's only half the lesson though, because some of the alternatives are free or free up to N users.

The other half of the lesson is branding and hype cycle.
> I can't use the Conde Nast CMS in anything other than Chrome, so I can't switch completely.

Highlight of the article tucked in at the end there.
Back in the days of high crime rates, they used to say a Democrat is a Republican who has never been mugged. Maybe they were on to something. Same way George W Bush had an approval rating over 90% in the days after 9/11.
False premise - you cannot know the full aggregate of those who actively give to charity regularly.

A great number of people including some very wealthy ones prefer to give anonymously and often stipulate that as condition of their giving.

Furthermore, even with public donations, there is no mechanism to track all of it for various reasons (e.g. many agencies may release totals but not donor/donation details), so you can't know the totals, much less judge the rate changes of that.
And where did this 250ms come from? Seems arbitrary.
So the genie just grants me invulnerability to physical harm? What about everyone else?
After years of being a Chrome user, I've been trying to work myself off of Google's infrastructure as much as possible. Firefox is great, but I was very disappointed to learn that they are partnering with political activists to block sites that they deem to be "fake news."

Edit:

makeee below posted a good source describing what Mozilla is currently doing, which appears to be limited to "researching" the problem of fake news.

I would love to support Firefox so I hope they come up with something more innovative than blocking (which they do not appear to be doing now - I stand corrected) or labeling (which has its own problems).

As I mentioned below, browsers, search engines, or social networks should not be, IMO, attempting to block or de-rank websites based on political activism, regardless of the source.
And I keep saying I don't know how. If I knew how to fix these problems, I'd consider becoming a politician or philosopher or finding some other way to influence the debate.

This would be a start: how about ultra-wealthy advocate and lobby for a wealth tax, and stop feeding their gains through tax avoidance schemes?

All I know is that today, there's too much levering power in capitalist structures, that feeds too much surplus to owners of capital. I know all the arguments against alternatives; I want to preserve economic incentives, innovation and investment. But by the same token innovation is definitely reducing the utility of labour, and that's a problem that needs solving too. If every want and need in life could be produced automatically with no labour (the end result of innovation, where innovation has itself been automated), who would want to live? What meaning would there be in life?

At the end of the day the human animal is a tribal, social creature who wants to be useful to his or her neighbours, to make his or her way in the world with his or her head held high, knowing they make a positive contribution. That drive is ultimately not compatible with capitalist economics, which seeks efficiency and encourages consumption (the two, ironically, being in opposition to one another, ensuring that we'll never feel like we have enough, even if we didn't live on a hedonic treadmill).
"Get Coq out for monkey at QA."
How many stories? If you had three or so words per story, that would give you about seven stories, which fits the notion of 7 +/- 2 "chunks" of information.
If you want to hear this article read out loud, this podcast has this article along with some commentary:

https://soundcloud.com/noded-bitcoin-podcast/noded-020
No, I'm only saying this calibration QA has no readable source code to work with. And there are ways to obscure some parts of the ECU behaviour.
This repo is the financial institutions and "CEOs" pushing for an arbitrary change over the objections of the engineers, and in many cases their very own CTOs, and the travesty of how terribly poorly it was written and non-tested shows that bitcoin should never again entertain this kind of nonsense.

This was never about scalability-- the actual on chain capacity more than quadrupled in August and Lightning ads a nearly infinite increase in theoretical capacity.

This was always about the self important CEOs wanting to take over the project and force the engineers into their will.
Videoshow Pro Editor 7.6.4 APK for Android
> our undergrad reactor thermohydraulics class's professor was notoriously strict because there's just no tolerance for failing to do the math for cooling a reactor.

How is this different from calculating any other design?
Well, of course designing an autonomous system to operate in an environment where malicious actors are actively spoofing and jamming your sensors with pathological inputs is a pretty huge challenge - admittedly one the military is probably very interested in - and is not the purpose of any of these competitions. It's hard enough when you trust your sensors, at the moment!
This isn't bitcoin you're looking at, this is an attack on bitcoin.
Inside the Revolution at Etsy
Much of what you learn in Ruby and Rails is not portable to other languages. Ruby and Rails are deeply flawed and much of what you learn is dealing with those flaws. Similar to learning PHP for example (but differently flawed than PHP). Ruby is also showing its age and is lagging behind modern languages.

Rails is probably fine and fast and good for small projects. It is probably not good for professional large projects.
Sociopathic socialist scum...
Ask HN: Resources for understanding and practicing distributed systems?
Any recommendations for good resources for understanding and learning about distributed systems?
No. Learning Python is quick and simple compared to learning data science or machine learning.

Knowing Python and Django (which I do) does not afford you any ability do to those things.
I know many who fall in the conservative end of the spectrum and who are entrepreneurs and have taken tremendous risks for extended periods. "Fear makes you conservative" is catchy though.
This is a single, non replicated experiment in human psychology, with a viral result.

These are all prime risk factors for studies that turn out to impossible to replicate.

Doesn't mean this has to be one of those, but I wouldn't change any major life philosophy until this has been confirmed a few times.
Of course, but wouldn't one be better preparing themselves for data science by working with python/django on a web app vs working with Ruby/Rails?
For more on suggested influences on political position, see New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's TED talk The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives:

https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind
Oh, that's great news. Blocking fake news sources would get me to try to switch some relatives back over to Firefox.
I think wedge issues are perverted to be the centerpieces of modern conservatism to create an easier path to adhere out of fear. Reasoning about the issues you mentioned is much more difficult than bite-sized strawmen ("sharia law is coming to america!").

I think the issue comes down to a conflict of motivations between the politicians and the voters. The voters may desire safety, but the politicians who offer them safety have no accountability to deliver on that, nor do they tend to actually do so.
There’s nothing wrong with Rails in 2018. It’s maybe not the most forward-looking choice you could make but it’ll get you running quickly.

But if you have a smart team and a little bit of time for ramping up then I’d suggest Elixir+Phoenix or Node tbh.

Rails is good at what it’s designed to be - a one stop shop for fast to develop, kinda dirty, framework magic, webdev.

And there is nothing wrong with that.
It actually does not help to say this answer, it would go over badly in 95% of interviews no matter how egregious the unethical request. The interviewer typically questions if you're being truthful and if they will be accused of the same in the future. When I worked as an agent, we generally coached people to state one of the other reasons they quit or were fired and if ever asked the interview question "Have you ever been asked to do something illegal or unethical?" to just answer "No."

The only time you're allowed to mention this is when it becomes easily verifiable in something like a newspaper. I actually have personal experience in one of my jobs where the owners very casually asked me to do some unethical things and then shrugged it off. At the time I highly suspected I was fired because of it, but had no evidence. So for years at interviews when asked why I was fired, my answer was "Nepotism," which is true because they replaced me with an incompetent relative. The FTC shut them down 5 years after I was fired. I only mention it if the employer tries to verify past employment and asks why the phone number doesn't work.
Even if the article is bunk, I think you're conflating different kinds of fear. You can be afraid of the dark without being afraid of heights.
It depends on whether or not you are on the React bandwagon. Yes Rails does work with React - but this means two different asset pipelines (Rails and React/Node).

If I was building a product focused stack, then I would simply do React+ Typescript. Why bother bringing in two different languages for front end and backend ?

Typescript is pretty awesome in itself.
This bears an uncanny resemblance to the "Great Operation" from We[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)
Cool post! The stuff about Curry-Howard was really interesting and relates to a question i have been thinking about. But I'm a novice when it comes to the theory of type systems or theorem provers. Maybe someone here can enlighten me?

As type systems become more complex (like say in Scala or Haskell), they move towards having specialized syntax and weird hacks to express what are arguably simpler logical theorems/invariants about values in a type.. so why can't we have a programming language that gives you a full blown logic system(Coq? or Microsoft Z3? a SAT Solver?.. i don't understand the differences in detail) rather than part of one? Are there attempts at that, or does it turn out to be unworkable?
I've yet to find anything that comes close to Rails in programmer productivity for the web. So, as long as programmer productivity is a concern, it's relevant.

EDIT: On the other hand, I wouldn't choose Rails for a project where the main concern is performance/scalability
There are two languages to discuss here:

1) The underlying pure functional language that forms the logical basis for Coq (called "Gallina"). It is not possible to write a program which runs forever in this language, because all recursive calls must be "well founded". Coq uses a very simple set of rules to determine when recursive calls are guaranteed to terminate (slightly more flexible than primitive recursion), but it rules out some legitimate programs which do not terminate. For example, writing merge sort is difficult in Coq because the type checker can't automatically prove that the recursion terminates. For these cases, you can provide your own ordering relation and prove that it is well-founded. So tldr, you have to prove that your programs terminate (and this is automated in many cases). The fact that all Gallina programs terminate is crucial; otherwise, you could trivially prove any proposition.

2) Usually in Coq you do not write most proof terms in Gallina manually (because it is quite unnatural). Instead, you write scripts called "tactics" to generate the terms for you. These scripts are written in a dynamically typed language called Ltac, and programs in this language can run forever. But all proofs generated by these tactics are type checked in Gallina, so it's impossible for a tactic to generate a bad proof term without it being detected by Gallina's type checker.
Interesting. I assumed that spending more time working with Python would be beneficial, but I guess it's not a big deal. This is great to know, as I've been resistant to starting with Ruby/Rails for the reason I described. Thanks!
If conservatives are people who are dominated by physical fear, why are so many American soldiers conservatives?
Related: Hoare looks back at formally proving programs correct https://m.cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/10/42360-retrospective...
Does that tell you anything interesting about your candidate's ability to think critically and problem solve, though? There are far better questions (and indeed, types of questions) that can cover more ground and be more candidate-friendly.
Picking the basics or just enough python shouldn't take long(a couple of days?) for a intermediate programmer.
That's why I'm decoupled (to an extent). You can have access to my lastpass account, but that won't get you into any of my 2fa-protected accounts of which lastpass is one.
They aren’t superior
Same interesting things as ever.

Provided the modem card is still in there.

Looks like maybe it's your Communication and/or Serial controller.

Last time I checked at least with AT&T you got free dial-up for broadband account holders, you just have to locate their local or toll-free phone numbers then modem-dial in to reach an AT&T server when your laptop is plugged into the land line of any local dial-tone provider. You log in with your AT&T password and you get the internet at 56K.

For electronic instruments having control or data output through RS-232 or COM ports you can access them remotely over land lines at 56K without using the internet. And without needing more support from the manufacturer other than for a PC plugged into the COM port locally. Your remote instrument's COM port will need an external modem connected to it and a land line phone number for you to call in on. Your laptop would need the same software (or maybe terminal emulator) that you would use when connected to the COM port locally.

Remote office servers having a modem and land line of their own can be accessed even when the internet is down.

Multiples of 56K per land line when multiple land lines and modems are available and used in parallel, once accomplished between multi-modem desktops in regional offices without needing an internet at all.

In buildings or campuses no longer using (all of) their former land line wiring, the PBX can still sometimes be largely operational for access to any remaining formerly dialable connection locations on the local private exchange. If abandoned or without PBX power or relay control, any two locations may be punched together manually and discretely powered more permanently for direct modem use without a dial tone.

You can also connect to your own powered twisted pair(s) for as many miles as you have access to, or still lease lines from the phone company(s) needed to connect between any two points they have access to, all without dial tones.

Speed dependent on line quality.