skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure if it's just me, but after years of writing Python code with various async I/O libs and then used Go for a while, it felt so much better when the language/runtime handles async I/O for me and I do not have to think about event loops at all.

Python used to be the clean and simple language for me, but all those ”hacks” to get async right just makes the final code ugly. The cleanness of Go wins me over instantly.

Even though the two languages are not directly comparable, the foundations of Go seems to me much better and solid. It reminds me of Rob Pike's essay “Less is exponentially more” http://commandcenter.blogspot.ca/2012/06/less-is-exponential...
There's a sizable contingent which feels that high-tech (e.g., electric generating) solar, wind, etc., aren't generally viable.

I suspect that long-term, the amount of energy available via renewables will likely be a minority fraction of what's presently consumed in the US, on either a per-capita or absolute level. Which suggests a future in which we're looking at, say, 25 quads (1 billion joules / 300 TWh) or less total annual energy. What that suggests in terms of energy-based services and goods available becomes an interesting exercise.
Maybe. But a publicity stunt that highlights findings that run counter to what you're trying to sell the platform on seems dubious.
Mysterious ‘flying saucer’ slides found in documents leaked by Edward Snowden
Amen. When ripping all my CDs, I hand entered all my metadata. My biggest pet peeve is filling out the "composer" field correctly. If I sort by composer, I don't want to find Beethoven under "L".
One Durandal in a planetary network is bad enough. Having a clone on each device? We'd all be dead in days.

(See you starside.)
Ok, seems like it's doing pretty well in favor of positivity. I searched some common nice/nasty words in the DB and I'm seeing on the order of:

- 25-70 hits for strings containing words like nice/fun/smart/kind

- 1-3 for dumb/ugly/stupid/boring/fag

- no incidences of slut/bitch/hate/crap/... (I searched a LOT)

- one racial slur that I could find

- surprisingly no negative uses of curse words (one "fucking awesome")

This is a way lower incidence of negativity than anticipated. Due to the simplicity of the text inputs, I'm going to hold off on preemptive moderation that would change the feel of the app and see how it works if I just flag blacklisted words.
love donald, what exactly is this?
Tbh this just is a signal to me of what cars to not buy in the future.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who got down the road to overscoped features by saying "gee, wouldn't it be cool if my users could access this info that's living in a mysql table" and threw something together with a little php mysql_query(SELECT...), and it worked! except for some edge cases with non-ascii characters and the fact that you knew you were opening yourself up to SQL injection attacks, but you weren't really concerned because you only have 100 users and they're already authenticated by a more robust system. Anyway, you decide to do it the "right way" and rewrite it using SQLAlchemy. In the mean time, your coworkers wonder why you've burned half a day rewriting a feature that worked just fine after you had only been spending 30 minutes on it.

Sorry, that was a long way of pointing out that us novice programmers often don't have good methods of determining how long something should take because we've never done it before.
Of course. But without a bright-line test that can easily be applied by the corps of non-lawyer patent examiners, what's the point? And does the Supreme Court ever really give us a bright-line test?
With Free Version of Windows, Microsoft Gives In to the Google Way
I hate to sound like an old fogie here (I am almost 40) but one thing that occurs to me is that as we age our thinking changes and all the things you mention often develop over time.

When you are 20 you are pretty much at the height of your mathematical abilities. This is fine for certain kinds of programming, but it is not really ideal for others. It ensures that algorithms primary and the domains in a real sense become secondary. As you get older, these tend to flip. You understand the domains better and may not be quite as good at generating optimal algorithms, but the tradeoff is generally positive.

Additionally I think there is a tradeoff that happens between dreaming of building great things and developing a craftsmenship approach to the small things. Engineer the small pieces well, and the big pieces will take care of themselves.

In most areas, I think one is better with a very mixed-age and mixed-experience team. Older, more experienced programmers bring something very special to the table, but the same is true for younger programmers as well.

This being said, I have a few very minor disagreements with you ;-). These may be split hairs though.

First, while I rewrite more in some ways, I actually find on the whole I rewrite less because I am not afraid to procrastinate while trying to understand the domain. People wonder why my code seems to come out fully formed and it is because I am not afraid to spend my time thinking about the problem instead of writing a rough draft.

What has changed is the sort of rewrites I do. I will typically re-engineer a small piece to remove cruft based on lessons learned from the last two years, rather than rewriting a big piece to meet a new requirement (because things tend to be designed more extensably now). So I am less afraid to rewrite and more willing to do so, but at the same time, I tend to rewrite less.

Finally there is the question of optimal way to program. I am of the opinion (probably in part because of how much work I do with Perl) that there is no singular optimal way. Optimal has to be globally defined and one of the jobs of the engineer is to ensure that the framework is optimal so that the team can program optimally. If the team is not part of the definition of what is optimal, then I do agree it is a mess.

But I don't think we are dealing with a single dimension here. Understanding the problems the team is struggling with is a good way to ensure that framework can be built in a way that drives that average capability up.
I guess the drone's not vaporware after all (as posited in the previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6528598)
It looks very similar to the Colle System, which I have been using for years and I agree it is a very good strategy and has worked well for me.
I wasn't committing to any particular definition of "worth". Certainly they're not getting it at below market value, but that's not an interesting statement...
I stopped reading halfway through. If I have a major point in an article, it usually include it in the introduction.
Have you thought about establishing a minimum interest rate lenders can set to avoid indirectly contributing to the traditional trap of foreign aid?
> Can I shoot you an email when we get a beta version of that indicator working?

Sure.
I once was hired to a gig because of the following words that came out of my face hole: "Some people see a giant hairball of code, and think to themselves 'I don't want to deal with that'. I see the same code and think 'I'm going to get a new boat'."

Bad, evil, horrible code written by misguided children makes the world go around.
Can someone using S3 Glacier as a backup destination please provide some concrete costs? Even if no retrieval is involved, I'd just love to see: "I pay $XYZ and am backing up ###GB worth of data."

I see the calculator floating around in the comments, but it's not formatted in a backup-friendly fashion / use case (ie. set storage size with XYZ% churn for changed files, or continuously expanding snapshots with aged snapshot deletion).

I've always been curious for usage for backup storage. The costs for retrieval are expensive enough (in the time frames I'd care to see for a personal computer) that I think I'll still avoid that aspect for the time being.
Meet Onus - Incentives Made Simple (Would love feedback)
Hey guys, would love some feedback on my project I've been working on.

We just hired backend developer, have a great app working, and just looking to be pitching soon to Seed-funders here in the Valley.

Would love some suggestions or maybe product confusion you get when you visit the website!

Thank you!
Is it possible to explain in layman's terms why 1/e is the magic number?
I refer to myself as the non-technical co-founder all the time. I'm a male, and the CEO of our company. In my personal experience, I've never heard anyone equate "non-technical co-founder" to a term used only by female founders.

I also find that many of the entrepreneurs and founders I meet are incredibly humble (disarmingly so - the founders of Dropbox and Airbnb have zero ego). I don't know if there's any YC alumn who would say that Jessica is anything less than essential within YC.
came across a few in Alibaba http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Dev-Kit-with-10-iBeaco.... $140 for a pack of 10(!) - it seems like a OEM version of http://kontakt.io
Why does Childish Gambino need volunteers to write code for him? Can't he afford to hire someone? Without seeing more information this looks like a marketing stunt.
It is also entirely possible that since I have only posted this to HN and Facebook thus far, it has not yet reached its ultimate audience of idiot cyberbully trolls :(
"I don't know" is very good; "I'll find out" is usually better. So I was taught as a plebe at the Naval Academy...
Very interesting! I assume this is posted because it parallels how YC does their interview admissions. I think the YC method has some differences to this problem. YC has already seen the applications for groups, and probably already developed some kind of best to worse ranking of the applicants. The interview most likely functions as a confirmation that the teams live up to their great application. Additionally, YC expands its class to fit the number of qualified applicants. In this problem there is single spot to fill.

Edit: It is also totally possible many people upvoted this article only because it is interesting. If that is true ignore my post.
Do you have any pointers to studies that indicate that anyone -- child or otherwise -- has ever absorbed a significant quantity of lead from solder?
Metacomplaint:

The real title of this piece should be "Police used NDA as an excuse to hide use of cell phone tracking device from judge." As others have already commented, (e.g. pmorici) there is no way a civil agreement could prevent disclosure in a criminal matter.

It's no great surprise the police would want to do this.

What's disappointing is the reflexive journalistic cringe to be "fair" which in fact ends up being unfair. I'm not advocating froth-at-the-mouth partisanship a la Fox News or WorldNetDaily. But this headline unambiguously skews the story by taking the cops' word as they (mendaciously) uttered it.
"I don't think that minimum wage + basic income are mutually exclusive. I'm just highlighting what the actual dynamics of sub-minimum wages are."

I don't think they're actually mutually exclusive, per se, but I do think that with a sufficiently high BI the MW that reflects (shall we say) human cost of production of labor is $0. I'm not sure whether a sufficiently high BI is optimal, or whether the MW remains worthwhile to keep on the books if the market clears all labor far above the ideal MW anyway.
You can take this a little further by separating your comments into two groups:

1. An english language description of what the function (or code block) does as a black box (forget the internals as they are subject to change). What you put in and what you get out, or section headings to structure how you read the code.

2. Comments in the code block to tell you why a given decision was made.

What this gives you is the framework you are describing but it further cements it into three layers:

1. Function and block documentation describe contract and what the code is expected to do from outside. If the code does not implement the contract the code is wrong.

2. When reading through the code as contract-implementation you can understand why certain decisions were made.

As bonus points, you get good API documentation.
I just noticed Google started doing something like this. I got Google search results about purchases I'd made from Apple. They parsed a receipt from my Gmail account and displayed it in a card in my search results.

I was a bit taken aback by that.
How do you play against someone who does not follow the book openings? I usually find it hard to tactically have a book opening setup and then develop on top of it.
Interesting. What's the use case you're thinking?
Ask HN: Probably a dumb idea to lose focus, but..
I am experimenting with an offer and wanted to publish this without bothering my developers or messing with our production servers.

https://docs.google.com/a/monchilla.com/drawings/d/1xrOqlfrBiw-XPs3_Yarf4X58VVlU_BqF7NNMl1o26FA/edit

I thought that would be easy, but after an hour of digging I gave up and was about to pass it off to my team and than I realized this would be impossible for most of my users (small business owners - non tech) so I thought I might pay someone to build a real simple UI that would allow users to specify a background image and change the 6 lines of text and then publish it on our servers. Here is why it might be a good idea:
1. Its cheap and would give some free value to my target market (Most of my users don't have a web page).
2. If it is hosted on my domain I might get some SEO benefit and some exposure since my domain name would be in the url.
Here is why it probably isn't:
1. Its a distraction from the problems I'm trying to solve for my users.

Let me know what you think and if you don't think it's stupid, if you want some side work ;)
If the Basic Income in fact addresses every issue that the Minimum Wage is intended to address, and better, then I don't see that that's entirely the case. It's conceivable that a situation with both could be optimal, but any time you raise the Basic Income you can lower the Minimum Wage - and past some point, that would hit zero.
Ubuntu - because I can find answers for just about any problem easily.

In the past we started with Redhat then Centos, that was back in the day of more simple RPM where you had to resolve dependencies manually. We were mainly using the unit as an internal LAMP and file server, nothing exotic.

After Ubuntu went into creating server versions we went that route. The on-line community was way more active and the package manager just worked.

Ubuntu is definitely a route of lower frustration when things go wrong.
So I guess that settles it. Twitter won the Oscars.
I read your post, but the only part of it that I can find which remotely addresses my question is: "A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him."

So if that's the relevant piece, you are asserting that it's welfare for an employer to pay a man less than a few dollars/day (i.e., subsistence) in wages? That still doesn't explain what you mean by "welfare".
I was going to suggest Chocolate -- it's like Homebrew for PowerShell, but it doesn't always install things where you want it to. And as it turns out, PuTTY might not be maintained as much as it once was -- or that's the rumour.

I was shocked by how many forks of PuTTY there are -- and most suck: https://github.com/FauxFaux/PuTTYTray/wiki/Other-forks-of-Pu...

Many recommend KiTTY but with an ad supported site that complains about adblock when you go SSL (after a warning) and includes hidden features -- well, that's not something I'd trust either.
What's Special About This Number
Ask HN: Take low-stress job to learn web dev in free time?
I am currently teaching myself to be a full-stack web developer with the goal of developing my own apps and making it into a career eventually. I currently have a full-time job as a clinical programmer. It's boring and stressful but does have decent pay and benefits. I've just started applying to valet attendant jobs in my city so I can have a low-stress day job while I continue to learn how to hack in my own time. I've made some good progress in the past year and is starting to churn out some code for real projects. I feel that if only I had a less demanding job during the day I can be more productive in my self-learning.

Has anyone else done this sort of thing? How did it turn out? Any thoughts/advice?
Kind of like "student" athletes, with presumably the same outcomes?
> Yes, maybe 5-7 times as much.

I do not think we are arguing here. My point is that good professors and good universities have a solid quality of life. Whether this reward system is the best for society in the long term is another question.

> How is UNC mid-range?

It ain't no Ivy.
not a marketing stunt. this is giving hackers access to a much larger audience.
Did you post your implementation to the mailing list?

I highly doubt Python or Matlab beats q, but I'm biased.

I'm not sure I understand the comparison to a "native implementation". You mean C? How about assembly? Why would you compare an interpreted language to those? Just use C, if you can.

If you don't tell us exactly what you were trying to do and how you approached it, then there's no reason to give any weight to your comment.

In other words, where's _your_ citation? Give us the problem you were trying to solve.

If you do not give anyone else a chance to offer a solution, then you never really know if you have tried the best approach.
Interesting to contrast national business strategies in Africa.

China is pursuing something like neo-neo-colonialism. See these recent China-Zimbabwe deals:

http://www.bdlive.co.za/africa/africanbusiness/2014/01/30/zi...

http://www.thezimbabwean.co/news/zimbabwe/70687/china-plans-...

Zuck which wants to fly drones so they can setup facebook accounts and see advertising.

Somehow I think it will take more development on the ground to make the ultra long ball work for facebook, unless they are hoping someone else will figure that part out. Like Gates.
Your point about _advertiser_ lock-in is true in the short term.

However, the limited _user_ lock-in means that a 'better' search engine could take user share, which would then make it more attractive to advertisers.
> It wasn't something important to me for a long time since I did other stuff instead, but coming back to programming in an effort to make a career out of it, a lot of that stuff became instantly obvious & I felt foolish for not recognizing it in the first place.

I think one of the key things experienced programmers finally get is that we never stop understanding that there are things which we are doing sub-optimally and can continue to be reflective and self-critical of that. How can I structure my code better? How can I solve this software development problem that seems to come up frequently?

And then as we solve them, the solutions seem so obvious we wonder why we didn't realize it sooner.
“What is learned without play is qualitatively different. It helps
with test taking and mundane exercises, but it does nothing for
logical thinking and problem solving. These things are separate,
and you can’t get here from there.”

This is the core of what people mean when they — legitimately — talk about ‘passion’. Did you learn computing (or any field) for fun, or alternatively because you thought it paid well, or your parents wanted you to do it, or whatever.

(Not to be confused with ‘passion’ as mbaspeak for ‘naïvité enough to work ridiculous hours for peanuts’.)
It's cheap until you have to grab a bunch of stuff back all at once. Then they have you by the short hairs.
Can you then define the "real cost" of labor? Surely it's not subsistence, since that's only a few dollars/day.
Defense, defense, defense. Your code should be peppered with checks that should never go wrong. You should feel stupid writing them.

They will save you a lot of headache one day.

Really the only way to get better is to write stuff and ship it to someone who uses it, and you have to experience the pain of supporting it. That's when all the important lessons are learned.
The financial situation in CS is not at all typical of academia. I'm not sure what your point is. Surely you're not suggesting that all academics should become CS academics?
It may be a good idea, or it may not.

You should discuss this with your clients. Also, set some price for it (people tend to discount the value of free, plus just b/c your customers will accept a free x does not mean they value x). My $.02.
And continually invest some of your time in 1> keeping current (meaning right at the leading edge) of your specialization as well as something else that's emerging, and may replace your specialization, that also interests you and 2> getting the word out. In a specialized domain this doesn't mean you need to have some intense twittersphere / githubsphere presence as the "networking" maketroids claim, it just means that fellow experts in your area should know who you are (not necessarily in person) and respect you.
This is a bit simplistic, and I'm not saying that to be rude.

It's true that searchers don't pay Google money, and advertisers do. But Google is running a platform. In the past I've compared it to an information marketplace. And the goal for Google is to make the market run as efficiently as possible, otherwise they risk losing one side.

Searchers don't pay Google, but they do (presumably) pay Google's advertisers, who pay Google. If you lose the searchers, you lose the advertisers.

Now of course there is a balancing act, which you allude to in your last paragraph. But there are plenty of easy examples where Google returns no ads even though they could. A search for "how old is barack obama" just returns the number (or Wikipedia), without ads, even though I'm sure there are advertisers out there who would pay for an ad to be shown.

So obviously it's not universally true that "the best search results Google can produce are those which maximize their revenue." Perhaps adding some subtlety to your argument would help me understand exactly what you're saying.
Not so much sexist as it is derogatory. Implies immaturity.
The function that approximates the best ideal solution can be approximated with the log function. It's kind of like why the taylor polynomials means that e^pi*i = -1
I don't like when apps put badges on the icon that don't go away but otherwise I like it.
If you are looking for for-hire development with a small scope and clear objectives, might be worth checking out elance or odesk.
But helicopter money helps realize demand for things people actually want. If people don't want so many cars and want something else, some entrepreneur can borrow money, hire people and provide it. Borrowing to make money is good, borrowing for consumption is bad. We've been relying too much on the latter, as a nation.
That's a good idea. I actually just bounced it off one of my users and they thought it would be great, but I often get flattering responses when I ask my users if they would like X because they already like us for solving a real pain.
When I was in Tanzania, there were many places where people hadn't even heard of Facebook. Human interaction is entirely face-to-face, and the only way to Snapchat someone would be to literally stick your face through their window. Same goes for pokes.

Why they want to propagate the loneliness and technology-dependence of the modern age onto the truly free societies of the world is beyond me.
It actually becomes obvious after realizing that all Facebook does is copying Google.