skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While on the surface of it, sure, programming is a skill and not an innate talent, it would be foolish to compare it to other career fields in that way. You can go to school to learn how to be an architect, then go and get a job as an architect and be immediately productive. You can go to school to learn how to lay bricks, then go to a job site and immediately start building something.

You cannot go to school to learn how to be a programmer, and then expect immediately to be productive at any arbitrary programming job, unless you're a talented coder. The education gap is too great. It's like medicine in which you need a few years of residency before the medical field considers you fully competent.

If you go to code school and learn Rails and React, then you can expect to be somewhat immediately productive on a Rails / React project. You can't expect anything out of them if it's not a Rails / React project. They may be able to ramp up quickly, if they're talented. If they're not talented, then they won't be able to, and the employer has to take the hit.

We will need a revolution in software development pedagogy before individual aptitude stops mattering to employers. The state of education at the moment is so bad that unschooled yet talented individuals can be much much better at fulfilling business requirements than trained and educated professionals. Try that with medicine!
"when no one need be judged by the quality of their script"

The reviewer mentions Thomas Aquinas, whose writing was notoriously illegible. She might have mentioned Napoleon as well, or quoted from Middlemarch

"At that time the opinion existed that it was beneath a gentleman to write legibly, or with a hand in the least suitable to a clerk. Fred wrote the lines demanded in a hand as gentlemanly as that of any viscount or bishop of the day: the vowels were all alike and the consonants only distinguishable as turning up or down, the strokes had
a blotted solidity and the letters disdained to keep the line--in short, it was a manuscript of that venerable kind easy to interpret when you know beforehand what the writer means."
More likely I missed your point.
The challenge of calendaring
Direct link to actual source: https://mobile.twitter.com/JuanSGalt/status/9830645876658012...
Amazing free blog sites that lets you to start your own business
Yes.

The claim is that you’re profiting from their publishing activity without compensating them. In essence, the feed is a data stream and you must obtain a license for it. I’m not saying I agree, but that’s how I understand the argument.
Not if the system fails on a Monday morning at 3am after 20 years without issues and needs to be fixed before the business opens. Having comments for every line helps fixing it dramatically.

For most code it will be overkill but there are some companies where it's integral for core systems.
My team hosts a meeting every two weeks to talk about staffing - who's overworked and why. We also discuss what problems we're dealing with and solutions we've found for those problems...so the group's knowledge grows, but not in an official, legible way. It's still tribal knowledge, but an effort is made to at least increase the size of the tribe.

The only time when people are absolutely required to document something is when it's a deliverable to a customer...so the customer needs to understand the product we're delivering to them.

We're all supposed to be using an engineering notebook to help document designs...but those really only come into play when someone leaves the company and the company is trying to retain as much IP as possible. Though they are incredible useful on an individual level.

Other than that, it really comes to down to finding time to draw a diagram or do a brain dump into a document describing how something works. Maintaining ICDs (Interface Control Documents) describing software/command protocols or hardware interfaces is pretty easy and provides a lot of information.
If it got the work done at a reasonable cost and performed reasonably well (i.e. it served the purpose it was meant to serve), how “bad” a choice could it have been?
The UK introduced a 5p charge for plastic bags and saw usage reduced by >80%: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/30/britain-banishes...

> The total number used fell from over seven billion a year to less than half a billion in the first six months of the policy, saving 40,801 tons of plastic, which is the equivalent weight of roughly 300 blue whales.
Why is this relevant? How tall or short he is does not matter at all.
Yep, but in addition, I would like optimistic, intelligent idea-driven sci-fi that doesn't make me want to step into a euthanasia booth.
Yeah, the "master & his student" approach is unparalleled in terms of effectiveness.
That's not how tax brackets work. You only pay the higher rate on the income over the bracket. For instance, (assuming you're filing single) you pay 10% tax on the first $9,525 of income. You pay 12% on the next $21,175, and so on.

Here are the tax brackets for this year:

$0.00+	10%
$9,525.00+	12%
$38,700.00+	22%
$82,500.00+	24%
$157,500.00+	32%
$200,000.00+	35%
$500,000.00+	37%

Only 1/3 of your income would be subject to a 35% tax rate. Less than half of it would would be hit by a 32% rate. The majority of your income would be taxed at 24% or less.
If you're not doing much/any text encoding, guessing graphics/VFX is not, then upgrading is pretty painless these days.
Those three scripting languages actually an interesting comparison.

Perl 5 -> 6 broke all your code in exchange for a whole new language. Some people moved to Perl 6, some to other languages, and a lot stayed with Perl (5), which still runs programs written in Perl 1.

Ruby 1.8 -> 1.9 broke most of your code in exchange for minor cleanups. But Ruby was Rails, so the culture accepted constant rewriting and breakage, and people went along.

Python 2 -> 3 also broke most of your code in exchange for minor cleanups. Users expected some stability, but the language's culture demanded conformity. The result has been a decade-long war in which Python fans try to shame Python users into moving to version 3.
Plenty of counter examples though, most recently "Altered Carbon" - the story was bent completely out of shape into a consumer friendly trainwreck.
You wash your clothes. Any clothing that is mostly synthetic (eg, fleeces[1]) will shed fibres into the water system. In some places those fibres end up in the oceans.

But also I think a lot of it is industrial.

[1] A bit frustrating that these were sometimes sold as eco-friendly way to recycle PET bottles.

EDIT: this comment got downvotes. Here's a newspaper article talking about microfibre pollution: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jun/29...

> Multiple studies have shown synthetic fibers to make up the lion’s share of microplastics found in oceans, rivers and lakes, and clothes made from synthetics (polyester, nylon, and so on) are widely implicated as the source of that pollution. Microfibers, as the name implies, are tiny, so they can easily move through sewage treatment plants. Unlike natural fibers, such as cotton or wool, synthetic fibers do not biodegrade, and tend to bind with molecules of harmful chemical pollutants found in wastewater, such as pesticides or flame retardants. Studies have shown health problems among plankton and other small organisms that eat microfibers, which then make their way up the food chain. Researchers have found high numbers of fibers inside fish and shellfish sold at markets.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rachid_Dris/publication...

> Synthetic fibers are one of the forms in which microplastics can be found. They derive presumably from synthetic clothing or macroplastics. Different pathways are thought to be an important source of fibrous microplastics in the aquatic environment. It has been shown that laundry washing machines discharge large amounts of microplastics into waste-waters reaching 1900 fibers in one wash (Browne et al., 2011)). During wastewater treatment, synthetic fibers are known to contaminate sewage sludge (Habib et al., 1998; Zubris and Richards, 2005). The sources and fate of microplastics in the various compartments of the urban environment are poorly documented (Dris et al., 2015a); this paper focuses on the atmospheric compartment and investigates the contribution of the atmospheric fallout as a potential vector of plastic pollution
Hrm, but a ref is a file containing a hash, right? So if the hash is equivalent to the file, the surely a ref is equivalent to a symlink? A symbolic ref, in turn, should be a symlink to a symlink... Or something like that...
It's true: Publishers' business model is under threat, and some politicians pushing for this law are doing to so out of a genuine interest in fixing that.

But actually, only a few very big publishers have lobbied for this, claiming that this would "save journalism in Europe" when they care mostly about their own bottom line. Limiting how news spreads on social networks and aggregators is not in the interest of and would actually harm smaller publishers, who benefit from competing with the big brands on such sites on an equal footing.

Small, independent and innovative publishers had to get together to form their own lobby organisation to OPPOSE this law that politicians would claim is to their benefit: http://mediapublishers.eu/our-views/
Because of unnatural time constraints nobody was able to press on his defense of "you own your data because we made a download your data button" which is a dramatic oversimplification of how the adtech ecosystem actually works. In addition, I feel that the format and time constraints were carefully set up to avoid this more important discussion, because Congress needs FB, and FB needs Congress.
Digital Behavioral Design (ebook) [pdf]
That 40% includes federal, state, social security and other taxes taken out.
Because most tools don't show them so it's useless. Users don't know what a character even is if they can't type and see it.
Lab-on-chip technology for chronic disease diagnosis
"I am happy when I'm unhappy" - a line from the movie, The Big Short
If our starting point is that programming is mostly about skills, productivity starts getting interesting - what does productivity mean?

My personal take is that it means solving problems with less wasted effort. Less code (a 0.1× programmer can solve problem with 10% of the code - https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/), but also by solving the right problem, and coming up with better solutions (https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/10/04/technical-skills-pro...).

These are all skills you can learn. And I think focusing on learning technologies obscures a lot of these skills, since they're about communication and listening and project management.

For productivity in terms of technological knowledge I'm starting to think that, since choosing which tool is more important than how to use it, a better way to get better is to study case studies. Instead of trying to learn "how can I use Mongo, how can I use PostgreSQL" you try to learn "when should I use Mongo, when should I use PostgreSQL".

I'd love to hear about good sources of case studies. http://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html is good, but doesn't cover kind of programming one would do at a company, much.
tcrow what are some real-world examples of "consulting agencies?" I'm a technologist but examples in any industry would give me a feeling for what kind of company you're referring to. Thanks in advance.
This is for a specific type of corporate organization in a particular state. You can start a business without forming an LLC. If you really want to pretend you are for real, you would form a delaware corporation. Delaware is a tiny state that many years ago decided to create a very well defined and (permissive) legal framework for corporate law. Virtually any reasonably sized corporation is a Delaware corporation.

Delaware does benefit from this... they get all the filing and other miscellaneous fees out of the deal as well.
Then you make a wrapper program in a language that has an Excel library which e.g. takes your own data in some structured format (JSON, YAML, or whatever) and emits Excel.
The way I’ve always explained it: if you suddenly got $50k, would you put it all into one stock? No. So if you suddenly got $50k of one stock, why would you not turn it into cash right away? The scenarios are identical.

EDIT: as 0xB31B1B points out it’s worth clarifying that the scenarios are the same only when we are talking about post-tax numbers. Generally when you receive RSUs, the taxes have already been withheld.
> The truth is that programming isn't a passion or a talent, it is just a bunch of skills that can be learned.

Aren't these all talents?

* learning many things

* learning difficult things

* recalling things you've learned when you need them

If something is a skill, one would expect all engineers to get better at it with practice. But there are many abilities in engineers that don't seem to work that way.
That goes back to a whole other series of books and small stories that many now consider part of that whole universe.
Short of quizzing the user, you can't prove that they understood. But our lawyers and compliance officers seem to think it's enough to make it so that a decision not to understand is intentionally made by the user.

Like T&Cs, everybody knows that most people don't read them. Nobody's going to start quizzing their user, so what's a reasonable compromise? Forcing the user to at least scroll through some (or all) of it before agreeing. You make it clear that the intention is for you to read it, and that you're agreeing to something you should have read.
Who Really Owns a Cryptocurrency?
Both

ORM for OLTP

SQL for OLAP

Expressed nearby to each other when there is shared business rules, for maintenance reasons:

public static String PREDICATE_NO_GUMMY_BEARS = "user_preferred_candy <> 'gummy bears'";
public static Predicate noGummyBears(Root<User> user, CriteriaBuilder cb) {
return cb.notEqual(user.get("preferredCandy"), "gummy bears");
}
Used to be common in the US. You'd have two letters for the exchange, then five digits for the telephone number.
Yes his other article said this too:

https://donatstudios.com/CSV-An-Encoding-Nightmare

As of this writing, there exists a single usable CSV format that Microsoft Excel can both read and write safely across platforms. Tab delimited UTF-16LE with leading Byte Order Mark.

I work with CSVs in R, but I don't work with Excel that much. Thanks for the useful tip.
I'll tell you, I've worked for a business small enough to avoid needing to hire a "multi-thousand dollar legal team" and a few of the things that I know happened while I was there leave me very suspicious of the things I didn't know about.

> Are you an internet user that thinks that what the government says won't be exploited?

Nope, I'm a normal person, not actually a strawman. As long as there's government, it will be exploited; but, you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater by arguing that because people will exploit loopholes, we should eliminate (all) regulations. Instead of supporting a representative that tries to eliminate two regulations for every new one, how about supporting a half-intelligent representative?

You're worried people won't be able to start businesses? Where is Facebook's big competition? Can your kids' friends start a business now to compete with Facebook? No -- so why are you worried that they won't be able to do something in the future that they can't do now?
It's worse than that - if you don't properly document stuff, you are that awesome guy who can help everybody. Sometimes I have the impression that some people to (semi-)intentionally create tons of already-out-of-date and misleading "documentation" to create the illusion that they did their job, but that's just the natural state of documentation is - hopelessly out-of date.
> None the less, without a clear and proven why any "cure" could be risky.

The "why" is not as important as you might think. There are many drugs for which we don't know why they work, but we have clinical trials to test for their effectiveness and safety.

And clinical trials are more important than knowing the "why". For example, if you know why a drug inhibits such and such genes, then that is nice to know, but that doesn't tell you what other effects the drug has.
After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment

You can read more about undocumented features of Hacker News here [1].

[1] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
Given blender is mostly c bindings and a huge code base, it's kinda impressive, and a good example that it's not an impossible task to migrate even a very hard project, let alone the most common ones.
@zimpenfish do you have any advice on contracting?

I was thinking about going into one day.

I have a diverse background and have been a quantitative analyst, software engineer, and investment analyst. I have a MEng in Mathematical modelling (from a good UK uni) and a CFA Charterholder. My current tech stack (about 1 year experience) is React, JS/Typescript, GraphQL, Apollo Server all on AWS (AWS Lambda, AWS RDS and Docker on an EC2 instance). I used to work with Java, Linux servers and SQL (2 years experience). Would it be possible for me to contract? I could leverage my non-technical skills as well like my CFA and investment experience. :)
Company culture is indeed paramount. In a previous career in Japan, I played a role in publishing a book on this very topic: "The Knowledge-Creating Company", by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi. Might be worth a read. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-knowledge-creati...
Andrew Huang immediately sprang to mind https://www.youtube.com/user/songstowearpantsto

He's a musician and synthesizer enthusiast, granted electronic music and synths have taken on a pretty youthful market in recent years (thanks to cheaper products and a larger acceptance of the genre) but Andrew becoming a YouTube personality in this space was definitely met with backlash from the community.

It wasn't for the content itself, I really respect the guy as both a musician and video editor, but it's the gimmicky persona, the little "signature" things he does in his videos, the all too-perfect sheen put on top of his content, the silly faces on the video thumbnails that draw people's attention, the inauthenticity of it all. It rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, at least in the electronic music/synthesizer communities I visit (full of people who have been working with synths and modular instruments since the 70s/80s).

Now I realize it's not just his gimmick, it's everyone who hopes to ranks' gimmick!
Much of it is from fishing vessels.
This isn't the first time Axel Voss has dumped out a proposal that would undermine how half the internet operates and make the other half open to a court case from the first half.
What are the prerequisites for this tutorial?
I am new to React and Redux so I might not have a well informed opinion. Also, I see the value of Redux and I use it in my projects.

But it's awkward setting up a global event handler with switch statements. And it seems like adding new functionality should require one step instead of three (updating a reducer file, updating an action file, and updating mapStateToProps).

It's like Redux operates on a different paradigm than Javascript and React. I do not think I'm knowledgeable enough to suggest any solutions.
Because it's already too late, and we're not even really trying: https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...
Or, employers will start taking the long view and actually start investing in their employees.
GDPR has much higher punishments for breaking it than previous EU privacy laws. Many companies are taking the legislation seriously due to this. I expect GDPR to be actually useful in moving the line for privacy.
A new package index for Python
I think point 2 is really important. I've worked with a lot of new hires, especially college interns, and some of them are deathly afraid of coming in on the first day and messing something up. I always put together a getting started page on whatever wiki we happen to be using that details how to get the development environment up and running on the first day. Since the development environment changes as our code matures (new libraries to build against, new repos to check out, etc) following the wiki never seems to just work for someone unfamiliar with the dev environment and they encounter problems or just have questions. Whenever someone has a problem or a question the solution should be documented in the wiki, so we have the new hire update the getting started wiki as they go along. This gets them a little more comfortable making changes (since they see the whole building didn't burn to the ground after making a wiki update) and gets them in the process of documenting any problems or questions.
Don't forget that finite and finicky. A large download over a slow connection has a larger chance of being interrupted.

Everyone knows a interrupted update isn't good and downloading several times isn't good either.
At our 5k person company, the CPO has the heads of engineering and product management report to him, and is responsible for them working together well and delivering product.
You should have ongoing talks with your daughter about sex long, long before puberty.

Contraception should be a conversation you have with, approximately, a six year old, when they ask you how babies are made exactly, and why they were born (it’s not just “your parents had sex”, it’s “your parents stopped using contraception” that caused you to be born).

Safe sex, as in, “STIs exist, be cautious but not terrified”, and “intimate partner violence exists, don’t stand for or create cruelty or boundary crossing in intimate relationships” is a conversation for eight or nine year olds.

Young children aren’t yet embarrassed about their bodies or your body, it is much easier (and healthier for all concerned) to get open, loving, accurate information about sex and relationships at the moment it’s requested, well before puberty. Before and during puberty, when the urge to separate from parents is beginning and body shame frequently begins to set in, is a much worse time to have such conversations.
When you put something in the bin it means it "goes to the recycler" not "it gets recycled". The recycler sorts through the trash and recycles what they can. The price of oil, currently low, makes it less viable to recycle plastic. Not every container that has that little symbol on the bottom is really commonly recycled.

The vagueness of what happens at the recycler coupled with the fact that the packaging industry puts symbols on container that the average person thinks they mean they will be recycled, lead me to believe that a lot of this is done to make us feel better. I think we all should try to minimize the amount of packaging we use. Water bottles and plastic bags are completely unnecessary.
Yeah, and then at the end they did some time travel nonsense and hacked into the Borg transwarp network and got back to Federation space in no time at all, and were one-shotting Borg cubes to boot.

That show never really had the courage of its convictions.