skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to get better at task estimation and discipline?
I'm currently taking stock of my own weaknesses as a developer and one of the areas I've constantly had trouble with (that I think has hurt me professionally) is in estimating how long it will take me to complete a task.

I've never quite been sure how to overcome this and would love to hear from some developers on how they've tackled this problem in themselves and from managers on what you really expect from your devs in this area.

I know this is a multi-faceted issue; for me personally I think there's a few things at play:

- I can be easily distracted, which I tend not to account for in my estimates (which assume that fascinating time-holes like HN and Stack Overflow don't exist!). I know I need to work on this.

- When I think about it, despite being a dev for many years now, I don't really have a trove of historical data to evaluate my own performance against.

- I still have this mental roadblock that estimating often just feels like 'guessing' and I'm just really uncomfortable doing it. It feels more like trying to set myself a deadline and then compress the work into it, rather than actually determining how long the work will take.

- I feel pressured to give best-case estimates, especially when we're doing them in a Scrum where more senior devs disagree.

I really want to be a developer that can be trusted and relied upon and I think that my under-estimating is one thing that hurts me with regards to this.

So, fellow HN'ers, how have you tackled this?
There are a lot of tutorials around monads and monad topics using Haskell because... Haskell is one of the few languages which uses monads in a principled and explicit way.
Sweden’s School Choice Disaster
People that use Haskell tend to care more about this sort of thing than people that use those languages. Or alternatively, if someone cared about this sort of thing they would use Haskell.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by commercial banks issuing paper, and deposit banks buying. I think you mean investment banks issuing securities and commercial banks buying?

The reason Glass Steagall is important is because it stops commercial banks from needing to behave like an investment bank. Especially with publicly traded banks, you have entirely different types of investors with different expectations investing in investment banks vs. commercial banks, and that puts a huge amount of pressure on the commercial side of a merged bank to behave with similar risk profile to its ibank sibling. When they aren't merged there is significantly less pressure to buy higher risk securities. I think there's huge value in having both an aggressive ibanking system and a separate, stable commercial banking system, so yeah, I think we should bring back Glass Steagall.

The occupy wall street quip is unnecessary, don't do that stuff.
I installed everything needed to test this in a terminal.com container, including Torch, iPython, luaJIT and the libs (of course). Check it out at: https://terminal.com/tiny/3epyufPI5z
Verizon Business is NOT Verizon Residential.

Those companies couldn't be more different.
Twitter acquires Cardspring
There's still the reflog for that excuse (e.g. .git/logs/refs/heads/master).
More like an accidental "Fuck you" than an accidental "mea culpa".
Erik Voorhees: The NYDFS Bitcoin Proposal and the Right to Privacy
He never said he deletes messages, just that they aren't in his inbox.

I archive things I may want to search later, and star and leave in my inbox things I need to do later. Once they are done, they get archived. Often the inbox has no emails, but my account has 6k+
I am particularly fascinated by the small topological map. I like imagining what Mars would be like under Earth-like conditions - if a watery planet looked like that, how would people live? Where would the population be most concentrated? How would the political landscape be influenced by the geography?

I guess I spent too much of my childhood playing Role Master :-)
Is there a tl:dr of the video?
Unfortunately, they won't be. According to this internal memo, they're supposed to lay everyone off over the next 6 months:

"The first step to building the right organization for our ambitions is to realign our workforce. With this in mind, we will begin to reduce the size of our overall workforce by up to 18,000 jobs in the next year. Of that total, our work toward synergies and strategic alignment on Nokia Devices and Services is expected to account for about 12,500 jobs, comprising both professional and factory workers. We are moving now to start reducing the first 13,000 positions, and the vast majority of employees whose jobs will be eliminated will be notified over the next six months. It's important to note that while we are eliminating roles in some areas, we are adding roles in certain other strategic areas. My promise to you is that we will go through this process in the most thoughtful and transparent way possible. We will offer severance to all employees impacted by these changes, as well as job transition help in many locations, and everyone can expect to be treated with the respect they deserve for their contributions to this company."[1]

It makes absolutely no sense. Exactly what you describe is going to happen, except that by not telling everyone, it'll also cause people who won't be fired to look around at competing jobs with the impending possibility that they'll be fired. I bet some of them will take some of those jobs regardless and leave.

It seems to me like the whole thing was rushed for before earnings come out. They weren't ready for the full layoff (i.e. managers hadn't decided all of who would be laid off), but they wanted to get some momentum going on the stock. /conspiracy

[1]http://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/2014/07/17/memo-from-m...
Ask HN: Can you provide subdomain to me. for free
I write about free will and dualism and to do research about it. I want to solve everything!
Yep, I think that's totally fair. European banking infrastructure is definitely superior. I work in payments, believe me I know about the short comings of the ACH system :)

A lot of my main comment was more about how the Fed/Govt handled/handles the fiat currency of the US and the bailout. On those fronts I think we are doing significantly better than the Euro and Europe's response to the financial crisis.
Try the paper elements demo [1] in Firefox mobile before finalizing that choice. It's pretty maddening.

[1] http://www.polymer-project.org/components/paper-elements/dem...
Raspberry Eye Remote Servo Cam
OTOH, Apple has how many indirect employees in China? 100,000+?
Would the cognitive overhead of that be any less than lifetimes in Rust?
Of course, it wouldn't fuck with anything since Verizon would just change their argument.
I think we need more detailed information to identify the cause of the
spamming...There could be several strategies to spam her contacts with
her account, even with the facts that you listed (assuming fact No. 3
really is what it appears to be, as virus detection itself is an open
problem -- and in theory this problem is indeterministic).

2-factor authentication (with SMS) in place should be able to rule out
the possibility to have her account accessed somewhere else, other
than the computer and smart phone she uses. But there is also the
possibility that someone else obtained all the contacts in your
daughter's gmail, and then spam with a fake originating mail
server. The critical path for this attacking strategy does not involve
2-factor authentication and your machines.

Another scenario could be her iphone has been compromised and hence
have all the information stored on it exposed to the attacker,
including the SMS (and once the attacker obtained control of the
iphone, he/she could delete the text message and erase the trail after the attack). You need to
check the SMS record with the telecommunication SP to see if there was
any text message containing the 2-factor password sent from google to
your daughter's number.

But in the case either your daughter's mac or iphone has
virus in it, and you failed to find it out (which could happen to
anyone), this could be another possible cause.

At this time, perhaps we could also do several other things to mitigate the impact of this attack...

1) all the contacts she cares should be alerted about this account
compromise (there have been cases in the past where compromised
account has been used to swindle money).

2) change the gmail password.

3) check the vacation responder (e.g. auto-response) of the gmail
account (gmail settings -> General -> Vacation responder) see if it
has been cleared.

4) set different mail signature for all the different mail clients she uses (this could be done through each mail client's own configuration), and
also the signature for the gmail account (gmail settings -> General ->
signature), in the sense of marking the different critical paths of sending mail. So next time we could find out where (in terms of the
apps and client) the spam is sent from, in case it happens again.
One issue to keep in mind is that while people might initially not see the naughty interpretation, there's oftentimes a "cannot unsee" effect with these kinds of things. Happened with a company I used to work at with their logo redesign.
Every night when I close my eyes I envision a future in which React surpasses HTML and browsers start to only render REACT code, documents are written and named index.react, amateurish people say they are REACT programmers and everything is so beautiful that you can't stop looking.

_________

Now seriously: there should be a way to turn React from a library to a DSL that could be rendered by any language, so all servers, not only Node, could generate their pages in React and pass them to the browsers.

Event handling could still be javascript, as servers don't need them, but code that rendered elements according to specific this.props should be universal.
TCP quite literally is NOT UDP. You can do TCP over IP and you can do UDP over IP.

But under NO circumstances could you claim to do UDP over TCP/IP.

Were Netflix performing this "data rape" of Verizon's network it would be huge news as a DoS/DDoS attack. But that's not what we're hearing.

CAN people perform attacks? Yes absolutely and it requires no consent. But without some kind of consent it's regarded as an attack rather than as legitimate network traffic.
Great post. I really need to exercise. I do take walks though and I find that really helps. I think a lot of this boils down to knowing yourself, and that takes time!

For example, I've found that I skip around a lot, and I that's ok with me because I learn a LOT by doing that. I've found that if I stick to one thing longer than I'm able to stay interested, it is counterproductive. So I try to mix it. I read, I code, I explore, etc. As long as I feel internally that I'm making progress, I'm happy and I continue to love my work and love programming.

If anything by doing this I've found that I'm impatient and I want to learn more. I feel like my brain expands when I learn more about programming and I love that feeling.

Right now I'm working on C++ and sometimes I feel discouraged, but then I'll switch pace and - for example - write some code rather than read about how incompetent I am, and then I feel empowered and really want to read more.

So for me, a lot of it comes down to knowing yourself and working that to your advantage. And right now, I know that my health suffers due to my love for programming + all my other responsibilities. And so I'll work on that next.

Once again, nice post :)
I am anti inbox zero. I think archiving email is busy work, I'd rather star the ones I DO need than spend all day archiving everything else.
Facebook spends $400M on Liverail to improve video ads
Hi Matt, I've been inspired to start setting up something myself. Long story why, but in short I've got kids of my own around Bertrand's age (also, my own son is named after famous scientist and thinker). They were born healthy, and can't imagine going through what you all have.

Also, pre-software development, I did grad school in public health (lots of epi and biostat in a dept of inhl health) and briefly worked in health research. So I may be in a good position to help out.

I'm in the process of setting up something using Flask right now and will soon (next few hours) open source it on Github and open it up for contributions. I can't absolutely guarantee that I'll be able to maintain it long-term, but I can certainly get a forum, site, and member registry database up and going and open sourced. Hopefully in such a way that it could be managed by a non-programmers (I realize you have such skills but you obviously have your plate full).

Perhaps eventually it could bloom into a full registry of genetic data, pending resolution of privacy issues (maybe using something like dnasubway).

I'd really love to team with an established designer(s) on this. I can hack up a UI, but would be best to team with a designer(s). I'd also love to team up with other devs who are interested.

Would sociallyrare.org be an ok name for a social media hub for rare diseases? I went ahead and registered that name, but if you have any other suggestions/requests I'd love to hear them. Not sure if Socially Rare has the right ring to it.
It's analogous to the natural termination of a while-else, where the else block is executed after the condition evaluates to false:

>>> a=1
>>> while a>0:
print(4)
a=a-1
else:
print('done')

4
done

clarity cribbed from here: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/1999-July/0044...
Ask HN: I can't remember this website
It used to have programming exercises, in which you were supposed to fill in code in incomplete programs to make the completed program work.
I went there in college (went for the physics, stayed for the fun science room) - what I remember most was an exceptionally well-built Chladni plate that you could control.
$ find ~/Maildir/inbox -type f | wc -l
31439

That's after filtering out bulk mail and mailing lists. I'm a gmail user multiple times over, but use mutt + IMAP instead of webmail, which I visit once in a blue moon to do a tricky search.

Yeah, I should probably practice Real Inbox Zero, but mutt's new message flag is usually good enough. It's nice having new messages in full threaded context. To get Inbox Zero in mutt, with full threads for each new message, I guess I'd have to switch to something like mutt-kz [1]. (If anyone has pointers here, I'm all ears.)

Also:

$ find ~/Maildir/read -type f | wc -l
53774

I've got archived mail dating back to 2006. Every once in a while I take old messages from 'inbox' and move them to 'read' to make things more manageable.

It's a pretty low-tech setup. There are surely lots of fancy things I'm missing out on. Having all your mail locally and in a hackable format inside Maildirs lets you do some pretty interesting stuff though. For example, here's a shell one-liner that generates a time series of my mail volume (gnuplot tail not included): https://twitter.com/alangrow/status/448965593564078080

[1] https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz
DotScale 2014 – Robert Kennedy – Life in the Trenches of healthcare.gov
Over 101,000 in gmail's all mail. Inbox only has 40 emails, so depends on the definition here since we're talking labels/meta vs traditional folders.
What would happen if Netflix stopped allowing access to its service to Verizon customers in areas where there's another provider? Netflix could argue that it doesn't want to provide an inferior product if there's a choice, and maybe leave a number on the homepage for the cable company in your area.

I wonder if Netflix or Verizon would lose more customers...
Right; we're talking about upper bounds here. Assume that the boards are chosen by some kind of wily, malevolent demon with an obsessive desire to embed tricky 3SAT problems in everything.
I'm willing to do that, however there are quite a few sites that will host your blog for free. Send me an email (it's in my profile).
Totally agree. It's been bothering me for a while too- I never fully realized it was because I would generally guide my mouse towards it as I'm looking at it.
Still much better than having somebody else do the disrupting, no?
Facebook has been using React in production since 2011. Polymer is a "developer preview", aside from the Material Design presentation, I haven't heard of anything public-facing that Google's actually done with it yet.

React is backwards compatible to IE8. Polymer? Not so much. Unless you live in that mythical world of evergreen browsers, Polymer is sort of just a really great demo.

http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/working-with-the-browse...
http://www.polymer-project.org/resources/compatibility.html
This is not the best React feature. React solves a bigger problem: nested components. You'll never find other framework that solves it.
Any feedback on the design is greatly appreciated~
Emprestimo Online Dinheiro Rapido e Seguro Pela Internet
It really doesn't matter what the company name is.

At the peering point the arrangement is no longer mutually beneficial for both parties due to one side of the peering arrangement now using more than its fair share or traffic. This is what Verizon has issues with.
It's complicated. The overall effect on the country -- significantly contributing to raising it out of poverty -- has all kinds of good effects. You also have to see it in connection with certain disastrous policies that came before it, such as the government's previous insistence that everyone have as many babies as possible, to swell the Red Army's ranks. China is still very much recovering from a few decades of insane misrule.

Try to talk to Chinese parents (especially mothers) who are affected by the policy. First, they are all, in my experience, willing to talk about it, even eager. Second, every one of them has said basically the same thing: It is a difficult policy but necessary, and beneficial for China overall.

Difficult: Most mothers' experience is related to not having the children they wanted to have. Abortions too. They often look like they are about to cry when they talk about it. It's definitely tough, and many are deeply scarred.

Beneficial: In an overcrowded country, the up side is obvious. (The mothers I have met are mostly middle or upper class, so it is a biased sample.) They connect the policy with the radical improvements in quality of life. Not just consumerist measures of quality of life, but also education and all that goes with it (that's another discussion, but it includes a happier home life due to improved equality and rights).
khanacademy.org
code.org
codecademy.org
SoftBank Picks Google’s Arora to Head Internet Business Unit
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FedEx Charged With Shipping Drugs For Illegal Online Pharmacies
Online retail does an amazing job of selling things that people already know they want. It's terrible at helping people discover things they didn't know that wanted (look at AMZN's recommendation engine -- still very dumb.)

There's a possibility for something big here and makes sense for YC.
If you've read an email, decided it needs action, decided you won't take that action now, and decided you need a way to remind yourself to take that action later, wouldn't it make sense to just star that one email rather than move away all the rest?

I don't really know. My inbox has everything from ever in it.
There are many methods.

You can have batch processes push them out periodically.

You can put public keys in LDAP

You can configure SSH to use Kerberos.
rex@rexmorgan.net
It only assumes a world where everyone uses JavaScript. And in this context, "everyone" is web developers, so it's a fair assumption.
The problem with this is that to some extent, the content business effectively sponsors the internet business. The same is true for the phone business.

It gives them pops, "free" capacity (meaning they have to buy dark fiber, and can resell internally cheaply, or just wouldn't have it at all if they didn't have phone business), shared infrastructure.

So if you do this, effectively it will mean the same any other solution means : more expensive internet.

Given that that will be the result, might I suggest an alternative solution ? Get a basic business internet line from Verizon. See the difference.
It's true that most people don't like them, but I don't think it's true that their only use is for touchscreens.

See Fitt's Law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law
None of these are what I'm looking for. These do have programming exercises. However, I'm looking for a very specific type of exercise: a problem is given, and an incomplete solution is also given, and the student is asked to fill in the blanks of the program to make it work.
It's really amazing to watch things like this happen. I wish I knew something I could do to help, but the closest I can come is having used Pygr exactly once.
Google loves Epic Rap Battles and the ad money it brings in
Yes it is technically feasible to perform a push-type operation and send data to someone without their consent. But that's generally regarded as an attack, rather than legitimate network traffic.

I don't have any hard numbers but I would guess that at least 90% and very likely 95% or 99% of all internet traffic is pull-style.

Transferring data between two parties on the internet for any reason usually goes hand in hand with one person wanting to receive some data and another wanting to send it. If the sender doesn't want to send, no transfer takes place. If the receiver doesn't want the data, it's regarded as an attack.

I am having a hard time coming up with legitimate situations where someone sends data to my computer without my permission (express or implied) and that doesn't seem like some kind of attack.

But I'm also open (at least I'd like to believe I am) to someone cooking up a situation that proves me wrong.
Nope, sorry. That's a different rex morgan. rex[dot]morgan at google's mail service.
I just mark mine as Unread if I need to read them again.
Using Laughing Gas to Relieve the Pain of Childbirth