skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> showcase a lot of creativity I have a hard time taking it serious

This isn't constructive criticism. "Showcase a lot of creativity" is vague. Do you take products like Dropbox seriously? Their front-end looks like default Bootstrap.
I'd love to hear the correct answer to this, with explanation.
Grow your clicks
please don't think about it in terms of "the virtues of unfortunate". Everyone wants "kids to get a solid education and get good jobs and lead a happier, fulfilling life".

please, rather, try to think about it in terms of what best-explains the difference.

this data seems highly inversely correlated with productivity, in countries with lower productivity, people spend more time with their child. Time available seems to be the best explanatory factor.
Hangouts is ok, but as far as I recall, its either a Hangouts message or SMS. For my contacts, very few use Hangouts on a regular basis. SMS is still king around these parts.
Parent said "Go for breadth rather than depth". I dont think multiple easy bug fixes are harder then deeper one. The reason most contributions are in sparse and low-impact is that it is easier and less time consuming.

Isn't ability to maintain code better proven by maintaining one codebase longer? Mostly because that is what maintennace is?
you guessed wrong. but those I could live with ;)
I thought so too and its mainly brick houses
On the other hand, parental involvement in their children's education has been shown to have a positive impact on children's development.
Probably the person who wrote it is in marketing, gets handed down a list of talking points, and has no idea about the technical background of the decision.
Another causation / anti-causation question is what effect porn (possibly specifically rape-fantasy porn) has on rape rates. There are two obvious arguments that point in opposite directions. The first is that rape-fantasy porn acclimates the user to the idea of sexual violence and makes the user more likely to commit it; the second is that rape-fantasy porn gives the user a safe outlet for their baser desires and makes them _less_ likely to commit actual rape. AFAIK we can say that access to porn, and all kinds of porn, has increased a great deal, while rape rates have gone pretty steadily down, during the last few decades; a graph on Wikipedia shows annual U.S. rape rates going from 2.5 per 1000 down to 0.5 per 1000. This doesn't prove the second theory—I think violent crime in general also went down—but it at least shows that, if the first theory is correct, the effect it describes is much smaller than everything else that affects rape rates.

I can think of arguments for why white-nationalist forums would decrease the likelihood that the white nationalists who find them would go and kill non-whites. (a) Such a person might feel relieved to find that there are others who feel similarly, and therefore not feel like their cause has no one working for it and they need to do something spectacular and terrifying to attract attention. (b) They might have few friends in real life, and they can't fully show themselves to the ones they do have, so they have no truly close friends. But on the forum, they meet fellows who share their beliefs and feel they can trust, and then they make what feel like close friends. And now they'll know that, if they kill someone, that carries a high risk of getting thrown in jail and cut off from their friends; that extra disincentive might be enough to stop them. (c) On that note, the most visible and admired participants in the forum are not going to be those who go out and kill people, because (I assume) people can't continue posting when they're in jail. The general incentives of the forum probably point towards being a blowhard who doesn't do anything.

This is why I will only accept the conclusion "Letting white nationalists gather on a particular forum will cause more white-nationalist-perpetrated killings" if I see a decent study showing it.

(I think one of the official basic arguments for freedom of association and of the press is that, if you prevent people with grievances from associating and publishing their views, they will go underground and then get violent.)

(Incidentally, I do like it when one of my possible conclusions is that, in order to reduce the likelihood of people doing terrible things, the solution is to work to raise everyone's standard of living, so they'll be too comfortable to want to risk losing what they have.)
or CockroachDB
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Well I have seen it with my own eyes, so what can I say?

I specifically remember this guy who was really good debugging the 'undebuggable'. Perhaps more business-oriented bugs would indeed be assigned elsewhere, but more elusive stuff concerned with 'mechanisms', setup code, etc would be perfect for him.

I also have performed a similar role myself (just at a humbler team)
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I suspect if encrypted SNI became popular, you would find them censored via one means or another. I imagine state operators have the resources to scan all domains, connect to them to identify their content and just blacklist their IPs (along with any innocent domains hosted on the same IP).

I could also see state operators mandating the plaintext SNI (by dropping non-SNI TLS), and operating a transparent TLS proxy based on that SNI with their own DNS lookup (so you would have to provide a legit, resolvable hostname in the plaintext SNI).
I moved to Amsterdam 5 months back from Bangalore and couldn't agree more on the last paragraph.

Everything here seems so laid back which was one of the reasons why we moved to EU – to have a better/more relaxed lifestyle but at the same time, I do miss the vibrancy and liveliness around me.
How does backscattering work in the presence of multiple networks?
Actually a good example is Blueprint CSS framework from palantir (https://github.com/palantir/blueprint). It's fully tailored around their design philosophy and they are not beholden to anyone else.

However you have to remember that your scale, we will follow you (and fix your bugs) rather than demand you serve us.

Who knows we both might learn off each other !
I agree with your sentiment, but I think most business would already fare very well with having someone structured with project management skills in significant leading position.

Without that, working as a programmer in such disorganized team, you will mostly spend your time working "against" them. It's like you are trying to glue things together and people will just go and and rip those glued together things apart constantly.
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For those who care about the shortcomings of academic philosophy, I just wrote a blog post on why I'm switching from academic philosophy to computer science at least for a while. https://dstrohmaier.github.io/life/2018/04/20/restarting-my-...

I recognise at least some of the points, although I'm much less bothered by philosophy having little connection to the pragmatic purposes of many people. The abstract she uses to illustrate her point is also a infelicitous choice. It is from Sinhababu's "Possible Girls" and that guy is a weirdo, in the best sense of the word, even for philosophy.
This is just a list of the usual gripes about academia. It applies to almost every subject. Including Biology, which I work in. I like how the author explains the pyramid scheme of academia:

>The task of standing out is nearly impossible. Usually it comes down to informal factors, like having an influential advisor or coming from a “top program.” My school was ranked ~25–30ish (in the world) for its philosophy PhD program, and it would be polite to say most grad students struggled on the job market. “Struggling” doesn’t begin to describe the pain and anguish of sending hundreds of job applications and not landing a single interview. That’s not uncommon.

As a PhD dropout and research assistant in a large lab filled with overworked students, it hurts me to think about their futures. Because of my position I can't say much, but I would love for them to look around and take note of the ratio of post-docs to PhD students. If every lab has 5 students for each post-doc, then the odds can't be good.
Into Developer Ergonomics
> 1. It is still alive

A mature project that just works does not need new commits.
Besides 'normal' friends, sports club, meetups, local university public lectures, out and about cycling etc. I don't see the problem.
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Not really. A de-facto standard is when multiple implementations from multiple parties agree on some behavior without it being described in a formal specification. Whatsapp does not have multiple implementations from multiple parties.
> Median is the appropriate measure to use if you're looking at the overall pay of a company's workforce.

I would disagree with that. Imagine this dataset of salaries:

[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10]

You have around half employees being paid like shit (1) and half being paid well (10), but the median will show a good salary (10).
And the fact that you can spend 2 years writing a dissertation that 3 people will read and maybe fewer will understand or connect with.
Not in any meaningful way with just the sun's light hitting the panels.

On the other hands, if you were to beam a few hundred kilowatts by (carefully!!) aiming at the panels with a massive laser, you could power it this way, yes.

Bonus if you are doing it from a satellite: you can power a plane even across an ocean and don't need many ground stations. On the other hand you just built an orbital death ray so expect protests from, well, everybody.
also super interested in CockroachDB, but I just can't find enough war stories, or stories of people using it in production...
Does MacOS need to be #1 priority at Apple?

We've gone from OS-as-a-Platform to Browser-as-a-Platform (albeit on an OS). Operating systems have matured and have become relatively stable.

I feel MacOS has an edge in the market given the excellent trackpad (i.e. the #1 way to interact with a mac or any computer), iCloud, and honestly it just works.

Outside of Chrome, I use VS Code, VLC, FaceTime, iCloud, Dropbox, Zoom, and the Terminal.
Chrome was also heavily marketed, and that worked just fine.
The question is too vague. In what environment? Web? Desktop? Mobile? Embedded? Backend programming is a completely different world than mobile apps when it comes to build size concerns, for instance. As an Android developer, I have to deal with the infamous 64K methods limit imposed by Dalvik. The "I import TONS of libraries" approach (to quote one commenter) is very bad practice here.
Except for 99% of users who sadly don't give a shit about E2E.
Wow, that's showing surprising awareness.
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Looks like a great proof of concept, but I wonder whether the off-the-shelf WiFi devices will need to support some sort of protocol to enable this to work? I didn't see anything in the video about how they specifically integrate with WiFi, but I'm assuming there will need to be some sort of broadcast and then response read. Either way, very interesting project from both a software and electronics point of view.
I already guessed a few days ago that this is probably the next step we will see from Google and Amazon after the Russian blanket ban on AWS and GCP IPs [1]. It was either that, or the Russian goverment backing off an extreme measure.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16856763
...but a bird which builds a nest on a dying limb leaves its dependants hanging in the cold.
Well, the lack of a specification is a major hurdle. IMO, some of the glaring issues of the protocol could have been caught early if there had been an attempt to formalize the protocol.

That said, hindsight is 20/20, and I don't doubt there'll be some work to write a specification once the idea stabilizes somewhat, but since the current version of the protocol has been adopted by users, I think updates to it will be challenging.
No, what I’m saying is LIDAR doesn’t work when it snows, and lane localization doesn’t work when there’s sleet on the road.
Back in the 50s, my great grandfather built the house where my mother and my grandmother grew up in all by himself. It took him 6 years, but he had no help. He started digging into the ground with a shovel. He was a carpenter and bricklayer and used his spare time and skill to do it. This house is still standing and my grandmother still lives in it.

This is him with his wife, my great grandmother: https://i.imgur.com/y7sXvaa.jpg

It was his greatest achievement. But unfortunately he only lived in it for a meager year before passing away.
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>Lao-tzu said colleges may not give you the fish directly but it teaches you how to fish for yourself.

And I say fuck Lao-Tzu and what he said.

Someone living in 500 BC should not direct your life's direction. You have something called the Internet now, which he didn't. You have nearly unlimited access to knowledge that you can't possibly consume in all your lifetime. You have courses from top tier colleges free. You can learn anything.

Yeah some stuff requires a degree to work in if you're not at the top of the field and want to join a good company (ML, Neurotech and stuff like that). Most of it doesn't. College isn't just expensive. It's passive and it has a terrible system of teaching people stuff that doesn't interest them just because someone thought it would be useful to them. And it's boring as fuck.
How did they distinguish parental involvement specifically in education from the fact that supportive, encouraging parents are likely to engage with their child's education? I ask because my instinct is that emotional stability and encouragement are probably more important than homework.
I'm a library by default kind of guy, but it's always a series of trade-offs. For example:

- how value adding is this functionality?

- how well does the library meet my need?

- is the library still under active development?

- how stable is the library's API? (Building against an unstable API becomes a tedious waste of resources, fast.)

- how good is the documentation?

- is it popular/well-used? If so, this makes it easier to get help on Stackoverflow, or wherever, when I have a problem.

There are times where we've started out with a library, but moved to a homegrown implementation, or vice versa.

For example, we work with a lot of CSV input data. We started out with a library, because properly parsing CSVs is, well, not exacly tricky, but there are a pile of nuances and edge-cases you need to take account of. It was just much easier to use a library for this so that we could focus on adding business value elsewhere.

Anyway, the size of the files we needed to work with grew, so we swapped the original library out for a different, faster, library.

That worked well for a while, but then the size of the files we needed to work with grew again, and the library was too slow, so we swapped in our own faster CSV reader implementation for working with these large files.

We still use the library for other CSVs because our implementation makes certain assumptions about the content of the files that don't hold for the smaller files we work with.
Not on pay-as-you-go in the UK, where you still pay for every message. 3p each for my plan which doesn't seem much but I easily send over 100 e-mails and IMs every day.
This is a complex issue that takes days of careful analysis to take a decision.

Long story short we implement something ourself if:

1.It is a differentiator for our company because 2.

2.We can make it better than available libs and 3.

3.Making it better represents a real change on our company or the world, changes like "It will make possible what was not possible" or "will halve the cost of X, because Y".

4.We need to parallelize-make it on hardware.

Implementing something inside is extremely expensive as requires salaries of highly paid people, makes those people unavailable for doing other things, and takes always more time than planned.

On the other hand with your own code you could do magic. You can hardware accelerate(with electronics and FPGAS) it to use 10.000, 50.000 less energy, or GPUs to make it 100-200 faster. You control everything to suit your needs.

We normally start using standard libraries and replace then slowly with our own code if it will make a difference.

We do the same with parallelization: we start with multiCPUs, then GPUs, then FPGAS. Then we can even think on offering investors the option of making ASICS if functionality is proven and very well tested.

Disasters? Yes of course. It is part of experience, they happen like great successes. When you risk you risk disaster, but you give yourself the option to success greatly too.

When I was a kid I learned to ski probably faster than anyone around. But it was because I did not play safe like most did and keep falling(at great speed) until I did not.

In life you could do the same.
Are there also studies on the effects of parents' addiction to social media and other forms of screen time?
Wait CockroachDB is monolithic? I though it was distributed.
Really? Never?

I find that hard to believe.

Writing, to take one example, requires practice. The amount of practice you can get in a single academic year maxes out at 180 hours without homework and you would have no time to actually teach.

I can imagine that 5 hours a week of writing homework in English rapidly exceeds the amount of time you could ever spend in class.
Red, blue, yellow, green. And white. That's five colors! ;-)
I am from Kota too and your argument is just nit-picking. Of course, when you're blaming high-pressure exams, you're also blaming every factor related to it. Your analysis of suicide rates fails to consider that these are very young students barely in the age group of 15-19 and the cause is singular (high-pressure parenting).

But suicide rate is just one symptom that this industry engenders. The immense pressure these kids are subject to is depressing as fuck. They (and their parents) all have been fed the dream that working 15 hours/day is a sure-shot way to make it in. And once you make in IIT, you don't have to fret about anything else.

Some kids have been working towards this dream, right from 6-7th grade. Yes! six years before they are to take the actual exam.

I was very lucky to escape this trap. I considered myself to be very dumb and knew that there's absolutely no chance I was going to make it.

Looking back, it just escapes me how so many people can come to believe that a single exam is going to narrate your whole fate in life.
>People need to understand they can do what they want, how they want, and on their terms

Not to be nit picker...but while encouraging to hear, that sentence seems a wee bit exaggerated. I think the main takeaway from your post--which I 100% agree with--is that social approval being the motivator in your life is a recipe for disappointment.
You imply that you're still going to understand your code one year later. While this is a favorite fantasy of all programmers, it's usually false. Also, if you're in a team, the person running into the bug is likely not you, so it's foreign code for them anyway.
>It's pretty much the only software paradigm that's survived for that long.

Functional programming predates non-functional programming - Turing's papers and thesis were published (at least) a year after Church's papers on lambda calculus.

Type systems in FP run decades ahead of type systems in regular programming languages. For example, simple type system for FP was published in 1948 and it was (more or less) equivalent to Fortran's type system (1958). The type inference was published in 1968 by Hindley and Milner adapted his algorithm to more "efficient" mutable state in 1978. Type inference come to mainstream languages only in what? 2004?

The algebraic types and pattern matching were born in 1971, the year I born too. These facilities start to appear in mainstream languages no earlier than 2008 if you consider Rust at that time as a mainstream language. And C# acquired them, I think, in 2016 and not earlier.

I boldly and offensively assume that OOP is the only paradigm you decide to care about and thus you consider it "the only software paradigm". I think that it is a very useful position in life, not to care about things you decided not to care about. I do that too.
I agree. Many Indian jobs advertisement specially mention student from IIT only. there is job site that targets only IITians.

So the pedigree obviously is valuable.
Sure, but you might be surprised how many undergrads go in not realizing how common these are.
True, a project with a bunch of stars and ownloads and whatnot and no open issues and pull requests can be perfectly fine even if the last commit was a few years ago. However, if the last commit was years ago, and issues and pull requests have been piling up without getting any attention, that's probably a bad sign.
I don't understand your comment, I never said it discourages working.
Alienware built a decadent gaming hotel room at the Hilton Panama
This is completely badass. Construction is so overpriced and hard to get done. He's just jumping in and doing it. Good for him. Probably would cost $500,000 to build.
This is a terrible solution at many levels. Paying someone who isn't on your payroll (yet) needs a lot of bureacracy on both sides (e.g. taxes).

And even if it's paid, it's still a not-insignificant time investment for the applicant. They're probably applying for several gigs and take home assignments would quickly turn into a full time job, and filing the tax paperwork could take more time than the coding.

And finally, assigning a job that would actually get used at a company pushes up the complexity level, the need to understand the context. This would also make me very suspicious about the motives of the company.

In my company, we give a "fizzbuzz" level assignment on the whiteboard (or their own laptop if they prefer). The purpose is to weed out the applicants who can't code at all (makes a surprisingly large portion of applicants). Additionally, we've noticed that the ones who are good programmers will ace these tests.

I don't think that whiteboard assignments or takehome work is a good way to assess how good a programmer is. A 15-30 minute smoke test with a binary result (the applicant can or can not code at all) is good to filter out bad applicants but not to distinguish good from excellent.
Does reduced productivity at work correlate with more available time though? Take subsistence agriculture, which is very common in poor countries - it is usually done inefficiently, and yet it is very time consuming. In my experience, it's more the leisure time that gets sacrificed - parents have almost no social life while their child is growing up.
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Lets talk PHP
The HN community is clearly (in general) anti-PHP. If HN was all you read, one would get the impression that PHP is a dying language with no jobs available for developers. This seems to be the opposite of what I have seen (as a mid-level dev with .NET & PHP experience). My 12 year old nephew is starting out his coding career with Javascript and I want to get him some experience with server side languages too where he can immediately get hacking on some real world examples (and not just 'hello world')

Lets see...the most popular (and best) CMS - Wordpress is PHP, most of the popular open-source e-commerce platforms are PHP (Woocommerce, Magento, etc), the biggest social network is PHP (Facebook), the best open source Dropbox competitor is PHP (OwnCloud), then we have Wikipedia, Moodle, Limesurvey...it seems the best competitor for commercial incumbants is an open source PHP projects every time...

So can someone illuminate me why the HN community is so anti-PHP, and why my nephew might not get a job when he finishes school (in 5 years) if all he knows is PHP & Javascript?
We need a reset:strong user rights & strong privacy for a much better internet.