skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is kind of the dirty secret of any kind of programming, that it's very hard to make arguments that this or that technology leads to categorically better or different software. I mean, yes, there are specific domains, like trying to write webapps in C vs Ruby, but in general the programming languages well-suited for a task tend to be much, much more alike than different.

We love to hate on PHP but it basically runs a non-trivial proportion of the web, incl Facebook. Python and Ruby look different but they're not so different that we can say, on average, a programmer is X times more productive using language Y instead of Z.

That said I am kinda sorta sympathetic to the idea that people who veer off the beaten path of Java are self-selecting and may be open to more ideas, more adaptable, etc. But I'm leery of extending that to saying they're "better" in any measurable or definitive way.

The one thing I would say re: FP being "newer" is that while the ideas aren't newer, it's "newer" in the sense that it's not as battle-tested as Java or C. Although, then again, when you see Ruby (a friendlier, no parens Lisp-alike), JS, higher-order functions in C++, list comprehensions in Python, and so on, it stops looking quite so much like FP is really all that foreign. People are already using a lot of it. So perhaps I should be more specific and say that while the concepts aren't new, the implementations are new to industry or production systems.
> nor the ability to sustain conflict.

How do you know this? The CIA world factbook puts N Korea's army at 6 million people. Seems like they have the ability to weather a sustained conflict just fine:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
And your point was correct, and sloppy of me. I knew that one of the reasons Trotsky split from Stalin was over Socialism in One Country (in addition to the growing bureaucracy), but I'd thought it was still always the plan to eventually spread socialism globally.
You must read his The Slow Winter: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/theslowwi... — It deserves to be made into a movie.
So... how many women do you know that have died in childbirth?
What has that got to do with anything that has been said?
Apparently the execution was over who controls profits from their shellfish exports.

You'd think they would maybe feed their people with the profits.

If they get that nuclear bomb in portable form, there is going to be hell with that child at the helm.
Bob's lyric site is way better than Rap Genius. His should definitely be on top. He's also a pretty cool guy.
I'm pretty sure that if the commons had been divided up equally among the people who previously had the right to use them, we would be exactly where we are now.

Capitalism results in inequality regardless of initial conditions, because people differ in their abilities, and in their luck.

A much more powerful argument for redistribution than capitalism original sin, is that (1) we all live in a society, where we rely on the state to provide the security and infrastructure in which the free market is even possible, and (2) redistribution is the least intrusive, least restrictive method of improving societal wellbeing. It is (potentially) completely indifferent and blind to everything a person is and does, except for their total income.

I know this argument seems weaker because it involves utilitarian aspects, but it is really a more powerful argument because it doesn't rely on an accident of history.
> Oh and he was educated in the USA, another one we raised.

Can you supply a source for that claim? I've only read into the the Kim family a bit, but my impression was that most of the family members were educated in other socialist countries or somewhere neutral/friendly like Switzerland.
Keyczar --- and other cryptographic libraries, mostly --- don't solve the issue of protocol design. They do let you choose the primitive you want, but it's still up to you to pick a mode of operation, make sure you use authentication (AEAD mode / MAC), initialize IVs/nonces/counters correctly, etc.

NaCl is very much a step in the right direction, but it's not an end-all solution either. Key management alone is a huge issue, for example, but virtually no library helps you out there beyond providing a basic toolkit. Of course, key management is very much in the realm of policy, so that's to be expected.
Open-source laptop .stl files
i sure hope that they don't start casting doctors that only look like this average face, as suggested in this article.
Analysing web performance waterfalls from 10,000 feet
Mickens is awesome, they should make him their new CEO.
The last time I looked chaining collection operations still required unnecessary boilerplate and was not even the default way to use collections. Did they fix that? As far as I know, they didn't.

Additionally, it seems that moving from lists to a different collection type still involves rewriting your whole code due to the insane idea of using different functions by default (fmap/map, mempty/[], mappend/++).

I just don't have to deal with any of these design mistakes in Scala. Having sane defaults and stuff that "just works" consistently are a huge benefit.
Just for starters, he is almost certainly warping his perception of the 1950s by only considering what movies and television showed the 1950s being like for white men in suburbia America.
As a business accepting credit card payments, we attempted to be good citizens at first. We would try to notify the credit card company or the banks when an obviously fraudulent transaction came in and that kind of thing. We even tried calling the police at one point with IP logs and so on.

Nobody gave a shit.

We asked our credit card processor, Stripe, what to do about fraudulent transactions. They told us that they had no way of notifying a bank about that kind of thing and to just refund it.

So now our policy is just to refund fraud and forget about it. It's a position we were forced in to. This means that the person whose credit card was stolen will continue to be abused and there really isn't anything we can do about it.
I edited that one out, I was very mistaken. Thinking of someone else.
He's already the Galactic Viceroy of Research Magnificence. Is CEO a step up or down?
hell yeah ;)
In the old shared hosting days, they knew exactly which scripts were suddenly eating up resources. You might get an email like, "Hey we disabled xyz.php because it was hogging the server." So it's not like they couldn't see who was about to make boatloads of money and then jump on the bandwagon.
If you combine this with something similar to Namecoin, for dns, this might be an interesting distributed website hosting solution. Or, perhaps publishing scientific studies (documents and data) instead of using academic journals[1].

It might be horribly inefficient as a hosting solution, but i'm sure that can be optimized.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6960989
I also suspect (given others comments that it's a private school) that when they do have lessons, they have very small class sizes, making it far easier to learn/be taught.
If the gender gap can be fixed through hackathons, this could completely change how many women accept jobs in tech, and the overall culture of startups. It wasn't until I attended my first hackathon (HackNY) that I fell in love with designing and creating new apps. Though my major is not CS, I know I'll be entering tech after graduation, because of the hackathon experiences that started this interest and propelled my self-taught education around it.
Quasi-Literals
Angular ftw
I think the image in the article may have been photoshopped though.
I went to some of the essays linked but the only way I'm going to be able to read that is to increase the line spacing about 150% and put in about 3x as many paragraph breaks.
To take a car analogy, if motorsport was the aim, goal and objective but you hadn't even learned to drive yet, then, it might be advisable to get a regular car, maybe one that could be pimped to a certain extent, rather than fork out the £££ for an F1 car or a WRC rally car.

The AR Drone is pretty deluxe for a starting point, plus it actually works out the box and is affordable. Whilst having hours of fun with it one could work out what the 'ideal' is actually going to be.
Can you GNU guys maybe stop putting GNU in front of everything? It's stupid. It makes me want to avoid these products. The message it sends is that the licence is more important than the product.
Yes, I just listed the features of Clojure that weren't available in any other production-ready JVM language.
Now I'm imagining a website where people post about jobs they have that are like this, and try to get others hooked up with jobs at in these groups.

The logo would be a circle of vultures above some roadkill.
> Sigh. Sadly, it has become fashionable to bring up Perl only to ridicule it even when there is absolutely no context or need.

A lot of people ridicule C, I just laugh my head off.

Apologies, I assure you that I am not ridiculing it. The elegance of a language is not my concern. In fact, your comment has made me decide to put some effort into learning a bit more Perl, but I will have to find some time.
McDonald's employee site advises not to eat fastfood
Naw, I disagree... if you can accede that they know that tastes vary, and thus that their own tastes aren't objective, then when they make a statement about their tastes, they probably understand the subjectivity of the statement they are making.

I don't take what they are doing as an objective statement about taste, but rather as their own subjective statement, which you can't really avoid doing once you're designing stuff for folks.
Yes, there are pills that will both increase insulin sensitivity (metformin), and to stimulate insulin secretion (the sulfonylureas). These are basically the first line of treatment. But the disease tends to progress to the point where they are no longer enough. The insulin resistance keeps increasing, and at some point insulin secretion also starts to fall off -- though it's usually still very high compared to a non-diabetic. At that point, exogenous insulin is all that's left. Unfortunately, it also seems to be used as a bit of a threat by MDs ("you'd better loose weight and start exercising, or you're going to need injections!")

BTW, I'm not an MD, just a somewhat informed layman. I just happen to be married to a type-1, and have type-2 running through my family, so I've been motivated to learn a bit about it all (mainly in an attempt at self-preservation!)
The unethical part comes in when you're purposely padding your estimates, delaying response, feigning work load, or profiting from a side business. The last one depends heavily on your work agreement, state law, and how the company chooses to interpret things. I know of a guy who was outed by coworkers for doing side work, but after review, management decided it was fine as long as he wasn't using the work phone for side-work calls.

Of course, nothing is black and white, and rationalization is just as strong an intoxicant as overreaching corporate policies are.
I think the point can be a little larger. When you have a large audience it's inevitable that a portion will be, offended and annoyed and/or disagreeable when you are even slightly politically incorrect or strike the wrong tone or voice an opinion on something. The bigger you are, the closer the scrutiny. The end result is that most products and companies are completely devoid of personality.
It pains me that you do sound smug, arrogant and also patronizing because you're bang on in your analysis.

Please, I'm basically begging you: don't adopt an obnoxious stance when you're arguing an important point.

Not because you're wrong, but because you're mostly right.
vinegar.vim – NerdTree replacement
Not sure why you're being downvoted. This is a perfectly valid approach to managing type 2 diabetes.

My mother is a type 2 diabetic and has been on a diet in which she consumes less than 30 grams of carbohydrates every day. To put that in perspective, the recommended daily consumption of carbohydrates is about 300 grams. The vast majority of American adults consume more (sometimes much more).

She cannot eat bread, pasta, fruit, potatoes, or even carrots, among other things. Surprisingly, some forms of sugar substitutes can also raise blood glucose levels. But she can eat many kinds of vegetables, meat, eggs, and dairy products. Just no sugar, and no carbs.

The diet has been very successful. She barely needs insulin anymore, and she's at the lowest A1C level she's ever had -- even lower than when she was taking lots of insulin. As a bonus, she's returned to a healthy weight.
Unprofessionalism is an opinion. I'm a contractor and so its common for me to work in 3-6 different offices a year, depending on the amount of engagements i take. I've been doing this for around 10 years now. So as you can work out i've worked in a lot of different offices, in ALL of them, i've never once worn a suit, i've never worn a suit to an interview and i have the luxuary of never having to wear a suit because its just not the norm in this industry. Then i went to an interview at a bank, the first financial sector client i've interviewed at. The feedback was that while they thought i'd was absolutely qualified for the role, they viewed me as unprofessional because i didnt wear a suit.

At first i was kinda pissed off, because to me, wearing a suit has no bearing on whether i can do a coders job or not. But afterwards i came to the realisation that if a company judges my suitability on whether or not i'm wearing a suit, its not a place i want to work in.

Dont be professional, be authentic. - 37Signals
Can you give some pointers to projects workin on fixed-wing aircraft? Autopilot would be what I'm interested in, but most everything I see are quadcopters, and then with these remote-control gadgets that I don't care about.
That was "Javascript on the JVM is coming soon".

I don't think Rhino's being used much in production (correct me if I'm wrong) perhaps because of slow execute times, but the far racier Nashorn is likely to kick out any lingering use of languages used for JVM scripty stuff, e.g. Groovy, Xtend, Beanshell.
Well, this is very interesting idea...
> ultimately you want to tailor the work towards something you're enthusiastic about

This depends on being passionate about a how (e.g. a technology, a language, a development methodology) instead of a what. An employer will not frequently let you turn the project of building their food-reviews website into an automatic musical-accompaniment AI.
> The fact is that roughly 82% of Sudbury students go on to college compared to 63% of public school students nationwide.

this doesn't blow my mind at all. that means a 5th of the students aren't going on to college.

i'm pretty sure your standard, stereotypical east coast prep school named after a dead white guy could beat that number easily.

and as long as your metric for success is acceptance into college, that's probably going to be true.
Good point. Perhaps he could take it on as a side-role for an hour after lunch. Shout a bit, do a dance, assault some furniture, you know the usual stuff, nothing too strenuous.
I don't know if it's that unethical -- I think there are a lot of jobs where if you made a graph of the worload it would look rather spiky -- IE, sometimes you're very busy, but with long idle times in between. Those downtimes are a good opportunity to work on pet projects or learn a new skill for career development. I think most good employers will recognize that if you're otherwise good at what you were hired for.
The stats on other schools in MA with a similar socioeconomic average are around 70% - 90% going on to college: http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/index.php?measure=32

Again the point is not to show that Sudbury Valley is better, but rather just that the complete lack of curriculum is clearly not producing horrible results.
I'm in a similar situation -- right now I have what I guess would be called a unicorn job, I work on open source stuff that I have 90% or more of the commits on full time and am paid for it. But it's not really a fluke or that someone is 'vouching' for me -- the stuff I work on is essential to my company's workflow, and pays off very directly as our work becomes faster and better, so I don't see it as a job that will go away soon (although I could certainly be wrong).

I work at an agency, and we crank through a lot of smaller sites very quickly. My role at this point is to spend most of my time working on the tools that we use to build on top of, researching and evaluating other tools, and generally improving workflow and making it more efficient. I'll take a couple months to put in work on tools and workflow, then come back and lead a client project with the new/updated flow. When the project is wrapped up, I take what I learned from working on the project and use it to make further improvements to the tools/workflow I spend most of my time on, and that's generally the cycle.

Topics that I have sunk a significant amount of time into recently include using git/github more efficiently, researching and working with a variety of client-side MVCs, static site build tools, deployment tools, new project templating tools, sysops monitoring and provisioning (docker), requirejs and browserify comparsion and benchmarking in various situations, focusing on svgs and perfecting illustrator svg workflow, etc. It seems to me like there is an endless supply of cool things to work on at the moment, and I enjoy my work and do the same stuff whether I'm on or off the clock, which is nice for my company because I probably work a lot more hours than anyone else (although voluntarily, because I enjoy it).

I tend to span across the stack pretty widely, from design to ops and everything in between, which I like, and am also involved in a few new business accounts that are more dev-heavy. I absolutely love my job and would never give it up. Not sure if this is interesting to anyone or if anyone has perspectives on it, but I definitely am in a unique position and am curious to hear whatever it is that people think about all this!
I wonder when GNUnet and GNU Social will be eventually combined.
Less computation power required to store new data.
I mentioned in the blog post that it is an apples to oranges comparison for a lot of reasons. The point is that clearly the complete lack of curriculum is not placing these students at any significant disadvantage. That alone I think it a mind-blowing idea given how radically different the educational environment is compared to traditional schools.
> Lisp exists truly in its own realm, syntax wise.

It's fairly easy to put another syntax atop Clojure if you want, though in my experience the net effect is to restrict what Clojure can do, beginning with disallowing macros.
This is also an issue with Freenet. Granted, Freenet has not taken off the way Tor has, however, it is still chugging along.
This small segment of people actually created this wealth. Why shouldn't they be the one consuming it? And you cannot call the sum of all wealth owned by people "a pool" because it is not concentrated in one place nor should be.
I haven't yet seen any studies showing specific comparisons, but they seem to do well, enjoy college, and graduate. Again the point is not that Sudbury Valley does significantly better at preparing students for college/jobs but that it clearly is not doing a poor job of this, which I think is a significant observation given how different the environment is.
> 'unicorns' designer + developers positions conjoined

I've always found the resistance to this so strange.

My CV has Erlang, Haskell, IA32 assembler, and HTML5/CSS3 on it in various places. The first question any company inevitably asks me, when I send it in, is "what position are you applying for?" (Even though I answer this in the cover letter. Good evidence that they don't bother to read it.)

I should probably just start answering "development factotum."
Ok but people were upset about this before it got to Salon and it doesn't seem that your comment is so nuanced as to observe that distinction.

I'm sorry I hurt you. How were you hurt by my words?
Sudbury Valley does not self-select students. It is a private school, but if you can afford the relatively low tuition ($9k a year) and want to go there you can. There is no selection process other than making sure the family is on board with the educational philosophy.
Montessori schools are somewhat of a middle ground between what this article describes and traditional school.

I was in public Montessori schools from preschool through 8th grade. We had scheduled lectures for maybe two hours a day and the rest of the school day was spent working on whatever project or assignment you wanted to.

Due dates were due dates and this type of schooling encouraged individual agency and personal responsibility. If you wanted to you could sit around and talk to your friends all day and not work on / learn anything, but if you didn't complete all of your work before deadline you faced consequences. But "homework" was just whatever you wanted or needed to work on at home to meet deadlines.

You can't imagine how shocked I was in when I entered a traditional American high school and felt like a prisoner. Not allowed to speak or socialize (unless to ask a question of the instructor), move out of my seat, or do what I wanted. Just frozen in a chair listening to a teacher speak for hours on end. I was always the student who would raise their hand to ask a question, answer the teacher's question, or give my opinion because I was starving for any form of social interaction during classes.

That anyone has the capacity to see a traditional western high school as anything BUT prison daycare is what shocks me. It speaks to the ability of normalization to blind us to extreme circumstances.

Capitalism and the tragedy of the commons are the sole reason that our education system is so lecture-based, non-interactive, socially suffocating, creativity-draining, and non-personalized. Why would we spend more money, human capital, and time on improving the education system when it doesn't directly increase the GDP? What market force pushes us to improve education? What shareholder will benefit? This is the failure of a political and economic system that places too little emphasis on improving the public good.
Imagine if Microsoft did install a crazy smart creative person to lead them. They can always keep business school twerps to do silly things like manage their existing lines of business. The CEO doesn't have to be a chair lunatic. They should be a CS lunatic.

Microsoft could be a thing to be feared again. Instead of innovating once every 10-15 years then milking their few products dry (and in 20 SKUs for each individual product), they can build out a 90% greenfield engineering business unit to tackle larger problems in the world. (Yes, that would require not including most current employees who have had their brains rotted and can't think in any other ways except Big Corp Big Process Patterns).
The latter applies here, this is the node:

typedef struct dll__ {
struct dll__ *lnk[2];
void *dat;
}ndi;

I've seen some examples on the web, but I haven't seen it done this way. I have a suspicion it might be slower than the traditional technique, but I'll have to check that. What is not evident from the code snippet is that I'm trying to make the code handle both fixed end and looped lists.
I probably shouldn't have included that stat. The point was not to say that Sudbury Valley was sending 100% of their grads to MIT or something, but rather to note that I think people would predict far lower numbers of college-going graduates if they tried to predict the outcomes of a school that had not requirements and no curriculum at all...
This comment should be in permanent red bold type on the hacker news compose reply screen.