skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you find yourself in such a scenario, then you haven't reached the enlightenment level.

Reaching for a "safe and familiar" procedural/imperative language is like most people reaching for a claw hammer when they wish to hammer and nail something in. To most people, it's the same, they are just hitting something.

To a pro, they know when they reach for their claw hammer, a sledge hammer, a mallet, a ball pein, club hammer or cross and straight pein.

If you have a text file that you just need to slice and dice. The tool to use is awk/sed/tr/cut, or perl. Got rules? prolog. Got massive array data? APL. Got multiple massive array data that you wish to combine and separate in various ways? SQL. Surely, you can use python for all those things. But should you?
> Think about that: that's a ton of people who are being trained to use Uber.

Well, they're also being trained to use ridesharing generally. It's pretty low friction to move from Uber to Lyft or another competitor. Think of all the other entry points into that market, like Google or Apple Maps (or any other mapping company) for instance. Once autonomous transportation arrives it also moves from an opex to a capex problem, and that changes the barriers to entry, the headwinds to critical mass, and the competitive landscape significantly.
Introduction to Optimization with Genetic Algorithm
We cannot expect more from Europe without giving more to it, says Portuguese PM
Why will Wordpress die
This just seems like being around something awful long enough that you develop a form of stockholm syndrome.
Correct. Mods, please add (2015) to the title.
Unless you're a kid, and then even the antidote is terrifying.
"Y Combinator CEO", to me, means sama, though I guess his title isn't actually CEO. I feel like a better title would be "Y Combinator company CEO".

Not a big deal, but confused me at first.
Paul Graham is a Lisper and made his fortune with a Lisp application. Moreover, he wrote a widely-read essay claiming that Lisp was the secret weapon that enabled his startup to outcompete its rivals. In that context, it shouldn't be suprising to find sympathy for Lisp in discussions hosted by Paul Graham's firm.

Lisp is quite practical for solving day-to-day problems, as long as you are a knowledgeable Lisper.
This is causing turmoil in the Audio-Visual industry when machines cant be relied upon not to try to upgrade in the middle of live events and critical times. It kinda sucks to have your lighting workstation or video switcher workstation have to upgrade and reboot because Microsoft decided to push a critical update that wont let itself be deffered for the period of time needed.
What is the difference here? Aren't prescription drug consumers the general public?
there's a lot of students.

Students and younger devs need to ask more questions, so they have a more active presence. While an older dev may still need to ask questions, they can just google, and find the answer without needing to create an account.
> Can you imagine someone advertising a specific stock, or a fiat currency?

The latter -- yes, that's ridiculous. But not the former. Companies whose stock is traded publicly do advertising all the time. The intended audience for the ads isn't limited to potential buyers of their product. It's often also useful for swaying shareholders, potential shareholders, regulators, etc.
You seem to be experienced and ignorant at the same time
Although, if you do decide to nibble one you may find it is indeed disagreeable.
The XKCD is a bad example in this case, as it is mostly about domain specific knowledge of computational theory or standardized algorithmic approaches to the problem spaces presented within those domains, whereas "low-level" is something different ... primarily referring to common layers underlying many domains.

Most programmers never have to write low-level code.

This is a good thing.

It doesn't mean they can't, it just means we've moved on from wasting our time re-implementing solutions to problems already adequately solved for a general case. Finally.

Manual memory management is frankly insane outside of extreme edge cases today.
An easy way to write independent functional tests with Symfony
Which OSes are that? I couldn't find a single one.
There's a real tension in this field between capital-C Computer Science and the work of writing code for businesses.

The business doesn't care about your toolset, probably. What they care about is solving a problem.

I've met no small number of very gifted, very creative developers that had this same mindset -- didn't give a crap about the Cool New Language or pure CS, but really DID get excited about building connections and features within existing systems to solve business problems.

These two visions of development are in tension. Few folks can get jobs writing Haskell or Lisp, but there are LOTS of jobs for .NET developers.

Neither path necessarily makes a better developer, though.
Sorry to interject, but I'm curious: as someone who is in their first semester of a CS education, could you elaborate on what you mean by abstraction?

So far, I just know it to mean making your function more widely applicable. I'm assuming there's a better definition I'm missing?
>Of course, as every programmer, I live in constant fear that I am part of the plumbing crowd waiting to be exposed.

How true, the 50% of jobs I see are actually semi-skilled overpayed jobs which won't last.
In many cases you configure somebody's else product and you manage it at best, it won't last. It is already happening.
This is also political flamebait :/
Sanctions are not a binary thing, there are many degrees. Freezing of assets, expulsion of diplomats, restricted movement of materials and persons, greater economic sanctions are all options being discussed by the House of Commons as we speak.
They should have called it the Raspberry Pi 3.14, considering which day it is ;)
Code generation is great. If you have a well understood domain, Lisp macros allows you to construct an effective DSL so that your programmers no longer have to write "lisp code" but to program in the new language. We do this today using functions/methods, but the issue tends to be that besides understanding these functions, we need to learn how to orchestrate them and write boiler code all around them. A good DSL hides all that. The issue as I've observed is that when most people create a DSL, they really forget that they have indeed created a new language and don't document it enough. The consumers of the DSL because they can read lisp code, don't focus and live in the DSL layer but wish to peer below then get terrified when they see the macros. Most developers get terrified when they peer one level below. Have you seen the bytecode generated by python or asm code by C? Do you think those are bad because those are code generation that don't look the way you think they ought to?
Probably they found 90% of the ads are frauds or just plain fraud like in their proposed amount you will gain from buying the said cryptos. Bitcoin would not need advertisement for example.
> I'm basically waiting for the previous generation to die/retire so I can have the chance to build software the way I think it should be built.

And by the time you'll be able to do that you'll be the 50-something who keeps using functional programming while the 37-year-olds want to use dilithium crystal programming :p
Yeah, I remember very little about it except a _lot_ of parentheses. Interesting to hear it is a lot more "real world" than I thought - seems my understanding is flawed... but equally interesting that I was unaware of it, having never once encountered it in my entire career.
While it seems inevitable, I really hope there's going to be a way to do all this without having to authenticate and link a name, credit card and cell phone. I really don't like the idea of not being to travel more than a few miles without being tracked, I hope enough people feel the same way.
Does it even make sense to talk about "superior" or "ideal traits" in humans? People who like to talk about eugenics tend to end up wearing funny little hats and red arm bands (only half joking here). :-)

I used to care about the direction mankind is taking when I was younger. Now that I have way more years behind me than ahead - I will die soon and so will everyone I know - I could not care less. It may sound bitter but it is also liberating.

The last person to leave the planet please turn the lights off. Or don't. All I know is that I won't be here.
March 2018 #SAP Security #PatchDay addresses decade-old vulnerabilities
True, but he was asking about static typing.
It's not as if distributed hash stores are new...
Sounds like the opposite way FB handled Russian paid political ads for the US election.
How to Visualize Code?
Just to provide a reference....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/01/...
About time they did this! Facebook did as well but they’re still popping up every now and then (non retargeting). Hopefully Google will enforce it better.
It should also say 2018, for archival purposes of nothing else.

I hate companies using the same name for different products. B+2 (or is it 3?)?
The most expensive residential property in the world
If they added a TRRS connector it would be quite easy to plug an external mic that way.
Mixed feelings on this one. Most of them are likely to be scams as its so easy to do. But there are also things like the Brave browser[1] with its BAT(Basic Attention Token)[2], which am very excited about. With the Ad revenue on Internet falling all around, with Ad-blockers increasing. Brave, with BAT, provides a new way for publishers to get paid. Interestingly it also has the potential to disrupt Google's Adsense model. So there is an interesting element of incumbent (Google) and disruptor (brave) in there.

[1] https://brave.com/

[2] https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq/#meaning

edit: typo
I don't know, every local market has always supported loads of private hire firms. It's a very price sensitive market. And Uber's support for cities isn't great anyway, from my experience.

Like here in Nottingham Uber doesn't support the suburbs 2 years after arrival. You can go there with Uber, just not come back, no-one's around.

A local app with better suburb support is ultimately going to win, as if you can only go one way, Uber becomes annoying.
> "how can you build this to be most efficient and cheapest in the long run and lifetime of the product"

I couldn't answer this question accurately. I can't even give remotely accurate time estimates for projects larger than "build a CLI tool to do this one thing," much less give an informed estimate about the tool's TCO. I feel like I'm just floating down the river, incrementally improving upon the stuff that we've already built and that nothing we planned to accomplish ever is.

I'm sure lots of people here have executed their Grand Vision for a project. But I'm also certain many of us never have.
"Medical research campaigns do not really go viral. We do not get a ton of people donating $5. You should consider donating as much as you are comfortable with."

Perhaps today we can make a difference, Mihai. I wish you much happiness and joy each day you have.

https://www.ebresearch.org/donate.html

http://www.sohanaresearchfund.org/donate/

https://www.debra.org.uk/donate/intro

http://www.debra-international.org (for donations via bank)
Agreed. I'm amazed the comment got such a negative reaction. I can't think of anyone I know who would be happy about being called a chick, however casually.
Your "me" is going to disappear. How do you convince your "me" that it is necessary to disappear? One possible explanation is that you will get another "me".
Like Edison? Only less original...
You can accurately attribute that quote to any external culture, re: another culture.

Hunter-gatherers on capitalist democracy, Capitalist democracy on hunter-gatherers, China on India, India on China, US on India, India on Iran, Iran on Israel...

You get the picture.

Perhaps what it really means is "communications failure: exception thrown in cultural assumptions".
Don't agree. Metrics you provided allow to compare two projects. They also allow to see progress in the project(or regression).

What they don't allow though is assessing code quality in terms of single project(i.e. judging if it's good or not). Since in many cases we do not have a good baseline, we are unable to consistently evaluate work. That leaves us with aforementioned problems.
You could commit any number of criminal acts in a more efficient manner, it does not make them any less criminal.
> Transportation is going to become a monthly flat rate
> Owning your own car will be a luxury item.

Sorry, but I hate it when people talk about the future like a certainty. It has yet to unfold and many predictions turn out to be wrong. I definitely would not bet against car ownership, especially in the country side.

And maybe there will be an open renting framework where everyone can buy a few cars and put them into the system for anybody to rent for a drive. If Uber does not make the self driving software, what would be their role and strength in 20 years?
They don't have access to all the cookies in the users cookie jar, but since they work by intercepting requests, they can read the cookies that the browser send and act upon them.
Perl 6 has hygienic macros, so you can count Perl out of that list.

Also Perl 6 is written in itself.
I don't use C# any more (outside of personal projects), but I absolutely love it as a language.

ASP.NET has always been a mixed bag for me, and I've always felt tied down by my decision to restrict myself to the Windows platform. More often than not, I've found that peoples grievances towards C# or .NET has been more to do with Windows issues, outside of actual issues with the language.

Outside of Windows, the sheer amount of control over the ecosystem has always turned a lot of devs away, despite it being something that .NET devs love. Give me Visual Studio and a decent set of standard Windows tools and I'll be in heaven, whereas someone that is used to choice might not feel the same.
That's what the person did -- they put wpa_supplicant.conf to the boot partition -- but somehow the Pi wouldn't connect, and they had no way to debug it to figure out what went wrong.
Pi Day Rant 2018
ugh thats bad news. i can't stand uefi its more a hindrance than help.
> If you have a text file that you just need to slice and dice. The tool to use is awk/sed/tr/cut, or perl. Got rules? prolog. Got massive array data? APL. Got multiple massive array data that you wish to combine and separate in various ways? SQL. Surely, you can use python for all those things. But should you?

Arguably, yes, most especially when several of them apply to the same process, rather than to separate pieces of data.
When Working Remotely Fails in Practice
I had to make a throwaway as well just because I couldn't believe this comment. This is so utterly false. You're essentially claiming that the value of these services is all based on the innovation of the _hailing_ functionality, but there are countless apps that recreate this functionality _exactly_ whether for 'regular' taxis or separately licensed cars. If what you want is for a driver to come to your exact location very quickly, you can get that _anywhere_. This, as a business model alone, is like Dennis on 30 Rock with his basement coffee business. It's so easy an ubiquitious that it's not worth mentioning as a differentiator _at all_.

Separately from this, it ignores the fact that there are cost-based reasons for these kinds of behaviors. Drivers, for example, have to think about round-trip cost. If you ask me to drive you from Washington Sq. Park to Astoria, I have to think about what fare to charge you such that it covers my expenses on the longer trip _as well as_ the likely problem of not picking up a return fare that takes me back to a high-traffic area.

This is all discussed with much greater statistical depth in the Naked Capitalism articles on Uber, but the basic problem is that none of the ride hailing services have found a way to make this any cheaper, except through massive subsidy (to pay drivers to be the ride stock in low-profitability zones they others wouldn't be in). And even with an innovation like self-driving cars, it would only make a difference if it is not a commodity. If it is a commodity (which, IMO, is the overwhelmingly most likely outcome for self-driving cars), then either Ubers completely captures all relevant IP for end-to-end commercial solutions ahead of any competitiors, or else Uber is licensing out the cars just like everyone else, and for whatever cost reduction it buys them for getting rid of drivers, it just creates a new price war race to the bottom on who can charge the least for the self-driving based rides.

I'm just so tired of all the mental gymnastics defending them. It really is total ownership of all IP for commercial self-driving cars or bust for this business model.

And if it busts, you'll see that all the niceties you describe in this comment are mostly the product of either (a) massive investor subsidy, or (b) easy and cheap-to-copy innovations like a map and location-enabled hailing app.
WRITE TEAM: Preserving the memory
Airspace Sys raises $20M to take down dangerous drones with other drones
I won't say it's vanishingly small but, relatively speaking, there aren't a huge number of people who have a problem with needing taxi services in a bunch of different cities. I travel about 100 days a year and I don't use these services very much and I don't think I've used Uber in a year or two. Worldwide availability of a brand just doesn't seem like a huge deal.
WRT Caltrain, I remember using it for commuting, and certainly don't remember paying $50 a day to do so. But perhaps the times have changed and the prices with them. Still, $25 per ticket one way seems ridiculously high.
It's just a shame most people don't know that there is such a difference. I wouldn't feel so bad if all that money was going to important things. But I witnessed so much waste, and so many people who do literally nothing but wait for retirement. It's upsetting that that money doesn't go to the soldiers who need it.
Excellent article. Highly in-depth and well written, yet accessible. Was particularly pleased to see a section on SaaS apps in particular. Worth your time if you have or are working on an app, whether or not you've begun to consider about eventually selling it yet.
We're trying to move this forward at https://anvil.works - the usability of Visual Basic, with the ease of distribution of the web. Biased I may be, but I'd call that progress :)
The vast majority of cryptocurrency advertising is aimed directly at taking advantage of investors who probably don't know how to do proper diligence on such an early and untested technology.

I would put this squarely in the same vein as ads that might encourage you to 'buy our gemstone, it's going to be the new diamond'. Or 'our baseball cards are first edition and guaranteed to go up in value', etc.
> Maintaining a distinction between "actual software development" and "plumbing" is elitist

Maintaining distinctions like this is necessary to have the right people do the right jobs. Some developers like being puzzled by hard problems and will get bored writing adapters for Java classes or connecting A to B in some set of Javascript frameworks. Others are motivated by seeing their high level design realized and don't like having to give too much thought about the lower abstraction layers. Giving these people the wrong jobs is a waste of time and money.
> so there's not a whole lot of value in having a >4GB address space.

Don't most ARMv7 CPUs (like A7, A15, etc.) have 1 TB address space? On LPAE ARM, 64-bit arch will only get you larger virtual address space, but you get same 40-bit address space in both cases.

> reduction in memory consumption that comes with pointers that are half as big

Nothing prevents you from running 32-bit binaries on 64-bit OS, as long as you have 4kB page size.
Never said the Osprey could carry tanks, just pointing out that air transport does not require a runway. The Osprey is great for picking stuff up not transporting it.

As to domain knowledge, I have actually worked on related subjects for the DoD. I am far from a domain expert, but I was for example required to attend various lectures including some on logistics.

As to Airdrop you generally drop a tank* from ~10 feet not ~10,000 ft. Getting close to the ground does not take infrastructure stopping does. Runways need to be long and clear because aircraft need to slow down. http://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/this-is-the-last-tank...

*Not that we still do this largely because we don't have such 'small' tanks any more.
If you're learn Ada, be sure to check out Building High Integrity Applications in SPARK to get the most benefit from it. I also find Barnes book does a good job chapter by chapter showing how it's systematically designed for safety. Finally, if anyone doubts improvements that can happen, I have the most apples to apples study you'll see comparing Ada and C.

https://www.amazon.com/Building-High-Integrity-Applications-...

https://www.adacore.com/books/safe-and-secure-software

http://archive.adaic.com/intro/ada-vs-c/cada_art.pdf
The op is flagged, but that is a great line and I am co-opting it.
Zimbabwe's telcos to fund tech startups
Ask HN: Is online self-education useful or just delusion?
HN is the cream of the high-octane tech intellectual powerforce out there so I have no doubts many and many will contradict my point: online self-education is a delusion because passive enthusiasts and desperate folks do not just really need tools but a purpose or a market. A purpose is needed to apply that knowledge in a domain (but few have a domain knowledge), a market is needed to get money from the effort (but remote work is actually not so easy & available). More in general, the very recent democratisation of knowledge opens the average joes and marys from marginal markets, minorities etc. etc. to a nice range of personal opportunities to climb the ladder but also to exploitation and depression, once they understand they are still where they started from. I want to say that the world still needs local hubs with real persons from different backgrounds with different needs to create and sustain a market, so possibly knowledge dissemination should come on top of other actions to make a real impact for a great number of persons.
USA drug purchases fund most global drug research. That money comes from somewhere. It's fine for us to question whether this is the best way for drugs to be marketed in our nation, but for the rest of the world to do so seems a bit ungrateful?
My Sivers, I've been reading about you for years. I love your story about how you scaled CD Baby with People instead of Algorithms. I think its of greater advice now in a startup world where every thought of every startup is that everything has to operate with a robot brain.

I lost my value in most books in 2010, We have lots of reads in common 2010 and my feeling about books is that lots fall under motivational porn and they provide instant gratification then things you can apply.

Seeing your list now I want to read Arnold Schwarzenegger book Total Recall and tempted to read Zero to One.

I would love to aspire to your level of success you had with CD Baby.
Applying the model is fast, training it is slow(er). Not that crazy.
A DNA nanorobot functions as a cancer therapeutic in response to a trigger
Fascinating! Never knew how many aspects go into consideration depending on the different types of apps/software.

Lots of great takeaways on the marketing side as well. Especially in regards to analyzing the competition.