skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why the bitterness against CS?

As jarvic says,

> However, CS and software development are not the same thing.

A lot of schools offer a separate degree in Software engineering as opposed to CS (or at least separate tracks). So the distinction is pretty clear. Where I studied, there are separate degrees for CS and IT. You seem to be fudging the two. Do you expect physics majors to be mechanical engineers automatically?

CS degrees teach you algorithms, not how to write code in Java. Doesn't matter what IDE/language you're using, bubble sort is going to be slower than quicksort for large lists.

Yes, unfortunately most people who do CS end up becoming IT drones. That's the nature of the industry, not the CS program's fault. As a matter of interest, what do most physics majors become? I'm sure there aren't enough professorships available.

Or in the words of E.W.Dijkstra: “Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”
Finally! NASA is marketing itself! All my life I've listened to dry announcers say pitiful boring things about the astounding achievements of NASA - starting with Walter Cronkite years ago. Never did we celebrate the cowboy-astronauts risking their lives on top of incredible roman-candle rockets going places no-one thought they could even survive. No, it was all about how science made it all safe and sensible.
Currently reading Salt, Sugar, Fat by Michael Moss, check it out if this interests you.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15797397-salt-sugar-fat
Slick animation on the scroll.
It's being standardized now across most states. It looks like quadratic equations are in high school.
http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/HSA/APR
And yet others have such faith in the market behind such regulatory capture.
Thank you for granting the world the spoils of your hard work.
And what about the 83,000 fake likes that his Science related page has? Can you explain that too?
Can you provide an example of a typical problem most people have that's not trivially solvable by "don't do the thing that causes you to have the problem?"

There's literally hundreds of thousands of pages of advice columns and books and lectures you can go to about various typical money/relationship problems which make up the vast bulk of people's issues which are all summed up with the above.

Problem: I don't make enough money

Solution: Stop not making enough money and make more money.

Problem: My Significant Other and I don't get along

Solution: Stop not getting along and get along or break up.

Problem: My life sucks

Solution: Stop living a sucky life and get a better life.

Yeah, not every problem is simple, and not every problem (simple or not) has a simple problem, but the vast majority of day-to-day problems people have are trivially solvable...they just don't do the things to solve them.

Solutions don't have to be instantaneous, they just have to resolve the problem. People want instant quick fixes, "I'm poor" and poof money falls out of the sky, sorry doesn't work that way. But making money is stupidly easy...do something somebody wants and charge them for it.

"But I'm not rich" well that's not really a problem is it?
I always took his statement to mean that if something is essential to your business, you should think very carefully about the risks inherent in outsourcing it. The two major exceptions to this are

1. Things which aren't essential to your business. (e.g.: things that could be replaced by nothing (even if just temporarily))

2. Things which meet the definition of a commodity, in the formal 'fungible goods' sense of the word.

Many .?aaS offerings fail both of these tests in that they're an essential component of a service, and also fail the commodity test in that there is qualitative differentiation between offerings. The features of EC2 (used to their fullest) are wildly different than those of Rackspace, and the two are only really fungible with one another across a small subset of their feature sets.

Examples of offerings that pass this commodity test include:

- Most mailers (sendgrid, mailgun, postmark, &c) when used simply. Switching from one backend to another isn't a huge endeavour, as they are all cut from conceptually similar cloth.

- VPS offerings when used simply (notice a pattern here?). A basic Ubuntu box in the cloud is a basic Ubuntu box in the cloud.

In contrast, Stackmob, Parse, et al. all fail this commodity test hard. Switching costs are very high (especially with Stackmob, whose iOS SDK bleeds anti-patterns all over your app), data migration is a nightmare, and major architectural assumptions can vanish in an instant

Part of the bargain of leaning on non-commoditized offerings to back essential services is accepting the risk that they may one day leave you in the lurch. In the metaphor of technical debt, outsourced services are extending you credit to finance your technical debt. Having one of your outsourced dependencies close up shop is really just them calling in their debts.

Of course, there's no right answer. I agree completely that the point is moot unless you ship; the GP wasn't really intended to be imperative; it was meant (or at least it was always how I understood it) as more as a heuristic to assess the risk associated with outsourcing a core dependency that can't be easily hedged.
U+1F4A9 UNICODE 6.0 character is "Dog Poop" (💩)
You act like a Heroku gives you a personal sys admin. At best, they keep your servers updated at a laggy pace to maintain major stability rather than security.

Heroku is not a replacement for a sys admin. In fact, you get less with Heroku because you can't even access the systems running your code.
Interestingly enough, the very source of that quote goes on to make a bright-line distinction between food and food products, which, not coincidentally, are chief on the "sugar is poison" crowd's "avoid" list.
Note that high-fructose corn syrup (water+glucose+fructose) is included in this generalized definition of "sugar"

I cannot imagine a narrower definition of "sugar" than glucose+fructose. It's exactly what you add to your coffee and tea, just in the form of sucrose crystals.

There is no functional difference between HFCS and table sugar. If the regulators/activists force the food industry to replace HFCS with some other sugar, all they'll achieve is a minor increase in prices.
Right, but I think "best in the world" is more a negative comment about other systems being terrible than a positive comment about this system being actually good.
I taught a college pre-calc course for a short time. We had "show your work" exams, so I got to see how students solved problems. I think that many of them had been taught "test taking skills" in high school, including a method of finding answers to math problems by guess-and-try or process of elimination. Basically, their teachers had hacked the standardized testing process. (Probably including the AP exam).

Honestly, college math wasn't much better. Rather than confronting them with critical thought, we simply replaced the old hack with a new one:

1. Recognize the "form" of the problem, corresponding to a section in the textbook.

2. Plug the parameters of the problem into an equation solvable by the method of that section.

3. Apply the method and write the answer.

When I realized this, I told my students about it.

There was a chapter on maxima and minima. But the only function they had learned was the quadratic, so all optimization problems boiled down to arranging things into a quadratic. The text had them graphing each quadratic. I decided it would be more interesting for the kids to see how we make our own formulas, so we derived one for the optimum of a quadratic function, and memorized it.

Now is this math or not? Well, I think there's a place in math that involves classifying the forms of expressions and equations, sort of like taxonomy in biology. But it shouldn't be the only thing.
UNICODE 1F4A9: "PILE OF POO"
I have too. I used some cheap vms for about 9 months, but after the host lost vms including backups (I had my own backups, but I still had to set everything up again), and relatively frequent outages, I switched to Digital Ocean, and couldn't be happier, and the price is pretty good. I figure I'll switch to Linode if I start having problems, but it's been great so far (knock on wood).
http://www.jiblm.org/guides/index.aspx?category=jiblmjournal

Inquiry based learning is the way math should be taught. Teachers should pose interesting problems and guide the students to a solution instead of frantically rewriting equations from their notepads onto the blackboard.
This conversation isn't geared toward insulting Jennifer, it's an attack on the lameness of using Heroku. I think Heroku users should each get a sticker that says 'I'm a proud black box user'
I'm getting sick of this ignorant sugar alarmism. Sugar is not the culprit behind all the diseases listed in the article. Obesity is [5] [6]. Unless of course you're talking about cavities. Then not brushing your teeth is the culprit. The reason sugar gets such a bad rep is that high-sugar foods tend to be less-filling and lead to overeating [1]. Stay at a healthy weight by controlling caloric consumption [2].

The article mentions such scientific evidence as "nearly two-thirds of the studies cited there to repudiate Lustig's views were funded by Coca-Cola." Seriously?

Normally I wouldn't care - sugar alarmism = more candy for me - except that, as the article notes, "Lustig ... calls for sugar to be treated as a toxin, like alcohol and tobacco, and for sugar-laden foods to be taxed, labelled with health warnings and banned for anyone under 18." That's just bullshit extremism. Doughnuts, one of my favorite foods, can be part of a healthy diet just like anything else. In fact, sugar is fantastic for stimulating muscle growth [3], and can help with diet adherence during a caloric deficit [4].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index - this page lists satiety indexes for common foods. Notice all the lowest scores are bakery goods and sugary snacks.

[2] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2009/10/14/ajcn.2009...

[3] http://jcs.biologists.org/content/122/20/3589.full

[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11126336?ordinalpos=47&it...

[5] http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/obe/ris...

[6] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19801534

Edit: People are taking my words out of context. This is my reply to another comment below that elucidates my meaning: "I advocate moderation and balance. Consume reasonable calorie and macronutrient (protein, fat, carbohydrate) quantities. Eat what allows you to do that. For me, those carbs come from doughnuts and candy but also from brown rice and pasta. Just like my meats include both lean meats (chicken breast) and fatty, delicious meats (bacon). Combine this with exercise and all you'll avoid all the scary things the article talks about."
Yeah me too. For those who haven't checked it out yet, here's a screenshot of HN as a ransom note: http://i.imgur.com/Io2bqof.png
Lustig could no doubt write some great posts here about growth hacking and selling your product, but if there's one thing he's proven about nutrition, it's that he's no one to be taken seriously when talking about it. One taste of what Joe Public doesn't see in his unintended hyperbole is here: http://sweetenerstudies.com/sites/default/files/resources/fi...

Blaming sugar for everything is no better than what the fat-bashing crowd do. It leads to self-parodying solutions like the "keto-adapted" lifestyle. We don't eat rice or bananas because refined sugar is to blame for all the ills of the world. Those crazy Japanese are probably just lying about their lack of heart disease anyway (when we remember the place exists at all).

As long as people only understand nutrition in terms of reductionist extremes, "alternative" diets are going to continue being a bad joke that achieves little more than inflating the ego and bank balance of people like Lustig.
Github doesn't support real emoji
Yes. To talk about startup anxiety, but also balancing everything else in life. I think the desire to problem solve also extends to life issues, and sometimes this gets unhealthy if it all stays in my head.
"I work at a startup for the small team size, for the massive impact you make as an individual, for the team building experience, the hard times and the good."

I would rather build my own company. Why would I want to toil my life away at a terrible wage and extremely long hours, only to get a fractional percentage of the payout if the company is bought out?

This is why I don't work at startups.
I think most people are aware this is an emoji.

http://i.imgur.com/28RHMUc.png
Go does compile to ARM and does run on phones. It works on Android phones (linux/arm) out of the box, and it has been made to work on iOS (darwin/arm) but it hasn't been merged with the core: https://bitbucket.org/minux/goios/wiki/Home
I don't believe they had much say in the change. They are still using the money to do what they said they'd do in their campaign, and many people are setting up their registry as their default. As far as I know they just got caught in a situation that was less than ideal (while also getting rid of some financial burden). I think they deserve an applause for running it at high cost to their business for free for years rather than be villainized because they got caught in a situation that they weren't in control of. If you donated, or are worried about what Npm, Inc. is doing (hint: so silly to feel this way) you should set your default registry to theirs (it's already set as your failover, btw).

The cynicism in this thread is so bizarre to me. No one is being evil. There's no secret foul play. Everyone go write modules and share them and be happy.
>There is a story about generics in Go. The story is, a variety of complex programs are being built and deployed in Golang without generics, which makes it an open question as to whether they're required at all.

The same argument could be used against adding closures to Java. After all "complex programs are being built and deployed without them". And yet, everyone thinks that it's a good idea that should have happened years before.

I think the argument is a variation of "I can do stuff in assembly just fine, why I'd need a higher level language?".

>Golang doesn't have to be all things to all people, nor does it have to fulfill every programming task any one developer has.

Well, generics are pretty basic to talk about having them as "being all things to all people". It's not like the majority of users testing or using Go regularly ask for all kinds of exotic features. The vast majority, judging from the mailing list, blog posts, articles etc, just have this major gripe.
Have you still not gotten a reply about this? I've been using svblte for a while and this post made me seriously reconsider.

I would try medium but I really don't like the design.
So really what they're doing is stealing opera's idea. This could be advertising, or it could be awesome. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see what the details are and who they partner with.
Feminists give their girls toys typically associated with males and male professions. They seem mortified that their girls might want to be veterinarians, teachers, nurses, or mothers. Thereby, they devalue all the women who have acted like women in the past.

No dolls for you, little girl. If you have a Barbie, it better be the one with a computer, web developer Barbie. How about you put down that tutu, and put on these mechanic overalls instead?

This isn't a hypothetical. I have a friend with a strong education who wants to be a teacher. Her parents told her they would be disappointed if she did that. It's an inappropriate profession for an ambitious female, even if it is what she's passionate about.

We tell girls to work 80 hours a week. Forget about a family, unless you can squeeze it in somewhere in your late 30s. And pick up a nice male profession, like programming. Don't even think about being a housewife or a yoga instructor.

The message is to act like boys, not useless girls.
Tragedy of the commons type problems. Concrete example: CFC Regulations.

Prisoners Dilema type problems. Concrete example: Cigarette advertising bans. (I'll clarify that this is better for the companies involved on a competition between company basis and "better" for the public in the form of a shrinking tobacco market)

More to the point a real concrete example is healthcare costs. Per person they are cheaper in comparable countries to the US such as UK, Australia, Canada all countries with public healthcare systems (this is including the tax money spent). I would also point out that if you are going to argue that health outcomes are better in the US than those other systems (Maybe that's true, I couldn't say) you are missing the key point of what these non free market systems can be good at (that is capturing externalities, like in this instance bankruptcy or inability to afford service).
I'm not a founder or co-founder, but I started to see a therapist or counselor about 2 years ago. My level of stress was mounting and I was falling into depression. I had just gone through some pretty big transitions, but I realized it was too much for me to handle on my own. After going to counseling regularly, I started to feel like I really regained control over my emotions and decisions. I could organize my time much better, and, although not necessarily "Mr. Peppy!", I got back much of my spunk and personality that had started to slip away.

If anyone is thinking about it, I highly recommend it; if you think you need it, it probably won't hurt. And don't be discouraged if the first counselor doesn't fit; it took a few before I found one that was comfortable to talk to and that could challenge me to actually make progress in myself.
I watched the video and think I saw the guy putting a single coin in the vending machine to buy this.
The author claims that FB is being accused of "implausible conspiracy theories", but the accusations are neither implausible nor conspiratorial (nor "outlandish", as he describes them elsewhere).

They are accused of hurting non-advertisers in order to encourage advertising (which Yelp and many other companies have been accused of) and allowing click/like-fraud to inflate numbers to the detriment of customers (which Google and others have been accused of).

Neither of these accusations comes as much of a surprise, and they are both consistent with FB's past behavior (such as decreasing the reach of a page's posts in a way that encourages Promoted Posts).
100 dogecoin sent to user PC[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pc

Thanks for using Dogecoin!
Doughnuts, one of my favorite foods, can be part of a healthy diet

Can they?
Bear Stearns failed mid-March 2008. Despite this, on March 27, 2008 Mark Hulbert gave serious weight to Richard Band's prediction of an "uptrend that could carry the blue chip indexes to all-time highs by late 2008 or early 2009. Dow 16,000 here we come!" http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dow-heading-for-16000-richa...

And on April 18, 2008, Hulbert said "The Dow Theory appears poised to go on a buy signal..." http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dow-theory-poised-to-trigge...

Following this advice, you would have bought near the top of the market, when what you really want to do is buy low and sell high...

Hulbert is probably the most knowledgeable student of DOW history. He knows that what happens to the DOW in the short run is mostly meaningless noise. He should take his own advice:

"Some psychological researchers, for example, have presented series of random numbers to human subjects and then asked them whether there are any patterns in the data. Overwhelmingly, the subjects claim to have detected patterns in the data.

"We should keep this research in mind as we watch the stock market day in and day out. We may think we have detected a pattern, but that doesn't mean that it really exists."

Quoted from: Market Watch (April 3, 2007) http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dont-read-too-much-into-sto...
Americans find swift stonewall on whether NSA vacuumed their data
wow, now i'm running through all possible parses of that title to figure out the funniest interpretation. The longer I think, the less funnier its getting. :|
That's exactly what I was getting at.
That's really not fair. Bitcoin is still young and considering that it's surprising we don't see more incidents like this.

Where is it written that it was a script kiddi. If this was the work of just a script kiddie, we would be seeing incidents like this all the time.
Because skinny people don't get diabetes right? /s
The underlying premise that there's something strange about the correlation between the rise of sugar and the rise of health issues is stark. Obviously, we can't say that correlation = causation. But such data points should be taken seriously for more investigation, much like for example, global warming (which is a debate that I still don't completely understand either).

This is the key quote for me:

Yudkin's detractors had one trump card: his evidence often relied on observations, rather than on explanations, of rising obesity, heart disease and diabetes rates. "He could tell you these things were happening but not why, or at least not in a scientifically acceptable way," says David Gillespie, author of the bestselling Sweet Poison. "Three or four of the hormones that would explain his theories had not been discovered."

Let's apply that towards global warming. This reminds me of Al Gore's little movie where he talks about his old prof gathering climate data. The temperature kept going up, and he could not figure out why. Lots of data, no explanation. What should have been the proper response? Dismissal because there's no explanation or further study?

I worry that there are other things where the timeline required to truly observe and understand things is not possible, and that risks are completely accepted because no current viable explanation can be made as to why the thing is actually dangerous. The biggest one for me is wireless communications. Can cell phones and other wireless devices cause cancer? Generally, we say no. But we don't have enough data to truly say no, and we probably won't have that data until kids born after 2000 become geriatrics, as they'll be the first generation to truly grow up from birth in an age with ubiquitous cell phones. And besides that, it's not like anyone's been able to provide any widely acceptable explanation on the matter anyway. So we'll just trundle along blindly because our current data says there's no risk. I'm mostly sad because what other choice do we really have? You can't turn back the clock on technological progress even if you wanted to.
>The story is that generics for Go is an ongoing research project for the team.

I don't see that in real life. That's just a "shut up" story employed like 4 years ago. If it's an "ongoing research" project, where's any researchy output?

"Python 3000" was once a research project and had tons of proposals and research done on various features. Closures in Java were researched, and there were implementations tested. ES6 was an ongoing effort to add features to Javascript, and there have been test implementations, shims, etc before it's out.

All languages that wanted to add a feature had attempts by various key developers to add these to them, proposals, papers, testing, requests for comments, etc. Where are those regarding Go and generics?
Yes, because it sure worked well for Java, this slowness...