skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's interesting is that tech is very precise and yet plumbing is not (it's analog with some margin for error just like cooking as another example).

But both of those things have been around for much longer than tech so perhaps the roles are clearly defined for that reason. (You probably could find counter examples of course.)

Maybe this stems from the fact that the general public doesn't typically deal with "computer guys" [1] so they have no need to differentiate them. But they do need plumbers, carpenters and electricians and they know what they are. [2] (And those are also union jobs so that probably also makes titles necessary).

[1] How many times have you heard "he does something with computers?".

[2] Maybe this all stems from the fact that there was no central defining authority at any point that made any statement as to what the titles meant. Even in religion there are clearly defined titles, right? In tech (on the net at least) what do we have? RFC's a nice way of asking opinions.
Do you have any real responses to my arguments?
The phrase "just right for a hangman's noose" comes to mine.
I agree... how come real women developers like Lynn Root, Audrey Roy, Audrey Tan, Jessica McKellar aren't on the top of the gittip list? Its because of whitenighting!
Python 3 is a huge distraction. It's hard to get people to move away from languages like java while there's a fragmented python world. If only we could just forget py3 the python community would be a better, more newbie friendly place. Every time I hire someone I have to explain why python 2 and why not "the latest"
What is really needed is a 3to2.

I have been very impressed with 2to3, the amount of work it does is pretty impressive. But as somebody who tends and prefers to work in python 3 but often needs my scripts to run in python 2, I have no choice but write those in python 2. I can see the same dilemma for somebody who writes an open source library and hope for as much usage as possible.
12 or so. This was 1996 and websites were getting to be a big thing, so I taught myself basic HTML and started making websites. I didn't get into any real programming until I was 24, staying with web design until then.
There is a vast difference between writing out zeroes to the SSD but still having some of the original data potentially persist on the SSD but unreachable without special techniques, and not zeroing out the SSD and giving the device to a new VM and letting it trivially access everything that was previously there.

If I can provision a new VM and cat /dev/vda and see data from the VM that previously occupied that spot, then you are doing it horribly, horribly, horribly wrong.

That zeroing out the data leaves open a different and vastly more difficult attack path doesn't make that any less true.
US announces six drone test sites
I'm not too familiar with Scala; but isn't its life at a different stage than Python's?
IT firms lose billions after NSA scandal
The Story Behind the Bitcoins.com Domain Name
Poll: How often do you exercise?
Just wondering what the HN crowd does in terms of exercise. Feel free to share your habits,experiences and routines. It can be physical or mental exercise.
Few times a week
Few times a month
Hardly if any
Note that the linked article didn't say Apple actually influenced the pricing up or down; they asked to review and approve the plans. I think there's a fair chance they were trying to prevent gouging.
I'm not surprised that your campaign hasn't succeeded. You do a very poor job of explaining how it works, or what the benefits are, and it largely duplicates the efforts of other existing mesh networking projects, and free software/hardware projects like FreedomBox.
If we can expand life expectancy by 30 years, we would effective double if not exponentially increase the rate of progress. This is because it takes scientists and engineers about 30 years to mature into their field and find their niche, counting from childbirth. Another 30 years before their are close to retirement age. If people were healthy into their 90's, you'd have unbelievable masters of their craft working at high levels for an additional 30 years.
Marketing Yourself: How to Create a Blog
Biological immortality does not mean immunity from accidents or homicide. Hugh Hixon, at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, calculated the half-life of a biologically immortal population at 1 654 years [1].

If we lowered fatality odds to 1 in 100 000 per year (no accidents, Sweden's homicide rate) this figure inflates to 69 315. It's an interesting illustration of how the effects of randomness will not be muted, just shifted.

[1] http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/MisadventureAsACauseOfDeat...
Usually people who worry about how long others live (mainly those who issue life insurance policies) use the "extended" Gompertz-Makeham Law (which is, basically, the Gompertz Law extended with an age-independent component - the lightning bolts).

One thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around is how the lightning bolt deaths (the Makeham component) will be dealt with by society if "immortality" becomes a reality. As it is now, we accept that people gets killed (i.e., gets their date of death advanced) by e.g. traffic, but how will that change?
Well it's not that pedantic.
Supermarket for poor families
It is possible to write your own contract abbreviators with Code Contracts so I would hope such functionality gets added to the new language. The post does mention however that object invariants are not supported so I do wonder how much Code Contracts are actually influencing it.
I was and am at the same time not sarcastic. I would be genuinely thrilled to get $3000 and am aware that it is a stupid small amount :) There are not many smaller prizes in math that award money.
But if you wrote sensitive data to a block that then went bad, then there's a good chance that a large fraction of your data is there and will never be erased, not matter what high-level commands you send the card.
It's true that TSP is not NP complete because it is not in NP, because it is an optimization problem, not a decision problem.

It's also true that TSP is NP hard. The simplest way to see this is that if you have solved a TSP you have also automatically solved the Hamiltonian Path problem for the corresponding graph and the Hamiltonian Path problem is known to be NP complete.

What the op does not state and which is also very important to realize however is that TSP is also NP easy (and hence NP equivalent). In other words if you have an algorithm that can solve any NP complete problem in polynomial time (ie. P == NP) then you can use that algorithm to solve TSP (actually any finite optimization problem) in polynomial time. There is a sketch of a proof of this in one of my previous HN comments, but I'm pretty sure this is well known to complexity theorists, though there seems to be a fair amount of confusion about it on the web.
My opinion has shifted over the last few years working in plants, and I've now settled on the idea that the fan solution probably needed the eight million dollar project. Without the project, the operator would not have been inconvenienced, nor would they have achieved their goals as soon.

Also remember that the project was worth it - it was returning on the investment. Ideally the simple solution would have been found first for a massive windfall of savings, but industry runs on constant, small, incremental changes over many years. And it takes a very special mindset to invent awesome hacks like the fan trick!

The operator should instead be applauded for making it so no other plant needs to buy such an expensive system!

Edit: also, never underestimate the utility of inconveniencing operators. They will find the most brilliant, clever, and cheap hacks to solve problems. Watching operators is the best diagnostic tool available. When you see a c-clamp or duct tape on the machine, you know exactly what needs workin' on next!
For me this is really the only value of this list, since it actually address the object of programming, rather than the individual themselves.

Any environment that thinks code is too valuable to change, alter, throw away, simply hasn't got a fully oiled production line going from Design -> Code -> Build -> Use. If there is code too valuable to change because 'nobody understands it' the problem isn't the code, its the people reading it.

But the problem is, people are people, and these days people talk a lot of shit about each other. Its 'normal'. Blame culture infects all human activity, it has been scripted so.
There is no meaningful performance increase to go to a backwards incompatible version? Three letters: DOA. if not performance then at least we'd need some crazy new feature like good multi threading or perhaps running on a new relevant platform (say ios or android). Otherwise we will be 2.X forever.
That's only assuming we could be immortal, but still stuck on a single planet. I find that an unlikely event.
> If we didn't want to kid ourselves, we'd kill Python 3 ...

Using Python both personally and professionally, I do not think it is necessary. I already came across a few 3.X features, that I miss in 2.X and I write most 2.X code "in preparation" for the jump. But that's it, it is a jump, still.

The most interesting part of the post is the feedback matter, which seems to be accidental, but isn't since an open source language is shaped by the people - something you can forget, when you are not a contributor (which most of the people might not be).
Do you consider those who support antitrust regulations to be on the side of freedom? Monopoly is the opposite of freedom and is much closer to dictatorship.
"How are we going to push this nail into this board?"

"We can use a hammer."

"A hammer is a tool, not a solution."
Why Denver should be on your tech radar next year
But do we really want to be forced to design components based on whether errors are unrecoverable or not? It seems to conflate two orthogonal concepts. I say that without seeing any code or examples, of course.
My last few Python projects have started out as Python 3, but ended up as 2 due to missing library support.

Would it be at all feasible to enable Python 3 to import Python 2 code? I imagine this could be done without making Python 3 fully backwards compatible, but I might be wrong.
This is possible. It might be that the greatest benefit of these kinds of interfaces is in pedagogy. In any case, this work is clearly worth keeping an eye on, even if I don't buy all of Victor's arguments for its utility.

I also have children in grade school, who can scarcely believe that when I was their age, and in high school, and in college, actually having a computer in your house (never mind in your shirt pocket) was just science fiction. So I struggle with trying to figure out how valuable computers can be in helping to educate them, or whether they are more of a distraction.
It will cause people to become much much much more conservative and safety oriented.

You already see this in practice - you can't buy real chemistry sets, kids are never left alone, safety equipment for riding a bike, etc, etc, etc.

Basically everywhere people say "When I was a kid we used to xxxx", and today they don't. It's a direct result of accidents slowly becoming the primary cause of death.
Been there, done that.

It might be worthwhile to use Earth-to-Moon travel as a benchmark -- such as we used "crossing the Atlantic" or "New York to LA". Otherwise, what's the use?

1) I suppose we could build factories to make stuff too dangerous or difficult to make on Earth. But LEO would probably work just as well more cheaply.
2) Build a "Super Guantanamo" where "life without parole" has some real teeth.

We might find LEO, Sealabs, and near-Earth asteroids more useful. Going to Mars would be more difficult and more imaginative.
This sounds remarkably like Perl 5/6.
If true, that supports my point further.
Fail safe. Fail safe. Fail safe.

It's fine to make this optional. But it needs to have large flashing red warning lights all around it and it needs to be off by default.
Fast and easy installation of Docker VM on OS X
Cryptography is one big part of it, but I think all of counter-economics is the real hope.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-economics
> There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever.

There are plenty of fundamental reasons for why we can't.

> Gompertz Law is not a law of physics, but a law of observation (...)

Second law of thermodynamics.
"Its not what you know, its who you know"
Glad somebody pointed this out. It's also hilarious to me that we were all screaming for heads with the GD (mt) acquisition a few months back, and this is just a "pat on the back" type of thing.

Their growth and offerings are great, but they were going to run into problems sooner or later. As we've seen with many other hosts in the past, this is probably just the beginning.
Indeed. The ONLY guarantee against companies abusing their near-monopoly positions is to deny them those positions of power in the first place.

Not to trust them because they seem nice and "don't be evil"-ish.

Not to trust the government to stop them from abusing it (clearly).

But supporting competitors. Competition is the regular individual's best weapon.

And that is why, where possible, I strive to support underdogs wherever possible. I use a Windows Phone (with a Jolla on the way), read on a Nook e-reader, use duckduckgo for search, and avoid lock-in wherever possible (upload my music to your cloud? No thanks), etc.

And I encourage others to do so, or at least give it a try
If society included lots of immortals, they'd be pretty driven to make sure that we're not stuck living on a planet with finite resources. There are plenty of untapped resources laying on the ocean floors and deeper into the Earth's crust than we typically mine today, and lots more off-world. Those are all technologically within our grasp today, they're just not cost-effective. But if we had to support an immortal society, the ROI terms change: it becomes reasonable to invest in an infrastructure that will take a few centuries to pan out, because people will live to see it completed and get the benefits from it.
Yeah but that is business. That is exactly how a good business man approaches business. Study the market, determine what is successful, emulate them but either more efficiently, to a new niche, or marketed better.

I mean the whole point of business is to maximize the return on your investment.

Now making absolute garbage may not be the right solution, and making incredible product that takes 5 years to develop is probably not the right solution either... finding the right mix is key
Apple hires lead 'New York Times Magazine' designer for marketing
I think most engineers are familiar with easy quick hack solutions that are cheap and fast. You want this to have an effect? Tell it to the product monkey overlords or the design "gurus"
No, I actually agree with a commenter on the page: what you need is a small compatibility layer to run 2.x code on 3.x, which can be slow and emit loads of warnings, and then stop making 2.x available AT ALL.

What 3to2 and six really do is keeping the 2.x runtime alive, and as long as the runtime sticks around (and is patched, and features are backported etc etc etc), people will keep using it.
That applies to every single blog post about "white men" she's every written. Her first. Besides, don't want to draw the ire of the twitter harpies... again.
> The reality is Pakistan or Yemen does not want terrorist on their ground more than me and you.

I dont know about Yemen but some of the Pakistani terrorist camps are actively supported by the Pakistan military.
Re: finite resources - Constraining the human race to a single planet puts a pretty small upper bound on our species' potential.

Humans evolved a desire to explore and adapt to new environments as an evolutionary advantage, this advantage doesn't need to be bound to one tiny little ball floating in space.
The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2013
Yep looked at doing secure paperless direct debit back in 2000 or so it is quite practical to build ATM's securely and to have atm update procedures that are much much more secure requiring a two man approach for edxample.

for physical access Having ATM'S that self destruct on tampering woudl be another possibility like the iron key USB sticks and bank grade key stores
That wouldn't solve the main issue, which is the [non-negative] amount of work in porting existing Py2 codebases.

Besides, 3to2 (which does exist but isn't maintained) and 2to3 are both bad ideas. They miss edge cases, even common ones, and they add even more complexity to the build/test/install process which people already find hard.
On the other hand, there's what you could call the Homer Simpson reaction[1]. If you know you're going to die, and you don't even know if it won't happen soon, you might be discouraged from doing things with a longer time frame.

[1] http://global3.memecdn.com/live-each-day-like-it-was-your-la...
$666k is a rounding error for Apple.
The total lifetime value is reflected in the price established by the market at sale time. Value is not destroyed.
>a dictatorship implies central control, and there is quite a contrast between that and strong market-favoring

Not in Asia. Singapore is consistently ranked as one of the most economically free (pro-business and free market) countries in the world, yet they are essentially a one-party 'democracy.'

Hong Kong is another example of an entity consistently ranked as one of the most economically free, but less democratic.
I don't understand how robots could do a better job than humans at the job of 'being a human walking around on the moon'
ElementTree has always been in 3.x. I believe NumPy and SciPy are finally making the leap just about now.
I like to think of engineering as "solving problems within a system of constraints". In the physical world, engineering constraints are things like the amount of load a beam will bear. One of the primary easily-overlooked constraints in the software world is backwards compatibility or migration paths.

There are many examples of systems where many look at them today and say: "This is terrible, I could design a better/less-complicated system with the same functionality in a day". Some examples of this dear to my heart are HTML, OpenID, and SPDY. It's important to recognize the reason these systems succeeded is they sacrificed features, good ideas, and sometimes even making sense to provide the most critical piece: compatibility with the existing world or a migration plan that works piecemeal. Because without such a story, even the most perfect jewel is difficult to adopt.

The OP, about Python 3, is right on except for when it claims making Python 3 parallel installable with 2 was a mistake; doing that would make it even more impossible to migrate to 3 (unless the single binary was able to execute Python 2 code). (Also related: how Arch screwed up Python 3 even more: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/arch-linux/qWr1HHkv83U/dis... )
Essentials of Twelve-Factor Apps
This seems like a reasonable perspective, but I wonder how much will change when Python 3 starts shipping with Linux distributions (and probably OS X eventually).

It won't change anything for the shop that has a million LOC, but it might start to budge that 2% number.
You are missing some key options, 3-6 times a week (which is the category I fall under). Exercise is important to ensure that the body stays healthy, and thats important so the mind can stay sharp. Eating right and exercising can have a profound effect on the way people think and act, often in the positive, and will allow you to have the energy to push through rough times and continue down your path. My mental exercise is my work, as I often leave everything I have in the terminal by the end of the day.
BlackBerry CEO: Here's our new strategy
It saddens me that your thoughtless and damaging response is pinned to the top.

Right now we have one major source of news about drone programs: government PR. It is biased and one-sided.

The Guardian has found a legitimate source of an additional perspective and they are adding it to the public's understanding. And you are somehow claiming that this makes things worse. That is bullshit.

The only people hurt by this are pro-war assholes who view reminders that war sucks as being problematic to your twisted causes.
Scala releases are usually not BINARY backwards compatible. Very different from SOURCE backwards compatible.
Have you tried putting a test in your CV web page? For example, "I welcome inquiries from prospective students. I get a lot of advertising email, so include the phrase 'brown M&Ms' in the subject line so I will know you are a real person." That should weed out a lot of the email blast applicants.
That's of the 15 job categories expected to grow the most over the next decade. Doctors likely aren't one of those high-growth categories.
The video has a English and German audio track, I couldn't figure out how to get English in Firefox, but it was simple to switch with VLC.
I am not at all up-to-date on the Perl side, but Python 3 is real, whereas

> Perl 6 is currently being developed by a team of dedicated and enthusiastic volunteers. (http://perl6.org/)
Canonical has been working on making 3.x default for Ubuntu for a while. From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Python/3

> It is a release goal for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to have only Python 3 on the desktop CD images. Also, we won't be allowing Python 2 on the Ubuntu touch images.
Studio rent, accountancy fees, tax, App Store membership's and some tech/software. Basically I dont take anything home with me.
Remote work - More time for me, more time for my family
Perl 6 is vaporware. Python 3 is here, it's widely supported, it's faster than Python 2.7, and while Guido didn't do us any favors with his migration strategy, I don't see what the big deal is. Python 3.3 makes writing code that is compatible with both almost trivial.

People aren't using Python 3 enough because it's not the default in Debian/Ubuntu. That's about to change with Ubuntu 14.04. I expect that to tip the scales.
I like the values that jokes like this reinforce (simplicity, creativity, and proactivity versus complexity, expense, and bureaucracy) but I wonder if they serve a positive purpose in engineering culture. Do we tell these jokes to keep ourselves on our toes, to make ourselves better? Are we really in danger of forgetting which is better, simplicity or complexity? When we create complex and over-engineered systems, is it because we forget that simplicity is better?

I don't think we do. I think we tell ourselves these jokes to contrast good engineering with bad engineering and to congratulate ourselves for being on the right side. A good joke would lead you down the garden path, encourage a bit of smugness and then rip the rug out from under you. This joke telegraphs the punch line from the start: it encourages smugness and then vindicates it. A healthy joke would make us uncomfortable about whether we would have been on the right side, whether we are doing a good job of living up to our values. This joke reassures us that the problem is other people's values, and by doing so, it promotes exactly the kind of complacency that it makes fun of.
"There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever"

There are plenty. Mainly, every machine has an expiration date.

Unless we go the "Ship of Theseus" way, but even then one thing remains, the brain.

Let's go for a much simpler analogy: Is there a way a car can be used forever? By replacing every part, maybe, it still precludes "total loss" events.

"Oh, but we can have micromachines fixing our body" sure, great, this will be helpful, but not everything can be 'micro-fixed'

The lightning bolt theory is not "wrong" per se, but it is a small part of the causes of mortality, and it certainly doesn't explain the sharp fall, but it is the main responsible for middle of life causes of death
PyDev 3.2.0 released