skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think part of the attitude comes from watching this incoherent mishmash kill the World-Wide Web and wear its skin. There used to be flamewars about abusing non-semantic markup around content, but now it's common for a document to lack any content at all, just a bootloader for a javascript app that never needed to be an app.
The other day I was (lightheartedly, but still) asked: "what went wrong?" that I had chosen front-end development even though I graduated from university - because apparently these two things are related somehow.

I've found that while I can't change peoples' biases, waving the flag of "I do stuff in Rust in my spare time" is enough to scare off at least the Java folk.

There's an interesting power struggle I've been caught in more than once: Back-end devs describe their work as very hard so that they're left in peace, and the easiest way to strengthen that is to describe someone else's work - front-end developers' in this case - as easy.

This way whenever a change in requirements occurs there's pressure to avoid doing changes on the back-end in favor of changing things on the front-end. At the same time interesting and "hard" things are meant to be done on the back-end even though nowadays it's possible and sometimes easier to do them on the front-end.

The fact that back-end devs are paid approximately 20% more naturally only worsens this.
Every single thing you wrote is identical in the US.

There is free healthcare, power of attorney, everything you described is the same in the US other than the terminology.

People out of the US have a very skewed view of healthcare in the US.

All children, all elderly, and poor people with serious illness are all covered fully.
My thinking about the blockchain/cryptocurrency space shifted significantly when I changed my perspective from thinking about technology to thinking about problems.

The web caught on because in the late 80s, the biggest problem in the world was that we were starved for information. We didn't know it yet, because we'd never lived in any other world, but once we could fire up Netscape and view homepages from people who lived across the world, or talk in real-time on AIM with people half a world away, or ask any question of Google and get answers, or find whole communities of people who were interested in that incredibly niche interest that we'd despaired of ever meeting someone else to share it with, or view the satellite & street view images of any address on earth, or order any product off Amazon and have it delivered tomorrow to our front door, it was apparent what we were missing out on. And that has spawned multiple trillion-$ companies.

The biggest problem in the world today is lack of trust and the failure of institutions. (Which, ironically, may have been been caused by the web and the huge amount of information it made available.) And blockchains address this. They don't solve it - actually, my biggest resistance to Bitcoin & blockchain hype earlier, and my biggest risk factor now, is that Bitcoin doesn't actually solve the problem it's purporting to solve. People still get screwed when transacting in Bitcoin, they just get screwed by scammers & hackers rather than the government & big corporations.

But the problem still exists, and people are aware of it now. Satoshi's greatest contribution was to create something that could semi-plausibly fix it and then release it into the world, which generates all sorts of attention from other entrepreneurs. Just like Tim Berners-Lee's original WWW browser was pretty clunky by modern standards, Bitcoin is pretty clunky by modern standards. But it's attracted a lot of minds into refining & replacing it, and as long as there's a problem, there's a market, and there's a good chance that eventually somebody will figure it out.

(Or not. Who knows, in the 60s everyone was sure there was a market for flying cars and robot vacuum cleaners. We did eventually get both flying cars and robot vacuum cleaners, but so far the market for them is much smaller than anticipated.)
I typed at 105wpm when I was 20. QWERTY keyboard, no training, just six fingers, one thumb, youth on my side, and a lot of practice.

If you can deploy 20% more digits, and have an expert on hand during the early stages to give you advice on form and technique, then I'd expect 120wpm to be attainable...
Why? Because you want somebody to be able to censor out your whole website
without notifying you and without giving you any meaningful way to protest (CA
revoking your certificate and giving you as much support as Google gives to
its non-paying users or PayPal to the sellers).

Now we have the same situation with DNS, but let's add more choking points, it
surely is a good idea.
It's just probabilistic.. someone who's really into SICP and clojure is showing signs of being interested in more than your typical minimum 9-5 job requirements. It's not "THE" sign, just one of many. SICP teaches many things, such as how to write compilers, how to think about abstractions or the benefits of immutability. Is it so weird to think that someone's willingness to get better and learn more is more likely to get more job offers?!

Here's one way to look at it, considering everything else equal, if you were an employer, would you pick someone who knows X (where X is jquery or whatever requirements you need) or someone who knows X + Y (where Y is some interesting technology that may eventually turns out to be useful)?
Avoid News, Towards a Healthy News Diet – By Rolf Dobelli [pdf]
What does "signalling" mean in this context?

I tried to look it up and failed to find a definition that made sense.
You remember that time where a bug in the implementation of SSL went undetected in open source software for over a year?
The web is 'easy' in the sense that it is well (at least in quantity) documented. If there is something you need to know, it is unlikely that you will have much trouble finding it. Justified or not, I am unsurprised that people with more esoteric knowledge, that is not easily found through a Google search, want to try and boast about it. That's pretty standard human behaviour.
The dot com era actually started in the late 1960s with packet switching networks. It took 50 years to get mass adoption. The first really working cryptocurrency was in 2008. I expect mass adoption by 2058.
I’ve probably been lucky in that I haven’t had any wrist pain and don’t really find typing uncomfortable but I’ll give it another try. I’ve tried twice before and didn’t stick with it.

How long did it take you to retrain yourself?
Sure, I understand what you're saying. But I'll continue to challenge the use of language like that. In my opinion, saying something is true "statistically speaking" is more grievous than saying something like, "I'm 99% sure." Both are artifacts of the English language, but I think the former carries much more quantification behind it, implicitly speaking. In that sense it's not just about informal use of language.

This is because saying something is true "statistically" is a claim made in both scientific and casual contexts. It's mentally taxing to figure out which context is in play - someone could have come into this thread with actual statistics and said the same phrase, verbatim. Therefore (as I see it), it's realistically plausible that someone could read the original comment and come away believing recruiters have done actual statistical analysis a la TripleByte to arrive at their conclusion.
While I agree with you, I would not have chosen PageRank as a comparison. I cannot think of another domain where it made billions, but to me it is a pretty neat way of extracting information inside a graph.

It just needs a concept that has transitive properties in order to shine. For web pages, the transitive part is that a high quality page is more likely to mention another high quality page. It uses the indifference one might have about a lower quality page, it uses the author's implicit contract with the reader that he should be showing (and linking to) high quality content. It builds on top of man.millionYears of painstaking content filtering.

In a graph, you can run it about any property that has that transitivity. There is a paper running it on citations in physics papers [1], and it can identify some Nobel Prize winners, even if the paper has a low number of citations; the paper just has the important ones.

I deeply believe that corporations could greatly benefit from continually asking their employees "who in your coworkers had a positive impact on your work this week?", and running PageRank on top of it. You could have natural leaders emerge out of that.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0604130.pdf
The government pays for healthcare for retirees.

They are bilking the government, not the individual. They actually prefer it that way since there isn't anyone checking on them.
So this is one of the hardest lessons for engineers to learn. Being right doesn't actually count for very much in the end.
Wasn’t the whole LIBOR thing mostly a Brittish scandal? What does this have to do with the POTUS?
HTML version: http://www.dobelli.com/en/essays/news-diet/

Prologue:

> This article is the antidote of news. It is long, and you probably won’t be able to skim it. Thanks to heavy news consumption, many people have lost the ability to read more than four pages straight. This article will show you how to get out of this trap – if you are not already too deep in the trap.
I haven't seen a better approach for decentralised verifyable databases yet. Postgres for example offers several approaches for mirroring or decentralisation however non of them feels certanly clean and all of them come with their own downsides.

I agree that we are not there yet to use it as a simple drop in solution for such problems. But we are certanly getting there.

Also there are no limited reads (or writes for that matter) every actor of the blockchain can modify their local version as much as they want.
I just built a PC today and the motherboard has a switch for "slow mode". This is a modern system.
Besides a quick search of critical OS-related security vulnerabilities over the years that were not related to 3rd party code?
WISH- Windows Improved SHell
https://github.com/michael79812/wish
A (not yet) improved shell for Windows. supports very limited scripting, some commands, and piping. any comments or anything is good! thanks!
find the release here: https://github.com/Michael78912/wish/releases/tag/v1.0-beta
>but whatever happened to doing what you love and not giving a shit what naysayers think?

I'm in my 30's and have used a lot of different languages and have worked in a lot of different aspects of software development. As long as I'm being compensated at my skill level, I couldn't care less what language I'm using. I'm currently a web dev and the company I work for primarily uses PHP. To make a long story short, a good friend of mine works for a huge university and if I hang out with him during the week, I'm inevitably going to be around some college kids. The typical icebreaker conversations of "what are you studying" often times leads to chats with CS students. The amount of trash talking I get from kids who haven't even graduated and have no professional experience once they find out I primarily use PHP is astounding. Golang and Python seem to be cool amongst college students, so once they find out I also have more experience with those languages than they do with programming in any language, I suddenly become cool and worth their time.
Obciouly not exactly the same, but this article reminded me of the scroll lock key. Many people seem to have forgotten its original purpose: When PC Magazine asked an executive of keyboard manufacturer Key Tronic about the key's purpose, he replied "I don't know, but we put it on ours, too"
Finally, a us multinational who recognized the danger of Canada. So actually, the article didn't explain why we wanted to cut them out. It just was. I thought they suggested it was the marketing company, not mackers, but it wasn't specified.
People have an abstract distaste for "trusted intermediaries" because they think the intermediary just sits in between you and somebody else while collecting fees for adding no value. In many cases the fees absolutely need to be reduced through market competition.

However the root of this thinking is wrong. Intermediaries do add value. Humans are inherently un-trustworthy animals, and you pay your fees to buy the valuable peace of mind the intermediary provides.

So we know trust costs money. The question is whether the cost of decentralized cryptographic trust will ever be lower than centralized trust. The Rube Goldberg machine that is bitcoin has proved the answer at least for the foreseeable future (the next few decades) is...no.
So in other words, it’s no different than state sanction gambling - ie the lottery.
If there was a difference, are you allowed to note it or will you get fired for it? Programming skill is hard to measure. Chess is an interesting area that is a bit easier to quantify.
It comes down to what you are measuring. But, their are some domains where you can't undo like e-sports making it a reasonable option.

Historically, physical typewriters could not erase without leaving residue on the page which may not be obvious, but was sometimes relevant.
I can hot plug-in & plug-out as well as the normal plugged-in while booting.

I tend to have the MBP in clamshell mode and connect my display to the eGPU (4K LG monitors).

When I not-so-nice hot-unplug without telling the OS, it goes to the login screen on the internal display + internal GPU, and when you log back in the session is restored with a stern warning that hot-unplugging without telling the OS is bad.

Note: by default you get no boot screen from EFI on the eGPU on TB2 models, never did a boot on a TB3 MBP with the eGPU attached in clamshell mode, probably doesn't do it there either. I suspect something with GOP or some other EFI graphics protocol not enjoying TB3-TB2 adapters. Not much of an issue for me; I can either do a FileVaul2 unlock on the internal display (or blind), or do an fdesetup authrestart to bypass FileVault2 login on the next reboot.
but wasn't icloud where those people were stealing nudes from celebrity accounts?
Yeah I have no instincts in this because my experience has always been so fewer women than men on the engineering team. So this is totally anecdotal. But the few women I’ve worked with have always been in the upper part of the talent scale, while there has been much variance among the men. I.e., I’ve encountered many low talent (and high talent) men but not one low talent woman. Maybe there are enough hurdles for women (even if the only hurdle is that there are so few _other_ women) that you kinda have to be interested & reasonably good at the job to stick around. If this is true the bell curves may be better for women applicants. However amy anecdotal experience could be simply wrong and it somehow is even or worse for women or something other like overlapping curves of different shapes.
"Like that" trying to tear down a fun little hobby project.
18. I've been learning a lot about Drupal recently, and it's been really eye opening in terms of what PHP can actually do. I haven't taken a serious look at it in years and frankly writing tests in it has been really odd.
> I instantly get elevated to a respect-worthy status for free...Coming upon the Correct Signal by accident

I have worked at companies with open positions, and I have had to sort through a lot of resumes. I also get an informal Bayesian probability heuristic in seeing the resume and then seeing the person who wrote the resume. People who are on the ball, who are the standard deviation above the rest, know what to put on their resumes which looks impressive. People who are a standard deviation below the rest not only don't know how to put together an impressive resume that stands out, they don't even know how to put together a median, average resume.

If I was hiring programmers with little experience, and everyone has the same skillset - Javascript, ES7(8,9...), V8, Javascript framework du jour (React, Angular, Vue, Node.js) - they all look the same. If someone has Clojure on their resume as well, it sends a certain signal out. You still want to talk to that person, and verify that they are a standard deviation above the rest, but it sets you out from the pack. If we don't go by such signals from resumes and the like, I don't know where to go from. The OP is correct though, once you send up a signal you are a standard deviation above, then you have to follow through and you start feeling compelled to be able to produce at a level a standard deviation above.
Yes, but due to the TB2 bandwidth limitation it's not as good as an external screen directly attached to the eGPU. But it's of course still much faster than whatever GPU came with the MBP when it was designed all those years ago.
Obviously software was totally different back then, and Apollo 11 was much more than a software project, but FWIW the Apollo guidance computer software was 130416 lines of assembly[1][2], while Facebook is probably at least 100 million lines of code at this point[3]. Also note that Facebook uses languages that are much more expressive than assembly, so "1000x as much code" probably indicates much more than 1000x as much logic being expressed. The reason Facebook and Gmail seem relatively simple is because they're designed to feel simple so they can be used by regular people, but the full implementation details are very, very complex.

[1] https://qz.com/726338/the-code-that-took-america-to-the-moon...

[2] https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11

[3] https://www.quora.com/How-many-lines-of-code-is-Facebook
Loom prototype publicly available
Same here -- I jumped from about 70 on Qwerty to about 130 on Dvorak. I think it's almost entirely due to the fact that I now type "correctly", rather than anything great about Dvorak. (I don't really recommend switching to other people, but I don't have the motivation to move back.)
You've either been lucky or oblivious. My experience with office people has been that any minuscule thing that can be used to alpha-dog somebody, will be used to alpha-dog somebody.

I suspect it's because the mothership goes out of its way to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and confusion--open offices, stack ranking, endless meetings, etc...

It is easier to assert your dominance over them when they are at each others' throats.
You should check out Workona's workspaces. We've built some of what you've mentioned as a Chrome extension backed by a web app.

Our workspaces (persistent windows with names) remember your tabs automatically, are multiuser/collaborative, and even have a URL (like any good web object). You can also access your workspaces on multiple computers, so you can start a project at work and finish it at home.

We're officially launching out of beta next month, but you can sign up now if you're interested:

https://workona.com
More precisely:

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is what no-deal Brexit actually looks like
It’s strange. Blockchain and crypto currencies biggest advantages are simultaneously its biggest detractors.

It may have its day if global systems fail for some reason, but right now it’s just not something that anyone really wants. Both people and companies are inherently risk averse and like stability.
Am I the only one who recoils in horror reading this and hopes for the day when WebAssembly gets DOM support so we can put this language where it belongs -- the trashbin of history?

Obligatory https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/221658/13510
I switched to using the Dvorak keyboard layout several years ago and haven’t looked back. Never focused much on typing speed but I feel very well with Dvorak in terms of it reducing the amount of finger movement necessary.

When I switched I bought a TypeMatrix 2030 USB with two skins — one with Dvorak layout printed on it and one that was all black. Used the printed skin for like a week or so before switching to the black skin. Had no idea where almost any keys were but this forced me to learn where the keys were very quickly. Only took about three days from not knowing where any keys were to being able to touch type Dvorak quite well.

After having used the TypeMatrix keyboard and Dvorak layout for many years I finally found a mechanical keyboard that looked very compelling. I read about it a bit and decided to go for it and am very glad I did. The ErgoDox EZ Shine. It’s programmable so I defined a Dvorak-based layout for it that was similar to the layout of the TypeMatrix. One of the best things I ever did was to buy the ErgoDox EZ Shine keyboard, it’s great :D

My layout: https://configure.ergodox-ez.com/keyboard_layouts/qppwjy/edi...
This is such a PC solution. When the Apple IIGS came out, there was a software control panel to adjust the speed:

http://apple2history.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Apple-II...
This is a teeny tiny symptom of much more eggregious problem. Online publishing and Digital advertising today is essentially a modern day protection racket. The data targeting is only one iteration of this problem.

Google selling ad space on brand searches to competitors unless you outbid them. Ad networks selling you in market audiences based on intent to buy from you anyways...if you dont buy that data, your competitors will... than you need to use first party data to compete and you spend to remarket to customers who would buy from you anyways if the ad networks were selling that other signal driven data to your competitors. Startups and publishers whose entire business model is ranking in google for your brand name and selling data... than they all have the chutzpah to claim their targeting and ad network should get credit for the sale...

Its one big protection racket driven by publishers and ad networks to skim from businesses...

If the targeting didnt exist for everbody, the cream would still rise to the top... 80% of online advertising today is only necessary because those same predators would sell your customers to your competitors if you dont pay to play!!!

The only solution is to take advertising out of the hands of publishers and put it into the hands of businesses and consumers...

The incentives are all wrong because publishers and middlemen control the monetization!
Is that due to the layout itself or the fact that you are a) probably spending more time practicing (or at least focusing on improving) and b) unlearning bad habits you may have had when typing QWERTY?

Everybody is different, but there are plenty of people that type faster than 85 WPM with QWERTY.

Also, I'm not saying there's no reason to switch. I can believe some alternative layouts are more comfortable and/or better for your hands (these are far more important than raw speed, anyway). I'm just not convinced on the claims as to the size of improvements.

Either way, I can totally get behind self-improvement.
I would imagine some of the problems people have with web developers is this inflated sense of ... something. Comparing GMail with the moon landing is hilariously out of touch. If you hear these sorts of statements enough times it's easy to associate most web developers with delusions of grandeur.
I switched to Dvorak then Colemak then Carpalx. The most interesting part to me was that switching a keyboard cold turkey seemed to only take about a week of solid use before I got used to it. I think when a lot of people thing of switching keyboards they think "it took me years to get fully comfortable with Qwerty" and it scares them away or causes them to switch back in the first day or two thinking it'll take months.

I also vouch for my hands feeling better after the switch... I can't type in qwerty for extended periods of time without getting cramped but I rarely run into issues with other layouts. To be honest this is probably more important/impactful for me than speed.