skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I completed a Ph. D. in software engineering between 1998 and 2003. I started out in Sweden (Blekinge Institute of Technology) and finished it in Groningen (NL). After that I continued as a post doc and then decided to quit the academic world.

My main reason for this was that the paths to success in academia are basically to be a glorified manager (aka. a professor) or a teacher. Doing research seems to be mostly not on the table for either path as that is outsourced to Ph. D. students and post docs on temporary contracts. The path to professorship is long and hard and involves dealing with organizational politics to establish slow progress via post doc positions, an eventual tenure track position to maybe a professorship. Over the course of this career you have progressively less time to do research and you get bogged down in bureaucracy, budgets, and other management stuff.

The alternate track of becoming a teacher seems reserved for those that fail the first path. This has always felt a bit wrong to me as an important function of a university is teaching. But the reality is that as a teacher, you do no research and you report to professors that are mostly interested in doing research and regard you as a second rate citizen. This seems to be more true in Europe than in the US where quality teaching is key to university revenue and thus your career.

I was well on track with the research path having a steady stream of publications and options for continuing. But neither path appealed to me and I found the prospect of dealing with university politics, funding, and publications for the next forty years to be unappealing. Teaching could have been appealing to me but not as outlined above where you are essentially treated like a career failure.

So I left university to work for a small software company (for the first time practicing what I had been preaching) and later rebooted my academic career for a few more years in industry by joining Nokia Research in Helsinki. In there I found myself doing a lot of the same things as a post doc but with a decent salary and career options. I had a lot of fun and worked with some smart people on some cool projects. Unfortunately Nokia did not last and I transferred out into the maps unit in Berlin. After a few years, just before it turned into here.com, I joined the startup scene and have also done some freelancing.

I haven't really looked back. I enjoy building software and learning new things while doing that. I'm currently in a CTO type role and I haven't published anything this decade. So, my academic career at this point is pretty much over. I don't miss it but it is definitely been educational and formative. IMHO the most important function of a academic education is learning to think for yourself and the ability to learn new things. That doesn't really stop when you leave academia and they don't have a monopoly on this. Especially for computer science related fields, a lot of the progress is actually made in industry, not academia.
Show HN: An iOS Gopher client, written in/for iOS/Pythonista
Just for a bit of fun, an iOS Gopher client, written in/for Pythonista for iOS.
For those who are focused on the privacy aspect of this issue, perhaps Privacy.com can help?

https://privacy.com/

Full disclosure: I found it when it was mentioned on another HN thread a couple weeks ago.
Ask HN: What were you doing around the age of 18 – 20?
I'm currently a 2nd Year Uni student at a relatively prestigious University in the country I live in (Ireland), studying a mix of Computer Science with business, as I enjoy both (more so the technical aspects). I recently built and deployed my personal website, using self taught full stack technologies, something I'm thoroughly proud of. Languages I would use mostly are the regular web technologies and frameworks(JS, Vue, React etc), Python as the main language I would use and Bash (eh) for maintaining a project I'm working on. I have dabbled in Java before and I'm making it my 2019 goal to learn C++. I'm also trying to get a summer internship with one of the big tech companies here. While also trying to do all this, I'm also working a full time job (20-30hr/week) in a retail position for the last 3 months (is my first job) Despite all this, I feel my priorities are all mixed up, or I'm unintentionally slowing myself down in some area. 2019 is here and I want it to go down a different path. Thing is I've heard a couple final year students doing my course say they've been looked down upon as having lackluster technical ability compared to full CS students, which worries me as I enjoy programming but want to set up my own business at some point in the next 2 years. Just looking for some advice on how to move forward with everything, maybe I have a little too much on my plate?
What's being done to infect engineering with the right culture? Culture is automatic. A year or so ago, at my place of employment, software engineering and customer support were newly seated together, almost mixed in together (it's not too noisy, which was my only concern when the idea was suggested - customer support probably fields a half-dozen phone calls a day; they do most of their work through logging in to customer sites and over various text chat formats).

The software engineers see (and sometimes hear) support helping customers and talking about the problems and how best to fix things; they see the results of their good work directly, and they see the results of their bad work directly. They have a cup of coffee with their friends in support who deal directly with the customer's requests and complaints. Now, they're one team; it can be seen in how they interact and how they work together. I get eMails from people in support telling me how helpful various software engineers are and what great work they're doing fixing bugs and adding features, and software engineers take pride in doing a good job to help out the person who sits opposite them. They are SO much more plugged in to the needs of the company. Everything works better. They are steeped in the company culture every day.

It was automatic. We didn't have to tell people to pay attention to the other people. We didn't have to tell software engineers that it was bad when they heard support trying to talk a customer through a UI that they just wrote last week. Writing software that met the needs of the customer was no longer an abstract thing; they could see the effects of good and bad software right there every day, cringing when their good friend was having to apologise repeatedly to a customer for something not working properly and taking pride when a support engineer passed on good words from a happy customer who had received a bugfix. You can't turn culture into process to be followed; so how are you ensuring that your culture is infecting the engineers?

Culture is learned from the people around you. Is your engineering team isolated? Are they simply repeating bad behaviours to each other? Can they see the consequences of doing a bad job? Can they see the consequences of doing a good job? Do your engineers actually have the chance to learn culture, or instead do they just have processes?
I would not be surprised if they did. After all, Apple put terrible things like desktop Java and Flash out of their (and our) misery. This sounds like yet another iteration of Swing, a technology to develop GUI programs that could, at best, look subtly wrong on every platform.
The efficient decision would be to swap out into an Android phone of similar vintage and sell the iPhone. You’ll come out positive because iPhones hold value better.
Because it lacks the social part
> Unlike other positions, for engineers, it's the companies that are replaceable, not the employees.

I read that a few times in this thread, but I'm not sure whether it's as true as pictured here. Maybe in some bubble environments (bay area and Seattle). But for most of us other engineers there isn't necessarily the next employer around the corner - even for those with exceptional skills.
Zziz/pwc: Papers with code. Sorted by stars
Fast? Yes. The Gold Standard?

Pshaw.

This thread is utterly incomplete without Fizz Buzz Enterprise Edition™[1].

If you want to get straight to the good parts of it, just look at the Factories folder[2].

[1]https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

[2]https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
In France and Germany they banned paternity tests https://www.irishtimes.com/news/french-men-s-insecurity-over...
Well, given that most people don't have content creators in their social circles it sounds rather short-sighted if Mastodon intentionally lacks methods to bring content (creators) to the platform.
A Readable Specification of TLS 1.3
Sounds like you're in a filter bubble.

Can't have good engineering without good management.
Nope, not special.
Totally agree, although hype can at times help bring the real thing in that it raises expectations above the bar they are currently at. Side-note: it's "dysfunction"
>So we are still equally reliant on employers as the facilitator of access to a retirement benefit. Functionally it’s truly not different than pensions, only the underlying financial instrument is different.

No, 401K pensions are 'defined contribution' systems; you put in X, your employer puts in X/2 (or whatever it is they decide. X/2 is common in my area, but as you point out, some lower-end employers contribute nothing at all, while others have weird vesting schedules on it.) - when you retire, you get out... however much that money has grow (or lost) - no guarantees, just a tax deferral on money you invest for retirement.

Usually when people talk about pensions, they are talking about /defined benefit/ pensions. These are essentially like an annuity that is only good if the issuing company doesn't go under; you work until you retire, and you get some fixed amount of income every month until you die (or the company goes under)

The idea that a defined benefit pension is very much like a lifetime annuity is key to understanding why pensions seem to work fine in some times and not so fine in other times; In the '80s, when my parents were getting jobs that got them defined benefit pensions, you could run out and buy T-bills and expect to make significantly more than inflation. annuities made a lot of sense. By the time it was my turn in the late 90s/early aughts? T-bills no longer returned significantly more than inflation. Safe investments became a lot less profitable, and thus defined benefit pensions became a lot more difficult.
Trim App is meant to be something like this but so far it on,y does something about recurring subs, I think.
It's somewhat been picked over. If you're looking to renovate tho there is still a lot to choose from. GF recently bought a house for 45k which will need 40k in renovation probably. But recently a house sold down the street for 150k so there is still money to be made.
For urban areas the land costs far more than the panels.

Utility scale has largely abandoned tracking as not cost effective.
The whole 8 hour exam in under 3 hours?
> My opinion is that these vehicles are a lot safer than most human drivers

Eventually, that’s likely to be true, but currently these are sill in the experimental stage and regularly have issues. The collective benifit is probably a net win long term. But, they are not replacing google street view cars or something so as to spread that risk out. Instead they are concentrating that risk into a small subset of residential streets in some poor neighborhoods.

Even if it was already slightly safer than human drivers the extra traffic really risks these people’s lives. But because they are low income they don’t expect to be able to afford self driving cars in the next 10+ years. So, that’s meaningful harm without the exception to benifit.

Now how a tiny subset of a community responds is predictable but not justifiable.
I’ve started doing that whenever I have trouble sleeping. I start with a random world, set it to orbit, then make another world, have it orbit the first world, then add a third. I let them all orbit eachother.
Say there's a car manufacturer that makes a car. It's a reasonably safe car, but sometimes people speed in it.

Without really telling anyone, they install a webcam and point it at the driver to see whether they might speed on a certain day, based on facial expression and skin color. Why those? Just a weird hunch! They find that the person actually did speed. (Turns out, they didn't really tell anyone that all your driving data was uploaded to their servers, too!)

The problem is two fold. First, they shouldn't have been collecting this data on their users in the first place. The manufactures job is to build a car, not ensure that the car is being used responsibly. This is simply an impossible task to charge anyone with, and the implications are frightening.

Second, I'm not a believer in using algorithms to predict behavior. Too much black box "mangle the numbers until it works". You could make an argument that there's a correlation between skin color and speeding. You might even be able to make pretty charts, but I think this is simply bad science.

You make it sound like this model would actually continue to work at 75% perpetually. I think that it's far more likely it worked this one test, and performance would trend sharply downwards. However it makes this decision, I think it's about as absurd and wrong as the crazy example above.

On the other side of the coin, people are putting too much trust in magic algorithms they don't properly understand, and are far too complacent about egregious invasion of privacy.
Detroit New Year Gunfire 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3yo7tX7c_k
it's difference between not carrying cash and telling you they don't have cash/change for obvious reasons, this happens only to foreigners

if you are drunk enjoy those fake banknotes they have for these occasions. happened to me only once completely sober in restaurant they tried this while i was there with my Chinese wife, they really have no shame
It's fairly common for people with law degrees to either never use the degree, or quit law after a short time because they hate the work, just like it's common for people with humanities education to go into technology and engineering.

One of my fave guitarists, Robert Quine (Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Lou Reed, Brian Eno, Tom Waits, Matthew Sweet) was arguably the first punk rock lead guitar player. But before that he had passed the bar in Missouri and got a job writing tax law articles for Prentice Hall in NJ while commuting to Manhattan to play with the Voidoids on nights and weekends. After a few years, he hated working in law and eventually quit. He looked like a college professor, but he was a total animal on guitar (listen to the two solos he plays on the Voidoids' "Blank Generation" single). He talks about all that in this interview: http://www.furious.com/perfect//quine.html
Matter of definition.
PE is required in the US but the article is specifically talking about the software engineering PE.
Trivially, you could then "copy" the weights that a ANN would learn into a kernel and obtain the same accuracy.

Sure.

I'm not sure I agree with this bit in theory.

No one really agrees with it in theory - I'm not aware of a good theoretical explanation as to why some deep networks are easier to train. And yet there is a growing body of real, generalized practical hints which work pretty reliably.

This is pretty exciting! There is undiscovered ideas here. But it is unsatisfactory from the theoretical sense at the moment.
social security isn't an investment program. When it started during the great depression, the money put in by workers was immediately paid out to retirees who hadn't contributed to the system.

This is how it works today; working people pay in, and our parents or grandparents get that money.

Any perceived financial trouble is because we've now got people living longer, and so we've got more retirees for the same number of workers. This... just means we need to raise taxes.

I mean, really, I think it's silly to say we have a special tax for social security; my understanding is that the money goes into the general fund anyhow (and it's been running a surplus for some time now)

We don't have a special tax for the army that you only have to pay on your first $128K/yr, why do we have that for social security?
Most people are not members of the underclass. Anyway you can't really use historical data like this to estimate the non-paternity rate today.
CVE-2016-3959 also called the golang infinite loop: big.exp
For urban residential I wouldn’t give up any area of my small plot of land even if it provided all my electricity and the installation was given to me for free.
My site is at https://www.stavros.io/ and various smaller projects at https://www.makerfol.io/stavros/. The particular dog feeder is mostly my dad's build, I only provided the software and relays to trigger it, so it's not written up anywhere. I can post some photos if you like.
yeah, that one had me wonder too. but i suppose before that there was nothing. and maybe the raised platform makes it easier to spot the bus in a distance
Are you sure? In their latest COD loot boxes do not contain anything pay to win. Same with Overwatch which falsely gets blamed for the whole lootbox thing we have going on atm - https://youtu.be/PTLFNlu2N_M

Destiny2 had some issue with theirs but didn’t they listen to the community and fix those.

I’m not a fan of loot boxes but their are not as bad as others in the industry.
a reference to an old Bugs Bunny cartoon

Which, in turn, was a reference to Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men".
Matrix (im bridge), the current status and year to date
How about “stop being actively hostile to people”. Most rural areas are populated by anti-people people. They want some idea of “jobs”, meaning they want themselves to have higher quality higher compensated work. They don’t want anyone else to come there because “traffic”, “this place is full”, and “do you want this to be Manhattan? God forbid people not want to live in shoeboxes” and shit like that.

They’re also usually homophobic, transphobic, racist, and xenophobic. It isn’t 90-10 but the true shift in society happens when you go 60-40 one way to the other. No one wants to live in this parochial backwater but them. Don’t trust me, ask Pew Research Centre.

Anyway, all told, each region gets what they encourage. This 10% requirement is idiotic. If rural regions want tech jobs, they can stop sucking so badly.
Progress in Deep Learning Object Detection
Times just likes to bash their competition, Facebook, at every opportunity. They're not attempting to hide their agenda.
The first problem with Telegram is that it's not full e2e. Only the private chat function is end to end encrypted, all group messaging is not.

The second problem with Telegram is that it's not truly open source. Only the client is open source and I recall (correct me if I am wrong) that the client code is not even up to date with the deployed apps in production, which seems strange to me.

The third problem is that Telegram are using their own encryption and authentication algorithms rather than using academically reviewed techniques.

The forth problem is monetization, after so many years of operation with no ads or obvious income stream from consumers it makes me question how it's even operating.

Other than these concerns, telegram for a daily casual messenger is great. The app is better than whatsapp and is cross platform.

To address my problems/concerns with telegram I recently tried "Wire". Which seems to operate more transparently and securely, whilst also having excellent cross platform apps.
I’ll second the Joel test. But like a lot of “modernisations”, I think the version you give has lost some of the spirit of the original. Less room for individuality, more tooling, rules, and processes. And losing “quiet working conditions”, in particular, is a big change.

I still find the original holds up pretty well in many environments.
I don't think a general answer is possible. Academia and industry both cover such a huge range.

For example in my case, I did a PhD and then went into embedded industry. We did better engineering in some research projects than in the industry project I'm currently in. In both cases the projects are not representative though.

In general, I can only say that I enjoy building stuff which gets actually used. The chance for that is much higher in industry.
Upgrading the Nginx Executable on the Fly
One thing that massively sped up serving content on my RPi was precompressing everything static and disabling on-the-fly compression.

I'd also be more exited about getting EdDSA leaf certificates than ECDSA.
iOS apps aren't Apple's products.
NASA's Mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt
That’s a well established notion in anarchist thought as well as feminist thought (as an explanation for why women are considered inscrutable but women are also considered empathetic- because men don’t really have to put in the effort.)

https://amp.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/14qprl/explanati...
With the price for solar-panels falling exponentially (1/2 every ~6 years), north facing tiles even in the most extreme examples will become profitable in a few decades or less.

[0] http://blog.comparemysolar.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/... etc
As if every aspect of our life is not shaped by "big corp"s. It is laughable actually. They should vandalize their tv, detergent box and cereals as well.
Commenting on one RFC a day
Apache spark – the Best data processing Framework for data scientists – 2019
I believe nothing when it come to data on educational outcomes as it has all been totally corrupted by politics.

Do you think smart people would bother to spend a fortune on education (either directly via private schooling or indirectly by housing) if the school didn't matter? Follow the money, not the rhetoric.

More directly I have spent sometime helping out in different schools and I have seen with my own eyes the consequences of a single disruptive child on the learning environment - all the teachers time is sucked out dealing with this one student. I can't imagine trying to teach in a classroom with 3 or 4 disruptive students.
I still might chicken out. There's a lot of people that are likely going to fall off my radar. The thought makes me sad.
That's...ironically the distinction made in the case(s).
Being able to do something is completely different from it being an advisable thing to do, and this is a can of worms that would be better left untouched.

For example, if Facebook can identify suicide risks in Ohio, then they will be pressured to identify gays in Saudi Arabia and Muslims in Xinjiang. Or weed smokers, underage drinkers, and a bunch of everyone-does-it-but-nobody-cares crimes, where the punishments are technically quite harsh.

The only effective standard that differentiates suicide from the others is "what Facebook's executive thinks is morally acceptable". It is certain that Facebooks executive are not the right people to arbitrate moral issues, not matter how black and white.

There best layer of protection we have here is Facebook taking an official position of "we don't judge, we just sell ads". It isn't perfect and it isn't necessarily logically consistent, but if Facebook sees itself as an arbiter then sooner or later it may well disagree with something we do and take action to stop us doing it.
The demographic time bomb that could hit America
Regarding rotl/rotr, that was a typo in the example; they rotate the top three items left or right, I find Forths choice of 'rot' arbitrary but that may be a consequence of how the pieces fit together in Snigl.

And I agree, the sum of 0-7 is still 28 :) Another typo.

Thanks again, this really helps. The plan is to turn all examples into actual tests and generate the README using Snigl eventually, but the required features are not quite there yet.
> and a functional digestive tract.

Different disease to yours but I hear that, I never realised how important that was until mine went sideways, it affects everything.