skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Maintaining and conserving things is the job of conservatives, not entrepreneurs, and conservatives resist change.

I'm mystified by this. Why does maintenance have to be a 'conservative' thing? Probably 70% of software engineering work is maintenance of one kind of or another. Are those engineers conservatives? Do they 'resist change'? Unless you mean 'conversative' in a very restricted sense of that word.

> so well-thought-out, so vivid and so blatantly superior to the incumbent alternatives that they become inevitable. That is, society cannot help but enact them.

This is a version of 'technological determinism' (Google it if you need to). If there's any single takeaway from the last 50 years of scholarship on the history of technnology, it's that technological determism is false.
> Your browser does not support webMIDI. Install Chrome.

I think maybe my life will be better if I keep using firefox and don't use whatever this is.
I'm far from an expert, I'd say intermediate. There are people I work with who know far more than I do.

The company specializes in a couple of frameworks so yes they sell expertise in that sense, and they've done a lot of work developing the brand.

But yes, there are more jobs than people to fill them, which is pretty much any software development job that isn't gaming related or movie related. My company always has open software dev positions and they can't fill them fast enough despite being very well known in the industry.

What domain is your consultancy in?
To be pedantically correct: the C standards call them "preprocessing directives".
>If you want to use Reddit et al as your standard reference on the use of language and punctuation, have at it.

In terms of what contexts one should keep in mind when interpreting comments with good faith to come to a most reasonable interpretation of what they are saying, the way language is used on reddit is probably a much more reasonable benchmark than MLA style guides.
And developers only thinking about the development experience. In my next project I'm going to monitor the gzipped size of my deployed site as part of continuous integration.
Are these mostly premeditated murders that don't normally affect tourists or other passersby?
I don't think that's the rule? I think the rule is if you're using quotes and it's ambiguous as to whether the person the quotes are attributed to actually said it, then the person better have actually said it.

(For what it's worth: this little subthread is about 10x more interesting than the story and the rest of the thread it's attached to).
To do this right you'd need a common registry with all the proto schemas you'll ever want to use. It's a solvable problem, but it's comparable to setting up a new build ecosystem and getting people to use it. (Consider TypeScript and .d.ts files.)
RFC stands for "Request For Comments". Some of them get turned into standards, but most are just the IETF equivalent of a forum thread. They're a way to start a discussion about a network engineering design.
> macros can’t be debugged. When you use a function, that function can be stepped through by the debugger. The macro cannot.

Looks like the debugger could use some improvement.

> A macro is faster than a function.

This is false. Macros may be faster in some cases, but I've seen them being slower. I suspect this is because functions have more type information that can help the optimiser. I've tried it with Monocypher: replacing serialisation/de-serialisation functions (load and store) by equivalent macros slowed the whole thing down.
Ask HN: Do you agree with white board coding interviews?
Posting with an anon account so i don't get identified by potential interviewers.
I have been happily employed for many years and just recently started looking for new opportunities. I was a bit shocked at the white board interview methods being followed at major companies (FB, Goog etc). Whiteboard interviews were initially devised on the idea that it helps us understand the thought process of candidates, while things like syntax and getting the code to be perfect were less important. Looks like nobody even pretends anymore. It is all about getting the code to be in compilable and bug free state.
So my question to HN is this: Do you agree with these kind of interview practices at your current company? If so, why? I am genuinely interested to see if there is any evidence that correlates ability to do this with actual job performance. If not, why do you continue to participate in it as an interviewer in your current company?
Hey pretty fun.
Signed up for Loom last week and it's pretty awesome! I like the fact that it's one click to record/upload/host. The embedded video of the speaker is cool too. My team is currently working on a set of internal training videos using it.
Isn't Japan pretty infamous for their low productivity per capita?

I'd go about optimising the use of healthy young workers away from endless hours of presenteeism to short more productive hours before declaring the well empty and moving on to putting old people to work.
You also wrote in the next sentence:

> pure free markets are impossible and in fact dishonesty and chincanery can utterly distort markets

My point stands. Dishonesty and chicanery are not condoned by the free market, because they're fraud and theft.
I don't get styrofoam or bubblewrap in Amazon packages. Just those "bubble pads" that I have to deflate to dispose of.
Tiny Houses in San Jose – For Homeless People and Workers
I didn’t mean to imply that the web should follow those style guides (and said as much). I was refuting his claim that no one expects that quotes imply an assertion of verbatim quote.

I certainly default to assuming it does and in many contexts it is an explicit rule.
> With the correct pin (as described in my linked comment), you can prevent systemd-as-PID1 from coming back.

Frankly, it's an ugly hack, not a proper solution. I hope to run my servers for years to come and the upgrade process should be as smooth as it can be.
I highly recommend watching Danny Rensch's analysis of games 3 and 5 as it is interesting to see the (human) reasoning behind the moves (they are linked on the page). One should also be very skeptical about the "empty" moves from Stockfish. While watching I was surprised that it was making quite a few of these but what is not explained in the video is the reason why it occurred. Nakamura hints on it by mentioning that Stockfish was running on laptop grade hardware and in the post it is mentioned that there was a 1 min/move time limit (not to mention the very low cache). Additionally people who replayed the moves on their own laptops using Stockfish like [1] were unable to reproduce some of the moves.

Although being quite an achievement, I would love to see how Stockfish fares with some minor tweaks. I mean AlphaZero did not lose a single game under very specific conditions, nobody likes a poor winner.

[1] https://chess.stackexchange.com/a/19378
Hah, I never thought I would ever hear a story about a computer that needs its hydraulic fluids topped-up.

My first modem is 28.8k, I guess you can call me young'un...
So if they let themselves into your house while you were away and left a note in your dining table, you’d say there’s a reason they’re doing this?

There is not a reason to access and modify your private data. This is not some kind of out of band multiplexed signal, they are reaching into your applications and changing their behavior.

There are other ways to communicate with people you have a billing relationship with already in place.
There's one big one for me, it's not based on statistics so it's not accurate or predictive.

There's little more here about it's utility:

https://youtu.be/GXHj7eZ23gk?t=343

The big five/HEXACO, however, correspond roughly to neuro-chemical/structural pathways/circuits in brains.

tl;dr Meyers Briggs is makes you feel good about yourself. The big 5 /HEXACO can tell you if you're a piece of shit. I know which test I'd rather people take.
Well, there are some things that the ISA impacts, most notably the translation overhead (modern day x86 "CISC" implementations are really essentially RISC processors with a translation layer over it). Jim Keller, who's been on both sides estimates that fully developed RISC ISAs should be about ~15-20% more efficient than their x86 counterparts.
Github uses Elasticsearch [1]. I agree that ES is too dumb by default, however the analysis pipeline can be customized for searching source code.

1. https://www.elastic.co/use-cases/github
thanks this is an enjoyable blog
How a REAL MAN catches a mouse
Is called business continuity.
This.

> Being personable: "Can I have a beer with this guy?" is the worse in my opinion.

Social Drinking is a very western activity. In the East (India, Pakistan, China, etc...) a large majority of people are what are called "teetotalers" - never drink alcohol. Yet they socialize as much, if not more.
I’ve had to patch against this in the past when it turned out my system was breaking for a set of users whose company was installing a browser extension that injected JS that broke the app. Never did find out exactly what it did, but I worked around it but fixing the progressive enhancement to work properly in the context of broken JS as well as no JS.
That's a relief. Three kids mandate 9 to 5 work hours. There isn't much quality time or mental energy to dedicate after that.

It's a relief because whatever energy I have left I spend on books, articles, papers. Those things have helped my 9 to 5 in a big way. I bring what I learn to the job.

It doesn't beat hands on practice. I do itch to work on practice projects and I'm hoping when the kids are a little older, I'll have more time and energy for that.

In any case, my kids are my number one. The day my first was born was the day my motivations and my reason for being shifted.
Unrelated: you joined >400 days ago and this appears to be your first post? Cool!
Screenshots.debian.net
>Shipping your garbage half way around the world does indeed make little sense

But it did make sense as long as China accepted the garbage. Remember the ships that bring stuff here will go back to China. No sense in them going back empty.
> This is definitely a problem, but the place to solve it isn't Son.

But then what problem does Son actually solve? How is a canonicalisation format that's not actually canonical useful?

You take a hit (e.g. by forgoing fast existing libraries, control over pretty printing, and by being forced to sort on serialization which screws up streaming), but gain essentially nothing, not even the advertised benefit of your stuff not randomly changing as it moves through the stack. The likely main benefit of canonicalization is for security and crypto, but unless you use son without numbers (or create your own subset of son) it's kinda useless for that. Of course you can just encode all your numbers in strings or something, but at the point where you're doing your own number parsing logic (which is the hardest bit), why not just use some well-designed actually canonical format like csexp?
Doesn't every country have that? I live in a place were by law everyone is entitled to a house and a monthly €1000. And there is still poverty and social ills.

I mean the basic MO here is to throw endless amounts of money at every problem and the results are at best mixed.
you guys should use my diagonal vector registers in RISC-V I developed for my Master's Thesis explained in this research paper [0]

[0] https://www3.nd.edu/~shu/research/papers/ipdps01.pdf
Ny mom did!
One example of fallacious reasoning is the comment that "This is why despite his IQ, Donald Trump got elected as the president of US.". In context it can be taken as a claim that Trump has an IQ below 120 but that his exceptional persuasion abilities more than compensate.

This whole section is filled with fallacious reasoning but I'll just point out that Trump's IQ has been the topic of much debate but there is no reliable source for what it actually is. Any vaguely impartial attempt to estimate it however has to conclude that it is significantly above average, e.g. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41573846

Unless you have special access to Trump's IQ test results (I'm sure the media would love you to share) this comment doesn't support your line of reasoning and probably undermines it.
> personalization

Apparently it's already a widespread business and The Guardian published this article about it. It's an amazing, at times heart-breaking story about what people need, and in a way it's only tangentially about porn:

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jul/29/jon-ronson-b...

(It's not at all a catalog of fetishes, in case that's what you expect/want/fear.)
Technically, one makes money for Comcast.
It's false equivalence because you (and everyone else) knows that the case of an end user injecting script into a page on the receiving end of the connection is not the scenario under discussion, and is not the behavior that the rule implied by the earlier comment would be intended to prohibit. If the comment was tongue in cheek then I have misunderstood you and withdraw my objection :).
Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus...
I get offers for cash loans, no questions asked all the time. Or on Coinbase I can buy Bitcoin using my credit card, which has a 4-digit Euro limit. What's stopping the neighbor who has the same card to think "Oh I'll just max out my card to buy Bitcoin, it will double (or whatever) its price by the end of the month, I can withdraw my principal to pay off that credit card.".
The only people to benefit from less education of the majority is the rich
The situation we’re dealing with is scenario 3: a world that makes N widgets, and everyone is used to the quality of life that comes from the society making N widgets, but the population is decreasing and making N widgets is becoming harder and harder. In that situation, why should able-bodied old people get a pass on working?

Japan is not a post-scarcity society. Even if income we distributed completely evenly, it would be about $43,000 per year. That’s comfortable, but not so much that Japan could afford to produce a lot less and still enjoy the kind of lifestyle people associate with a developed country.
The comment (copied below in case it has been edited away from some earlier more inflammatory version) is not inflammatory, it is a factual assertion supported by the content of the article. Hiding this subthread is inappropriate, as the comment does not attack the beliefs or adherents of a religion. Rather, it asserts that cultural change resulting from the spread of one religious made the works of this historical writer institutionally unwelcome.

Labeling this as a flame and shaming the poster for it is extremely inappropriate.

No, but it was still simple and pure religious fundamentalism that preferred her work disappearing (or at least not being saved), in charge once the Christianity started to dominate the Empire.
I don't see why I should have to really. Have you heard the argument that bullshit is a lot easier to create than to refute?

Anyway fine:

> There is some innate affinity for computer programming which you must be born with, and cannot be taught.

Clearly true. Anyone who has been to a non-profit educational school knows there are some people you simply could not reach to program. Of course more people could program than do, but that isn't what he said.

> Compiled languages are always faster

Nobody sane would claim this. People say compiled languages are generally faster, which is true. Besides his link refuting this is to Java, which is compiled! (Just In Time).

> at least the outcome of integer maths is always defined

Yes it is in nearly every programming language.

> every computer on sale today (2017) uses two’s complement notation for negative numbers.

To a rounding error, yes this is true. His link is to a computer from the 60s. Seriously.

> every computer on sale today uses a register width that’s a multiple of eight bits.

Again, probably 99.9999999% do. Actually... Probably more.

I could go on.
>One of their lecturers insisted that the second return in "return; return;"

That guy has a great career ahead in comedy!
Mitragynine/Corynantheidine Pseudoindoxyls as Opioid Analgesics
Modern Object Pascal is a linear descendant of Turbo Pascal, so the resemblance isn't coincidental.

OTOH, it's not the same, much as modern C isn't the same as K&R C.
!0 if we actually want the exact value `true` :)
You’d need to repackage it in some form to make it palatable for modern audiences. Let me take a quick stab.

Make “ASN.2” or something, update the fundamental data types to modern standards (think of what changed from NeXTSTEP to macOS X; they changed from TIFF to PNG, from PostScript to PDF, etc. but kept the overall architecture the same). Consolidate and simplify the many options (but do not eliminate options entirely). And call it… JASN or something, which sounds like both JSON and ASN, and make up some acronym where the “J” stand for “Joint” (like in JPEG, which stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group).

And, maybe most importantly, make freely licensed tooling available for both converting to and from ASN.1 and JSON, but also jgrep, jless, jcat, etc. (similar to zgrep, zless and zcat, etc.) Make these packages available for all common operating systems, readily installable using that plaform’s usual mechanism.
> Being personable: "Can I have a beer with this guy?" is the worse in my opinion

I'm not going to disagree with you re: beer buddies. Really the way I read this is not as a requirement that employees participate in after-work events or in mandatory work friendships, but more of a misguided heuristic for something simpler. The general question is whether the average interaction with you is pleasant or not. If your job requires interacting with others (as it often does in software teams) and you're generally unpleasant or difficult to interact with, then people might avoid interacting with you, and that's a hit on everyone's ability to do their job. On the flipside, someone who's easy to interact with can be a great resource to everyone and also learn from all the people they interact with.
> just in case the first one did not work

I repeat all statements in my code for exactly this reason. Sometimes I even compile the same code twice. You can never be too careful.
I never really thought about it, but when I write, I do tend to talk to myself. I also often write out concepts that I have difficulty verbally expressing. Interesting...
Think more in terms of monthly streams not individual value. Think of dollar cost averaging instead of timing the market.
Jon Ronson recently did an excellent podcast series about this: http://www.jonronson.com/butterfly.html
When talking about serious staff, can you talk face to face, or, dare you?
I had a manager recently say not to use a new flask server to host a tiny one client config wizard, but to use the existing one (elsewhere in code base that hosts a customer facing Gui), severely concerned about memory usage.

I feel like sometimes managers create abstractions in their mental model rather than simply relying on their engineers to perform that role at a much greater level of detail. So to this individual, web server == heavy.
I agree that more automation is going to happen. But I also think that regulations which increase recycleability will be required.
That seems, let's just say awfully generous considering that we're well into the End of Silicon Scaling at this point and no such advantage has been seen yet. But whatever. The point isn't to say you can't design a bad ISA that would have performance impact, but that arguing about ISA as if it were a core driver of processor performance is dumb.

Stated less charitably: programmers like us like to argue about ISA because we understand that stuff and want to bike shed about something that makes us feel smart.

The real issues with CPU design happen elsewhere, as literally illustrated by the linked presentation!
AFAICT, Minix 3 copyright is held by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, not by Tanenbaum himself.

http://git.minix3.org/index.cgi?p=minix.git;a=blob;f=LICENSE
Treating anyone this rudely is a bannable offence on Hacker News. Please take the civility requirement more deeply to heart (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and please don't do this again.

If a fellow community member has a first-hand involvement with a situation under discussion, such as working for a company that some people are mad at or does some wrong thing, we're all responsible for reacting responsibly. Otherwise bad things happen, such as first-hand observers being scared to post because they'll get lashed out at, and the already-weak community bonds we have here getting weaker. We all know what the culture of online shaming has led to and it's all our job not to do it on HN.
They're the ones who issued the standard.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6108
Like @ndh2 has stated, train yourself to not do it. Otherwise, your spoken audio files will be fine, but your conversations in team meetings over webex or conference calls will still have it, and it would be annoying everyone else (if it's a lot) and you wouldn't know about it because no-one is going to tell you.

Also, if you start to edit the ums out, you will quickly get tired of wasting time on doing this, and would train yourself to not do it yourself. I went through this exercise after recording youtube screencasts that are 5 to 10 mins long, and wasting about 30 minutes editing out my ums and ahems.
C macros are extremely necessary for winning IOCCC contests. Essential, really.
Also the condom law further fragmented the industry just when tube sites were hitting. DVD sales plunged from 150k average per release to 15k in sales no industry call handle a 90% plunge in income. The tube sites are run from Germany so you can't necessarily get content taken down even if you sue. Porn Valley is no more besides a handful of custom content businesses and the huge companies like Vivid porn as a small startup business is absolutely dead. Like music you have the old 70s dinosaurs still working but the path from startup to porn star business is blocked. The new content is amateur driven all the controls to prevent underage actors and HIV testing are gone so it's an utter mess and basically a dead industry.
Umm.. You should not be using http to begin with.
Everything else is the results of not using ssl for everything.
> I'm saying what somebody else is saying, in their voice. This goes in quotes, because it's someone else's speech, even if it's my version of their speech.

That's fine, when you're writing fiction. But in most online forums, fiction is frowned upon.
YouTube creators get paid if there are enough people watching them. People watching videos, discussing on comment threads, and paying for YouTube Red don't get paid for their effort.
Isn’t the answer obvious? The answer is the same as the answer to the question “Why is there so much free everything on the internet?”

The answer is that copying is cheap – in fact almost free – and products in markets with lots of competition tend to converge to its marginal cost, which in this case is zero.
Holy crap that game is fun
this is pretty good. Key line for me:

> How do you prove that a coin has validly been spent? First, prove that it hasn’t already been spent! How do you do that if you don’t have the blockchain data? You can’t, and no amount of fancy math can change that.

and also, something Bitcoin devs realise that Bitcoin fans often don't seem to:

> On the other hand, decentralization isn’t cheap: using PayPal is one or two orders of magnitude simpler than the Bitcoin protocol.
I found it really hard to play with Firebase because it is only available hosted from Google. I like to tinker with things that I can run locally and it was so much work (relative to other technologies) to get a staging environment established. For example, I'm building lots of things with docker so I can setup and tear down really quickly.
> Uber has burned through most of their cash, and the assets they have are mostly unsellable

Source?