skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a huge difference in my mind of being friends with someone who doesn't share your political views and someone who actively belittles a group of people because of race, sex, etc.

I treat anyone in my family with a "long handled spoon" whose whole topic of conversation is about "those White folks" don't want to see "us" get ahead, and "they" are all alike or "them foreigners" are taking all of our jobs.

I don't need that crap in my life. Not only from a moral perspective, but they are insulting people I consider friends, hang out with, and at the end of the day, I have far more in common with than the people making the remarks.

Also, from a practical standpoint, I know they are probably talking about my family who are almost poster children "liberal elite".
I would disagree. On of my first jobs was porting assembler to C for a paging switch. The assembler was well written and well documented. The task was slow, hard and painfully boring. It took months to get every function to be a perfect match.
yep, i distinctly remember wanting just my first name and it not allowing it. i have one of the first 500~ accounts, and it wasn't taken
The biggest win I've noticed from CSS Grid so far has been from `grid-template-areas`. (The `grid-column` and `grid-row` syntax used in the article is kind of an alternate way to spell this, but I prefer using the `area` properties.)

Ever been given mockups where the mobile design moves stuff all around into a different order? That has traditionally been extremely difficult to handle with CSS given identical, unchanging markup.

With CSS Grid you just give each of your components a `grid-area` name, and then you just tell the grid where those areas go at different breakpoints.

So on mobile you might have 4 components laid out in a single column:

grid-template-areas:
'breadcrumbs'
'filters'
'sort'
'products';

And using a @media query, a more traditional desktop layout (and add a `categories` area):

grid-template-areas:
'breadcrumbs breadcrumbs sort'
'categories products products'
'filters products products'
'. products products';

I love it because not only is the above a list of the subcomponents that make up this component, but it's also a visual indicator of how they'll be laid out.

Now all the subcomponents need to do is define their `grid-area`, they don't need to adjust their own layout at the different breakpoints.
I shall never begin to grasp why Grid was not a top priority and feature in CSS 1.0.

Two+ decades spent on kludges to have things line up in columns.
Go and read Marty Cagan's book on product management: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inspired-Create-Tech-Products-Custo..., I am also blogging a bit about how a successful product team look here: https://www.stephenson.dk/successful-product-team/
TLDR: "Facility management employment continues to grow, as does demand for advanced technology in buildings...For now, it does not appear that automation will lead to significant job losses in the industry. However, facility and building managers need to address other, more critical issues, such as training employees to be prepared to use rapidly advancing technology and attracting more talent to the industry."
Show HN: Get feedback on your side project from other founders and developers
Material science is so interesting to me. Like real life mad scientists.
"armies of bureaucrats doing things that could easily be automates" = "jobs for people who you owe favors but don't want to put in a position where they might screw up something important"

Elected officials have little incentive to make governing any more efficient.

Bureaucrats themselves have some incentive to be more efficient because then they can spend more of their budget at their discretion.
Ember 3.0 Released
Most bitcoin mining is on hydropower. The fossil fuel ratio is around 2%.
Do something small everyday. I declare the day a success after that. This has worked very well for me because:

1. doing something, anything, will move the project forward.

2. I do not feel guilty if I stop and do something else. In turn this allows me to continue the next day (well rested and without any guilt for beeing "lazy")
Are people writing new non-Jenkins Groovy code in 2018? What's the use case? Legitimately curious. My experience with Groovy is always frustration and I liken it to the Coffeescript of Java.
It's fine to be average, see other comments

If you want to raise above, you have three options:

1. Become very good in one particular skill
2. Become good at multiple skills
3. Choose a niche or something new where due to lack of competition you are already very good

1. is hard, especially in popular, well paid areas
2. + 3. are much easier to accomplish.
That would not be recalling correctly: SystemTap does that, and so does eBPF (via uprobes and kprobes).

A large problem with SystemTap is that it was developed in the open, and in the early days people were scared off with its kernel panics. SystemTap built a negative brand: first impressions matter. DTrace, however, was largely built before its public release, and with the help from many other engineers and test teams. People's first impressions with DTrace was something that was already awesome. Of course, there are other problems with SystemTap: its process of compiling code and loading kernel modules was always risker than an interpreter.

As for how eBPF compares: I summarized it last year http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2016-10-27/dtrace-for-linux...
It's about as elegant as a mechanical watch is versus an electronic one, it has a ton of moving parts and it is a tricky thing to maintain. It's functional in that it gets the job done, I highly doubt they meant functional in the functional programming sense of the word.
> I never understood why so many people like it.

It's a good reference for anyone who is researching how to approach a given problem. One can switch off to a different text later on if they need to, and one of the nice features of Skiena is that he provides links at times to source code and further reading.

Ideally you'd know all the basics and use something like Kao's Encyclopedia of Algorithms to lookup the rest, but that thing is big enough to beat a man to death with. Skiena is a lot more approachable.
> I'd like to be able to easily remove all calls to ic from my code though, since I share my scripts with my team and try not to use non-standard packages so it works on a default python install.

That's a wonderful idea. I'll investigate the best way to accomplish this. Thank you.

Don't hesitate to let me know if you have any other ideas; feedback is how good products become great.
Counterfeit Xanax laced with deadly fentanyl becoming popular party drug
Sometimes you can get that insider by becoming a customer of a different part of the company from the one that is giving you trouble.

We had an email problem with a major free email provider that also ran an advertising network (no, it was NOT Google or Microsoft...).

Our problem was that they kept deciding all the mail we sent to their users was spam. None of it was actually spam. The only things we were sending were:

• receipts for purchases

• installation instructions and license keys for whatever the user had just purchased

• if the user was on a subscription plan with a term longer than a month, a notice a few days before subscription billing that they were going to be billed

• responses to support tickets the user initiated

We'd complain to the louts running the email service, and they would fix it...and a month later it would happen again. Each time it took them longer and longer to fix it.

Then we realized we were spending a large amount buying ads on their ad network. Our guy in charge of ad buying called up our account rep at their advertising sales department, and asked why the heck we should keep paying them a large amount to drive customers to us, if they were going to make it so we could not communicate with those customers if those customers used their email service? It doesn't take a young Einstein to figure we shouldn't.

The account rep put our guy on hold a few minutes, then came back and had conference called in someone high up in their IT department, explained the problem. The IT department head conferenced in the person in charge of mail filtering and told him to put in a white list entry for us, and he wanted it done right away. About ten minutes later we were told it was done, and we never had another problem that I know of with email being misclassified as spam.

This disturbed me quite a bit. None of our mail was spam, so no one was harmed by that white list entry. But they had plenty of people using their ad network who were pushing sleazy products and who I greatly doubt only sent non-spam mail. Would they also be able to get white listed just be calling an ad rep and complaining?

We never had any spam classification problems with customers who used Google or Microsoft free email services, so have no idea if similar things work there, or if they keep a stronger separation between the ad network and the mail services.

In my more cynical moments I wonder if this sort of the thing might be the reason advertising companies run free email services. If they can amass a large number of email users, and they grant exceptions in the spam filters for their bigger advertisers, that provides an incentive to use their ad network over one with a smaller email service or without an email server, so you'll get more customers that you email market to at will.
Running ZFS (boot&root) on both Ubuntu 17.10 on my home server and Debian Jessie on my laptop.

The ZFS experience between the two is heaven and hell. Ubuntu just ships the zfs.ko and basically everything works 100% of the time, zero effort.

Debian OTOH has to compile the module via DKMS for every minor kernel release... You better track those apt upgrades carefully, and run `dkms status` after each one, or you might end up having to drop into a rescue shell on next reboot, or try booting older kernels until you find the one that works. Also hopefully you didn't remove the last working kernel and/or zfs.ko. ZFS module upgrades are a roulette too (although none have failed... so far). Full disk encryption (including /boot) only adds to the complexity.

I set this up in January 2017, at the time it seemed like the coolest thing on Earth. In retrospect, it was foolish. I wish I went with ext4 for /boot & /, unencrypted /boot, and left ZFS for /home & maybe /var/lib.
As an example, if you search for Dearborn, MI on AirBnB it takes you to Detroit instead https://www.airbnb.com/s/Dearborn--MI--United-States/homes?p...

That's an interesting choice. I wonder if this is even intentional or a bug?
Just because they're connected to the internet doesn't immediately invalidate their use. We've got the PNW DMR network up here[1] that gives you tons of coverage where cellphones don't[2] all through a linked repeater system.

We had an emergency a while back where someone got stranded up on the mountain due to a flat tire and they were diabetic so it was an urgent situation. In that case just hitting one repeater they were able to raise anyone in WA state that was listening vs just the local repeater.

Ham radio is a different thing to different people so just because you don't see value in it doesn't mean that others don't find it interesting and a reason to get into the hobby.

As a younger ham it's super frustrating to see this attitude whenever anything internet and/or packet related comes up that people dump on because it's not the thing that they enjoy.

[1] http://trbo.org/pnw/index.html

[2] http://trbo.org/pnw/images/heatmaps/WA-Combined.jpg
how did the process of fiber development go? sounds like kevlar was a non-starter, but you ended up with something similar? How many pairs of tights would I need to stop a 9mm @ ten meters?
Probably he's not a programmer?
And why should I not get as much as I can for my family?

Also, how do you reconcile your statement with the fact that companies will fire someone as soon as it makes sense for them?
Ok, how about elegant? That would be the last word I'd use.
> This is how it ends up with huge armies of bureaucrats doing things that could be easily automated.

Less bureaucracy and lower costs sounds like something anyone would agree on, but remember that a large part of congress has run on anti-tax promises. Hampering the efficiency of the IRS is one way of making good on that.
> Cryptocurrencies (Monero, Zcash) with strong privacy protections usage prices soar

The private transactions in ZCash are very rarely used so any privacy leaks the article talks about should affect large parts of ZCash users as well.

Monero indeed is the best candidate so far with it's mandatory fungibility.
Wonder how many have tried to trace transactions done with Bytecoin / Monero? If nobody has been able to yet that would then render this a bit irrelevant in respect to cryptonote / cryptonight based currencies.
Java? Hope they don't need an unsigned byte.
Simple rearrangeable list with a completion status per task. That seems to work for us at https://usebx.com , as long as we get the granularity right (i.e. each task is assigned to exactly one person).
I’m not talking about putting infinite value in a system or exponentially increasing investments. I haven‘t made a case for either of those.

I’m sorry, I don’t really know how to express the point more clearly at this juncture, so I guess this will have to do:

1) in finite, discrete measurements of time, the activities of a game can be positive sum;

2) corollary to point 1, the aggregate market valuation trends upwards over time.

You keep focusing on infinite or underspecified measures of time for your arguments, which is frankly incoherent for the discussion at hand. This indicates to me that you don’t believe anything can be zero or even positive sum, because according to your logic - as literally stated - the value of gold is negative sum because resources are finite and time is not, so gold will eventually be stolen.

Not only is the probability of a thing being stolen outside the interactions of the game we’re considering, it’s not relevant to valuation unless you rigorously quantify its cost (such as through insurance) for a discrete measure of time. In essence, you’re conceptually refuting central tenets of game theory by invoking Murphy’s law.
Java seems like a good choice for the IRS. There are legions and legions of programmers well versed in Java, since its among the most commonly used programming languages to introduce programming at universities. This means the IRS should be able to focus its hiring on "People who know tax law and can use Java" instead of "Java experts that know enough tax law to be dangerous".

Its not the flashiest language, but I think its the right choice for them.
The problem that gets touched upon by the article but never really explicitly stated is simple - these people are using a retail business as their office space. And they are doing so without a contract which guarantees the business owner any income. They are basically left running like a charity, in the hopes that these poachers will be gracious enough to throw enough money at them so they can stay afloat (which then requires them to produce food/drink, so it's worse/less than a charity). It doesn't matter if the cafe is mostly empty during a work day. They are taking advantage of the situation and the business. Many of the cafe owners want to create a certain environment, one of social interaction that is designed to be a pleasurable experience. I totally understand why they don't want to have zombies sitting there all day.

Why don't these people either work from home or one of these shared workspace places that have become popular in recent years? I presume they want to get out of the house but also don't want to pay what is surely a higher amount of money to get a shared space. The article mentions that it was $100 more than that one person spends regularly on their cafe budget. I find that hard to believe that it can be that cheap, but apparently it is based on a quick search I just did. But that extra $100 also comes with 1) a contract and 2) no food/drink.
I think the best project management practice is: "Don't adopt entirely new project management practices every year." The caveat being: do what works for your organization. Iteration on process seems to be a good idea all the time.
Dyson’s audacious attempt to shake up car industry
I've seen some pretty cool assembly code, I don't think code elegance is a function of the language.
MoviePass Customer Service Woes
“The Expressive C++17 Coding Challenge (in Rust)” Revisited
This is not a partisan issue. Both parties have a long history of meddling with the IRS and generally making things worse.
Have you tried http://skimfeed.com ?
"But if you play hardball with a $3M company, then they're only going to keep you until they can outsource your job away."

They're going to do that anyway.

"You're directly affecting company viability by not being willing to leave some money on the table."

If my extra $5k is the difference between live and die, then the company was failing anyway, and I should take as much as I can before the company closes, to tide me over while I look for a new job.
I'm fortunate to work for a manager who is a half-time developer. He's really good at interviewing people, and finding out if they're what we want.
According to my German teachers, Germany makes extensive use of electronic speed cameras that can be moved around and left unattended. You don’t get pulled over; you get a ticket in the mail. It would be inefficient to waste officer time on speed traps (Americans do this because speed cameras are politically untenable).
Not OP, but I read that as the codebase is compartmentalized poorly. Agile works best when you can dip in, fix something small, and move on. If you need to change half the codebase to do a small thing; it may make sense to combine multiple small changes together. "While you're in there...".

I do consider that an environmental 'code smell' though.
Good news but this is just a drop in the ocean.
Knowing When to Scale
>Have you ever been in a union?

No. There is a reason I went into software development and not blue-collar work. ;)

(Nothing wrong with it, just not the stuff I want to deal with. Unions included. I lose enough money already to the gov't.)
I have stumbled upon Algorithms
(by Sanjoy Dasgupta Algorithms (Author),‎ Christos H. Papadimitriou Algorithms (Author),‎ Umesh Vazirani). I find it, good for beginners, without being overwhelming. It goes like prose and not terse.
I have friends who lean toward the conservative side of libertarianism and I lean more liberal, I have a friend who is the opposite politically from me in almost every way but they all seem to believe that one shouldn't be judged by their color or discriminated against. That's basically the only line I draw.
Advertising agency, marketing agencies where technology takes a back seat to marketing/promotions etc. Places where projects number in the thousands on websites, apps, games, many systems clients, new technologies etc.

Every developer/engineer should work in an agency for a while because of the amount of sheer work and lifeline of said work is short, projects are primarily promotions and one and dones in many cases.

What we did at the agency I worked at was try to harvest systems from common work. Landing page systems that then had base code that was testable and common across all, create a content management system that supports agency specifics. Promotions/instant win systems that had common code across all and could live longer than the 3 week promotion, create a prize/promotions system that ran all future promotions and improved AFTER most promotions due to time constraints. Game systems for promotional games / advergaming, after new games and types became common or re-usable etc.

Many times, you have to take an after the ship approach and harvest systems that make sense from the sheer amount of work you are going across hundreds of projects. Where good engineering really comes along on subsequent systems where promotions, projects or games/apps were initially made and proved a need or prototype for how to do future projects quicker and with more robust systems.

Testing and doing code specifically for that campaign may be usable or not, but later you can harvest the good ideas and try to formulate a time saving system for the next, including better testing and backbone/baseline libs/tools/tests etc.

I have worked in agencies 5+ years and game studios 5+ years and both are extremely fast paced, usually the harvesting approach is the one that is workable in very pressurized project environments like that. Initial projects/games/apps etc are harvested for good ideas and the first one might even be more prototype like where testing/continuous integration might not fit in the schedule the first time around, or might not even be clear what to standardize and test until multiple types of those projects it out. Starting out with verbose development on new systems/prototypes/promotions/campaigns/games might not be budget capable or time allowed to do so on the first versions as they might be throwaway after just a few weeks or months. There is a delicate balance in agencies/game studios like that where the product and shipping on time is more important on the first go around as the project timeline and lifeline may be short. Subsequent projects that fit that form are where improvements can be made.
I was the exact same way! What worked for me was just picking an open exam day and committing. I used the Ham Test Prep (no affiliation) Android app, studied for two days, took the test the third day, aced it.

Just pick the next available exam, cram for a couple nights, and get it over with. The Technician exam is much much easier than you think. If you take my advice, fail the test, and prove me wrong, I'll pay the exam fee :P
https://i.imgur.com/dqPq0wI.gif
I think it's quite rare that people actually knowingly act amorally -- everyone tends to see themselves as the good guys, or compelled to do bad things by circumstances out of their control. You mention WWII; I have the impression that one of the factors generally considered to be behind the war were the repercussions/aggression against Germany following WWI. Dismissing every German not actively fighting back against the Nazis as "stupid and/or evil" is in my book an example of the mistaken viewpoint I mentioned earlier... but yes, these discussions tend to get out of hand :).

As you mention, sometimes action is required, and that doesn't preclude an understanding viewpoint.
Are you saying this is how contracts are awarded on FedBiz Ops?

I know a handful of small players, myself included who have won IT contracts with the gov't and it is not at all like you stated.
They've got a decent team that manages their mainframe systems
Linux Commando: Ubuntu: how to reset lost administrative password
If you haven't tried the latest entries in Knuth's work, I'd recommend those. The preprints of the Dancing Links stuff is surprisingly approachable and a ton of fun.
Although it may appear a bit surprising at first, assembly language is homoiconic in the sense that you can easily reason about the program code within the language: It is easy to reason about bytes in assembler language, and compiled assembler code is just a sequence of bytes.

This is similar to high-level languages like Lisp and Prolog, whose code is readily represented by built-in data structures in the respective language.

A fun fact about this is that extremely low-level (like assembly) and extremely high-level (like Prolog) languages are homoiconic, but there is a large gap "in the middle" (like Java, C), where there are many languages that lack this property.
Political relationships aren't the entire problem. You have to be a BigCo with an established relationship with the government to be able to comply with the rules and lobby for a contract that favors you.

If anyone could land a contract just because a senator owed them a favor you'd see a lot more diversity in who the government does business with.