skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A very recognizable problem!
While I'm definitely still trying to figure this out for myself, here are a few of my thoughts and experiences:

1) books usually trump courses
books are much easier to browse through. pick and choose what you need. Do make notes, or in 6-12 months it will be like you had never read it at all.
Courses seem nice in that they offer varied learning - a lecturer, assignments, a forum for questions, a shiny certificate at the end.. but you have little control over pacing, and there just aren't enough solid ways to judge beforehand if the course is any good. Trudged through many hours of bad/repetitive content before I understood this :)

2) don't memorise specifics, understand design choices
if you haven't done so already, I can really recommend looking into how languages are built - what are the paradigms / design choices. I'll even recommend a MOOC: https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages.
A focus on design makes it much easier, at least in my experience, to pick up a new language and become an 'expert' at it; nobody will turn to you for help writing a loop or grokking a few conditionals (I hope). But understanding, let's say, prototypal inheritance in JS and how this differs from other languages, or the effect of having (or lacking) functions as first-class citizens, figuring out what are the language core concepts and what is just syntactic sugar - this let's you reason about languages and problems on a whole different level.

3) if you have the opportunity; coach/teach
trying to teach stuff to a few interested souls is a stellar way to force yourself to order your thoughts. Pick something that's right at the edge of your audience's skill level, and explain it in the cleanest, concisest way you can. It's a win-win, in my experience.

4) create something
the hardest part about learning a new language is not the language specifics, but learning the ecosystem. What are the tools and libraries you must use or avoid, what is the right dev setup, how do you build/deploy, and in some god-forsaken cases, how do you even version control a project? The only way to really learn this imho is to just start building a small project.

These are only partial solutions; it still takes a lot of time and effort, and I probably haven't come close to maximising efficiency of self-study :). Don't forget to have fun though!

Looking forward to reading more about this.
My wife used to be a leasing agent for an apartment complex. One day a tenant from her complex started the dishwasher, something broke and it flooded the entire apartment and the apartment below it. Had tenant paid the $13 or so a month for renters insurance it would have been nothing or only a few hundred out of pocket for a deductible. Instead, tenant was looking at over $20,000 in repairs.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've done it a ton, and we ban accounts that do this repeatedly.
Trump’s election was the most democratic thing in perhaps the history of US politics. Maybe 1% of oligopolists supported him before the primaries and many prominent Republicans didn’t even support him when he had the nomination. In the wake of 2016 one could easily argue that US politics has become far more democratic (the founding fathers intended it to be much less democratic than it has become).

This shows that “democracy” is not a synonym for “good governance.”
From my experience, one of the causes of this issue is that in some companies, the people who are in charge of the money (upper/top management) are rarely also people with software engineering backgrounds. These people are often unable or unwilling to fully grasp the concept of "ramping up a new employee" in the context of software development. The fact that any large codebase will take a smart person 3-6 months to acclimate to and become productive. The fact that other people on the programming team have to help these new people (and therefore lose productivity themselves). The fact that the new person is going to produce more errors and the number of defects in the product will temporarily increase.

If you look into the history of a company (e.g. by looking at how many users in the issue tracker are no longer in the company etc.), it's usually quite obvious when there's a systemic problem - the employee turnover is high. The management is interested in saving money by looking at the market and trying to hire at or just below the average compensation levels. In their eyes, it's cheaper to bring a new employee to the team (and there's always some fresh meat on the shelves of the job market) than to pay the current (experienced) employee more. And in the short term, they're probably right. But in the medium to long term, this approach tends to have a cumulative effect resulting in high employee churn rate.

The problem? Software development is not fast food industry. You can't have high employee churn rates without it manifesting somewhere. But pointing out exactly where and how is not easy (linking causation and effect in a discipline involving multiple people across multiple years is not trivial), especially when you need to link it to the bottom line (the market state and marketing efficiency will mess with your analysis... not that you typically even have access to the financials as a run-of-the-mill employee) and even if you do, there is no reason to expect that you would be able to effectively bring these findings to the management (such work would probably be seen as you overstepping the bounds) or that the management would change the processes responsible (that would be expensive). It's an uphill battle. When you are in a company with high employee turnover, there's typically not much you can do other than to start looking elsewhere. These types of companies will have problems (lower level of respect/loyalty, higher level of product defects, lower productivity, higher technical debt), it's best to leave them as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
The new module system makes it easy ;)
that's soo disinformed. there's absolutely no sign republicans or even most of democrats will support single payer
> That goes well beyond "simply a lucrative trade", though, doesn't it

Sure. When I say it is "simply a lucrative trade" I don't mean to characterize programming as sterile or mundane, I only mean to suggest that the programmer's vaunted status as a profession is a function of the current labor market and not a function of some quality specific to the ability to write software. Writing software is a trade-skill subject to market forces, literacy is a critical thinking skill more akin to logic itself.
Evolution does have a strong bias towards offspring survival, though it is in some cases OK with the law of big numbers and statistical probability.
If there wasn’t, how would lightning happen?
I don't know if what it's promising is actually possible. Ultimately you need to trust that the machine/node which claims to be running your code is in fact running it as-is and not running some hacked version of it which behaves the same superficially but is actually collecting all your user passwords behind the scenes.

The node can always lie by perfectly adhering to the protocol but doing something completely different behind the scenes. You can hash, sign or encrypt the code as much as you like but that has nothing to do with verifying that the hardware is actually running that code.

Maybe with homomorphic encryption this will be possible but AFAIK this technology is not even close to ready for such use cases.
There are mods for the java and android versions of Minecraft (Raspberry Juice Mod) that provide the API. The old, limited pi version if Minecraft has builtin python API support.
> fundamentally recursion is syntactical sugar over loops and stacks, as assembly can show you.

That's one possible implementation of recursion on commodity hardware. Recursion itself is a mathematical method for defining a function which may not even be computable, or may be computable using other primitives.
Interesting there is no discussion about Pivotal and the ethics of optimizing war machines, given that only a couple of weeks ago there was a big discussion about Google employees successfully stopping the company from working on drones.
“Code Ahead,” a new novel about programmers
If there is one area ripe for disruption, it's US health care.

A few months ago my wife was showing me atrocious bills people were posting on FB, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It hit home because we "accidentally" got a bill when an in-network lab sent a blood test to an out of network testing facility and we got a $14k bill... for a blood test.

Just recently, a 2 hour ER visit for my toddler cost $3.5k for a breathing treatment, some Tylenol and some influenza tests. All part of my high deductible plan.

I used to be on the side against healthcare reform. I'm now counting the seconds until we have ANY regulation to stop this madness.
What It Takes to Build and Train Neural Networks for Autonomous Vehicles
In a word no. I spent twenty years as a fertilizer agronomist and I'm very familiar with the costs of producing a crop.

The numbers simply do not work. Even when they tried in Detroit and got buildings for five cents on the dollar they couldn't make it work.

The investors funding these enterprises do not understand agricultural economics. I keep investigating these stories looking for some kind of 'breakthrough tech' that would dramatically reduce costs or increase yields. I've been tracking these vertical greenhouses for fifteen years, they open and a couple of years later they're gone.

I think what could change things for produce is solar cells and electric trucks. It would isolate producers transportation costs from oil prices and lower the cost of getting produce to the cities. I know technology is quickly improving in both battery technology and solar cells.
what's the point of a cvv then? This seems rather odd
> if the patient is from a place that has a national system, they pay

This obviously varies by country. E.g. for travel within the EU, a country will pay for their travelers healthcare. I live in Japan, and while the universal health insurance will pay for treatment sought outside of the country, they will only pay what it would have cost if it was performed in-country. So that doesn't help travelers to the US.
Why a restaurant wouldn't run their own private vertical farm where they would control the quality and amount of supply?
That would remove supply volatility and transport costs entirely, and even some bulk products can be produced at smaller scale organically.
> I used to be on the side against healthcare reform.

Why?
Facts and Values/Science and Religion: Notes on the Sam Harris Discussions (I)
And that is a pretty sad state of affairs compared to ways that do compose well, like the one in Ruby which you can easily chain.
Could you please stop posting ideological battle comments to HN? It's not what this is site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In Hong Kong, homes are absurdly unnecessary luxuries, too. Maybe Marx wasn't so wrong after all...
Yes, I guess you could navigate it this way. But clearly this is not something Github wants users to do, so I wonder if this way is bad somehow. Maybe there is no backup mechanism to recover from u2f token loss other than the old 2fa mechanisms, for example.
I understand the motivation (even though I fundamentally disagree with it), but I find this rather inconsistent with issues such as 'the right to be forgotten' and other privacy initiatives put out by the EU.

I can see this one being taken to the EU Court of Justice by someone.
Not quite utter insanity - isn’t it quite weird that every programming language has its own tool for installing multiple different versions of itself? nvm, pyenv, rbenv, rustup, etc.

Maybe it’s nice to think of a common solution to this!
BeOS was delicious all around and it's a crying shame it didn't take off. It really felt like the Amiga's spiritual successor to me.
I sincerely hope you are right, and I am wrong - but are you willing to bet your life on it? I’m not.
From the article: 'In addition to the name, the team chose a hashtag for its project that is a nod to both agile software development, and the fact that Kessel Run’s culture is more startup than strictly military: #agileAF

“The AF stands for Air Force,” Furtado assured me.'

I wonder where the reporter's scepticism comes from...
Maybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
That only works if they let you cancel. Otherwise they can't lose customers.
Seems like an overreaction to me?
I believe that you're not trolling but could you please email us (hn@ycombinator.com) with a clearly-non-trolling username that we can replace "totaldick" with? A name like that amounts to subtly trolling other users with every post you make.
>> Countries like India may have corruption, but their people, even the poorest, have the option to consult doctor free of cost or at the cost they can afford.

For something small, like Fever or Stomach Upset may be.

For bigger problems its not easy, and most of the time they just give up(Embrace death). In Bangalore, there is a hospital called Bowring and Lady Curzon Hospital, its sort of like a government hospital. For decades its well known that when burn patients arrive, and if the victim is really poor, they silently recommend euthanasia. And most people opt for it. Its just the cost of treatment is too expensive, and the whole family goes down in the financial burden that follows.

Also please take a look at government hospitals like NIMHANS in Bangalore, its like the most depressing place you will visit in your life. You have to pay bribes for simple things like IV drip. And most people are very ill and sleep on the footpaths and hospital compound. Most of the times let alone having money for treatment they don't even have money to go back home to their small towns and villages.

Personally I had experience with one relative who got Guillane barre syndrome, their family comes from Kolar(A place 70 kms from Bangalore). He was a flower seller. He refused our help out of self esteem, but we had to bribe through ward boys, nurses and doctor secretly without him knowing to speed up things and get him everything from a bed to the right treatment.
Up until 4 years ago, I used to always allocate addresses specifically on bit boundaries. I did this mainly for one reason - aligning the bytes and trying not to waste CPU cycles.

For example, in a /24 network:
0-15 - network equipment
16-31 - some special gear
32-63 - mail servers or something like that
64-127 - split it up and align more things
128-191... you get the point.

...
The ultimate goal was to hit everything on a bit boundary so the CPU wouldn't work so hard

These days, CPU power is so prominent, it doesn't matter. DHCP is probably the way to go.

IPv6 is here. We have the opportunity to really make CPU's fast again with IPv6!
The other way too. It's easy to get your server ips banned for unratelimited scraping.
Tesla is the New Theranos
While interesting, a yak shave is where you go off on a long excursion to solve a problem that helps you solve the real problem. This, on the other hand, is just having a hobby. Calling it yak shaving doesn't seem appropriate.
Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick
Story telling tools – The history of communicating well (2016)
This information helps my site alot.https://crazytechy.com
Looks like this supports both, so one can always try both and see which one is a better fit in a certain situation.
What about Windows 3.1?
Counter-anecdote - since switching to operating systems using systemd, I haven’t had a single bug or issue with the init system or writing startup scripts, because finally they use incredibly obvious files that I can write myself.

For me it’s basically magic that I can now write a simple declarative file that describes how to run an application, and from there it works with all of the expected features.
You underestimate the role of luck on the success of these guys. They are clever and cynical assholes, but they have also been very lucky. There are tons of clever and cynical assholes who have shitty jobs due to their lack of luck.
> Would land and shipping both be cheap if we ceased to externalize a lot of the cost of each?

No.

But neither would the energy and equipment used to do this vertical farming either.

IMHO it's only a "thing" because it can be presented as a disrupting-startup-venture to attract capital. Like those "farm-in-a-box" things.
Escaping Anxiety with LAX Airport Car Service
Why? The page clearly states:

Will be using TypeScript. For internal implementation only. Does NOT affect ES users, but should improve TS integration for TS users.
The Q isn’t when complete autonomy arrives, but how much autonomy we will add before the cost of adding more is vastly greater than having on-call humans take over. At that point the ROI of the research will fall as all you gain in going from 99.05 to 99.10 % autonomy is a few employees across a whole fleet of vehicles.

I agree with the pessimists: driving is 99% a mindless activity that even a mediocre AI will handle soon. But the last percent requires not just a better AI but a human. At least as long as it drives with other people in an environment designed for people.
Usually it doesn't.
Likely the Minecraft Pi Protocol [0].

It's a text-based protocol, so you can even use via telnet/nc. The python API included with pi is also just a thin wrapper around this.

[0]: http://wiki.vg/Minecraft_Pi_Protocol
Max Volume Conic Bowl
http://crazydigital.co.in
Yes, it would still be cheap in comparison.

You are correct that there are externalities. But even if we priced in thise externalities, it would most currently NOT 100X the price (which is what would be required to make vertical farming cost competitive).

I would be extremely surprised if those externalities even came close to 2Xing the price of "normal" farming.
The Eye of Sauron
> A few post-apocalyptic novels touch the idea of elite emerging from bunkers totally unprepared for the disaster world they avoided, until the resources run out.

Interesting! Any recommendations?
Er... maybe not that much reworking?
The poor in cities (e.g. New York City) will be no better off than the rich. They know as little about survival without civilization infrastructure as the rich.

This isn't like the homesteading days. Most of the poor still buy food from grocery stores (with cash or ebt) like anyone else.
> “Just because you followed the software requirements spec doesn’t mean you met the capability need,” Kroger said.

Sage words.

I do wonder, though: becoming more agile (or agile AF as the case may be) is one thing, but is it healthy for an actual military branch to be moving in the direction of an industry whose unofficial motto is "move fast and break things"? That's one thing when the bad outcome might be that someone gets delivered the wrong thing or gets charged twice and you have to refund them. But broken things have much graver consequences when they involve guns and bombs and airplanes.
Why CRM Solutions Are Helpful for the Healthcare Industry
What I still never saw so far, and what this article also avoids, was an actual explantion of

- why ever choose Vue over a minimalistic React setup?

I mean, yeah, when people say "React" they mean "Reach + a ton of other heavy complex stuff", but core react + redux seems even more lightweight than Vue. Or you'd just choose Vue to keeps way the "React gurus" that would come in and overcomplicate everything? :)
The topic at hand is slavery of Black people.

I am talking about slavery of Black people that continued to happen and, by the way, is happening today.

And instead of discussing the actual issue, it’s considered hijacking?

I have seen Hacker News comments of all types on an article, some heavily upvoted, that are on a tangential topic. Very often they were even political or opinions on other tech platforms or the landscape of tech in the FIELD of the article.

It happens so often on HN that I am truly bewildered as to how this is not just special pleading / double standard invoked specifically because what I am doing is currently politically incorrect: talking about issue X happening more recently and in the rest of the world, which takes away from talking about the history of the country where most HNers live.

Just step away for a second and think about it. Is it really a healthy response when I say Black people have continued to be enslaved long after the Emancipation proclamation in the USA, that for millions of Negroes in other parts of the world this continued, to say it is “hijacking to talk about my pet issues”?
The core of it is very good but the tooling falls on its arse on large projects and the build toolchain is dire and the update mill and roadmap schizophrenia has not been friendly. Also integration with other MSFT products is eyeball grating (VSTO for example).

Been with it since it came out in 2002. I wouldn’t start a new project on the platform in 2018, even .net core.
Insects can give some different texture to a dish. Just don't do an "only insect with some seasonning" dish: make something like veggies or pasta and add some insects for the crunchy feel. Think Paella, not barbecued steak.
From what I understand, if you're a publisher you can censor or restrict content according to your own rules. Very different from a common carrier, where you can't restrict content and in doing so gain immunity for the content.

It seems Facebook Et Al want the best of both worlds
Question. I started working with a startup right after my Masters when it barely had about 10-12 employees. I got some stock when I started. This was my first start up and so I don't know if what I got was a fair deal (if not a good one).

Now, its been about 4 years since and the company has grown to be about 60-70 employees and I am yet to get a raise, the company still doesn't match 401k etc. I hope the stock pays off eventually, if the company does well, but I am not sure if or when or how good that will be. Reading articles like this or articles that mention salaries that people are offered in other companies, I am beginning to think if "job hop" is probably the way I should go, even though the work environment is fairly good and I have enjoyed my time here.
It's up to the merchant; since in the event of fraud they'll be the ones who get hit with the chargeback, it's up to them to decide if they want to require that extra safety or not.
Tbh, I think that's true for most people. I don't know if it's particularly terrifying in itself.