skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have two criticisms of the article:

1. Every story is a 'just so' story where the way the system works is exactly the way the user wants the system to work. Great, it's like putting a button front and center on your app and the user wants to push that button and look! It's right there! Awesome. Except I don't want to push that button, I want to push the other button that's now hidden away because the designer is striving for "No UI". The new minimalist interface is now actively fighting me. What if I don't want my car to unlock when I approach it?

2. Using AI is a "step 2: ???" solution, and the flaw with it is best exemplified by the columnist who bought a pregnancy book for a pregnant friend on Amazon... and now his Amazon suggestion stream is now still filled with baby clothes that are age appropriate for his friend's baby, years later. For every adaptive step the non-interface takes on the basis of past behaviour, it's a step away from future behaviour that's different than past behaviour.

I suppose my criticisms come down to the fact that the article doesn't seem to acknowledge that design trade-offs are a normal part of interface work. It strongly implies there's a hallowed land where every use case is obvious and accounted for and we all just "do". Annoying, in the same way that we all get annoyed when another framework comes along and is in its silver bullet phase where it's the awesomest solution to everything you need it to do.
When asked, greater writers and programmers will both emphasize study and practice. They recognize they were once bad writers and programmers and got better via study and practice. I see no reason to doubt these self-reports.

I think Richard Hamming is out of his depth here, as evidenced by his use of naive anecdotes and analogies. If programming is like writing, it is like a severely restricted writing exercise, where you can only use certain grammatical structures, where you have to define a lot of words explicitly and where your stories have to explain to a machine how to achieve a slew of mundane goals.
I'm with you, though you're fighting a pointless battle on HN, a great bastion of the privileged who don't even know their own privilege. They are young, male, predominantly white with knowledge that is (almost always) accidentally gained in a field of absurdly high demand.

99.9% of the world doesn't have the leverage we do. The amount of clucking and tsk-tsk-ing HNers do at the rest of the world is sickening.

This entire "well duh, quit" argument is the employment equivalent of "let them eat cake".
Let's clear some facts first:

- You're not born a programmer, there's no such thing as "talented"

- Different people have wildly different levels of skill/proficiency in programming.

- Skill in programming invariably takes time to acquire, nobody has become a great programmer after programming for a week.

With that being said, what the author aims for is to predict who will become a great programmer, not just an average one, he's looking for the 99.9th percentile of programmers, for the 0.1%, the ones which outrank 1000 of their peers.

For most of the profession/craft of programming that doesn't matter. You're certainly looking for people to hire in the 80th percentile and above but between 1:1000 and 1:5 there's a huge difference. We know that you can train people to become proficient enough in programming to be useful in it.

As to the difficulty of "training" great programmers, it takes a long time and a lot of hours, persistence and passion to become one. Probably in the order of 10 years, 10'000 hours. Not everybody can do that. The simple fact that different people have different preferences, priorities, etc. ensures that most people on the path from beginner to great programmer fall somewhere along the wayside. But those few with the stamina to persist, who push themselves, for a decade or more, those people have a shot.

So can you train personality traits that will allow you to pull trough? I think it's unlikely. You can show so-inclined persons the way, and if they have the right personality they can walk it, and you can train them on walking the path well. But you can't reshape their psychology to fit the path.
a lot of famous security vulnerabilities like the fact that Windows will execute things on a memory stick without being asked, are the result people trying for no interface.

This is an excellent observation.
PressureNET Data Visualization: first look at smartphone barometer data
> I don't owe you anything simply because you exist.

I have an opposing opinion. Let me explain my thoughts.

In a fair system everyone would have access to the same amount of land once he is born.

He could then farm the land build a house and provide for himself.

But this system would not be very efficient. We as a society do better once we start specializing. As a necessary result some people / companies have to own more land than others.

Now if someone is not able to make a living because his skills are not in demand, I think we as a society have the obligation to help this person, simply because he suffers consequences from a system, we as a society profit from.
Free software maintenance: Adding Features
There’s still money in old-school tech. Maybe lesson for startups…
The GitLab website is opaque. I searched for, and did find 1) How to download the product 2) How much it costs 3) what hardware and OS it runs on or 4) how to find out more.

Now I've only been developing web apps since 1997, and work every single day with GitHub. Evidently I'm just stupid.

Oh, I actually tried to find those things twice. Yesterday, and again today.

Are you guys even aware of your website's usability issues? What's with the mystery navigation?

Edit: don't bother giving me links. Fix these serious problems.
I completely agree. I'm for gun reform of pretty much all kinds except perhaps hunting rifles and longarms for farm/rural use. The problem is that the assault rifle are not even a sideshow to the main event. It's going to run counter to gun reformists desires because after long, drawn-out arguments where they finally wrest some concessions, those concessions are going to do absolutely nothing substantial, leaving the opposing side with a hard-to-argue-with "I told you so".
Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS
I think that may be a hint that he's blaming the wrong things: it's pretty strange to blame the U.S.'s social-welfare system for the country's disparities, when the U.S.'s social-welfare system is so stingy. Social Security is not why the older generation has so much more money, because it's pretty impossible to get rich off a social-security check in the first place (I know elderly who live off social security, and they live at a subsistence level). The well-off older people with huge retirement accounts got them from the private sector and the stock market.

What's changed is that the '60s-'90s economic/employment situation is probably not going to repeat itself. My dad had basically a guaranteed-for-life job once he got a college degree, and a generous defined-benefit corporate pension, neither of which really exist anymore. And if you didn't go that route, you could apprentice in a skilled trade and also have a good middle-class job.
It seems to me that they are, in fact, using "statically-typed, compiled system language[s] for their scripting efforts" - that is in fact what people are doing with server-side Java, Scala and C#, not to mention Java/Dalvik and Objective-C on mobile platforms.

Perhaps this article misses the point a bit. For several decades we have been using scripting languages to glue together sharp pointy C[++] tools (sh/Perl/Python/Ruby approach) or to puppetize monolithic C[++] hulks from within (VB/elisp approach).

More recent practice, on both mobile and server platforms, has been to abstract away from C[++] with a middle layer of memory-managed, compiled C-ish goop - JVM, .Net, Objective-C, whatever. This is the level where people are doing everything from amazing high-availability big data things to amazing little bleep-bloop handheld things. I think the answer to "what's the state of low-level systems programming?" is "not much is going on, but damn, there's a lot of fresh stuff happening in mid-level systems programming."

Go and Rust are late entrants to this party, and probably exist more as a hedge against Oracle litigating Java/JVM into the ground than anything else.
In theory, if you buy enough housing to fit a few kids then you'll have more housing than you need by the time you're looking at retirement, so you can cash out your 'investment'.

Of course, in reality this never seems to actually happen.
I've been looking at options for Git repos inside the firewall so happy to see this. Has anyone used Atlassian Stash too? How does it stack up vs GitLab? I've been using GitStack for a few months, which hasn't been bad for the basics.
It's a fact that you cannot become better at something without doing it. But it is not guaranteed that you become better at something because you're doing it.

The personality traits that let you become a great writer or programmer are not innate in everybody. And for the most part you can't reshape a personality to have the right traits. It's not talent, but the right precondition to make use of the practice.
I believe outside San francisco city hall we have a crosswalk which lights up. I believe it with with LEDs that flash. I like this on way better.

Does it turn off immediately when there is no one in the crosswalk?
That was my thought initially too, but I guess that if the crossing was shining all the time, drivers would simply start ignoring it after a while. The fact that the crossing lights up when pedestrians are allowed to cross acts as a visual cue for the drivers to stop.
Based on talking with Norwegians, who are quite numerous in my part of the UK, the relative health of their social welfare schemes compared with the UK's mostly due to a much, much higher level of taxation, and a huge cultural difference regarding levels of entitlement.

The `professional' unemployed, for example, don't appear to exist in anything like the same numbers in Norway, which removes a significant source of drain. Early retirement, which was fashionable here for a good number of years, is almost unheard of there. The expected level of pensions in Norway is lower too; here, people employed in the public sector routinely expect their pension to be ~50% of their final salary.

Taxation on nearly everything makes it much more expensive than it is over here. One notable example was the sports car of a man I know: here, it cost him about £30k; in Norway, the exact same model would have cost him more than three times as much. (That's an apples-to-apples comparison -- I'm not erroneously comparing a Kroner amount to a Sterling amount.) Another thing he was amazed about was how `cheap' cigarettes and alcohol are in the UK; somewhere between one-half and one-third the price they are in Norway.

I don't know enough about Germany to explain their success, but my impression is that it's partially a cultural thing, and partially that they still have a strong, manufacturing-based economy.
To be fair some of the feelings of entitlement and the sense of "do whatever you want" of Gen Y come from the boomers.

When growing up I remember being told from an early age by adults that my generation would have it great, their generation was putting everything in place for peace and prosperity such as access to education, better medicine and technology etc.

The overriding message was really just to work hard and everything would come good. It didn't matter whether you studied the liberal arts, technology or just got a job straight out of school and worked your way up.

Now Gen Y have grown up and complain "getting a job with liveable pay and reasonable stability is hard, and I have a masters!" they get told "the world doesn't owe you a living!" which is technically true but non helpful.
Yeah, I'm in a similar camp. I'm white, and a product of the LAUSD (Los Angeles) magnet program, which attempted to integrate schools well. Problem is, you're mostly integrating white kids with the minority kids who have parents motivated enough to put them in the magnet program.

My schools had both magnet and non magnet kids in them. What this wound up accomplishing was pretty obvious, there was segregation between the two populations. Walking out at lunch one could see the school was divided by a stark line, a line that was about 70% white where the magnet kids hung out, and mixed elsewhere.

It probably helped some people from minorities in the magnet, but I'm sure the dividing line just reinforced race and class barriers in the minds of those on both sides.
I find the ticket prices too high .. wonder if it just gets the prices from the vendor websites or has some special arrangement with them.
As someone who writes both software and fiction, I've only found an increasing convergence between the two over the years.

Basically, fiction authors are writing obfuscated C, but doing so in Python, where the interpreter was compiled for a version of DOS intended for Windows 3.1 but coaxed to work on WINE, set inside of a virtual machine on custom-built ARM hardware with propriety drivers, with nothing but the AppleTalk protocol provided for communication between the author and the reader. If we get a buffer overflow in that environment, then we win.
Normal people feel uncomfortable betting their children to prove somebody's else theories...
Thanks for posting this. Standard documents are great. Even if you don't get to use them they provide a point of reference for negotiating terms.
What is this? Hidden Google spam? How can a mediocre (at best) site like this get front page? Hope mods hellban all who up voted this.
Love your ideas!
Not that I'm defending grumblers, but I think a lot of the upset and anger comes from the fact that the opportunities aren't as readily available as they once were. The developed world is a much more regimented place than it once was, with fewer employers will to take chances on the people they employ. The classic trap a lot of Gen Y find themselves in is that they're not considered for jobs because they don't have experience, and can't get experience because they can't get the jobs. It's a pretty good catch-22.
This looks like an example of "Software Eating the World".
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...

Many law firms are doing automated textual analysis of legal work that used to be done by associates. The fact that they are still making more profit implies that they've just gotten more efficient. I suppose that there are a set of legal software companies that are probably profiting pretty well on this.

"Similarly, the number of hours logged by first-year and mid-level legal associates -- a productivity measure of young lawyers -- fell 12 percent from 2007 at some of New York’s largest law firms, says Jeff Grossman, national managing director of Wells Fargo Private Bank’s Legal Specialty Group in Charlotte, North Carolina. Yet profits per partner climbed $50,697 to $1.5 million on revenue of $66 billion last year, according to a separate survey of 86 of the world’s top law firms by The American Lawyer magazine."
It's probably easier when one hasn't set themselves to the task of representing divine perfection.

Commercial pursuits are driven by somewhat different considerations.
Note. The contract, as described , would not hold for California employees.

See http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab... if you don't know what I'm talking about.

(That said, Sony probably does enough different things that the difference does not matter much to most people.)
At least in the case of Megaupload, that remains to be seen.
Probably. And even self-taught creatives are taught. They only differ in kind from others in that someone (a teacher, a parent) installed - or arguably re-installed - the wetware equivalent of a compiler and headers on an otherwise consumer-orientated OS.
This is all client-side. You can just save the page if you want it locally.
Reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk (A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work)

Not that I disagree, it is just fun to think about possible unintended consequences of dependency on AI for every day tasks. I am sure there are some short stories that deal with people in an advanced civilization losing their automation, but I can't seem to track any down on Google at the moment.
I can picture it now :D

Me: "This isn't what I ordered."

Cashier: "It's what you ordered last time. We went ahead and made it for you. And we also charged your account. Aren't you delighted?"

Me: "But I just wanted a coffee. Now my account is overdrawn, and you just cost me a $35 overdraft fee."
This doesn't counter your main point (taxation in Scandinavia is much higher, as part of their social-democratic system), but your specific examples are "sin taxes" and not really intended to raise significant revenue. The Nordic countries all have very high alcohol taxes due to problems with alcoholism, and all of them except Denmark restrict alcohol sales to the state liquor monopoly, which has high prices, and purposely restricted hours to attempt to discourage binge drinking (e.g. the Swedish stores close at 3pm on Fridays, and don't open at all on weekends). There was a strong prohibition movement in the early 20th century, around the same time that the U.S. had one, but in the Nordic countries the tax/monopoly model narrowly won out over outright prohibition. Automobile and cigarette taxes are also there primarily to discourage greater use of those products.

The main taxes intended to actually raise revenue are corporate/personal income taxes, and the VAT.
Nice! It would be cool if you could login/send it to your gmail inbox or something. Than later use it.

I would love to write emails in such editor!
A word & character count somewhere in the margins would be great.

Absolutely love it.
Israel actually has rather tight gun control laws, and is tightening them [1]. To me, this is proof that a well regulated militia is compatible with strict personal gun laws.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2012/12/20/israel-lo...
Most people claiming to be "pro free market" still oppose cartels. A cartel is the banding together of multiple companies or parties in an agreement to work together to raise prices.

A union is a cartel. I don't mean that in as a normative statement. Unions may still be worth having, even if they are a cartel in that they workers band together to raise what they charge for their labor.

But, that is the logic by which many "free market" advocates oppose unions.
Jerry Seinfeld: How to Write a Joke [video]
Geez.. you deliberately take some words of an article and totally ignore the primary defining words in your own pasted text which is "error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault". Also, it is absuletely not unexpected or an incorrect result when it's not even implemented. It's intended by the programmer not to work and it's your own wish that it should work.
It's definitely not a fault in the program code that it doesn't cope with the URI. It was never intended to do that.

It would be a bug if there is code for that URI scheme and the browser/OS should handle that, but doesn't. So if you can point me to the code in Android or some other hint that the scheme should work, i'll agree with you and call it a bug :)

Rest assured that arguing that a bug and a feature request are the same thing will not help on HackerNews. You can try that elsewhere :)
Lot of similarities to good programming and design.
This [for newline] keeps up with the app aurea and it's short enough to solve decay problems:
http://www.freesound.org/people/orginaljun/sounds/153063/
I've heard many gen Y'ers talking about how baby boomers screwed it up for them but I had never heard baby boomers saying the same about their parent's generation. It doesn't make that much sense to me since boomers are retiring better off than their parents while gen Y is the first generation that will be worst off.
I don't know. There have been a lot of stories how young people are just a lot less willing to take risks than they used to be. I can tell you for a fact there are wide open $120k jobs in North Dakota and they are desperate for young up-and-comers, but no one wants to move to North Dakota. Older generations just didn't have that privilege.

A generation ago, Gen Xers would leave home and move across the country just to have opportunity. Now, people are living with their parents til the age of 30. It's partially a change in culture and partially a consequence of not needing to really take risk to get ahead. The prevailing attitude is "I deserve this, so I'll just wait and it will come to me." At least that's the attitude among many of my peers.
>There's simply no way around the math other than increasing the retirement age. If you go back 50 or 100 years, people didn't sit around for 20 or 30 years after retiring doing nothing - they simply died earlier. So if you're going to live until 80 or 90, you'd better work until at least 75.

That works out mathematically, but it's not going to work in practice. Just because you don't die before you're 90 doesn't mean you can work any longer than your grandparents did, even assuming somebody still wants to employ you.
I never use sed -i because I can't rely on that being a standard feature as I move from system to system. With a utility as basic as sed that is found on almost every UNIX (and hence often used in a system's startup or configuration scripts, etc.), I want my own sed scripts to work consistently across all systems I might use.

If I really want to create temp files I can use ed or use sed with shell redirection. Were it for some reason a requirement, I can avoid temp files, at least for the substitution (s) command, as follows:

sed -a '"$1"';H;$!d;g;w'$2
where $1 is some sed s commands and $2 is a file

This is not "perfect" as there will blank lines, but it does the job without temp files (if that were really a concern).

If GNU grep was in need of repair and you fixed it, then I thank you. But I'm not clear on how that justifies any "extensions" to GNU grep.

Maintenance, at least to me, means fixing things, not extending them and adding more complexity and things that can potentially break or create incompatibilities across different UNIX's.
Do people who want food also have the responsibility to feed society?
> I support United States policies that move in the direction of east Asian rather than western European patterns of government spending and social welfare, putting more of the investment in future generations back in the hands of families and less in the hands of bureaucrats.

Just curious what you mean by this. East Asian and West European nations do have very different models of political economy compared to each other and the US, but both of them involve a much greater degree of state direction than even very liberal Americans would tolerate.

Also not sure how your ideas on educational policy fit there. Every East Asian nation I know of regulates education with extreme top-down strictness from the national level, even where they do allow/subsidize non-state schools.