skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Systemic violence so drastically outweighs "individual violence" in quantity and affect that there's just no real comparison. Me smacking a dude for talking shit doesn't even come close to the totality of systemic violence: war, poverty, houselessness, rape, abuse, racism, hunger, prison, policing, immigrant concentration camps, border security, alienation, queer bashing, trans murders, environmental catastrophe on a global scale. And that's just the present situation. This violence is felt by individuals very personally, but it is systemic in cause, affect, and result.

The police, media, and state point the finger at a very specific subset of activity and call it violence in order to distract from the overwhelming violence they perpetrate. This is particularly true of those who resist the current state of affairs. Rioters are "violent" because they smash windows. The cops who beat them are merely restoring order. Police are rarely described as "violent" even though they frequently shoot people and control populations with the use of force. Prisoners are the violent ones, not the ones who lock people up in cages. The most oppressed are the violent ones, not those who maintain the system of violence.

To give a little perspective on anarchy and violence:

Anarchism tends to reject moralism. The question isn't whether it's good or bad to kill Frick. It's not about punishing a person for a bad behavior as that sounds awfully like what the state does and it's so-called "Justice." Rather, it's about what force this activity will generate. If a hated figure is assassinated, will this spark revolt? This idea was called "propaganda of the deed" and a similar idea lives on in smashing windows and similar small-scale activities among current North American anarchists: activities that can be picked up by others easily and may spread among the wider population. Other ideas tend to focus on blowing shit up and stuff, like the CCF and FAI. That's cool and all, but I don't think that spectacular acts of violence against the state will do anything to hasten its demise.
Or java/c# where exceptions tend to bubble all the way up the stack

There is really no difference. In Java you have to decide at what level to catch exceptions. In Go you have to decide at what level to handle an error and just not return it. In fact, if you have to pass an error on level further up the stack, it's easier in Java.

have to to try/finally which can be harder to write safe code with than defer.

Why? I suppose that you are referring to the fact that you can put a defer right next to e.g. opening a file. But Java has the (arguably) nice(r) try-with-resources construct since Java 7:

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/exceptions/...
Hey Chris, I'm also from US and in the Jakarta area -- sounds like there's a larger community here than I had imagined. I'll drop you an email.
Haha. We claim anything good New Zealand ever does anyway. Pharlap, etc.
Contractors can certainly be under an obligation to meet standards, particularly when this is specified in the contract. However, there is no ISO standard that says "a program shall not reach five hundred million lines of code even if you include all the autogenerated XML and suchlike".
Two possible reasons:

1) I think a lot of start-ups want to hire "smart" people. Because they expect the new person to eventually wear many hats. Objective-C, Java, Android, CSS, server side concurrency, monitoring. An we've all seen Hunter and Schmidt reference that tokenadult usually posts when talk about interviewing comes around and it does seem that a general mental ability test (like an IQ test) combined with a work samples seem to predict future performance of that employee. Well except that one can't just straight up give IQ test to job applicants (there is a court case about that). So we are left with a job sample (which many forget to give, as is the point of the author). But instead many focus on the GMA and create proxies for it -- cute little puzzles about blenders, round manhole covers, and other such silly things.

2) Those interviewing don't know the technical stuff and are afraid you'd out-bullshit them. "How does an Ajax request work" well if the interviewer themselves doesn't quite know the details the might not be able to evaluate it properly. They could have it written down but well, some technical questions have many different levels of depth that a candidate might descent to. So a quick written answer to the question might seem wrong but it is really because the candidate is more advanced. So puzzles seems to be a generic and "easier" to handle.
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From the Go FAQ:

> We considered adding variant types to Go, but after discussion decided to
> leave them out because they overlap in confusing ways with interfaces. What
> would happen if the elements of a variant type were themselves interfaces?

It's not that there isn't a way to implement sum types in Go, it's that they aren't happy with how they interact with interface types. (That's how I interpret it, anyway.) I'm sure you and I can conceive of reasonable ways for them to coexist, but simply coexisting isn't enough for the Go devs.

> The bigger issue is that having a zero value for every type does indeed conflict with not having null pointers.

I agree that it is indeed the bigger issue. Personally, I make use of the "zero value" feature a lot and very infrequently run into null pointer errors while programming Go. So that particular trade off is clear for me. (I certainly miss sum types, but there is a bit of overlap between what one could accomplish with sum types and what one can accomplish with structural subtyping. Particularly if you're willing to cheat a little. This alleviates the absence of sum types to some extent. Enough for me to enjoy using Go, anyway.)

OT: I love the work you are doing on Rust. :-)
This comment sounds flippant - but it has some truth... I've had a lot of experience with many academics from many different disciplines, from science to media studies, to philosophy.

The sense in which they are 'making out like bandits' in the short term is simply the kind of isolated freedom that tenured academics have been able to enjoy for so long. They only have to talk to one another and get the esteem of their most immediate peers - but beyond that the world leaves them alone.

The sense in which they have their head in the sand is that the world is increasingly asking them to justify their existence more and more - which is forcing academics to engage in various ways more with the external world. And naturally, they don't enjoy doing this. But rather than bite the bullet and tackle full on the problem of demonstrating their value - they just become somewhat histrionic at the suggestion that they have to justify themselves... and in the end - and this is the important bit - FAIL to deliver a coherent defense.

And before you say it: "Academics need to be left alone to their own devices otherwise you won't get innovations borne of long terms motivation and incomprehensible (to the common folk) abstract thinking."

This doesn't help - even if true. Because what is needed is a cost-benefit analysis of all the wasted resources going into the research community as a result of tenured academic life vs the the innovations that this system alone could produce. I for one have no idea how to a) identify the innovations the definitively WOULDN'T have been generated by an alternative system, nor do I - b) know how to measure the costs.

However, the one group of people that probably are smart enough to figure out an answer to this are the people who don't want to even consider the question.

(If anyone knows of actual research on this question - I'd be very interested).
Nothing wrong with what Google is doing. Google is essentially a consumer (and enterprise) cloud services company that is looking to commoditize (read open source/sell at cost) all other parts of the stack. That includes open-sourcing Chrome/Android, selling Chromecast/Google Fiber at cost.
"The :mod::pprint module" - an extra : there has broken the reference.
> Perhaps the same people responsible for the Ontario EHealth scandal…

I don't know if you were being facetious, but you're not far off:

http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/16/mee...
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My comment isn't direct at the individual in this article; I don't blame them for what they did. I just was thinking the whole culture that's evolved out of this is kind of annoying. Our society had the opportunity to just enjoy some cool images, but turned it into some stupid meta-drama.

The whole point of these works is to bring out this drama and highlight the absurdity of it all. It's not absurd in the sense that people are acting irrationally, but absurd in how our culture treats art as some mystical thing that has to be set on a pedestal behind protective glass. We've elevated "art" into something that supposedly only highly-cultured people can appreciate, and shut it away from the layperson.

By doing his art in the cheap and fragile form of graffiti, intimately accessible to everyone, he's giving art back to the people. It's just a simple creative expression for a creator to enjoy sharing. Yet, as Banksy surely predicted, we've tried to apply our weird notions of art onto it, that it should be locked up, cut out of the wall, sold for millions, viewable only to the elite.

There's no easy way out, because no individual is incentivized to change, yet society as a whole needs to change.
All the parts (tiered caching, compression, checksums, redundancy, deduplication, journaling, network availability, FS migration...) likely exist separately; having them in a single filesystem (especially that doesn't require kernel patches, just a module) is quite pleasant.
It is rather unfortunate how little correlation most tech interviews have with their respective jobs. It's largely a lose-lose situation for everyone. Developers who could easily build great systems but aren't experts in graph theory get passed over while brilliant mathematicians who can't necessarily code get hired. Result? Companies simultaneously having to fire employees while facing a supposed talent crunch. Given that this hurts everyone, how did we even get into this situation?

Probably because the only person who doesn't lose from this is the interviewer: they get to have fun. Honestly, when you spend all day buried in code, it's fun to play with puzzles for a change.

Perhaps it's time we started optimizing interviews for hiring success rather than interviewer happiness.
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My opinion on this is that most of the interview processes is pretty old(over 20-30 years) and back then a good programmer was also a pretty good mathematician, and now most of the people that do interviews just use the same old patterns because, maybe, some of them don't know any better or because that is what they found in some books they have read.

I tend to hate the interviews that ask me to solve math and logic brainteasers because I don't see the value in them regarding my knowledge of programming.
I'm interested in how you think it works well for Google if they do nothing and allow Alibaba's Aliyun OS to market themselves as android. When issues do arise and incompatibilities in apps occur.. is this not the fragmentation that Google already is looked down upon ?
Dude you're going the opposite way, I'm trying to get out of Aerospace. What are you specifically looking for in Aerospace. The field is pretty broad and the work you'll do will be so specialized that you'll be using only 5% of all you learn in engineering school. You can always take classes specifically for what you want to do, you do not need an engineering degree to do the job unless you want to become an FAA DER since they are the ones certifying all the work done by "the engineers".
This may be another reason people are eager to start their own company in lieu of working for someone else. If the questions are rubbish and completely unrelated to the actual job, then there's a huge disconnect between the interviewer (or HR company, as a lot of places outsource that) and where the actual work is to take place. I blame both.

The irony is that, in an effort to hire the "smartest" people, they leave out the wisest. Which is arguably more useful.
Unfortunately, it led me to vote for both options, since I only saw the Southern option after having voted for Western (and after all, I'm in the most western European country). Well, I suppose it's not exactly a scientific study either.
Shouldn't they have been called in a year ago? Six months ago? A month ago?

$95 Million apparently buys everything but new management and proper coders.
Looking at news.arc in the Arc distribution (I think that is a source code of the HN or at least a basis of it, right?), it just misses this kind of URLs:

(def parse-site (url)
(rev (tokens (cadr (tokens url [in _ #\/ #\?])) #\.)))

It basically tokenizes the URL "http://example.com/foo/bar?quux#woah" into a list "http:", "example.com", "foo", etc. (no "" since tokens uses consif internally) and takes the second element as a domain name. (It has a prior knowledge of url starting with either "http://" or "https://".) Obviously "#" is missing in the list of separators.

Edit: I filed an issue to the HN issue tracker. https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/35
But when this has been going on for 20 years, you have an accretion of features that don't quite hang together and collectively are a royal pain to deal with. Eventually enough folks get fed up with this state that a new language can gain critical mass, and the cycle starts over again.

I agree, but Java the language hasn't become much more complicated. In fact, it's development has been quite glacial, one of the reasons that some JVM-minded people switch to Scala.

Probably the larger problem is that Java (to the Python/Ruby and now Go crowd) became associated with applets and big and ugly frameworks that require heaps of XML. However, Java the language doesn't differ all that much from Go. Java is better in some respects (generics, checked exceptions) and Go is nicer in some respects (closures). However, Java has an insanely great runtime (JVM) that can be fully instrumented, supports hot code swapping (some natively, DCEVM, JRebel). It also has a zillion great libraries, good IDEs, great web frameworks (that don't require writing XML), etc.

Go will be popular in start ups, etc. Some people will take it into big corps (as happened with Python and Ruby). But to be used widely in the industry, it needs everything and more than the JVM or .NET offer.
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I like your analogy, very fitting. To their defense however they are far from the only ones to do that... I lost about 2h worth of production data with HBase in just the same way - fortunately I didn't want to trust it completely anyway and had my own logs of all transactions on filesystem, but it definitely shattered my trust in that DB (not to mention it was a pain to setup and had no secondary indexes).

I use MongoDB now in production and I am happy about it. Not huge dataset by any means so MongoDB fits the bill perfectly. It has a few idiosyncrasies (doesn't release disk space after deleting records - what?!?) and you definitely want to read the manual on settings. But it is incredibly easy to use (documents instead of relational data) and allows me to focus on app development instead of my storage backend.
I think (1) is probably the primary reason, along with the fun factor I mentioned above.

But honestly, why can't we just start giving IQ tests? Or at least asking for SAT scores? We shouldn't have to run through training puzzles just to prove we're smart enough to build a site.
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I actually like asking math questions on interviews. It shows how people approach a problem. Asking code questions in an arbitrary interview setting shows just about nothing - no access to a reference doc, somebody peering over your shoulder. Heck, I couldn't code my way out of a wet paperback in that setting.

Certainly, asking only math questions is stupid as well, people should know at least a little about the stuff they're supposed to work with, but teaching an actual language to a smart person eager to learn is a breeze compared to teaching problem solving to someone who memorized the reference manual.
It costs ~$300K for a senior web developer in the US currently?
True. Although, panics do run defers, so with good coding practise it's possible to ensure that either you don't share things (but rather pass them around over channels) or things like locks are safely cleaned up.
Can you give a concrete example of this? What 'criteria' is chosen by humans? Do you mean stuff like are the key terms in the h1 tags? I would still consider that an algorithm doing the ranking, and PageRank also is the major factor in deciding what gets returned, and though a human wrote the mathematics, they aren't scoring each page individually to quantify the value of each link.
The interview questions cited in this article are more CS questions than math questions. These questions are perfectly valid if the job will require lots of coding using said CS concepts. But if the job DOESN'T use those CS concepts on a regular basis, the graph algorithm test will generate some false negatives.

On the other extreme, testing knowledge of language syntax is just as bad. A smart programmer will be able to figure out the syntax of any language in short order, especially if it belongs to the same class of a language with which they are already familiar (such as functional vs imperative, dynamic vs static).

An effective interview process would test both reasoning and coding capabilities, and it can be done simultaneously -- i.e. code the solution to reasoning puzzles.

There can be an air of intellectual masturbation to some programming interviews. Lots of otherwise reasonably smart people are close-minded about what is predictive of productivity on the job, and I think that is the real issue that this article should address.
Yes, we've burned at least $400 mil. Last week, everyone insisted it only cost $55 million, and the $768 million figure was misreported. I can only speculate what the final cost will be after victory is declared over these bugs.

It is too late to get mad about any new/rising costs related to the ACA. It is here to stay and might as well be Medicare 2. "Law of the land" as the president is fond of saying.

Here's a fascinating visio diagram that shows just how much government has grown under the ACA. Anything red indicates new or expanded government:

http://www.jec.senate.gov/republicans/public/index.cfm?a=Fil...

Seems like the ACA created very painful integrations between federal systems and insurers, asking them to do many new things. Not a big surprise they're having problems. Some federal IT systems are archaic and integrations/change are costly and fraught with danger. The insider stories I've read about the Soc Security mainframe-based system are frightening!
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> Breadth-first search from both ends.

I believe this is deeply valuable. For some roles, I would much prefer to hire someone who can quickly see the value of breadth-first search from both ends.

If he/she doesn't happen to know the syntax of Ruby, or Java, etc. it's less important to me.
That's something I used to wonder too. I used to work for a company that had a number of highly-visible failures, the kind that gets reported in the news. They somehow still managed to score multi-million-dollar contracts. I suspect having a great sales team is more important that having a great engineering team.
That's a lot of morass.

Smaller government until it is not essential. We praise those Administrations that get out of the way.
You know that nearly any compiled language would give such speed-ups compared to Ruby?
You can't have a "western europe excl UK" and then a "southern europe". Italy and Spain are for sure in both categories.
While the server-side components may never become open-source or auditable (significant portions are based on existing, closed systems), the client-side code is easily auditable. If you have a chance, I would love to see what you would find by analyzing https://github.com/STRML/Healthcare.gov-Marketplace. If you get a chance to look at it, please submit a PR.
This may be another reason people are eager to start their own company in lieu of working for someone else.

If it is so, then it is a good thing. Right?
Malaysia boleh!
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NOT everyone who reads Hacker News has an account to vote. It would be really nice to have Paul Graham release the analytics data on for HN. That way we can see where all the HN visitors are coming from.
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Oh I agree, I am just saying they miss both the part about how GMA is best when paired with a work sample and that those puzzles are not necessarily good equivalents to an IQ test.
Ask HN: Taking full advantage of a San Francisco internship
I landed an internship in the San Francisco area for next summer.

It will be my first time visiting San Francisco and I really want to take full advantage of the 12 weeks I have there. Reading blogs and articles about the area can only get you so far, so I'm looking for some input from the HN community on things to do.

These are the general categories I would be interested in:

Tech/Startup Scene

Beaches - I haven't seen one since I was 12

Fishing - The largest bass we have here are around 5 lbs

Outdoors (Hiking, camping, etc.)

Anything interesting
Then you assume that less US residents have a desire to have their country of residence represented. Why?
I hope things get better for you really soon. And thank you for reminding me to be grateful for the things i've got.
That idea is a relatively recent one, starting with movements like the fauves. Throughout history prior to that, the job of an artist was to produce work his patron/client was satisfied with.

Some would argue that even those now 'breaking rules' have been subsumed by the massive market around art - as soon as the price tag is astronomical, and the method of display only a safe gallery, the rebellion has been captured in aspic and rendered safe.

Banksy is an interesting take on this as much of his work is trying to break out of the confines of the gallery, but he has still been trapped in a system he's at least partly unhappy with by the rising value placed on his work, and has resorted to trying to undermine this with stunts like that $60 sale. It's interesting that the perceived value of the spraypaint with his signature has resisted even that sort of rebellion.

So I don't think saying it must be provocative or break the rules is a very good definition of art, indeed, for most people, even those buying faintly rebellious work in the 20th/21st century, art is decoration (I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but that is how it is consumed), rebellion is an optional extra.
The thing is, it is not a bad language. It's also written by great engineers, who deserve their place in history. My problem with it (and this is the critique you see very much outside the HN circles, where Go is not a bit of a hype), is that it doesn't offer much over the state of the art of twenty years ago (Java), which wasn't exactly state of the art either ;).