skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Those '60's rocket scientists were genuine heros...

That's what the Germans thought too.
This comment is a grim reflection on the downfall of western civilization. I don't think society can recover from this level of evil bureaucracy that seems to have taken root.
If only we could automate the attribute of "being a human". Alas, as I often say, "as long as humans exist, there will be a demand for other humans to explain things to them". Thus a machine picks the berries while a human explains their feelings about the berries.

Could not the human do both, and take the job back from the robots?
Ask HN: Is high turnover a valid reason to start looking around?
I have a job at a medium-sized technology company with offices in a few major Australian cities.

Recently we suffered from very high turnover, many developers left over the last 1.5 years and the new hires obviously needed time before they could become productive again, this resulted in a slowdown and in some cases axing of new projects. This is still happening, two developers left just over the last quarter.

I never questioned the health of the company before, on paper they have many long-term projects and they are not losing money (it's an ASX listed company so the info is publicly available).

Do you think high turnover in itself is a sufficient reason to start thinking about moving?

Edit: one more question for other Aussie developers, how is the market right now for back-end web developers? I do mostly Python, PHP and Ruby. I'm not an Australian citizen but I'm a permanent resident so no visa issues.
Have you tried getting more sleep? ;]
Columbia MFA programs are notorious for being cash cows. Everyone who does a little research understands this.
> From that point on, most people have had access to some form of "artificial" light, at least occasionally.

The scare quotes are silly. It seems to come from the mentality that any technology that Hobbits can understand is "natural" but anything else isn't.
Cics use cobol
An associated topic is the history of artificial lighting. A good exhibit is the one at Old Sturbridge Village. Here are some pictures of it:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mytravelphotos/14693172893/in/...

It's crazy to me that no so long ago people had to make do with rushlights which were far more primitive than the oil lamps of the ancient world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rushlight
http://8-food.com/
Show HN: Paaart – free classified ads in any neighbourhood around the world
I think the bigger problem was the culture that company had in place that would lead people to do that.
Is it really better if we replace x million lines of COBOL with x million lines of java or c++? What is the financial language of the future that is easy to write and reduces errors?
Perl 6 uses rational arithmetic by default (or by defining typed variables), which covers the money use case well. And, of course, we have SQL's DECIMAL type in most backends.
The cost here seems to be bandwidth, is this because you're using VP8? Could this be adapted for other codecs like AV1?
Dumb question but what does this create? Is it a new smart contract for a new currency on Ethereum?
What happens to them? Do they get set aside in a pile for next year? Disposed/recycled?

I figure a rusty bike from the north will be nicely sandblasted after a year...

The rubber would get ruined though...
Did you read the post? What society is there that we can go ask right now who hasn’t mastered fire?
Blocky Friendship Simulator
Though I understand that it likely seems rural, by US definitions you live in an urban area. Any area with over 50,000 people is urban, which Manhattan manages even before adding the 25,000 non-residents there most of the year.

The labeling system seems outdated. I live in an area that is rural, yet everyone in a 120 mile radius of me would say I lived in a city. A new classification of "rural city" seems necessary.

The pedantic version of rural America is dying a rather ugly death. There are still nice places in the Midwest, but the further away you are from a true city the bleaker it often becomes.
That is 3 incidents over 5 years. I don’t think that is too much of a statistical anomaly. One of the injuries was from a pedestrian stepping into the bike lane without looking, one was from a car merging into me, and one was from a collision with another cyclist while racing.
> Some of my favorite gigs I've ever performed aren't possible under this standard.

Let's not assume that because the cost to the employer goes up, they will drop all the former 'contractor' positions. Employee rates are based on what the market will bear, subject to law and regulation; they are not based on 'cost-minus' - cost to the employer, minus a profit. Using a very simple case of the cost and benefit: If the employer can hire you for $10/hr, they will, regardless of whether they make $20/hr or $200/hr from your labor; if the law increases your rate to $15, they still will employ you. Of course, if they only make $9/hr from your labor, they won't hire you at $10/hr in this simple theoretical case. Reality is more complex: They may be happy to absorb the loss for other reasons, such as completing a major project, pleasing an important client, acquiring or maintaining market share, developing talent, your compromising photos of the boss, etc.

It's similar to the mistake people make about pricing: They assume goods are priced at 'cost plus' - the seller's cost plus a profit - and that therefore if the seller's cost increases then the price must also (businesses encourage this misconception - 'if regulations increase our costs, then everyone will have to pay more!'). Really goods are priced based on what the market will bear. That is, goods are priced as high as possible (i.e., at the level which maximizes profit). If they can charge you $10,000 for an item costing them $100, they will. If they have to charge $50 for it, they will do that too; $50 is better than nothing. If their costs change, it doesn't change what the market will bear.
According to this interview the addition of the $.99 charge was to slow down growth.

He wanted to be sure they could provide a fast, reliable service and was concerned they might get swamped by an influx of users.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puVxnKuFarA

According to the interview:

WhatsApp began as a "status" service. Original iPhone had no background or push notification; user had to start the app to check others' status. When Apple added push notifications to iPhone, they added this to WhatsApp allowing status to be "broadcast".

Users in Europe were paying high prices for international SMS. These users saw that broadcast status notications were similar to international SMS, but free. Some of them suggested this to WhatsApp and so WhatApp added messaging.

Then the app took off.

WhatsApp used FreeBSD, Erlang and SSDs when, according to Koum, everyone in Silicon Valley was using Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl (LAMP) and HDDs. Compared to others in Silicon Valley, WhatsApp had far fewer servers and employees per user.
The cost is encoding frames that won’t be sent, and non constant frame rate. Bandwidth is more optimally utilized.
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Since we're thinking like CTOs we need to account for risk, not cost. IBM sells Watson to companies with money, and for those clients the factors driving decisions are more often risk and liability. A CTO with budget who chooses to build in-house is taking a big risk. If IBM fails, they can cover their ass with a contract. If they fail in-house there is no such safety net. Easier to save face with the board.
I've noticed that people only speak well of COBOL when Grace Murray Hopper's name occurs nearby.

I suspect that this says something about COBOL.
We should solve this problem by importing more people from developing nations. They can help teach the natives how to thrive in this kind of environment.
Not for distribution ext:pdf site:*.gov
"Is this a startup company?

No.

Are you sure? Your website looks like a startup company’s.

It's just the HTML template! They all look like this. [...]"

Brilliant
> This is a loss for the country as a whole.

Is it? It seems like that’s the direct result of increased productivity. Even if it’s a loss for the people who would enjoy that life, it seems like tons of cheap food made available for everyone else is very much a gain.

tl;dr The losses of farmers in Kansas are large in Kansas terms, but small in United States terms. It seems a win for the country.
A WhatsApp to Telegram bridge as a service. Read more here: https://blog.shrimadhavuk.me/posts/2017/12/31/Telegram-WhatA...
Ugh I get these all the time.
COBOL is easy to learn if you already know how to program. What's a bit harder is learning the mainframe environment it's deployed in. It's not like Unix or DOS at all.
While you are entitled to your definition, I thought I'd throw in one of the original PG definitions:

> Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth.[0]

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
The lead programmer for itb stated the UI/UX and tutorials were the most difficult part to make

I played every game the author mentioned minus some of the small mobile /webapp games mentioned later.

I found this article interesting though, I had never considered how similar designing a poster ad in photoshop or building a catalog in indesign is similar to building UX/UI in video games or even UX/UI in webdevelopment. Things like simple intuitive animations, color schemas, font choices, element positions, ratio sizing, etc. They are really all the same thing. At the end of the day a good UX/UI design is really just a well thought out teaching style.

A bad teacher/tutorial is like a bad UX designer, vice versa for good teachers/tutorials.
I have more people on LINE in singapore than what’s app. People love stickers. Thailand/Cambodia seem to use line more too. These are SEA countries.

The main things I use what’s app for is when delivery Drivers or companies message me to say they are on the way or check if I’m home so they change deliver.
They don't track their failures properly. Sometimes they have a pitch/SOP/flow and a number at the end that shows conversion rates. Analytics does a terrible job of capturing customer annoyance.

Very often they optimize to the point where the customer annoyed just short of walking away. This optimum usually maximizes sales to timid people - the ones who wouldn't have bought without an aggressive salesperson.

A lot of tech does the same thing too. They will spam you with mail and notifications, just short of the point you delete the app.

What they don't capture is that if you push a little harder, you get the Groupon effect. People will start quitting in masses because they've had enough.
Apple deleted a job listing that hints at plans to cut Qualcomm and Intel chips
Status Lights
And Common Lisp, although it’s not necessarily “default”. (/ 2 3) works as expected, but 1.7 is a float (unfortunately), and not a rational 17/100. Shame, really.
It's a free game, so I'm sure he wouldn't mind giving refunds ;)
If I had to bet, I would bet that COBOL code will be around longer than either Oracle or SAP. The companies migrating to Oracle or SAP may be doing the proverbial "jumping from the frying pan into the fire".
I don't think that's a fair comparison. I think a better one would would be hurricanes.
This is timely given the terrible problems the TSB bank is having after failing to properly transition from a legacy COBAL system
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-43948889
Well, it might be argued that with the exception of this author (who apparently coined the terms they're using) neither the IBM marketers, nor any of the potential consumers understand what these words mean. It is pure abstraction to most people. If the marketers were pressed, I'd guess that they'd just define these terms differently than the people making claims of fraud.

I'm imagining the glossy eyes of a judge or jury trying to grasp the nuance and just throwing in the towel.
The source reporting can be found here: https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2018/04/30/with-decre...

Submitters: Please, always link to primary sources if possible.
I think "American Dream" is a micro-aggression now
Let me rephrase the question. Assuming that in the video the red background is the network capacity and the lines are the video bitrate used, salsify seems to be using ~6000kbps and WebRTC ~2500kbps. Is this higher bitrate because of you're using VP8, or it a limitation of the protocol? If it's because of VP8 how hard would it be to adapt to modern codecs like HEVC and AV1?
I know what you mean. But appearances can be deceptive. How are you measuring efficiency? While at a big company it may seem to take more people more time and effort to move the wheels, the wheels are much bigger and they have much bigger effects. Look at the revenue-per-employee numbers for some large tech companies: http://www.businessinsider.com/tech-companies-revenue-employ.... (Not shown: Netflix, whose numbers should probably be up at the top of the range). Ignoring the top end outliers, those guys are averaging around $0.5-1m. If the company grows by 10%, that’s like having every ten person team bring in $5-10m in business through established channels, and find a new $0.5-1m revenue stream every year. That’s pretty efficient.
Corporate Training Needs to Re-Think Its Model
Ask HN: Yale or UPenn for CS undergrad?
I got into both but I'm unsure as to which one I should pick. I'm aiming to become a Machine Learning/AI Engineer

UPenn:

+ Can take Wharton classes

+ More social?

+ Ranked higher for CS (by how much? is it worth grade deflation?)

- Didn't like how the campus is integrated with the city

Yale:

+ Got a better vibe from students, they weren't as stressed

- Not as good CS program

+ Investing heavily into the CS department (how good will it be by 2022?)

+ Liked the campus

At the end of the day, I'll be putting in the same amount of work at both universities. Would I miss out on any CS opportunities (classes, interships, etc) by going to Yale instead of UPenn?
Actually, you'd be keeping people in prison who you know have a disregard for the law, and decide for themselves what they think is okay. They are criminals, they broke the law at the time, and as such, are people that deserve to spend time in prison.

Of course, that's a very broad way to think of it. I'm sure for this particular topic there are lots of cases of outright discrimination which means people are serving sentences for marijuana-related laws that just aren't helpful to society at all (probably detrimental).

So, you may be right regarding this particular law, however, I think it is a very dangerous precedent to simply pardon anyone who committed a crime, for which that act is now legal.

If someone believes something that's currently illegal should be made legal, there are non-anarchist ways to deal with it than simply disregarding authority and committing a crime.
Grace Hopper is a legend not because the tools she invented are great by modern standards, but because she laid the groundwork. She was also one of the earliest to recognize how important computing was going to be and that hand-writing everything in hex was not a great idea. Later she championed even higher-level abstractions. Programming at the start of her career was considered non-creative secretarial work for women to do, which has the dubious distinction of being wrong and sexist at the same time.

When judged by standards of the day COBOL wasn’t bad. It was one of the first examples of a high-level language. People’s experiences with it (and large undocumented spaghetti logic programs) helped inform the next generation of languages.

Later our (ongoing) experiences with the unsafety of C led to Java, C#, and D among others. Further reactions to those are Swift and Rust.

I’d argue we wouldn’t have any of those languages in the same form without COBOL.
> Salsify is led by [...] Catherine Wu, a junior at Saratoga High School in Saratoga, California.

Oh
There's a legit use for those, to avoid screen blanking. Also used to keep computers from locking themselves after N minutes of inactivity.
I find that hard to swallow for a small company size, such as being discussed here. Do you have a reference or some reasoning to support this? I'm interested to know where it comes from.
I'm still pretty young and have had a somewhat robust love life. I sometimes wonder if I am not just audiating the brains internal lookup of the information anyway. If I am focusing then name recal is normal thankfully!
Sharetheload International
Slighty tangential...

Salsify is led by Sadjad Fouladi, a doctoral student in computer science at Stanford University, along with fellow Stanford students John Emmons, Emre Orbay, and Riad S. Wahby, as well as Catherine Wu, a junior at Saratoga High School in Saratoga, California. The project is advised by Keith Winstein, an assistant professor of computer science.

Salsify was funded the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Salsify has also received support from Google, Huawei, VMware, Dropbox, Facebook, and the Stanford Platform Lab.

Financially supported by the government, tech juggernauts, and executed by top tier doctoral students + a high school student + a top tier university professor.

Assuming this could be game-changing innovation to further advance worldwide communication, it's refreshing to see the positive externalities of a combination of capitalistic (F500 tech co's) and socialistic (university, government) systems executed by a seemingly diverse set of actors.
It's his game Really Bad Chess. The game is similar to a normal chess game, except that instead of the AI getting harder as you advance through the game, the AI gets better pieces (and you get worse pieces).

It's a fresh take on chess and is well worth trying. You end up ranking to a level where every game is challenging.
Hey Guys,

I joined Hacker News to get feedback on Sharetheload and potentially engage users to give advice, suggestions etc as we are a company that wants to be of social benefit as opposed to corporate benefit/greed.

We can be found on Facebook: Sharetheloadinternational

I would like users to express interest via the website: www.sharetheload.com
If only there were some way to zoom in with a browser...
This isn't terribly hard to achieve. E.g with a pretrained LSTM generator downloaded from some place that does neural network stuff + a homebrew text classifier (I'm fond of character-level online linear models with long n-gram ranges) that's just underpowered enough to overspecialize to a certain style, but unpredictably so. Make this poor man's model generative by choosing random combinations of characters that hit a high enough score; and then feed it to the LSTM (along with normal text samples).

The underpowered generator creates weird stuff that the good generator absorbs into its language model. Boom, you are witnessing the technological singularity. Or something.
The reason we don't have mass high rise construction everywhere in high cost of living cities is due to goverment regulations. In Seattle you cannot build above four stories for much of the city. San Francisco has similarly restrictive measures. The problem is usually incumbent property owners want to preserve the "character" of their neighborhood and protect their investment.
Summary: Every online coding tutorial is a lecture. They might pretend to be a little interactive, but the learning path is railroaded, and doesn't cater to individual progress.
> The contractors tend to perform the exact same duties as employees, but are usually paid less, have worse future prospects ...

There was a very interesting NY Times article last fall about that issue. They contrasted janitors at Apple, who work for a contractor and have no prospects for advancement in Apple, and Xerox's janitors in the 1980s who were employees, and one of whom is now Xerox's CTO:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-risi...

To veer off on a tangent, I suspect it's connected with a new elitism in the U.S. What used to be the celebrated 'Land of Opportunity' where anyone could live the "American Dream' through hard work, regardless of where they started (even if very poor immigrants), is now a place where the children of the wealthy go to college, those of the working class are encouraged to go to trade school, and immigrants are more commonly discouraged.
COBOL was designed to read like plain English (a total fantasy, as English is not even close to a formal language) and be usable by non-programmers (a modern contradiction). It was also designed by committee to serve business needs, with almost no input from the academic community (and thus excluding almost every idea they thought was brilliant, revolutionary, or innovative.) Thus it has a fairly toxic pedigree.
There are network effects at play; so once a messenger has locked-in most users, it's extremely hard for newcomers to gain sustainable traction.
Python 2.7.15 release
Sounds like "casuals" vs. "contractors". Casual staff are often on very similar terms to contractors, apart from the rates of pay, but are seen as interchangeable rent-a-crowd rather than outside expertise.
I'm not saying we should start shipping Mobikes to the Congo, I'm just noting that bicycles are, in fact, quite usable without a lot of fancy infrastructure.
Your way of viewing things is so foreign to me (and I'm a foreigner so makes sense I guess). I think prisons should be all about rehabilitation. If you crime is selling drugs, and selling drugs is no longer something we train people out of... What's the point of staying in prison?

Race does come into play as well, because your argument seems to be that it's "fair" that these people are still imprisoned. But by and large, they were set up by a society that left them few other choices, which is far from fair. Refusing to release them is tantamount to denying the error of our past ways. It was always a trap, ever since the lies that enabled marijuana prohibition in the first place.
We ought to be practical here - Facebook is a for profit enterprise and WhatsApp was their most expensive purchased. They're obviously under investor pressure to make that a good buy.
Anyone have thoughts on how to go about learning mainframe programming and COBOL? Honestly seems like a useful skill given its existence everywhere but I don't think very many engineers (myself included) know where to start in learning it.
>When judged by standards of the day COBOL wasn’t bad. It was one of the first examples of a high-level language.

Compared to LISP?
Zuck fucked them and the regulators over when he promised to keep WhatsApp independent.
The sale would have never gone through if he hadn't promised that.