skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, HN is an excuse to write and for me writing is thinking and the sorts of things I like to think about does not include accusing people of ignoring my posts, in part because many of them are worth ignoring [that's the way unedited writing tends to work] and in part because I have found I prefer conversation to flame wars -- and anyway, when I want a flame war, I have most of the rest of the internet upon which to stalk one and the one's I tend to stalk are much more important than vanilla ice cream versus strawberry, Mac versus Linux, AstroTurf versus natural grass, or the appropriateness of designated hitters and instant replay decisions.

Read the post to which I am responding. Was it thoughtful and reasoned and articulate? What did it accomplish? Did it raise anyone's standing in the HN community? Did it make HN better? Was it well written? What view did it advance?

Ok, I'll answer the last one. It advanced a view that I hold a particular view. Which is more convincing as to what views I hold, my original posts or brief assertions about those posts? And which is more interesting?

If despite the list of persons doing so being rather long, should finding disagreement with me constitutes an accomplishment, congratulations. Though as I've said, for me writing is thinking. Thus, I am also on the list.
To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand
Euhm abstractions in Haskell carry lots of penalties. Haskell is generally a language that only makes sense if you buy the "sufficiently smart compiler" argument. Haskell's abstractions shouldn't carry a penalty, because the compiler compiles them out when it recognizes them.

That's cute but while it's impressive what it recognizes, it's generally still stupid, and it will get beaten by bad programmers (especially by bad programmers. Becoming good at Haskell means, amongst other things, learning what the compiler will screw up).

Scheme, likewise, doesn't have free abstractions. Unless you mean macros, but those are not really free either imho.

There's one high-level language in wide use that has "free" abstractions, or at least, costs as low as possible, and that's C++.
Would you use this to gather feedback for small projects?
So you propose that colorblind people should make their OS turn all images, photographs and video into false color not correlating with reality because in some specific contexts color is used symbolically and it's important to distinguish between two colors? One option that might work would be a special drawing mode implemented in the OS graphics stack that did some mapping depending on what's configured in the accessibility settings; then applications could request that in the rare cases where it's important.
You can have SNI on Windows XP if you use a browser instead of Internet Explorer.
The syntax highlighting I use strongly emphasizes comments, making them bold and bright; I'm not at all a fan of highlighting schemes that fade out comments, like github's.

And I definitely agree about redundant comments. One of my earliest CS classes made it a requirement to have a comment for every line of code; those homework assignments looked like abominations (above and beyond being written in C++). These days, I try to avoid writing code that's too clever for its own good, and on the rare occasions when I can't make code self-documenting, I comment it instead.

As for the insertion/deletion item, though: I read so many diffs that I have a strongly established association for red->deletion->yay. Doubly so for the diffstat: always great to see -bignum +smallnum.

Regarding the linked article about "semantic highlighting", I've seen numerous complaints equating existing syntax highlighters to highlighting all the verbs in English prose, and "why on Earth would you want to do that?". Code is not prose; highlighting the verbs makes perfect sense given that code is a set of instructions. A better analogy would be to a step-by-step instruction manual, and I've seen many instruction manuals that highlight the verbs in each step.
Talent Management in Silicon Valley
Well, that might be nice, but I wouldn't expect to see it happen. The company formed to collect this data, Q, is a B2B play that will want both Companies A and B to pay for each individual assessment. Persons P and Q will not want to pay for the reverse service, and even if they were so inclined, Q's client base won't really be large enough to make it worthwhile.

In other words, hand-wavy big data aside, this is yet another HR tool.
While I appreciate the general principle that many others have also observed, that one should assume bugs are in one's own code before blaming the underlying system, I find that this is often an excuse to avoid understanding the problem and applying the solution where it belongs. The operating system, the network, remote APIs, and other infrastructure often are the problem, and if you don't invest in building and understanding tools that can truly explain what's going on, you often and up building crappy workarounds for shortcomings in the underlying infrastructure.
Yep. And it's mostly about communicating. That they choose red for removals and green for insertions is meaningless. We may argue the same nonsense about stop lights. A parked car is safe a moving one can kill. So let's replace the stop lights colors. What? Yeah. Silly argument. The colors do not matter at all. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

When programmers all around the world look at the red/green in a diff they understand it, without having to search for a legend explaining the colors.
That's not fair to say. A vast majority of drive-by attacks happen because of java/javascript/flash

I should be able to browse the internet without scripts if I want to for my safety's sake.
Lego is exorbitantly expensive, though it is virtually indestructible. I was given Mindstorms for Christmas one year, but I was only able to play with it at my grandparents' house where the computer was good enough (i.e. had more than 16MB RAM).
For myself, and many others, green is green and red is also green. That likely presents a problem.
Related to the linked article at bottom (coding in color: https://medium.com/p/3a6db2743a1e/): I've been using the Sublime Colorcoder plugin (https://github.com/vprimachenko/Sublime-Colorcoder) and beside some instabilities, it's been working well. It's really nice to see the flow of a variable (or more) through a function, without manually highlighting the occurrences.
Good point! That looks like it cuts it in half -- 4 or 5%.
The Game Of Life implemented in Brainfuck
This video helped me out greatly with accessing google spreadsheets through python. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWCLROPKug0
Agreed. You can probably drop SSL connections in favour of TLS only if you do this, too. I've done this on my work and personal sites and everything works fine for modern browsers.

For example, the config for your Nginx server block can go like this, with no need to support SSL at all.

> ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;

I realise this excludes some traffic and I'm okay with it.
This is awesome. They've managed to identify many little utilities that users need occasionally. Google has a similar set of utilities, but it is only accessible through the search-bar, and you need to know what you're looking for. DDG's is much easier to browse/use.
Angry Birds seems inspired from this sixties French animated television series
Perhaps you are right. It seems like the environment is murky enough that a sufficiently motivated individual (or organization) with Mike's drive and skill set could set up a fake identity dumping program while avoiding detection, just as scammers can mask their activities.

There would be the inevitable question of incentives: Who benefits from this service and who pays for the service? Mike tracks these guys down (unsuccessfully) in his free time, as a hobby. His only reward is the feeling of justice he gets from cornering a scammer and making him squirm.

There is no data to support this in the article, but it seems as if the majority of the scamming targets lower-income, misinformed, and vulnerable people. So it would make sense that the taxpayers would pay to rectify this situation and rid the general public of this predatory nuisance. The failure here is with the government - they have the resources and the incentive to fix this situation. Seems kind of ass-backwards that our legal system would protect a company such as Lead Flash. But hey, capitalism isn't perfect is it?
>You make it sound like a situation being ambiguous is bad. I disagree. I think that's exactly the time for discussion, negotiation, collaboration, and reflection.

The ethical conflicts I've used as examples are "I have information relevant to all parties. If I tell everyone, one party will be damaged. If I tell no one, the other party will be damaged."

Negotiation is... difficult, when you can't reveal what you are negotiating about.

Reflecting on "who do I screw" is incredibly stressful and unpleasant.
Open Source application monitoring and packet tracing system
Interesting article. I definitely try to avoid comments and let the code do the talking, I hope more devs would. My eyes ALWAYS skim over comments, unless I can't make sense of some agency dev's code, then I have to look at the comments if they exist.

Although I detest comments, making them stand out more and consequently wanting (hopefully) to write better code, is a plus. There will be some cases for comments, and it should be few and far between, and only super necessary (read Clean Code for contextual examples).
I believe that a redundant comment is just someone being lazy while writing a comment. Each piece of code we write is part of a bigger whole, and if all you can write in a comment is a spaced out version of the name of a variable, you're doing it wrong. Tell us when the value is set, or what happens when it's set or how it affects other parts of the code; things that aren't immediately obvious by its nomenclature.
You mean a pseudo-shell? Because when you're running OCaml on top of a hypervisor, there is no OS and shell in the traditional meaning of those words. So nothing to connect to.
That's a really interesting idea. You'd want a fast toggle for it, so that you could use it primarily for browsing semantic content that uses colors, but not always for photographs or videos that represent the real world (unless those photos or videos contained such semantic content). It's not ideal, but much like assistive devices that translate vision to other nerve impulses (http://www.nei.nih.gov/news/briefs/weihenmayer.asp), it could be useful as a learned adaptation.

That said, it would also make sense for diff software in particular (as one of the most prominent software uses of red and green right next to each other for semantic purposes) to have an easily adjusted option for a different color scheme for the very common case of red/green colorblindness.
Yep, since I've first started hiring (2001) I've always found fault in asking folks if they are smart and handsome, they always say yes. The ATS I have now is a lot better about filtering candidates - getting proof of skills first. I then temp-to-hire the best candidates. Much easier finding out how well you can work with someone, when you're working with them.
Whether schools are subpar is a separate question.

I am saying that if you were in my high school and weren't expecting to go to college, there were courses designed for you across all disciplines to teach you practical life skills. However, I do think the school still required students to struggle through at least some of the standard curriculum.
Outside of emergency rooms and acute care, people have quite a bit of choice as to when to see a doctor, and whom to see. It is conceptually little different than auto repair in that sense. Making the world artificially black and white only serves to obscure nuances. Some times you really could use some help right now, most of the time not. The efficient way to deal with the former, is to plan ahead and make arrangements. For the latter, YAGNY may well be the efficient approach.

Heck, even someone rendering services as conceptually involuntary as a will executor, can have a reputation fr being good or bad. Despite you not necessarily having much choice on the matter when the headline service is being rendered.
Good coffee does not come from McDonalds.

Other places were sucessfully selling coffee at a lower temperature than McDonalds. While burns are still possible at those lower temperature a few extra seconds would have given her time to remove her clothing which would have eeduced the severity of the burns.

People are not pushing personal responsibility onto McDonalds - McDonalds took responsibility when they admitted that they preferred to settle 700 cases (some including full thickness burns) out of court than adjust their procedures.

Your personal preference is for undrinkably hot coffee. McDonalds could have offered two temperatures - regular and extra hot. Someone asking for extra hot is taking personal responsibilty for that choice, and is declaring that they know the liquid is very hot.

(About those 700 burns, including full thickness burns: full thickness burns are a medical emergency. They can be fatal. They require specialist medical attention involving painful procedures that leave scarring and possibly loss of function. McDonalds made a careful conscious choice that allowing these burns to continue and then settling costs out of court was preferable to complying with national advice about beveridge temperature. You are asking people to take responsibility for their actions: the jury decided to make McDonalds responsible for that choice.
> I believe that a redundant comment is just someone being lazy while writing a comment.

Perhaps, but it's also often someone being lazy when writing the code. It takes more effort to write self-documenting code that's optimized for understanding and editing rather than for writing. And I'll take good self-documenting code over well-commented code any day.
You can if you want, but you shouldn't expect everything to work. If you disable something, you can't complain when sites try to use something that's, more often than not, enabled.
Shouldn't this be published as an email?
It's not to be found in the AppStore. Have you geo-limited it to ensure you grow less? :)

[EDIT: my mistake, it was loopd not loopt]
Colors are certainly a significant part of user experience, so although I agree that these issues exist, I disagree with the solutions.

Comments shouldn't be pink/red because they are not necessarily a bad thing. Just make them bold and opaque.

Changing to blue and yellow for diffs is equally as wrong as red/green but more confusing. Blue signifies safe information and yellow signifies warning. It would be better to use the same color for deletions and additions but make deletions darker to show they are stale/rotted and additions brighter to show freshness.
I have no problem with systemd but neither do I have a reason to use it (although I admit, Poettering's general attitude does bother me a bit).

As long as Slackware doesn't incorporate systemd and alternatives remain I'm fine. If alternative disappear, I guess I'll cross that bridge when it happens.
You're not everybody. When you send email to someone else, your preferred mode of working doesn't really enter into it.

I'd rather not have bloated Word files sucking up my data plan.
The best people are rarely going to sit though an on-the-job trial or the classic tech 6+ hours of interviews over 3+ days. More importantly the single most important part of the hiring process takes place after the fact. If you don't take care of your people and deal with people that are a poor fit minor changes in how you higher quickly becomes meaningless. On the other hand if you can manage people appropriately then you can almost randomly higher people and get by simply because your filtering based on a long term on-the-job trial after the fact.
The author seems to brush off criticisms of his/her diff color ideas:

[Edit: quite a few people disagree, which isn’t
surprising, coming from people that already read
diffs all day. It would take some time to retrain
your eye.]

Comments like "well these people are just stuck in their ways," don't really disprove criticisms of your ideas.

Also, the author also seems to choose the colorscheme for comments base on his/her ideas of how one should use comments. This is less an argument of how right/wrong current colorschemes are and more of a battle of "More Comments, Be Explicit" vs "Less Comments, The Code is Documentation".[1]

[1] I'll weigh in my anecdotes on the "code should be documentation" idea. I've been places where this was the mantra, and the code was a complex mess of spaghetti. The idea that all I had to do was "follow the code" is laughable when "following the code" could be a several hour affair just trying to determine what one option to a class did. Or usage of variable naming schemes from the 90's where everything was an abbreviation (presumably to keep variable names as close to 8 characters as possible) or avoiding name collisions by prepending characters ('ppc' already exists, so use 'qppc', but in other source files use 'rppc' or 'PPC').
My thoughs on Go – completeness it provides through simplicity
Beijing’s DIY Clean Air Movement:  Can’t Buy a Pricey Air Filter? Build One
Which is weird when you think about it. red/green colourblindness is way more common in men and tech is quite male dominated.
> It seems like you guys ... added a feature
> to tag "meta" comments so they appear all
> the way down the bottom of a comment thread?

I have no personal knowledge of this, but I suspect other people have flagged the comments, and that's what's caused them to sink. No other mechanism would be required.
Good article expressing something I have felt for a long time.

Emailing asking to set up a call to do something email could have handled better drives me nuts.
Project Ajira (VU Amsterdam)
And they did all this despite their paying customers not wanting their coffee that way? Simply because they wanted to, above else, be as nasty as they could to people, never mind lost sales, complaints, court fees and what have you?

In other words, the corporate culture of their coffee operation is not greedy, as often assumed, but specifically sadistic. Happy to suffer lost sales and revenue, higher legal fees, and a shattered reputation, just for the pleasure of burning people?

It would be interesting to see the kind of interview processes that managed to maintain that kind of a corporate culture despite all the churn inherent in minimum wage job environments.
You can use them without javascript too, if you know the shortcut. e.g. https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=qrcode%20http%3A%2F%2Fddg.gg%...
It's interesting to see how some of these opinions are reflected in Go, because Rob Pike helped design Go about 20 years after writing this essay:

Typography: Automatic formatting is part of the standard Go tooling and culture.

Function pointers / Protocols: This section seems to be decsribing a technique similar to Go's interfaces.

Include Files: Rob Pike talked about this in his presentation at SPLASH [1,8:00-12:30]. He mentioned that Plan 9 had fast compile times in part due to following this discipline. He contrasted that with one of Google's C++ code bases in which the compiler had to read 2000 bytes for every byte of source. That was largely because of includes, and was a problem for compile times. A little later he talks about Go's method of importing dependencies, and presents them as a big improvement to the situation.

[1]http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Go-Google
ILLIAC I Programming Manual (1956)
"Every comment here is redundant. The textual decoration attempts to assert its own importance, adding two non-semantic lines to every comment. And indeed the eye is drawn to the useless comments instead of the code. So, after looking at these useless comments all day, what do we do? We use our syntax highlighter to turn them off!"

Is it really such a burden to scan a few comments? Come on.

The real problem here is that most developers are total brats about reading code. They'd rather cut off their hand than read anything, and once you're in that mindset, anything that you can latch onto is the target for excessive, self-affirming hostility about the stupidity of the author: those comments are just useless! The idiot who wrote this code must be terrible! I now feel slightly more justified in re-writing everything!

Given that developers almost never write comments for anything, I'd rather see someone erring on the side of over-commenting. If I see code that has been commented in that way, and I see that the other methods are well-commented, I know that the developer was probably more careful than the person who wrote no comments at all. I'm more likely to trust the code. Moreover, having your editor insert a comment on every new method is really a best practice -- it gets you in the habit of documenting, because you always have that empty comment template, staring at you.
In many years of programming, I don't think I've ever run into a genuine compiler bug. It's fallacy to assume they don't exist, but they tend to be so rare and esoteric that you probably have a better chance of winning the lottery than finding one.

I have however, run into numerous bugs in standard libraries. These are definitely much more common in proprietary languages like ActionScript (Flash) or Lingo (Director), or rapidly-changing (I'll be nice and not say poorly designed) languages like PHP than in say, C, C++ or Java. Platform-specific bugs in x-platform code also seem to be the most common.

I agree with the general premise that "it's probably your own fault". I can probably count more times that I've suspected a compiler/OS/stdlib bug and found after extensive testing that it was my own fault than I can count genuine library bugs. On average, I probably hit one genuine language bug every two years at most.

The trick is to start with the assumption that it is a compiler/OS/stdlib bug. Next, go create a minimal proof-of-concept to demonstrate the bug you believe exists. In doing so, more than 50% of the time you'll figure out what was really wrong with your code as you are doing this. The other times, you have a nice minimal test case you can submit to the language maintainer's mailing list.

It's also surprising how much you can learn about how a language or feature by trying to methodically prove that it is broken. The process of doing so forces you to think about all the edge cases you don't normally consider, but most of the time, the language designer already did.
I think you need to learn a lot more about the US economy, if you think WhatsApp is representative of the world's largest and most productive manufacturing economy.

The US is the largest in: software, internet, communications, media, manufacturing, pharma / biotech, defense contracting, aerospace, energy, finance, agriculture

And somehow you think Instagram is a big deal? Laughable. Any idea how many $10 billion companies there are in the US?
As I commented elsewhere, I'm running systemd with syslog-ng, netctl, and cronie. It plays just fine with them. Do you have examples of pieces I'd want to swap in but can't?
Don't ever try to offer something of serious value on HN. This is a marketer's troll board.
Partly because launchd didn't have a sensible Open Source license, and partly for the same reason systemd doesn't run on non-Linux kernels: it's designed for its target OS, and makes use of that OS's native functionality to the point that porting would become decidedly non-trivial.

systemd took heavy inspiration from launchd and other sources, but provides extensive functionality that launchd does not.