skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It became more important to hate white people and what they stood for than participate in Enlightenment culture, so they happily regressed to the cultural norms of, say, the Middle East or South America.

Multiculturalism and post-truth thinking was always insane nonsense, and the leftists have been drinking that koolaid for two decades, at least.

To hold up cultures that cut off clitorises in the bush and burn witches, or cultures which stone people and attack women with acid, or cultures which participate in unusual amounts of violence as co-equal to the culture which put us on the moon has consequences — but is a core part of a deeply racist leftist platform, that identifies racial groups with an essentialist culture, eg “black culture”, and views the co-existence of those “racially essential cultures” as the only means of racial co-existence.

As part of that, they formed alliances with questionable groups, such as the “black caucus”, which has long had links to black supremicists and have advocated for racist policies, and similarly sexist feminist groups, eg ones which advocate for female privilege in education even though men have trailed in college degrees since the 1980s.

So, basically, in the 1980s Democrats decided to build a party of racism and sexism to capitalize on social change, and we’re seeing the consequences a generation later.

People warned that this would be the outcome, but people were “right” and knew better.
Health Benefits of Radish
I find it highly inappropriate that EU money goes to a company that openly uses the "diversity" shtick to increase the hiring pool, thus driving down wages:

https://protonmail.com/blog/diversity-in-tech-why-it-matters...

Also, no one has ever explained to me why one should trust protonmail. The Swiss location is not it (c.f. Crypto AG).
This and the integrated terminal been a shortcut away is why I stay as well.

In the future language services may get most of the way there but I think jetbrains will stay ahead.
Ncurses is just a crappy GUI toolkit.

For local work, vast majority of the benefits of using ncurses based applications over X11 ones are cultural and not technical. In similar vein using terminal vim over gvim, or using tmux over just tiling wm does not really gain you much.
Because that's not how companies operate.

Also blaming people on the Internet for Microsoft not listening is extremely rude.

But even if it were true, how is it any of our concern? Personally I couldn't care less about the way Microsoft chooses to conduct its business.
I completely agree with this advice! Find a task that you repeat all the time and automate it. A pretty good place to start is just python, git, and bash. When I start a new job it's actually what I do to get my bearings. I keep a written journal of tasks, I make a notes README, and document repetition. I make bash scripts for shortcuts and to prove things, then I start working them into fabric[0] a (python lib) script. I keep all of this in a private git repository.

My older brother taught himself to program at 36. He was a 3D artist before, he had four kids and a wife and a full time job. He spent evenings and weekends building things for his wife's interest in photography and started blogging about his experience learning. He now runs a very successful company and completely changed his life inside of 3 years. He's not the best programmer, but he focused on the work and the assets that he had that were different from people who might be the "best" programmers, that edge is a huge asset.

I've been programming since I was 12 so it's hard for me to fully relate to starting new. Now at 35, I think the thing that people thinking programming is hard later comes from thinking of it like learning to paint or something. One unique aspect about programming is that it's a force multiplier. Once you grasp something, you don't need to reproduce it, you have it and you use it to prop up the next thing.

I'm biased towards python, but experience tells me it's one of the best starter languages because of it's flexibility. Whatever you're working on will always need a web portal, Django[1] is amazing. You can get started quick and python will allow you to do whatever crazy thing you dream up as well.

----

I've done a reasonable amount of programming mentoring and four things I've found about having limited time to immerse are:

1) Do things you think are fun! It doesn't matter if it's "relevant" to your track, learning to make it play is vital.

2) Give yourself easy wins early and often. If you find yourself stressing about not getting something, put it down and find a way to get something out quick. Once you have a win, take that new confidence back to your rudiments.

3) Never underestimate documenting your process and sharing it. Blog, draw your problems on paper and in a graphics tool, and keep a physical journal.

4) Try to wrap your head around that the feeling you have now about not knowing IS the state of being a programmer. As you get down the road you will be moving into the exact same state with a new "bigger" things. Something that does change is being able to tab into the sense of discovery and wonder easily. Enjoy it!

I believe in you! You got this!

[0] https://www.fabfile.org/
[1] https://www.djangoproject.com/
They pass it once, at most. Many take it many times.
I use terminals but I generally prefer GUI.

> In Unix, one tries to design programs to operate not specifically with each other, but with programs as yet unthought of.

That's what Microsoft did with Word, Excel and most parts of Windows. They all expose very large API surface allowing them to be controlled by other programs, or embedded into other programs. No intimate knowledge is required, both human-readable documentation and machine-readable type info are available.

> but the more you get used to plain-text, the easier it becomes to type commands rather than to search for options or buttons.

Well designed GUI programs use both mouse and keyboard. Users willing to invest their time getting used to a particular program aren't searching, they are using keyboard shortcuts. The upside is users not willing to invest time can still use program, slowly but surely.

> The first is that all this abstraction makes people utterly unaware of what the computer is doing.

Even if you know which processes are compiling and linking your code, how they're launched and how they exchange data, you're still unaware what the computer is doing. There's an OS underneath all that, managing memory and scheduling threads. Underneath there're drivers and multiple stacks of hardware, high-level stuff like USB and PCIe on top of other things eventually on top of NAND. There's quantum physics underneath.

Thinking about all that might be interesting, but useless with regards to getting things done. To get things done, you have to stop somewhere. Stopping at IDE level is not that bad. If it's a good IDE and suitable language, the abstraction might be almost watertight.

Since the OP talks about programming, here're some GUI-related features I like a lot. (1) Wavy red lines under spelling errors. (2) Built-in image viewer (3) GUI-based debugging tools, i.e. live element picker, live property inspector (4) Profiler: data collection doesn't need GUI, visualization does, to view these graphs and dynamically adjust what's on them.
It might be interesting to require a bug bounty program with high enough reward values. If companies want to indemnify themselves from the potential payouts, insurance companies could step in with their own standards and testing methods
Supposed concern trolling first of all isn't even relevant here. A concern troll acts as if they fundamentally agree with you. So someone on the other side of the aisle can't really be said to be concern trolling because they would have substantive disagreements.
> Well, what's Fiji's excuse for being "barely above 'third world' status" ?

Well there's a very long list of reasons starting from geographic isolation to brain drain (incl. to the USA) all the way up to military coups, but I doubt that was a serious question so there's no point me answering your question in any great detail.

> What makes you think it's normal for Fiji to have low standards of development, but it's an aberration for the USA?

See above for why Fiji has low standards of development. In comparison, USA is the most prosperous and powerful nation on earth and has been for over a century. You've enjoyed democracy for almost 250 years. You've been to the moon.

> the US ranks poorly on some of those dimensions, due to extremely complicated and maybe intractable political and cultural issues.

And at last after the defensive stuff is out of the way, we see an attempt at an answer, abstract and hand-wavy though it is.
> (specifically speaking of the technology sector, as that's what I have first-hand experience with)

In other words, you're out of touch with ordinary, less privileged workers.

> It really is a different world, over here. The antithesis to the apathetical, if I may be so bold...

Oh, come on. If you're a developer you can have a "work from home" day in the US as well. Plus, you can earn far more and you pay less in taxes.
True. Though in tradeoff it has massively increased throughput. I'm always frustrated when I see blockchains recommended as a solution for a consensus problem in anything but a zero-trust scenario
Keep order, etc.
> The easy part is pretending animals are like us, even if there's no rigorous reason to believe they are.

You should look into the work of Jaak Panksepp. Watch his TEDTalk [1] for a quick overview but the really mind altering information you will find in his books. I highly recommend "The Archeology of the Mind" to everyone who wants to learn more how the concept of SELF is being created into the brain and the role primary affect plays in complex enough organisms (mammals, some social reptiles/birds).

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65e2qScV_K8
>...rather than the formation of the baby bells.. which pretty much all failed.

The general premise is that the smaller companies allows competition to enter the market. It is precisely because of this competition that the smaller bells all failed - because they were still stuck in the mentality that they needn't compete, whilst also lacking the resources to drive the competition out of town (e.g.: lobbying, buy them out, etc.). They didn't control the whole chain, anymore.

That's supposed to be the idyllic of the capitalist system, yeah?

I'm genuinely not trying to be contrarian, here, but trying to understand how breaking up a monopoly, such as Bell, didn't have any direct consequences on the territorial monopolies.

For example, if Bell had an agreement with 'x' area that they were the sole provider in that area, then as soon as they were no longer Bell, that monopoly agreement essentially hit dissolution, yeah? In principle, that should have an almost immediate net-positive effect on the area, I would think?
> What? That is literally what the article says

Yes, I know, that was my summary of TFA!
The following 10 steps will not just get you into software development, but will get you your own startup:

1. identify something that you do on a computer that is repetitive and boring, and think hard about how to automate it;

2. learn any language/tool that's most accessible to you and build something that at least partially automates that task;

3. start using it yourself every day;

4. every time you run into an issue, don't work around it, take the time to improve it;

5. put it on the internet so others can use your tool;

6. get other people that you work with to try it out, listen to them;

7. talk about your new tool to everyone that you encounter or tangentially work with, at meetings, conferences, colleagues, etc;

8. go back to #4 a couple hundred times

9. Eventually, a potential paying customer will appear, do whatever it takes to get their business.

10. Go back to #4.
I admit it: I like Python’s ternary operator
Tufts student claims innocence after being expelled for grade hacking
What do you mean by "move" ? By "move" I mean you're not in the place you were before you "move"
Cool idea. One thing that’s annoying about dealing with books (not just this platform in particular) is that there can be multiple editions of the same book where the contents are essentially the same. This is especially true for work that is really old or in the public domain. E.g. if I put “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” in the search field, it turns up many different editions. I’m not sure which conversation to join. I get the feeling that the conversation/community might get fragmented all over the place.

Unfortunately I don’t have a real solution to this, short of crowdsourcing for data entry to mark editions as equivalent and merge the conversations that way.
Active noise cancelling is overrated. Use passive isolation.
The problem I have with ^B is that the b is too far away from ctrl. A is much closer, which makes it a much faster one-hand press.
"but the more you get used to plain-text, the easier it becomes to type commands rather than to search for options or buttons. The hard part is to remember which commands to type."

And this is where terminals suck and IDE's are strong. Integrated autocomplete and documentation. I do not need to remember every function or parameter, but I can directly look them up, while I type.
Is there something like this for terminals? I have not seen it, yet ... so, to put it in a picture:

https://xkcd.com/1168/

But yes there is man and --help, but it is not really straightforward and fast, like a modern IDE. And usually I never find in time in --help what I am looking for, so am faster with googling anyway.
If dict addition was purely insertion, I would agree with you, but there is no way the following is intuitive:

{1 : 1} + {1 : 2} ==> {1 : 2}
Unless you're suggesting causation between barely above 3rd world status, and having family days off I'm not sure what your point is?

Richer countries tend to (or should?) have nicer things, its reasonable to ask why one of the richest doesn't have something that much poorer countries do.
> Who is paying for those five extra days?

The cost is shared between taxpayers and the employer – employers get a 150% tax deduction for wages paid for family care leave.

Taxes will go up, and perhaps some prices. This is good.

> You haven't gained or won anything really. There's no free lunch.

Workers maybe haven't gained anything, but a worker has, and that's wonderful.
You can argue all you want about economic models and the absence of free lunches but at the end of the day, a parent who needs to take care of a sick child gets to do that, and having the cost paid elsewhere in taxes or higher prices is a boon.
Citrix investigating unauthorized access to internal network
"Neither do humans"

We talk about it all the time. We have industries built around it. We write books about it. Maybe bears could read our books? Whoops! They can't read! Or tie their shoes, or set the dinner table. Maybe we're special after all ...
> Most of our parallelism is job based. There is a job queue and worker threads are taking jobs from it.

For a game or similar code that's sometimes too much RAM, and usually too much latency.
Citrix tumbles on report of unauthorized access, FBI investigation
banks have minimum balances for them to not charge a fee.. not having good credit and not having money for the minimum balance on a checking account tend to go hand in hand.
It’s a logarithmic scale, which is reasonably approximated as an increase of 3 dB doubling the power (“acoustic energy” is synonymous). A 94% reduction means you’ve reduced it to 6% of the original, which is about a 12 dB reduction (you can figure it in your head like so: 3 dB = 50%, 6 dB = 25%, 9 dB = 12.5%, 12 dB = 6.25%).

For more info, see https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel (which is much more approachable than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel).
It would also mock what you're saying about governments. Why would people working for gvt be better than us at making those kind of choices ?

consumers are rationale

You don't need to suppose that for supply and demand
They incorporate a pretty decent vim emulator as well.

When I've watched people use terminals on Twitch it feels there's big periods of times spent swapping around everywhere and a whole lot of mucking around. Watching people coding real things and dealing with the various normal problems is a pretty good test of an environment, I've never seen anyone do it in compelling way where I didn't think it would be faster in an IDE. That doesn't mean it can't be done, I just haven't seen it and I've been coding for decades and have a bit of an addiction to watching people code online!

There are, however, many times where it's better to go into a terminal rather than try and get things done within the IDE, but most IDEs offer the terminal as part of the experience.

The only downfall of some IDEs is they have little corners of the IDE where driving them through the keyboard isn't the best experience or not fully implemented.
I think you have cause and effect reversed.

They helped fund the development of the new CF drug by Vertex, which Vertex sells for $300k. Because of the success of the drug, they were able to resell their royalty rights to another investor for $3.3 billion.

Funds which they will use to drive massive amounts of additional R&D to make even better treatments at lower costs. In the process they have created therapies which did not previously exist, saving and improving people’s lives.

You can debate the profit motive (as your link mentions) but the Foundation considers this a massive win for their ability to fight CF and make CF sufferers lives better.
With emacs I can run eslint from the terminal, also other things like gcc debugging you get the advantages of an ide's interactivity without needing a gui to run it.
Emacs and Magit (2017)
I work in the technology sector in the US and my experience is exactly the same as yours.

> However, given the American exceptionalism showing up in the thread, I'm going to wager that this probably going to see some vitriolic response.

I actually don't believe in American exceptionalism at all. Nor European exceptionalism. But I am fed up with people from the most developed part of the world acting shocked and morally outraged when life isn't as amazing everywhere else.

You probably didn't intend it that way, but it comes off as extremely smug.
Marriott data breach has cost the hotel chain only $3M so far
Zsh too much bloat and configuration? Uh what?

Sounds like you're using oh my zsh which is seriously bloated.

Zsh and my 20 line .zshrc is basically equivalent to fish. (Only takes 5 or so to get it there)

That said, I have started toying with fish on one server simply because I'm annoyed by the 20 lines.

Similarly slowly moving to vscose but I find the configuration overhead a bit high. Why do I have to specify the same excludes for every plugin?

The main blocker for vscose is that it's just slow. Sublime text feels snappy, even plugin less vscode is sluggish.
Data Scientists Turned Against Statistics
I think the 450k GAN painting was a bargain. There is no doubt that neural art will increase in quality and quantity over the years, maybe even surpassing us in stylistic insight. That painting is the first of its kind, much like owning a first-in-style classical painting from the middle ages. Either that or it becomes a worthless parlor trick (but I deem the chance of this low).
The cost isn't paid elsewhere. It's essentially going straight out of their own paycheck. Not immediately and in equal measure, but over time and on the average. It's effectively vacation days.

Remember, everyone gets those five days. Big earners, small earners. It evens out to nothing. Everyone can't live at the expense of everyone else.
The problem is, as soon as one side starts doing that, the other side will try to outdo them next time they have a chance.

We're already seeing the collapse of many customary norms in Congress, for example.
>For the massacre, the killer actually hated Trump.

That doesn't disprove that he was right wing.

>For the bombing, consider this: people who want to actually hurt their targets, rather than running a false-flag operation, tend to succeed.

Proof?
I don’t understand why going to an option in a GUI counts as ‘searching’ but setting a text option in a terminal, which I’ll have to look up in a manual as I’m not going to guess it am I, doesn’t count as ‘searching.’
Yes, defaults are super important! And in my opinion one of the big shortcomings for many cli applications.

I try to keep the defaults when they make sense, and I try to make my configs add to the experience but not change it too much. So it's nice if it's there but I'm still productive on a clean system.

But ^A in tmux is one of those changes, I think ^A is so much more ergonomic (and used alot) that I have it remapped for that reason. But I still have to remember the default binding.
I know a literal neo-Nazi who voted for the other party. Are they worthy of contempt?
Absurdly not the case. You are in a bubble.
I have a cash back credit card. Companies pay a fee to do credit card transactions. Everything in the store costs the same if I use a credit card or cash. The company raises the price to cover transactions, I get that transaction fee paid back to me by my rewards card. Essentially, people who pay cash or use non rewards cards are paying for my credit card transactions.
There is a whole bunch of shells with all kinds of autocomplete. Terminal editors like vim have plugins for autocomplete and integrated documentation. CLI programs typically have -h or --help.

The whole "Terminal vs. IDE" argument is kinda weird. You can have an IDE in a terminal. This whole thing is about CLI/TUI vs. GUI, not terminal vs. IDE.
>In other words, you're out of touch with ordinary, less privileged workers.

Just because I'm "out of touch" with ordinary, less privileged workers doesn't equate to my experience and observations in the sector as being invalidated, yeah? Isn't the site "Hacker News" and not "ordinary, less privileged workers'" news?

>Oh, come on. If you're a developer you can have a "work from home" day in the US as well.

That might be true for you but is it true for developers in the overall society?

Let's take this to an extreme example: A coworker missed over two months, last year, for 'x' medical reasons. What would've surely driven him to the poor house in the states was paid through those taxes you later commented on and there was no threat to his job because of it.

>Plus, you can earn far more and you pay less in taxes.

What does that have to do with anything related to kids and the propensity to send them to school because you haven't the time to take off to take care of them or the funds to have a minder? Surely, those less taxes (and more pay) should equate to more days from school, yeah, if it really is as exceptional as you're trying to make it sound.

Personally, I like paying taxes for a better society (e.g.: education, health, infrastructure, etc.) but that's just me. However, that has nothing to do the topic.
> Python 2 was a mess. range vs. xrange, items vs. iteritems, keys vs. iterkeys

Generators execute asynchronously, you have to keep track of what they are up to and where they are in their iteration process. This can cause all sorts of problems. Consider the following:

for x in pull_from_database():
do_something_with_disk_or_network(x)

If pull_from_database returns a list, the code can be relatively easily understood. If it's a generator, this can be an incredibly confusing piece of code because do_something_with_disk_or_network can alter the generation of pull_from_database.

The same logic applies to iterating over dictionaries or other items. With python 3, I'm sure we'll start seeing many bugs of the following nature that can be pretty difficult to debug:

d = get_dictionary()
for k, v in d.items():
do_something_and_possibly_mutate(d)