skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The big lie wrt lines of code vs bugs is the kind if bugs.

What good is a single line of clojure vs 25 of golang if it takes 45 minutes to get that line of clojure working. I might have more bugs in my golang but the are trivial.

I've busted my ass on clojure for two years with various projects (systemverilog parser/manipulator, CPAP data decoder interpreter visualizer). I want to use clojure but I find myself dealing with awful error messages, constantly breaking tooling (cider), and dealing with asinine constructions all in the name of functional and programming directly in an AST.

I tried. I've read the awe inspiring posts about lisp from Graham and Fogus and Raymond and of course R Hickey and Granger and Hagelberg and Stokke . I think all these people are amazing!

After two years I have not gotten there. I can write reasonably sophisticated applications, but the productivity is so low I feel like in programming in Russian.

I got fed up with tree traversal the other day and said screw it. I turned around and rewrote versions of my CPAP app in golang, and then CPP in d a day. It took me weeks to get this done in clojure.

I couldn't get a binary parser framework to work except for the most trivial case, so I wrote my own generic binary parser. I couldn't tell if seesaw made swing better or worse. Actually I decides worse because at aleast with Java interop I can tell what the hell is going on.

In CPP writing a binary parser was nearly as simple as defining a struct and memcpy. God I live memcpy. You know how many years it's been since I wrote CPP? Never. I've never written a line of CPP before and the rewrite was almost pain free. The Makefile and understanding data alignment in struct a was the hard part.
The "but.. but.. look at what these other sites are doing!" stuff just comes across as bad and childish.
I'm a mechanical engineer, when I worked for a small manufacturing shop many of the best machine and fixture designs came from the machinists in the tool room. We tried to achieved the balance that you're talking about by having the machinists and engineers collaborate closely.
Unprotected heterosexual sex is considerably more dangerous than male-male sex. It kills considerable more people. Pregnancy has historically been very dangerous, and even now is not without serious health risks.
Well, definitions have changed, completely. The average home size in 1950 was ~1000 square feet, while the average home size in 2004 is ~2400 square feet.

Similarly, the 'sane working hours' you mention, generally speaking, were 48 hours a week or more. In the 'upper' middle class, more hours were spent at the office as well. Today, the average worker works ~37 hours.

Assuming job accessibility (which I have no idea if there's a guarantee of or not), and more reasonable home purchasing, I think it's not "simply false" that one can live the same way as they did in the 50s on the equivalent working wage, one simply has to make more apt comparisons to see that the goal posts have shifted.

The average 1950s family only owned one car, while the average family of today owns more than one (likely, to support the second job). If each of us bought houses half the size of what we're currently buying, and half the cars, we'd likely be in greater parity with our 1950s brethren. Also, they had to pay less than half of what we did for college, and they also likely didn't borrow in order to afford it, which factors in even further in measuring debt load.

Anyway, I think your comparison is somewhat rose-colored.
You caught that too, huh!? Brilliant photo-bomb PG!
Mmm, lasagna.
If living better than a medieval peasant doesn't mean anything, then why do so few people want to live like medieval peasants?
Italy: always at the forefront of legislative innovation to kill the internet. Piratebay blocks? Check. Fighting encryption and anonimity? Check. Taxing the crap out of anything that moves? Check. Cutting investments in r&d and universities across thr board? Check.

And then they wonder why their economy sucks.
Ireland doesn't allow people who lived in the UK for a while from donating blood.
Ask HN: What do you use to track your expenses?
I personally use a spreadsheet, but I am considering to switch for an app. I tried Mint, but don't like the fact that it must connect to my bank accounts before it can be useful. I prefer to log my transactions by hand, so I have full control over my data.

So what application do you use (if any) and what do you like and dislike about it?
The Kochs' money is mostly from natural resource extraction. Most software businesses are pretty heavily premised on intellectual property rights.
Childishness seems ingrained in this company's DNA.
> Most rich people became rich because they provided a particular value to society.

Evidence? I think quite a lot of rich people are rich not because of an ability to create value, but an ability to extract cash. E.g., 95% of Wall Street's activity. And even those in the value-creating category often attribute much of their wealth to right-place, right-time luck rather than an unusually high ability to create value.
Products as Vessels for Personality
I agree that the distinction needs to be made, although the exact difference between the two, as many of the comments have already stated well, is hard to define. A good post.

Nowadays academia is under ever increasing pressure to produce fit-for-work experts, and seen from such a perspective it really can look pointless. I personally strongly disagree with such a view. IMO, it should appear to be pointless! It should broaden your thinking and introduce you to the cutting edge of the field, not just specialize you for a certain line of work. There should be programs which will do only such a specialization, but a full-on CS course is supposed to be more. In the end, how well you will work will depend on a lot more than just the school, but a good school will help.

The Law of Leaky Abstractions is, perhaps, a good argument for why it is useful to learn all that theory even though in practice it is rarely needed. Sometimes, you just need to know what is going on behind the scenes.

P.S. I always have the feeling that the Dunning-Kruger effect is strongly present in these discussions. The first programmer that I heard claiming that a degree is useless is also the guy who didn't know what a DB transaction is for and when he should use it. It's not a huge deal, we fixed the bug, taught him, and then he knew. But - not knowing such basics, how could he possibly know what else he is also oblivious about?

We need good schools to teach us that we don't know shit.
tl;dr - you don't need to care, you can do perfectly well without it, but you're missing something.

Longer answer ...

There are several issues here, and many people conflate them. They are realted, and I'm not going to be able to do them justice in a quick reply here. It's Christmas Eve, and I have a lot to do.

So, briefly ...

Learning FP, really learning it, gives you a new insight into programming. It can change the way you work, and the way you think. If nothing else, it's mind expanding, and that's always a good thing.

There's a seminal paper "Why Functional Programming Matters"[0] (WFPM). It dates back to 1984, but it's still relevant. In fact it's so relevant that raganwald[1] wrote "Why Why Functional Programming Matters Matters." That's also a really good read, with many useful insights.

fogus[2] has included WFPM in his list of 10 technical papers every programmer should read twice.[3] There's also a StackOverflow discussion[4], probably several.

There are many, many programmers out there, capable, productive, useful programmers getting stuff done, but knowing nothing (significant) about FP. And that's fine. But personally, I think that if you want to be serious about your craft, you should learn about FP, what it is, what it's good for, how to think in it, when to use it, and when to avoid it. It's not the One True Style(tm), but it is

[0] http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=raganwald

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=fogus

[3] http://blog.fogus.me/2011/09/08/10-technical-papers-every-pr...

[4] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36504/why-functional-lang...
I mean the post by "chrissnell". I don't have any disagreements with what it says now.
What parts do you find hard to understand?
The objection reported in the article seems to me quite usual political boilerplate without real substance. One of the comments says something interesting: "Europe will have to address the fiscal treatment of multinationals, and by its nature, this is not a task to be faced on a piecemeal basis."

That sounds more the real issue of the problem to me.
How are they "cashing out"? Once upon a time eastern european hackers used to run a IRC chats under a .CC domain. They would post a bunch of CC numbers with their info and random forum members would grab and test/empty the cards. If the responsibility for cashing out is distributed, likely the culprits can stay hidden in the crowd of purchasers. However a kid in Eastern Europe did get arrested at a shipping port because he was waiting on a Ferrari he ordered with stolen credit cards.
Hows this different from Tinder?
I could claim facebook improved social productivity. Made it easier to organize events, for one thing.
Also, why ask for post permissions on twitter if you promise to never do that? :) Otherwise, a nice idea.
Israeli researchers find security flaw in Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone
I really want to like rap genius but I have a few basic beefs:

1. It's hard to read. Yellow or even white on black kills my eyes.

2. The "click" to translate" thing is really annoying & tough to read the full song. I feel like a side by side annotation would work better.

3. It's not as clean as other lyrics sites. Sure other ones are spammy - but they give me exactly what I'm looking for.

From a conceptual side of things - I really like what Rap Genius is trying to do. However, the little things like the ones I mentioned above make me looking for other alternatives.
> The real problem is: This additional freedom you can buy with money means less freedom for somebody else.

There are three wrong assumptions here: 1) that wealth is zero-sum 2) that wealth is the only possible way to obtain freedom 3) that for each individual the same quantum of wealth buys the exact same quantum of freedom.

Prime-facie, neither of these three are true.

There are all kinds of problems with associated with inequality (and the literature is far too rich for me to go into detail here), but this isn't one of them.
Can we ask where you live? I wonder how local real-estate prices effect things. For example, I live in fly-over county in a $115,000, 1400 sq. ft. house on a large lot, while my brother-in-law lives in an 800 sq, ft. house on a tiny lot in Seattle that is apparently worth more than $400,000. I support my wife and 4 kids on one income, while he and his wife both work to support their two kids. So even though I make considerably less money, we have a lifestyle that is on par with the 1950's ideal.
Google, Starbucks Corp. (SBUX) and Amazon.com Inc. have been criticized for strategies that shift billions of dollars of profits offshore.[...]

Google last year moved nearly $12 billion to the Bermuda unit, the majority of its worldwide income, cutting more than $2 billion off its global income tax bill. Google’s Italian unit last year reported total income taxes of just 1.8 million euros, corporate filings show.

Google's tax-avoidance has nothing to do with this new law. It's true that Google shifts profits around to avoid paying taxes where they do their actual labor. But changing that wouldn't change the fact that Google isn't based in Italy. For the sake of simplicity let's say that Google stayed in Ireland when they stopped abusing the system. They would sell all their European ads from Ireland, and pay a hefty tax with no loopholes. And their tax payments in Italy... would not change.

This law is strictly anti-outsourcing. It does nothing to stop Google's tax avoidance, and would still be just as 'needed' even if Google didn't avoid taxes. Bringing it up muddies the water and serves no purpose other than making Google look like a bad guy.
Heh, the links to their competitor sites are dofollow.
I was an engineer at Netflix from 2010-2012. There were a lot of things that I really liked about the Netflix culture. They really do live the "Freedom and Responsibility" culture. It was very empowering. There is a dark side to that culture though. At Netflix it was too easy to fire people.

This had two side affects.

1) People were afraid of being fired. You could come in one day and be sent home that afternoon without ever having any idea that you were under-performing. You'll hear Netflix employees talk about the "Culture of Fear".

2) In a meeting with my team Patty said "We are your co-workers, not your friends." `The idea being, you don't make friends at work because you might have to fire that person one day. It was really strange, people were very guarded and almost never talked about their lives outside of work.

PIPs protect employees from the constant fear of being fired. They require managers to give an employee negative feedback. Without them, managers can take the easy route and never have the uncomfortable conversations.

#2 made life really hard at Netflix. The majority of my friends come from my co-workers. You spend more time with them than most other people in your life. Some teams ignored the company culture and became close friends anyway. I think the correct thing to do here is to expect your managers to be adults and do the hard thing. Fire your friend.
Of course all this hinges on the admission that he was Hel in the first place .... which seems plausible to the amateur but requires more evidence for courts, I suspect. Though the name-clash of that service and the bribery is intriguing.

As to Target, there had to be a group. Somebody funding, someone inside, and then you've distribution networks for what effectively ends up as money laundering. At least that's the way I imagine it :)
Here's How Rap Genius Should Be Building Links
The first thing I would do is ask webmasters to remove all unnatural links, and any link that doesn't drive referral traffic. Than I would disavow any links that can't be removed. I would than submit a reconsideration request as they will certainly be penalized for their spamming the search index.

Than, I would FOCUS ALL MY ENERGY AND ATTENTION AT GETTING BACKLINKS FROM THE ARTISTS THAT YOU CLAIM USE YOUR SITE.

I would figure out how your content is useful to artists and their fans, and I would create widgets that the artists would love to add to their sites to share the annotated lyrics.

I would than focus on the media, everytime TMZ breaks a story, I would try to find a way to mine that artists lyrics to add meaning to the event. Hopefully media outlets will pick up your insights from artists songs to spruce up their stories.

Than, I would focus on the fans. I would spin an elaborate web of the interwoven meanings, hidden messages, and other clever things you can mine from your content about artists, and I would become a publisher of crazy content about artists.

Than, I would focus on growing social sharing. Adding meaningful lyrics to tweet out on every page, or tweet this line, etc... I would turn meaningful lyrics into ecards you can send your friends or loved ones.

You are sitting on a goldmine of content, why not start mining it for infotainment. Entertain us, and well link back to you, share you, etc...

When you reach a point where journalists are asking artists on the red carpet if the rapgenius meaning is accurate, than you are really in business!!!
Identical Astronauts Prepare for First Twin Study in Space
Your scenario isn't exactly what happened here. Rather, how would you feel if your friend asked you to link 10 Justin Bieber songs in your Python tutorial?
They know who the people are, but if the perpetrator's home governments don't want to give them up (article refers to Ukraine) there isn't a lot that can be done. Do we know that they aren't cooperating? No, but you can just look at the forums in question without an invitation so it's not like it would be hard if they wanted to.
You mean the bitcoin that maintains a public record of every transaction ever made on the network? There are still ways to anonomously cash out (payments to an anonomous account that forwards the funds to a mixing service, for example), but bitcoin is not a silver bullet for getting away with it.
I think it's a more basic problem. You find exactly the question you have, but SO decided the question was 'wrong' somehow.

The question may not be answerable, but it doesn't make the question wrong. The question is nothing more than an expression of the users query or intent.

For example, unanswerable questions could give a stack listing if relevant answerable questions.

But it just seems wrong to take highly targeted inbound traffic and send them to a page which basically says 'nothing to see here'.
> We need to find a way forward to make sure we can stop terrorists

Why is this such a trumping goal (or even a goal at all)? It's an impossible task without singnificant imposition on everyone's lives (we're no where close to being able to stop anything, and things are already leaning too far away from the people).

A disproportionate amount of time and resources are already being dedicated to "fighting" terrorism, with diminishing returns and uncountable atrocities done by our government.
Of course houses are cheap in places with no jobs.
Or the devices you don't check. In my case, I've yet to intercept traffic from a Dropcam to see if it's SSL'd correctly everywhere. Let's not start on the alert screenshots it emails me....
In a (US) Limited Liability Partnership, partners get a share of the firm's profits--while still having their individual liability protected in a similar way to a corporation. In a large firm, you probably have multiple levels of partners. While I'm hardly an expert, I imagine that this structure would probably limit the options for raising capital.
'inline.', that is, not 'online,'.
Let's not forget the millions of Russians who died on the eastern front. Without them, nothing at Bletchley Park wouldn't have mattered much for ending the war.
How to go about 'proving' why dynamically typed languages are better
> The lower middle classes can't own any house at all with just one wage earner.

The lower bound on lower middle class is, according to Wikipedia, $32,500. There are plenty of houses available for purchase in the $60,000 range, which is well inside of affordability ranges.

There are a plethora of rural homes available within those ranges, but that level of income isn't necessarily exclusionary to city dwelling either. Dallas, San Antonio, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Tampa, etc., are all very affordable, and at least according to MSN[1], has homes available for less than the lower bound on lower middle class.

[1] - http://realestate.msn.com/what-you-must-earn-to-buy-a-home-i...
No surprise there; would the folks who are satisfied with what they have, bother to become super-rich?
I have to agree that rapgenius has a great product but their "juvenile and occasionally offensive" demeanor tends to overshadow this. Would love to see them turn their image around but I'm not sure how likely that is. I've always wondered if that is a front they put on to relate to their user base. But then again I love rapgenius and I don't see it as being effective at all.

[EDIT] grammar
I like Mint. Not a fan of having to connect to your bank accounts, as you've pointed out, but the convenience factor weighs more heavily in my case.

I've heard good things about YNAB (http://www.youneedabudget.com/) but I've never tried it out myself.
I was in line and made a short conversation (short so as to not hold up the line) with the cashier at Target. The elderly lady behind me was pretty worried about the credit card theft, and the cashier knew about it too. It's cool at least that news about this stuff is reaching more people.

In my opinion just get a new card, don't wait for suspicious activity. Check it to see if it was already used. Also given that the 3 letter pins weren't from the back are not included I'm not sure if it's going to be very easy to make use of this card data. Having said, still get a new card if you used it at Target recently.
It's the same as when SourceForge started doing drive-by installs, and the cure is the same:

Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Maybe I'm wrong, but with this law Google is not able to sell ads in Italy. So if they still want to do that they need to open an Italian company and therefore pay taxes in Italy. So, for Italy at least, things would change.
I think you're actually proving my point - a second car isn't an indicator of marvelous bounty. It's a liability required to support a necessary second job and higher debt load.
They are doing that in most EU countries, not only Italy or the PIGS. I would say the PIGS have a lot of reasons besides maybe this why they are going badly; simple things like being anti-client-friendly as much as possible and finding that normal.
I wrote a very simple DOM diff'er a while ago in Ruby for a somewhat similar usage (diff'ing the same pages over and over with probably a small number of changes each time) https://github.com/conorh/rdomdiff. It works in a similar way to their diff, although definitely not as well as theirs works - for my needs I was able to ignore sibling nodes moving around. I made the tradeoff that once I hit enough changes I would stop the diff and treat the page as a completely new change.
While I am a fan of the RapGenius product, can all the superfluous crap just go away?

If I was investing in RG or advising them, I'd tell them to put a muzzle on it. They have a good product, stop screwing it up.
thanks for clearing that for me, I figured it out my self after giving it sometime.
Pushing traffic to both the Bieber page & the Beyonce page. Both HUGE numbers of search terms.

Interestingly enough - they weren't very specific about getting penalized and/or when it happened.
It seems to me what he calls "lighweight data modeling" is a synonym for "untyped data". Use ints, strings, arrays and maps to model everything (his JSON example).

It's great for prototyping but when you start getting big, you really need to tighten these models down to real types.
It's Christmas Eve, and I'm enjoying my coffee and feel rather disinclined to get into a political argument, so I'll just toss a few thoughts around without intending to respond (I'll chat via email tho'). I agree that increasing power should be treated with great scepticism (But it isn't, honestly. And that's a shame).

Point: Police power is inherently a use of force on the citizenry. The Army is the same, loooosely.

Point: Taxing, coining, patenting are all applications of force.

Point: The 5th amendment clearly lines out uses of force.

Point: The 5th amendment also includes a key phrase, "due process of law", indicating that the government is limited. The 3rd amedment supports this as well, requiring a limitation on quartering in time of war via law.

Point: Law & regulations, period, are the application of the government's use of force to ensure a smooth governing (See Hobbes for a work known in the late 1700s).

Conclusion: The US founders designed the government to have power (Unverified statement based on recollections - but split in such a way that each arm of government was naturally incented to limit the power of the other arms).

Nit: The US is a republic, not a democracy. It's regrettable that a district can't recall its representative wholly on its own. Perhaps that would restrain certain foolishness in the system...

Happy Holidays.
Are there plenty of jobs near those cheap houses?
No, large heterogenous systems like the web are built on serialization formats that different components within that same heterogenous system can (and do) interpret as either bare data structures, objects, or just unstructured streams of text (or binary data.)