skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So... don't do that.

There are plenty of options that have a reasonable probability of being stable.

(Also, consider committing the docs right in to the repo. In the 1970s such an idea would have been absurd. Today, a lot of my projects technically already have this, thanks to vendoring and docs embedded into the programs themselves.)
>Sure, but has anyone claiming the opposite done rigorous analysis?
Is there any evidence that having a CS degree makes for better programmers than not?

I'm not making that claim, you're the one making a claim that people with degrees other than CS are better programmers without evidence.

I'll only make the claim that a CS degree made me a better programmer. Specifically the upper level theoretical classes. I can verify that there are many problems I've solved because I realized that the problem I was working on had already been solved 50 years ago.

I also worked about a decade as a professional programmer without a CS degree, before I went back. Personally I am a better programmer.

Would I have been an even better programmer had I taken another few semesters of math classes instead of CS classes? Who knows? Absent any other evidence though, the simplest explanation is that domain specific knowledge is likely useful.

>I'm not thinking about people who stood out as particularly unusual. Most of the time I didn't find out which field someone's degree was in until months into working with them.

The point is that the more unusual someone's background is, the more likely you are to remember it. Particularly if there is some confirmation bias involved.
PWAs are also actively worked _against_, at least from Apple. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686602 for a previous discussion
> How do you check your code works?

When I think about my projects "working", I always try to answer the following questions:

1) Is my code doing what I believe it should be doing? That question always have objective answers and is the subject of software engineering testing.

2) Is my solution solving my problem efficiently?
Often that's a domain specific question and different domains have different ways of doing quality assurance, there's no silver bullet.
I believe V. mandarinia are also significantly more dangerous to humans. Nearly as many people are killed by them in Japan every year (30-40 according to wikipedia) as are killed by hornets, wasps and bees combined in the US (62 per year on average: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6829a5.htm) Bear in mind those figures aren't per-capita.
Will Data Science Be Ever Automated
> As a candidate, be very careful asking interviewers ‘why’ the company does something in a particular way.

> ‘Why?’ Is an aggressive question.

I agree that "why" can be interpreted negatively but there are definitely more disarming ways to probe. I personally would say (and have asked) something like, "Can you tell me more about the process or framework used to aid in decision making about technologies introduced in the organization and how it played out in your decision to use X?"
Nice to see some TruffleRuby love.

Ruby could have been Swift, if MacRuby had not been killed (well at least it lives on as RubyMotion).
I also liked runtypes more, but it turns out composing io-ts codecs is perfectly readable, and being able to deserialize at the same time/instead of validating is very convenient.

Caveat, I've only been using it for two weeks.
Because it gets more visibility on twitter than a blog and is already something many people using Twitter do.

You can use threaderapp to get a blog post out of it.
The problem is that the problem of finding staff is difficult in normal circumstances, and almost impossible right now when lots of people are sick. Add to that the fact that unlike healthcare professionals these caregivers have much less hygiene trained and currently littlr PPE available, and you have the recipe for trouble.

Antibody tests are also almost useless on an individual level: If they have 4% false positive rate and 10% have antibodies then there are 36000 false positives (4% of 900k) when a million people are tested! Antibody tests are good at a group level to measure the progress of the epidemic, but unless the incidence is high or better test methods are found, they are near useless for what you are describing, sadly.
See Linus Torvalds' thesis, section 4.3.3 "The case against virtual data caches": https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kutvonen/index_files/linus.pdf
Contributing to open-source can improve your programming skills
First-ever live view of our nearest star system
I wonder if ruby could eventually officially migrate to Graalvm
I get that this is a thought up example, but why is this role necessary in this case. If the business team knows what they need next, and the software team knows how long it takes, can't they just get together and work on it? Why do they need a middleman here that just creates meetings? To be bit more abstract: if the business team owns the roadmap, then what value does the role add?
Yes, so much good stuff in this series. Sagan must have been inspired when he released his "Cosmos" a year or two later.

But this one has that central thesis that ties all the episodes up with a bow.

Not sure I cared as much for Burke's follow-on series but maybe I need to give them a second watch. They probably couldn't measure up to his original "Connections" masterpiece anyway though.
That’s why I like fingerprint sensors.

I keep my phone very close and fully turn it off when I cannot.

I am more worried about shoulder surfing than exotic black bag jobs using weird technologies
Show HN: Podely – Convert your YouTube channel into a podcast
Some of this seems to overcomplicate matters. DP-3T for example (in the centralized setup) suggest in the whitepaper you linked to simply upload data to the health authority backend of the countries you visit. Having a single health authority registry sounds impractical.

At the very least, if you want this to gain any traction in the EU, please amend this specification to include a way to get a single users data back out by revocation or deletion.

Sidenote: What's with all the GraphQL? Do the data formats being exchanged here really warrant that?
I made this web app to convert Youtube channels into podcasts.

The app will try to search and replace the Youtube metadata to make it "fit" more as a podcast. For example, by default it will replace "video" to "episode" in the description, among other things.
This works automatically, so when there is a new video, within minutes a new episode will appear on the podcast feed.

Any feedback is more than welcome.
> modern engineering practices

Heck, I’d be willing to settle for seeing modern software languages used with modern engineering practices.
Nancy Pelosi's estimated net worth is $16M, not $160M.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_members_of_the...
My comment was about the fact that the keys need to released to the general public. This is a decentralized scheme. People won't participate in the first place if it is not secure or controlable. This thing could be run centralized but imagine the cross-government / legislation data sharing. Have fun...
Thanks. Do you know if you can have a vnc server running in tandem with xrdp? I'm not a big fan of the limitation of only one active session being allowed with xrdp as we do a lot of remote work on our Ubuntu boxes and VNC has been foolproof on that front. Being locked out of my box over the weekend (or during this extended stay at home period) because something got messed up with user sessions would be very annoying/limiting. With an active VNC session, I supposed I could use that as a fallback to ensure that I logout of the local session to ensure continuing connectivity with RDP.
Which is built-in releases of Emacs for as long as I can remember, btw:

M-x artist-mode
I'm sorry but for all the flaws of the NPM ecosystem, version locking is not one (both `npm` and `yarn` do much much better than anything in Python). There's no reason a correctly set-up project would magically break with time.

I don't love NPM anymore than the next guy, but my blame will go to the dev in this case.
That's ridiculous. It's computer science, not computer programming technician. You teach with the tool that most clearly distills the principles of what you're trying to teach. Racket and Scheme arguably do that much better than Python.

In fact, Racket 15 years ago still has more cutting edge features than Python has to this day. There is simply no language that provides the breadth of features available in Racket, and I don't even use it.

> Academia has scared away an untold number of aspiring students with their nonsense languages

A programmer that's scared or intimidated by learning a new language does not belong in this industry. You might as well say that we should coddle civil engineering students that are scared of computers. If this is a barrier you can't surmount, consider another career.
Do you get so much time to ask these questions during an interview ? The standard white board kind of interview goes on for an hour and you are supposed to finish the coding questions in 45-50 minutes. That hardly leaves any time for counter questions.
>Looking at the data

Yep, what we don't know (actually I believe noone does)is whether there is an offset or delay between the infection stages of the various countries.

If you look at the same data plotted attempting to align rates, it does seem like the UK is on a preoccupying trend:

http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/#wn2

specifically:

http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/#deaths-eu-norm

From the "shape" of :

Daily New Deaths in the United Kingdom

here:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

compared with this:

Daily New Deaths in Italy

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/

it does seem like the UK is a couple weeks behind Italy.
I've made a point of not hiring intersectional people in general been burnt before by employees who care more about 'woke' politics then actually getting the job done.
His Scientific American column was pretty good too.

He did a good TV special on climate change around 1989-90 that’s on YouTube somewhere
Virusnake
Hacking my arm prosthesis to output CV so that it plugs into my synth [video]
1 day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22825344
8,000 people is still pretty small.

I don't disagree with you about capitalism being survival of the fittest, or that companies should die. I don't think the US is a capitalist country though. We're living with corporate socialism.

I mean, look at the pandemic bailout. Nobody, except for taxpayers and employees, is paying for the failure of the airlines to operate responsibly. This is exactly the time every badly run company in the US should collapse and die, and it's not gonna happy. Restaurants, bars, small businesses, maybe some startups will crash and burn. But even private equity firms are getting bailed out.

This is not a one off. The same thing happened in 2008.

And it's weird to think only governments are running Cobol. What do you think the vast majority of hospitals are built on? Or things at IBM? It's the same problem.
If you run out of time, set up another call for you to interview them (eg ask these questions). Interviews are a two way street.
I used this for a bit, but ultimately found the non-determinism to be a problem for me. I ended up specifically aliasing a few common directories, going from there to sub-dirs was really easy.
It remains to be seen whether the US objectives in Iraq were successful or not - the recent tiff b/w Trump and Iran shows that many Iraqi's are not pro-USA. Violence may be down, but at extreme cost in both dollars and men, and the problem really never left - it simply shifted to Syria. Not to mention the abandonment of key allies in Iraq, the Kurds. The fact is, US objectives are hard to quantify in Iraq, because people keep changing them to make the US look good.

You're overrating the "logistic capability" of the US here. The US used its network of allies for staging into these regions. Without that network, it would've been much more costly and difficult. On top of that, Iraq had no realistic threat to US dominance at sea. In a war against a real state actor (like China), the US would not be able to operate with impunity. Simply knocking out 2 or 3 capital ships would devastate the US capability to project force.
I remain skeptical of JRuby. As of about 2-3 years ago, there were many benchmarks touting it's performance, but in our large publicly deployed web app, it always underperformed and switching to MRI on Phusion more than doubled our performance on half the servers. We also spent like a developer-year on issues that accompanied being off the beaten path with JRuby, like various nokogiri complications.

I even contacted the devs at one point with a benchmark that ran jruby directly on strings for several minutes. The answer I got was always that it would eventually perform better than MRI with more warmup. Spoiler: it didn't. Well, maybe I was supposed to run it for another month and it would have.
Surely the delivery cost is independent of the order cost?
The unmitigated doubling time is approximately 3 days. So for every halving in the overall prevalence you buy yourself 3 days of unmitigated growth in a population with no immunity.

On the testing and PPE front, again I wonder if this is just a feel good notion or if there’s even napkin math to show what scale of PPE and testing is theoretically being deployed and what impact that may have on R0.

But returning to the core point, how long until COVID has runs its course, and at what cost? Can we admit that herd immunity must be reached? As Dr. Birx repeatedly asks, are we at the tip of the iceberg or 25/50/75% of the way through?

No one wants to think about it because I guess it would make an uncomfortable choice obvious. Better to just self-flagellate so we can feel like we’re doing something.
> I'd rather have few packages of well trusted maintainers instead of a thousand packages from god knows who.

Then the problem is the fact anybody can submit a package, not small packages.

Linux distributions solve this problem by having dedicated maintainers. Users of a distribution trust its maintainers when they use it. Software developers want the complete opposite: language-specific packages, instant and unrestricted package publication, containers, etc. Nobody wants to have to talk to a maintainer in order to get their software included in a distribution. Of course the result ends up being a mess.

What if Node's maintainers decided to distribute a curated set of packages alongside Node itself? The size of each individual package wouldn't really matter.
cool that you created one because you can laugh when you want
> what the hell do they need you for, they’ve already got a team that can do everything you could bring to the table.

If that's the case, then why are they conducting an interview in the first place?

I guess an argument can be made that it's counterproductive to ask "aggressive" questions if you want to be hired. But then again, candidates will likely be asked "why" they did something dozens of times in a whiteboard interview. If someone can't take 10% of the pressure they expose their candidates to, maybe they shouldn't be doing interviews in the first place.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to answer any "why" question that I'm in a position to answer, and I always have, whenever a candidate has asked me one. I'm wary about taking the mere act of asking a question as a good sign (or a bad one) in the age of "Cracking to Coding Interview" and whatnot but it's the kind of question that leads to useful discussion.

Sure, we weren't right about a lot of choices we made, and sometimes, in hindsight, they were flat out indefensible, and we had to deal with the consequences. That's part of software development everywhere.

If they ask that because their bar is too high and they don't want to join a team that makes more than N wrong choices a year, fine, it's their bar, they get to set it wherever they like.

If they ask that just because they think questioning accepted practice is a good idea, that's actually great. Lots of companies end up making one bad mistake after another just because no one stops to ask why. And lots of narcissistic team leads and managers don't want that kind of attitude on their teams -- if that leads to not being hired, that's a bullet dodged, not a wasted opportunity.

On the other hand a question like this is a great opportunity to show them that we're good at both leveraging our assets and at owning up to our mistakes. That's definitely a quality I'd be looking for in a prospective team.

Edit: oh yeah, maybe some more general context is appropriate here.

One thing that took me a while to learn is that not every interview you don't ace is a failure. I don't mean that in some personal development hoodoo way, like the way to success is riddled with failures or whatever. I mean, literally, that there are interviews which you don't ace, and that's a good thing, because if you'd aced it, you would have hated working there, or it would have been really bad for your career, or both.

It's one thing if you don't get hired because you lack the knowledge and skills -- okay, you can work on that and try again later. But if you get passed because you asked the wrong question (and that question wasn't offensive or anything, obviously), or because you did not know that specific thing that a lead dev is really proud about knowing, that's a blessing in disguise.
Ask HN: Non-profit vs. for-profit privacy-focused social network
Could somebody explain the power dynamics of a non-profit vs private for-profit vs public for-profit?

For instance, let’s say you want to build a privacy-focused social network.

It’s my understanding that a non-profit would have a much higher chance of remaining true to its privacy goal, but I’m not sure why.

Is there any benefit from a privacy point of view to be non-profit vs for-profit from the beginning? Or does the for-profit company only “lose control” after a certain point, such as pre-seed funding, seed-funding, series A/B/C funding, IPO?

Wikipedia says: “Unlike non-profit organizations the policies of these organizations are usually profit oriented. Managers (corporate employees) here have a profit oriented mindset and aim at maximising the revenue of the firm which in turn contributes to the dividends (in case of public limited) or profits of the shareholders/owners.” This seems to indicate that if you’re a for-profit then focusing on privacy is only a marketing gimmick and the company should stop doing so when they deem that it has become more profitable to no longer caring about privacy.
How timely. I found this series after watching The Ascent of Man, which I found after watching Cosmos. Highly recommend all three, especially the Ascent of Man.

James Burke has a way of conveying a sort of fundamental optimism about society that I find invigorating. I remember listening to an interview with him from the past couple years and after all this time, he still sounds as sharp as ever.
'Pandemic drones' could single people out for coughing, sneezing, temperature
... which is heavily found in leafy green vegetables. Eat healthy folks.
I was going to ask what country with mainstream medicine has no profit motive, but then I saw your strawman where you equate herbal tea with chopping down phone masts.

Word of advice - pull your head out yer arse.
You can teach the principles of computer science without forcing some obscure and difficult language on new programmers. Learning programming is hard enough, no need to add more bullshit on top of it!
I've done 3 years of Golang as my main language, my experience is:

- go build ./... builds everything from the current project

- go test ./... tests everything from the current project

- go install ./... installs everything from the current project

That's one of the best thing ever. I can go to any project, I know how to build, test, install, and can directly be productive.

On the other hand, I started learning C++ one year ago, and it's the exact opposite, each project has its own homemade build system that isn't supported by one platform or the other.
These optimistic studies is used to get investor money. While it is good, they are not headed in the right direction with the beta-amyloid theories.
I thought the person that you're replying to made a very good point about Esperanto. Why do we teach linguistics with messy real-world languages instead of conlangs that most clearly distill the principles we want to teach?
Бомбезно
> It’s like teaching someone grammar by forcing them to use Esperanto

Or Latin, which for the longest time wasn't called "Latin", but simply something that was taught in "grammar school", because it addresses the underlying fundamentals quite clearly without getting bogged down with semantics. Latin is still used for that, btw, but only in "top schools".

>Teach students using languages with the absolute minimal friction

Say, something with a trivial syntax; something that is easy to express any construct in without too many preconceptions of what a programming language should look like.

If only there was a language like that!
A few years ago I wrote The Most Dangerous Writing App. It's been acquired since, but the open-source version still has a "hardcore mode" very similar to this, where you only see the last letter you typed: https://maebert.github.io/themostdangerouswritingapp/
The "good old days" are definitely not as good, nor as old, as you think they are.

For example, it wasn't until 1965 that racial discrimination in voting was prohibited:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965
Sensationalist headline.

1. Sample size was 130

2. Hasn't been peer-reviewed

3. "What this will mean to herd immunity will require more data from other parts of the world," Huang Jinghe, the leader of the research team behind the report.

Only interesting part: Interestingly, the levels of antibodies patients produced seemed to correlate with their ages: Middle-aged and elderly recovered patients had higher levels of antibodies. Nine of the 10 of the patients who did not develop detectable levels of coronavirus antibodies were 40 years old or younger.
Why Countries Succeed and Fail; What Should Be Done So Failing Countries Succeed [pdf]
That by itself is an old problem; see for instance Black and Rogaway's paper on restricted domain ciphers:

https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/subset.pdf
More Ways the Amiga is Awesome (1992)
Small packages means more packages, and more packages compounds the dependency graph which:

- makes dependency resolution harder

- means more points of failure

- makes auditing difficult

- makes install time longer

- leads to harder maintenance and upgrade

This also causes heterogeneity in the mass of your dependencies:

- it splits the resources for documentation, testing, tutorial, etc

- it ensures very weak integration between various building blocks, forcing everyone to rebuild glue code again and again

- it makes discovering the proper solution to your problem harder as you must chose a combination of dependencies instead of one

- it makes contributing to the project harder, especially to junior profiles, and increases the price of on-boarding

- eventually, it leads to a culture that pushes the "libs versus frameworks" so far you never get a decent framework for anything. This is why there is no JS equivalent to RoR or Django.

There is, of course, a balance to reach. You don't want a lib that does everything.
How is AES(0||id) subject to a padding oracle? Am I misunderstanding the notation?
The point is that interest rate matters. Anything below what you can get from low risk investments is essentially free money.
The skill-premium puzzle: Rediscovering the demand side of equilibrium