skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a lot the context you’ve built up in writing that code that could never fit in the comments (even if thoughts could easily be expressed in words, they would dwarf the code and not directly correspond to it; actually comments can actually make code reading harder in this way). It really isn’t about the language either, at least the programming language, but how the problem was defined and understood in the first place, how this understanding was encoded in the software.

Reading code is basically trying to reverse engineer the thinking of the programmer by looking at second order output. Of course it will be hard! It isn’t just style, nor would I say mainly just style. Continuous improvement is often just a matter of rebuilding the context that was lost with the last programmer.
There is often a world of a difference between code hard to read because it tries to solve a complex problem or is written in a paradigm I haven't learned yet, and code hard to read, because its author was just plain sloppy, and didn't properly care about naming or decomposition. Distinguishing between these two cases is a matter of enough experience.
A lot of American grocery stores also do a terrible job of simply naming the variety. For example, mangoes come in a wide variety & my local stores will often carry different ones. They are always labeled as "mango" though and never specify a variety. So it's Russian roulette on the taste & whether you will need to floss or not after eating it.
Bioink Enables 3D Printing of Stem Cells
But I never got this reasoning.

I've never not bought something because putting my money in some investment account will give me a few percent return... I'm not buying a house because the "market is good", i'm buying a house because I need a damn house. I'm not buying food or gas because otherwise my money will be worth less soon, i'm buying it because I need it. Yes, i understand that things will be vastly different if the whole world adopted deflationary currencies, but I disagree that it would be the end of civilization as many people seem to imply when talking about how "dangerous" a deflationary currency is.

There exist markets that you can put your money in and make more than inflation reliably. According to your reasoning, wouldn't the existence of those markets mean there is no incentive for me to spend my money at all right now? I'm not trying to start an argument here, I just never heard a satisfactory reason here besides "trust me i'm an economist". Does it have to do with the extra "work" required to invest in these kinds of things that prevents them from being a problem?

I'd argue that there's a lot more to it than just "deflation" vs "inflation", and that bitcoin as it currently stands isn't going to cause a massive collapse of the economy where nobody spends any money at all ever.
It really depends on what language that person will start with. For Java or anything front-end, I'd suggest a beefy laptop, with 8 or 16 GB or RAM. For Python, Ruby or other back-end stuff, a smaller machine is probably good enough.

I'd also suggest using Linux, either Fedora 27 or Ubuntu 17.10. It helps when your workstation thinks like the server that'd run your code and the person would learn a bit about how to manage servers in the meantime.
This is a fantastic post that asks a question that I think many people just jump over on their way to "being right".

What exactly does the thing we are talking about mean?

In this case "code readability".

I would add to this that "code readability" only means something to me in the context of it's intended audience. Code is readable when it is simple to decipher by the people that the author intended to decipher it. For anyone else to hold it to standards outside of those agreed upon by the author and the intended audience seems silly.
Hire slowly, grow slowly: how to grow from 1 to 100 employees
I thought this would be an interesting article then about 5 seconds after loading the page a giant advertisement took over the page. So I closed the tab. Oh well.
Ask HN: Best resources on algorithmic coding theory?
Basically anything interesting that I won't find with half an hour of Google -- I will probably find weird fringe stuff interesting. I want more algorithm than theory and ideally less rigor. Anything that compresses the subject matter for a high level overview is appreciated. Thanks in advance!
>What's the value of the in-app currency being a cryptocurrency

In a word -- decentralization -- is the key difference between a virtual currency described by some SQL tables and an API and one described by a blockchain.

A gov if it wants can take down a server if it is physically hosted in that country. A blockchain unless you've gargantuan CPU power is nigh on impossible to take down.
That's meaningless.

The actual action of bitcoin against anything in the economy leads to zero net inflation.

There is no wealth / money / assets being created or destroyed by Bitcoin going up or the coin count increasing.

There's no scenario where Bitcoin can reach into the economy without transiting through something, in which case there is a swap and no new value is created.

Want to take a loan against your bitcoins? The entity doing the loaning gets your coins if you default. Nothing new has been created, you swap positions.

Want to sell your bitcoins? The buyer swaps positions with you, no new wealth has entered the economy. The buyer holds your former position, and you hold the eg USD or Euro currency.

Want to direcly trade a house for bitcoins? (leaving off any taxes, fees, etc for this purposes) You swap positions with the seller. They get your bitcoins, you get the house. Nothing new has been added or removed from the economy.

New wealth is created almost exclusively via productivity increases, not by two people trading objects $1 for $1 back and forth.
There's always 'recreational mathematics' -- puzzles of the type Martin Gardner was known for.

On the less STEM side, taking a look at what's around you and trying to reverse-engineer the reasons behind design decisions is also useful. Why do zippers have that little nub on them? Why is jaywalking a crime? Why are red lights red rather than blue? Sometimes this is a matter of path dependence, but other times there's some deeper reason.
When the first quote is Pinker - this is a good article
Freecoin – complementary currency toolkit
Learn new skills this year for just 10.99 bucks
I Hate Women, but It's Acceptable Because My Mom Was Mean to Me One Time
Easier Factor Screening with RANK BY
Nor the AS/400's the system runs on in the back-end...
Totally agree. It's a lot of work though and can be humbling to find out that the previous people weren't complete idiots.

Reading code also doesn't really get rewarded. It's easier to declare the work of people who aren't there anymore as bad and rewrite everything.
Spoilers and Metadata
I've been using Revolut for a while now. It's been recommended to me by a friend, and I must say the website and app experience did make the whole thing feel safe. Makes sense.
GoPro quits the drone business
Muscular with 7-8% body fat (means you are into bodybuilding) and don't mention broccoli? Something doesn't add up :P

I joke, but i do agree with what you have said.
idea: wearable music: bracelet (refer to visualization in parent link) for deaf people to listen through skin interaction
Yeah, I'm just pointing that bit out because Dienstvertrag ("service contract", i.e. charging per hour) is a type of contract you might use to hire a freelancer (the other one is Werkvertrag, "work contract", i.e. charging for a specific work with predefined requirements). As a former freelancer my first read of that line would have been that it also includes (sub-)contractors, which it of course doesn't.

I don't know whether most business people are aware of §69b at all but in my experience many people just hire freelancers without a specific copyright arrangement and are then deeply surprised when they find out they don't actually own the project they paid the freelancer to create for them.
Oh they have gone nuts indeed. I see this pattern among my friends who are mostly financially uneducated. They have never traded stocks and have little understanding of how markets work.

They actually think they can read the “news” on reddit and buy/sell accordingly, outsmarting other players.
Many companies already "outsource" internal IT, support, testing, finances, HR, ... to virtual companies sitting in the same offices, just to make public numbers nicer (any unexpected cost is hidden from investors by paying premium).

Wouldn't this be possible across tech teams as well? To meet some cap rules?
The biases are real, but readability is perhaps less of an ultimate concern than maintainability and reusability. Both of these depend on the ability of yourself (and others) being able to understand and adapt the code. A bit of foresight in making the life of future you (or colleague) easier goes a long way. Technical debt is real too and the interest can be high.
The case for learned index structures – part I
Death of the American Trucker – RollingStone
A Fragile Biblical Text Gets a Virtual Read
A problem arises, if there exists no group of people that the author had in mind when writing the code. Some programmers really just code "so that it works" and don't care about readability at all. That's why we have code reviews - a code review is an attempt to read the code. If at least one reviewer understood the code, then we can assume it was not completely unreadable.
>There is no wealth / money / assets being created or destroyed by Bitcoin going up or the coin count increasing.

That's false. There is electricity being spent, and the security of all transactions before the current block being further secured by each new block.

you might not think it's a valuable thing, but many others do, and you can't just discount it as not existing because you don't see the value.

Just like how you might not see the value in videogames, or shitty daytime TV, but that doesn't mean it's worthless, just that it's not something you value. Bitcoin is a service that allows trustless transactions, and that service costs in the form of electricity usage.
Tile in a house-key form factor just launched
Pyeongchang 2018: hackers lurking with malicious Word files
The Downfall of Computers
From a safety point of view, I take a 747 or A380 any day or a (now defunct Trijet) to a twin engine 777 or A350. Guess were flying hours over the open sea (Atlantic) is safer because of redundancy, the more engines the more can go out and it still can land.

The 777 is way too crammed. The washrooms are on the side instead in the middle aka mini-washrooms (but with window). In general it feels like the first computer designed airframe, they forgot about the size of humans, it's made for short people. I take a 747 or even better A380 any day over the 777. I mean who seriously prefers to sit in a narrow long can for 12 hours, when you can choose a double decker A380 were you can stretch your legs, walk around and have big washrooms were you can stand even upright. And don't get me started on the entertainment system of the 777 - needs a serious upgrade.

The 757 will go out of service next, United still has some 757 from the 1980s - sure the seats are super comfortable because in the 1980s the were bigger and softer, but the airframe is old and the entertainment system was added as addon, meaning a computer box is below every other seat and gives the unlucky guy (who doesn't know about seatguru) little leg room.

Why is the very very odd 737 still going? It's older than the 747, I wonder when they finally design a new smaller airframe.
Similar experience, though I'm too lazy to check the value, I think I had something like 17k dogecoin mined. My password had to have been like 60 characters and I forgot it, deleted my wallet because I figured it wasn't worth much anyways and I had gotten bored with the community by then.

I really did like the community around it though (aside from a few ne'er-do-wells) and how when people would ask for the going rate of 1 Dogecoin you'd always get the response of 1 Dogecoin. In any case I think it worked well as an educational tool.
Things I did wrong as a professor (2016)
Ask HN: Prescription glasses which optimize function over fashion
Traditional glasses appear to prioritize looks over function. I am not a professional optician, but I imagine a pair of glasses which optimize function over form to meet at least some of the following criteria:

- Large lens to maximize field-of-view
- Cup-shaped lens to optimize distance from eye at all angles
- Thin shafts to enable lying in bed and using headphones
- Minimal sized frame (although should be mostly outside of field-of-view anyway)
- Light

Price and design are irrelevant. Contacts is, unfortunately, not an option.

Are there are any such glasses available? Is my assessment wrong?
If I'm not mistaken, I believe I saw ketchup on the food pyramid in elementary school in the 1980's. :(
Let’s Try a Triathlon
Here in Utah's public schools, we have to take TLC, which is cooking/sewing.
Cryptocurrency supporters like to say HN hates bitcoin etc. but for some reason "price point" stories keep getting voted up. I still don't get the fascination with price point stories. Do we need to post Google or Apple price points next time they break a marketcap?

That said yesterday's story about Dogecoin breaking $1B:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16090463

Edit1: And Dentacoin also crossed $2 billion in marketcap:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dentacoin/

Edit2: Oops it is down to $1.6 billion.
> Given the race detector has no known false positives, there should be very little reason to exclude a function from its scope.

Performance, maybe?
Israel's anti-trust regulator to look at internet giants
It's not decentralized if one organization owns 52% of it.
> Basically, they're forced to learn to never immerse themselves in any activity. I'm not sure it's a good thing to ask for.

No, inability to play computer game whole day every day at age of seven will not break your ability to immerse into activity.

Being immersed so much that you don't control yourself and act badly is issue parents need to deal with. If they don't, the older the kid grows the more consequences it has on his or her life. So, yes, it is a good thing.

Even if we are assuming there will be no long term consequences, if the toy causes enough bullshit for the rest familly, parents are entitled to limit it for their own or siblings sake.
Recommendation Engines 101
WPA3 is announced at CES by the WiFi Alliance
I'll probably be excited about this directive for a long time. I'm still excited about stale-if-error and stale-while-revalidate though it's taking a long time for support to go all the way out to the browser.
Your Market Can't Learn XOR
The U.S. Has Fewer Crimes. Does That Mean It Needs Fewer Police?
I would say that readability is a facet of maintainability. If a good developer looks at code the first time and thinks, "WTF," it could use some better readability. That's about as nailed down as I can make it (because it's so objective).
By the landing page it seems to be a market for git ruled projects/files? such as designs and code...?

Where do I see the products? everything seems to be more focused in the market itself but not on the products being sold/purchase. Perhaps I didn't get it and you are selling the market place itself and not any product within the market?

I won't register in such place, unless I see how it is solving my problem (e.g. there is a piece of software, plugin or theme layout for my CRM, which I would like to buy idk).
It’s also using make-believe numbers to get more money from someone else (donors and grant givers).
They can't make a cool 500 million from adding a row in their Users table for currency.
> I hold no illusions that we'd approach government automation with even the rigor that the space shuttle software was afforded.

I can't see any reason why my an application for a spot in school should have anything like the rigor afforded to

99% of government automation is of the "handle the easy stuff and dump the hard stuff to the operator to use their big fat brain" variety. In theory, well factored systems and machine learning should let more and more of that over to machines happily :)
And technically they run VC-25s, not 747s.
You're assuming our intellectual assessment of our lives is always right and without bias. Just because we don't recognize something as being "real" doesn't mean it can't have real effects on your mental wellbeing.
The Neo-Nazis of the Daily Stormer Wander the Digital Wilderness
999 and 112 can though. Sucks to be american.
There is a lot the context you’ve built up in writing that code that could never fit in the comments

Isn't that precisely what Knuth was trying to resolve when he came up with the idea of literate programming[1]? The fact that you might end up with more words than code isn't a really problem if the end result is better (for some value of 'better') than just the code.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
Go's "pragmas" are already exposed to the developer via go generate [0].

Edit: Granted, this is not a directive for the compiler though.

[0] https://blog.golang.org/generate
That is an easy one to answer: baby boomers, gen-x, and anyone over ~33 years old as of now... they didn't have cell phones or tablets growing up.

But I think what you are getting at is you want data supporting the emergence of a correlation in this new, younger cohort. I'd argue that a close proxy is the introduction of the PC workstation in the 70's and 80's and the "ergonomics" industry that resulted. Seems pretty easy to assume the same dynamics are at play again.

"The result of this study showed that prolonged use of smartphones could negatively affect both, posture and respiratory function." [0]

There is negative financial incentive for the device producers (Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, etc) if it is discovered that their products are harmful to consumer health. [1]

As for data confirming emergence of harm caused by smartphone/tablet, it is a easy google search to see professionals at top research universities and hospitals provide anecdotal evidence that there is a correlation. [2][3]

From personal experience, a talk with a professional in Physical Therapy or Occupation Therapy will yield their first hand experience with the identification of cell phone/tablet (and laptop) use as the source of the physical stressor, and the subsequent mitigation (through behavioral (use it less) and environmental (use ergonomically) change) as its cure.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4756000/

[1] http://www.crn.com/news/mobility/300089826/apple-ceo-tim-coo...

[2] https://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/pain/art...

[3] https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=is+smar...

*edited for more linkz
Another thing I did recently - shut off all alerts on my phone other than text messages and Telegram (both of which are pretty rare in my case). Before doing that I would get alerts from my personal email, a family email and multiple work emails. Now I get hardly any alerts and already feel much more productive throughout the work day because these things aren't catching my eye/ear so often. It's really interesting.
What's stopping doctors from using a replica of the original once the initial patents expire?
Ask HN: What is the transition from cubicles to open office like?
Found out our office is going to be turned completely open concept soon. This will be a big change as right now we all have cubicles, which I like because they give some sense of privacy and help to muffle the overall noise level.

I've never worked in an open office before. For anyone with experience working in open/closed (cubicled)/semi-closed offices, which did you prefer? What should I expect?
> Wait, am I stealing paper when I use a public restroom?

In China most public restrooms don't have any toilet paper and you have to bring your own. If this one is stocked with free paper, they may be trying to prevent people from taking extra to use in other restrooms.
Americans eat both - the sugar/salt laden one all the way to slightly crunchy natural peanut butter. Most folks grew up with the processed stuff that doesn't separate when sitting on the shelf, though (not all natural).

But more to your question: Most folks spread it on fruit, some veggies, or on a sandwich, much thicker than butter or cream cheese. Too little peanut butter makes for a dry sandwich, especially if you aren't eating jelly along with it. Even when you are eating pure nut butter, it is easier to eat a lot of it. It is similar to someone drinking fruit juice or a smoothie (blended fruit only) can consume many calories in a sitting more easily than one would do with whole fruit. The body perceives it a bit differently with less chewing and whatnot.
Oh the irony, Forbes itself is a low quality content aggregator that needs to be blocked.
Alternatively, we refactor because the right abstraction for the previous phase of the project is not the right abstraction for the current or next phase of the project.

While I do have a respect for Chesterson's Fence as a concept, sometimes the answer to "why is it this way" is "we were learning as we went, and if we did it again, we'd do it another way."

I look at it this way: When you look at an older city built before the age of the car, they were built to be tiny to start, not more than a set of shacks. As the town built wealth, the buildings went to more sturdy, to multi-story, and to more ornate structures. Similarly, our code should start simple and dirty, then cleaned up as it has proved its worth, and then refactored to more robust patterns as the code has built the wealth (and demand) to justify it.

We should consider rewrites, then, as a sign of value, rather than as a sign of the previous programmer's failure.
Lisp has the LOOP macro for this kind of nonsense.
That's a pretty huge assumption, I've never snacked at night and I can't understand why anyone would.
How is this different than live performances people pay for?
You have to balance one thing against another.

I like a large lens in that I get a wide field of view. I have a very strong prescription, thus large lenses curve through a lot of solid angle, thus no matter what angle you look at me from there is a strong reflection that obscures my eyes. It makes me feel like I am one of those anime characters whose eyes are hidden behind spiral lines. I think it is more than cosmetic, because it impairs people reading my emotional expressions.

When I go hiking with thin glasses, however, I end up craning my neck down so I can see what is going on in front of my feet. That makes my neck hurt.
That part really blew my mind. I spent a good 20min trying to find out how to buy audiobooks on audible
I have IBS too. I highly recommend taking probiotic regularly. This one specially helped me: Ultimate Flora Critical Care. Just make sure you buy them from a place that keeps them refrigerated.

Also try to eat lots of non processed food like salads etc. They add to the bacterial layer.
They do something like this with sidewall patterning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacer_patterning
I wonder how much of this has to do with lack of reexamination on the parents' part. Limiting 6 year olds to 30 minutes a day (or whatever) is fine - the same limitation is less appropriate for a 10 year old and even less appropriate for a teen.

It makes the most sense to me to expand time to use in adolescence, and what can be used in teenage years.