skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems like right now, the benefit of the education we're providing is waning. Making it free will deal with the student loan crisis, but won't make the education worth more.

Seems like, in terms of income/job prospects, you're better off studying to be an electrician or plumber (which is relatively cheap) than getting a BA in liberal arts or the humanities (which is relatively expensive). If this is the case, solution definitely isn't to encourage more people to do the latter.
While we’re talking about metaphors: this reminds me of the distinction between craft and art. Where one is the creation or something elegant and functional (craft, lisp), the other treats more important the ideas being put into practice (art, fortran).

I think the article’s artificially limiting its point to mathematics - there are plenty of other disciplines where we can find well-tread useful metaphors, etc.
> the most pointlessly tedious jobs ever created

Are you saying that the tedium itself is engineered to be present? I mean, the work is definitely not pointless. It is as pointed as it gets, as significant as a miner in a mine, a farmer in the field. Monotonous, tedious, yes. Pointless? No.

Now, the idea that the tedium is engineered in would be interesting. That would suggest it could be engineered out. Which is very interesting. You solve that problem, I submit there are some HR folks who would like your contact info.
Flux (https://fluxml.ai/) is one native Julia ML package. For a more detailed discussion of the use of Julia in the space see https://julialang.org/blog/2018/12/ml-language-compiler
https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BkpiPMbA-

Code: https://github.com/sunblaze-ucb/decision-boundaries
Well, life insurance does that. I recall having someone over to check my health and they had me fill out a form detailing the types of activities I do (it even covered skydiving).

Since I'm healthy, I got a fantastic rate.

However, nothing like that happened for my health insurance. The closest I have is a program that helps pay for my gym membership if I go regularly. The really silly thing is that I'm not able to go regularly because I ride my bike a lot, yet I am likely more healthy because of that than many of the people who go to the gym regularly.

Honestly, I would totally be down with a voluntary system like that for things like obesity, smoking, etc. If I present a lower risk to the insurance company, shouldn't I be rewarded with lower rates? If that were the case, I think more people would make real changes to their lives instead of fiddling with fad diets, pedometers, and gym memberships. Saving $20/month on a gym membership or getting a free Fitbit is less motivating than saving $100/month for being healthy.
Those coming from HipChat will vastly understand how good Slack search is.
People I have worked with who have graduate level education (masters or doctorate) are extremely well prepared when performing as a software developer. The education can be in any academic discipline.

People who have a bachelors degree are less prepared to work as a software developer. Counter intuitively this lack of preparation is magnified for those with a computer science degree. Most of my computer science coworkers have historically had weaker communications skill, such as describing details with precision objectively or documenting a simplified set of instructions. I am so under whelmed that basic reading and writing are something I would test for in a job interview.

In addition to weak communication skills I have also observed less flexibility or willingness to learn unfamiliar skills from computer science skills undergraduates. It’s as though these students believe they know all they need and the employer should adapt to the set of techniques these employees were taught. I have had heard somebody on HN describe this as lame duck syndrome. I have observed this enough that it biases me in opposition to job candidates with a comp sci education.
Fascinating piece of data. I found a source here which breaks down the "distance from mom" statistic further by region: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...
Identity, Single Sign On, and 'information gleaned for marketing' etc. are all different overlapping issues.

Truly there are almost zero situations in which an entity needs to know your real identity. You bank, surely, but you go into the bank to do that.

Single Sign on via Google and FB is now normative because they're ubiquitous and convenient, and of course, FB id's come with a greater possibility of legitimacy, and nice FB pixel marketing data.

I suggest that thre is something that could work, it just needs to be put forward by a credibly entity that for whatever reason feels it's in their interest, whereupon those interests are not entirely conflicted with the individuals right to privacy.
This is (%#(* ridiculous. If you're part of this group you're a coward or you're just looking for another excuse to treat women like something "less". I'll tell you to your face that you are wrong and that you should be ashamed.
I agree in principle, but there’s a rather fundamental problem here: writing the spec has to be easier than writing the program. Otherwise,we should just write a compiler for the spec language and save ourselves a step, or blunder on by writing the program without a spec, as is usually done.
Well you need both. Where people work in the SF Bay is distributed heavily through the area. You'll always have commuters, especially in two income households
Nasams
I'll believe it when they produce a MacBook Pro that developers love again or a Mac Pro that (not yet independently wealthy) developers can afford again.
If they're large enough, they have to buy 2 seats anyway, so it shouldn't be a huge issue.
No: telescopes are tools to study the universe, just as computers are tools for studying computation.
> As someone who did the software route, there are days I deeply wish I had done this sort of thing instead.

Don't. As an office worker, you have to worry about carpal tunnel syndrome, your back going and cardiovascular disease from sitting.

Manual labor means repetitive strain injuries and working in an environment that's conducive to hurting one's self.

Those who do manual labor and aren't able to stack capital, become their own boss and hire others will have to worry about all of those things, and the effects of aging on their ability to do their job. Bodies deteriorate with time, and a single injury might prevent them from ever being able to work again when they hit their 40s, 50s or 60s.

> I daydream about taking a pay cut just to be able to go live in like... Cheyenne, WY or something and not be a part of the tech rush

Find an agency or consultancy to work for. There are plenty of them using decades' old tech, maintaining their clients' projects, and "new and shiny" is actively avoided in favor of what's worked for years.
Tips for Completing OSRS Cure a Queen with 9% Off Runescape Gold on RS3gold
The OSRS Fairytale II is a important queat in Firaytale quest serial. From this quest, you can gain antique lamp and access to Fairy rings network. Learn the Fairytale II - Cure a Queen guide and win them all.

Best time to join RS3gold Summer Big Promo:enjoy 7% & 9% discounts to buy RS 3 gold, OSRS gold and any others on RS3gold.com from Jun. 4 to Jun. 10, 2019.

Guide & walkthrough to Fairytale II - Cure a Queen OSRS

Unlock the Fairy Rings
1.Head to Draynor Market to speak to Martin the Master Gardener twice with 5 minutes’ interval.
2.Go to Fairy Nuff's grotto in Zanaris at north of the bank.
3.Take Nuff's Healing certificate off the floor, right-click to study it.
4.Talk to the Fairy chef at south of the bank.
5.Head to the south-west area of Zanaris, read the Rune temple sign south of the Cosmic altar.
6.Talk to the Fairy Godfather in the throne room, then to the Co-ordinator north of the throne room., at last to Fairy Fixit near the fairy ring west of the throne room.

Curing the Queen
1.Take Dramen staff, and teleport using the fairy ring air, dlr, djq, ajs in order.
2.Talk to Fairy Nuff and Fairy Very Wise in the Northeast corner of the area.
3.Return to Zanaris and pickpocket the Fairy Godfather, then to the hideout to give Fairy Nuff the Queen's secateurs.
4.Teleport using fairy code ckp, then wait at the destination to pick a star flower that is to bloom.
5.Teleport using fairy code dir. Kill a gorak for gorak claws.
6.Return to the hideout and talk to fairy Nuff.
7.Use the star flower on your vial of water, then use the ground gorak claw powder on to make a magic essence potion.
8.Use the magic potion on the Fairy Queen, speak to her when she wakes.

Meanwhile, you can buy cheap Rs3gold or runescape 2007 gold with 6% Off(code"NEW6RS") from https://www.rs3gold.com/ at anytime.
I remember, in an upper-level Philosophy class, the professor mentioning Gödel, and I'm pretty sure no one but me knew who he was. (Though, to be fair, at the time I knew him as "Go-Dell", so when he asked about "Girdle" I initially didn't recognize the name.)
IMHO SCons had some nice ideas but it falls down in practice in non-trivial projects. Wrestling with eels is easier than doing cross-platform builds in SCons. And while I do love Python, I think using a fully-fledged language is a mistake.

I think a declarative DSL with scripting hooks behind it is a better model. Having used many, many build systems over the years, I've never found one I thought truly got things right (though several came close).

I actually think the ideas behind bjam ought to be revisited. It had a declarative style, with scripting to support it. The implementation was awful sadly; the tiniest mistake or typo would send the parser into a tailspin and the documentation was truly confusing. Any errors were presented to the user at the scripting level, which was even more confusing. But the idea of having toolchains defined separately, and having traits and features was brilliant. There's a lot to learn from there.
As much as the skepticism around their ability to truly do 8k 120hz (of which I am equally skeptic), and the technologies that have been in PC gaming for a while - but please don't forget the benefits this brings.

As we saw with the 4k console push, it helped expand the 4k TV market, and particularly 4k media content.

I'm all for pushing hardware manufacturers, developers and content creators to think more about high resolution and high refresh as something expected - not just something to strive towards.

So as much as I doubt there will be much 8k or high refresh content available - I'm glad we have two big companies in Sony and Microsoft helping drive that push. Kudos to them.
I am very skeptical. Can you give a more specific example?
"gratis" is not a common english word either; you'd only use it to make this exact distinction.
They have been selling trash can for retarded amount of money, 6 years old hardware. Now they made this ridiculous display and another pro and selling it for retarded price again. What exactly they are listening too? And mac mini is a total garbage with soldered micro storage. 256 GB for $6K workstation? Is it a joke? And stop offering iMac scam, displays live longer than hardware, with iMac you will throw away display and hardware along few years after.

Apple is legal scam, dumping extremely overpriced hardware which is barely capable to run their current OS. They dumped tons of mac mini models recently without a reason at all.

Maybe they have listened and replaced idiotic keyboards on macbooks? Oh no, they seems didn't.
my .gitignore is set to ignore everything with a wildcard and un-ignore a few hidden directories where i'm likely to place new files (e.g., .vim, .zsh)
Neural differential equations are something that's worked out in Julia. Neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs), stochastic differential equations (SDEs), and delay differential equations (DDEs) can be found in this blog post (https://julialang.org/blog/2019/01/fluxdiffeq). Neural jump diffusions (jump SDEs) and neural partial differential equations (PDEs) are described here: http://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/. All of this is built on the Flux.jl machine learning library which is extremely flexible.
Depends on office culture I guess. To me IM is easily the best of both worlds rather than worst. I couldn't imagine a productive team without it.
I think I might just be done with Apple. That culture of saying nothing and the surprising customers with things is like betting in Vegas. And unfortunately for Apple, the house always wins. They can repair the damage of the Mac Pro debacle with a new Mac Pro, but they haven't owned the train wreck of a keyboard on the Macbook Pro. Sure, they might be ready to hit it big on a double down on black, but in the meantime, my Lenovo keyboard is a delight.
Who goes to college to work in tech anymore?
My issue with this is that most of the emails I get are not thoughtful, verbose, well-reasoned responses. They're "great thanks" or "next monday at 5pm?". This is where IM shines – when you need to communicate something that should be brief.
Knuth is one of the few authors that shows the derivation of the Binet's formula for Fibonacci numbers.
Just a reminder, before we get too excited: this is the definition of vapourware. We haven't seen anything.
It's not abandonware. SUSE uses it as a default, and Facebook uses it too I believe.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14907771
It doesn’t get me HN points to say, but I’m a developer who loves my MBP.
That was when I had them reboot their computer when I was doing tech support in a call center
> Are we really happier than hunters and gatherers?

Would you be happier having to risk your life daily to get food and constantly facing hunger?

This is just romanticizing primitivism.
The lack of housing here could be taken as a sign that moving here or locating a business here could cost more by way of taxes and such. If it did cost more the flow of people and debt into the area might slow and some of the good jobs here would go elsewhere.
Site seems down...archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20190610020009/https://www.filfr...
Microsoft’s Next-Generation Xbox
We came from hipchat. Maybe search is just something I'm not very good at.
The people who went to MIT didn't need to spend 10+ years "establishing a track record" before getting a desirable job, people took them seriously right out of college.
How do you know what are the collective interests of society? If you don’t know, who does?
I think if you're doing your spec as a combination of high level set theory or algebra and some prose, then it should be easier than writing the program itself (assuming you know a bit about math and how to write a spec).

The question is how much time is it worth putting into writing a detailed spec. I think the answer is that it really depends on the size and complexity of your software.

I think the idea is that programmers have to be comfortable with writing something down, even if it's not perfect. A half-baked spec is better than no spec, basically. Otherwise you will likely end up with spaghetti code that needs to be rewritten or scrapped.
That's great! I'm so glad it exists!
in other news drinking too much water is harmful and can even kill you. now, how many people are dehydrated vs drink too much water?
> Commutes are long because most people can't afford to live next to their jobs.

I'd love to see studies by traffic coordinator. Highways in the outer suburbs are affected by this (101 south of Santa Clara, 580 east of Castro valley, 680, etc.), but not necessarily the inner core (e.g. 101 on Peninsula, 880 in the East Bay, etc.) which traverse similar priced markets.

Engineers that work in the South Bay aren't living in SF because they can't afford the South Bay.
With my family, for sure. I hate missing dinner more than anything. But it's more important to prioritize my face-to-face time with them, than my collaborators.
Here are a few references that solve problems on very large graphs:

[1] implements work-efficient parallel algorithms for a list of fundamental graph problems. They report times on a O(200B) edge graph on a single multicore.

[2] reports distributed running times for BFS, connectivity, PageRank, and SSSP on a large number of distributed hosts. The times are usually slower than the single-machine times, despite using two orders of magnitude more threads.

[3] Reports connectivity times on a truly large graph that is not publicly available (several trillions of edges).

My feeling is that unless you are at FAANG or a big national lab, the largest graphs that will show up in practice (today) are on the order of billions of edges, and can be solved quickly using single-machine multicores.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.05208

[2] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~roshan/Gluon.pdf

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.10727
Cost savings from fire safety may be higher in rural areas (in California), but I don't have any numbers one way or the other.
I agree with the author probably to the 75% mark, but not to the full 100% kill.

One key benefit of IM is being able to be the "next available interrupt". i.e. if team members have headphones on, we are only allowed to bother each other through IM which we say, "when you're available..." allowing the other party to effectively keep their current train of thought until it's complete.

Personally, I actively push conversations either to personal or to email depending on the situation.

IM is great and fills a particular space, but it's when people hold onto it too long it becomes a problem.

This can be said for email chains that are too long or face-to-face conversations that lack notes. Each has their problems, but also their place and is still useful.
> burn it up but keep it working as long as you can

I mean, if the ship is on fire, you want the missile control systems to shut down after all missiles have been fired.
RAID5 has been excessively risky and obsolete for a long time - not enough parity, and too much risk of data loss from unrecoverable read error during a massive-drive multi drive rebuild (like, an eight drive * 8TB RAID5). Better tests for production use would be RAIDZ2.
Given you have no desperation to complete something particular, gives you the edge to try new ideas.

Here are a couple akk yourself questions:

"What things do I find frustrating that I know I could make a positive impact on?"

"What is my idea of a cool one-man moonshot concept that I could (probably) never realize but would be ultimately be fun to do?" (you probably will be surprised on how far you can get or what it leads to...)

"What's the scariest thing I could work on?"
Just FWIW your experience doesn’t sound anything like the software jobs I’ve had. In fact all my programming jibs have been pretty close to your ideal. I’m currently in an enterprise job, but have done startups and consulting agencies as well. Only the startup had any long hours.

I’d encourage you to get a new job. These days programmers are in extremely high demand, and you sound like you’ve gotten stuck working at a place with a non-ideal culture.
I love my late 2013 MacBook Pro too, but I've been longing to replace it for years now, only to be disappointed time and again with each new MBP release. I'm still waiting and wishing for a model worth buying.
If only they kept the 2 AA batteries, but that's just me.
are you a fan of the butterfly keyboard ?
The loss of control and autonomy over irrelevant little things like this is one of those things that reinforces the power and cruelty of the guards.
At the best paying FAANG-type firms, the vast majority of developers have a degree. The employees there that don't have a degree typically had to spend a large part of their career working at crappier shops building their resume before becoming employable at a more desirable company, whereas the college graduates could get the cushy jobs right out of school.
This is why I feel like hyper-specialization in universities should be limited to masters or doctorate degrees- if the market for airplanes goes poof, then a "I can design ailerons" type of degree is basically worthless and can mean that you won't be qualified for a job for a while.

One of the things that Jewish communities have done for a while is have the men gain both a skill (university degree), and a trade, so that if one fails, they can switch to the other and still provide for their families. For example, after getting laid off in an economic downturn, being able to fix others refrigerators might be the thing that keeps yours from going empty.

The other thing that I wish people would learn is living well within their means, so that if something happens, they don't lose everything that was theirs / the bank's.
Back in 2012, I bought the original rMBP.

It fit everything I needed: it was thinner than my previous laptop as it had no optical drive, it was lightweight, it had a gorgeous screen, good enough keyboard, and seemed like a reasonable price for a higher end laptop work computer. I've used it everyday since 2012, and aside from the battery which I eventually replaced, it's been functioning without a hitch. From the 90s to the late 2000s, I used a variety of PC laptops and this was the only laptop that survived a huge amount of abuse from travel and daily usage (obviously, YMMV).

I'd love to upgrade to a new MBP, but I truly don't understand what they were thinking with this current iteration. The touchbar feels gimmicky and over the top. Call me old school, but give me physical buttons any day of the week and keep the keyboard simple. Most importantly, give me a keyboard that has more room to press so that random dust getting in there isn't going to screw shit up.
As far as a desktop Mac, a suitably configured iMac is more than powerful enough for development. A $2100 5K iMac - 6 Core I5 3Ghz (turbo boost to 4Ghz), 256GB SSD, 16GB of RAM. The RAM is user upgradable and an external SSD drive would be as fast as any normal internal SSD drive.

As far as a laptop? I'm not spending my own money on a development class laptop. I hate developing with just a laptop. I have a dual external monitor setup at home and at work. My next personal computer will definitely be a desktop. You still get more power and more thermal headroom on desktops than more expensive laptops.