skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's similar to the idealist trope that tearing everything down to rebuild it will somehow not be subject to corruption and perversion the next time around. As though they've found some way to control human nature. It's unavoidable systemic entropy.
A bit into the article I had the strangest feeling I was reading a dark Orwellian story.
OMG - is _that_ how Japanese employees spent their lives?! I wonder what the suicide rates are over there.
Does anyone else find this article, while interesting, a little odd? In that I'm not sure that his argument succeeds. Especially in that while he portends to show that "there is no such thing as a general purpose processor", the first line of his conclusion starts "The general purpose processors of today.."

It reminds me a little of philosophical arguments which attempt to disprove the existence of something common-sensical. If you define a general purpose processor as one which would be able to execute any algorithm comparably performant as a purpose-defined processor, then yes, that processor does not exist. But that's like saying processors with infinite cores, speed, and heat-dissipation capacity don't exist. It's true, but not all that interesting.

"General purpose processors don't exist" is certainly an eyeball grabbing headline, but I think his "real" conclusion is more measured and in a way less controversial: "Efficient designs will require admitting that there is no one-size-fits-all processor design and that there is a large spectrum, with different trade-offs at different points." Despite his not defining "efficiency", that point seems true, but not that controversial.

Does he show that "General-purpose processor" is not a useful distinction? I don't think so.

(Apologies: recovering philosopher, not a CS PhD.)
For now, we switch back to the splash screen design, sorry.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the US salaries drop in the coming decade. CS classes are incredibly impacted and universities are churning out students. Sure the quality of your average graduate is plummeting too, but that's never completely factored-in when you apply to a job
I just started a software development apprenticeship at my company and it's going amazingly. Recruitment for other development positions generally cost $1000+ and really didn't give us anyone impressive (our good candidates/people came from active recruiting). I used ad-words for $120 and indeed for $40 and got over 100 applications for my development apprenticeship.

We chose people with skills and experience we wanted, and selected for traits we felt would make good developers. (Passionate about learning for example). From the start we've been able to really teach good habits as well as focus on how we do things (testing, continuous integration, version control, etc). Some of the exercises involve rebuilding key components from management systems with the hopes we'll have not only great programmers, but experts on our business when they go from apprentices to full time developers. We're also going to get exactly the employees we want, starting from desirable employees with very little to no programming experience.

If anyone is interested in starting a similar program, I will be more than happy to share my materials, some of the things I would change about what I've done so far, etc. I highly recommend it. The cost is relatively low, we balance the pay with the fact that the people instructing can't do work while they're teaching/helping - so during the apprenticeship it's basically a decently paid internship. They're already producing higher quality work than we've gotten from any outsourcing we've done - we'll be finishing a project by the end of the program that we completely controlled the quality of, got an MVP done pretty inexpensively, and we'll have basically custom built the team for that application. All while teaching the group an entirely new career, I've seen what investing in career growth via continuing studies can do for employee retention, I really think that taking it to this level will give us some great retention numbers in the near future as well.
Speaking for myself here, but yes, as a rule, we are. Profiling and discrimination based on race and gender is a terrible thing, and arguably even more so when it interacts with the provision of justice. This is true whether it is re-victimization of abuse survivors, the racist characterization of young black men as inherently dangerous or criminal, or any other double standards based on a person's birth rather than their actions.
That's true, I totally agree with you at its irony in hindsight. I guess I'm a bit blinded at having worked on Android apps for a while and using this lib way too often.
This is a wonderful reflection on the joys and productivity of getting up when you wake up, and running with your naturally wakeful energy while it lasts.

My job is the only thing keeping me on a set schedule. When I retire, or if I make a move to freelancing full-time, I'm really curious to see what becomes of my schedule. I'll stay grounded in time somehow, but I'll also lose myself in time on a regular basis.
Given what you described, I was admirative that you succeded to avoid the "cynical" tone. Good skills.
I think you are mistaken if you think patio is bluffing about his rates.
the interesting thing is why? did you get rejected by american society (aka girls)? or you just have some asian fetish (yellow fever)?
cause the thing I noticed about these posts, is its some white geek moving to Asia, and 100% of the time he has an asian girlfriend/wife native to the country. and then all the people who chime in saying lived there too or currently lives there are in the same situation. deep down inside they wish they really fit in like a local. not a single one of these white guys moving to asia has a white gf/wife.
Show HN: Writing Your Own Auth-Plugins for npm Enterprise
I think to properly write a language comparison, you need to have extensively used both languages and with multiple use cases.

For example:
I've recently attempted writing a small service in Go and it only took a few hours for me to figure out how weak a language could be without some sort of type-abstraction or generics: I had to implement a FindValueInArray() twice for two different types. This should be a big issue in any respectable language. (I mostly like Go otherwise though!)
Show HN: Cliff is an API for cleaning data and preparing mailing lists
When i was young i did that sometimes at work. Worked out pretty well except that the code was a bit hard to understand.
So with about 7 billion people on the planet, on average our personal data is worth about $22/year? Rather than getting that $22 sent to me directly, can I pay $22/year and opt out?
The overall theme (as an American who has never visited Japan) seems to be one of risk-aversion vs. risk-insensitivity.

In the U.S., the culture embraces risk and risk-takers, if most of us don't actually live out these ideals ourselves.

It seems employees in Japan don't want to risk unemployment, while companies don't want to risk losing employees, while apartments don't want to risk extending credit to anybody who doesn't have a job with a recognized company.

In the U.S. it could certainly be argued that we're way too credit and risk embracing. However, it's also very likely that most of our economic growth in the last century is because we've been able to get credit and that we're a society that takes risks. Americans can be irresponsible, but this description sounds like the other extreme.
> Filtering out flights between midnight and 6AM that leaves us with [..]

Why do they do this?
There's still inverse square law at play, although it's much more forgiving than atmospheric attenuation (logarithmic db loss with distance versus linear).
Depends on what you mean by solid. It uses LLVM for all the codegen and perf is generally in line with C++. The core ideas around traits/borrowing/inference/mutablility have been stable for a while.

What's not stable is everything around the core ideas. Many things are in flight at the moment in anticipation of 1.0 stability. The core collection libraries had a major refactor land last night. How error handling works got changed earlier this week.

If you're interested in writing libraries for a new ecosystem, now is the time to get into the language. I've tried to get into Rust a couple times since the 0.4 timeframe and I couldn't keep up with the pace of change. My current attempt started at 0.11 and while there are steady chanes, I've found them to be manageable.

If you want to have idioms and ecosystem relatively settled, hold off until the 1.2 or 1.3 timeframe (6 week cycles). I say this because a lot of the current RFCs are split between things that need to happen before 1.0 and things that need to happen after. This generally means the base functionality in-place for 1.0 with the sugar/convenience stuff to come later. I expect it'll take a few cycles after 1.0 before Rust settles into what most people are thinking when they think stable.
> Is it in a state ready to replace C++?

Nope. That will take many years. But it definitely is in a state where you can start building real things with it, if you don't mind some of the usual costs of being on the bleeding edge, like documentation that's hard to grok, frequent trips to irc, and frequent breaking changes. But breaking changes will be going away very soon, the documentation gets better all the time, and the irc room is far friendlier than others.
Quite the contrary, learning a language because it is exploding in popularity is a nice way to ensure that you'll end up being abused, poorly paid and irrelevant. You can't possibly find a worse reason for learning a new language.

On Javascript you're missing the causality. Some people are learning Javascript because it is popular of course, because they've read on some forum that learning popular things gets them hired, but those people are totally uninteresting in the pool of developers that learned Javascript because they had shit to do and things to build and Javascript was the answer.

There's a big difference between learning X because you want to make your job easier, because you want to build things in a new way, because you want exposure to new ways of thinking, because there isn't an alternative to what you're trying to do, etc... and learning X because that's fashionable. In the former case, it's pretty much a gamble but you might actually get something out of it. In the later case all you're earning is the ability to slap another keyword on a resume that only mediocre HR people care about, being actually a time waist as it's keeping you from learning things that might actually be of interest for the things you're trying to accomplish (other than getting a shitty job of course).

Just as people that learned PHP or Java back in the day found out, learning for the sake of getting a job is a sure way to land you a shitty and boring job in which you are replaceable cog. Managers love popular languages and frameworks, of course they do. And the interesting jobs that are out there, that make people happy and that pay well - well, let me tell you, those companies aren't looking for keywords on your resume, but for things that you've actually built.

And after some years from now, when you'll be over 40, you'll find yourself either a manager that does LinkedIn searches for keywords, or an obsolete developer that can't find a job because everything you've learned is obsolete and you waisted your time in learning syntax, instead of learning new abstractions, algorithms and mathematics - you know, stuff that never gets old.
Really depends on the community. Comments sections generally work if the readership has something uniting it: a common topical interest; socioeconomic demography; regularity; intra-group reputations (and cognizance thereof); etc. Commenters actually put in some effort when they feel they have skin in the game, and when they believe they're going to encounter the same peer-commenters on a regular basis.

This was a lot more possible years back, before the rise of social sharing and syndication. Your typical comments section on any given blog -- especially interest-based or topic-based blogs -- could be reasonably intelligent and informative. This is one of the big tradeoffs we've made, inadvertently, by making sharing and distribution so much easier.

In the present day, audiences are much more heterogeneous, having come across any given article through dozens of different channels. They have nothing in common. They probably have no particular affiliation with, or respect for, the publication or blog they've stumbled across. Likewise, they don't know, respect, or care about their fellow commenters. Many don't even see themselves as commenters on a particular site, so much as drive-by taggers. They don't expect to stick around, so much as to shout something out and hope people see it. (Or to astroturf a particular link).

Reuters probably made the right call here. I don't know anybody who regularly reads Reuters in and of itself. Most of its readership is distributed and ad hoc, as its articles are widely syndicated across print and the web. That's a perfect recipe for a terrible comments section.

Note: some people think real identities vs. anonymity plays a big role in comment quality. I haven't yet seen this to be the case. Some of the smartest boards, comments sections, etc., are full of users with anonymous handles. (Though it's key that the handles be permanent, and that the users behind them feel a sense of identity attached to them). Conversely, I've seen "real people" make some downright spammy, idiotic, racist, and generally useless comments on major sites and networks. Identity matters, but it's about more than the name.
I think the point is that if the speaker is not one who may have experienced the discrimination then the speaker is not able to say that it does not exist.

Do you agree or disagree with this idea?

(Pithy comments may be fun, but a flame war is not productive.)
It's not clear how much experience the author really acquired with each language, and whether that experience was sufficient experience to justify his statement:

Go felt that way to me — it was good at everything, but nothing grabbed me and made me feel excited in a way I wasn’t already about something else in my ecosystem.

He's apparently using each language to write relatively small command-line utilities. If Go is "amazing" at anything, its usually cited as a language of choice for (1) networked systems, and (2) large yet maintainable systems. I'm not sure his initial foray into the language would have provided enough experience to accurately assess those merits one way or the other.

Rob Pike once expressed surprise that people migrating to Go weren't C++ programmers, but Ruby/Python/etc. programmers who needed more performance. That leads you to wonder: (EDIT: removed pejoratives) if a programmer desired to switch from C/C++ to another language but hasn't by now, why not?

1. They require the performance benefits of C/C++ (and as humanrebar pointed out, manual memory management).

2. They're tied to legacy code, with too little incentive to switch.

3. They have an organizational mandate.

Any programmer who wasn't subject to the above constraints and wanted to switch could have done so before Go showed up on the scene. And if a programmer uses C or C++ solely because the above constraints, Go isn't likely to change that.

Rust may have a better chance of converting C++ programmers, if it offers the performance and control demanded by programmers who are using C++ by necessity. It will be interesting to see if people migrating from Python/Ruby to a higher performance language will choose Go or Rust in the future. Kind of like the OP, I like Go but I'm excited about Rust.
I agree wholeheartedly with your first sentence, but I still find lambdas to be quite useful in spite of their limitations.
I might not be as precise as I've wanted, but I've taken a class where my professor mentioned that Google has their own physical infrastructure, thus achieving such low latencies for requests in general.

I'm aware that this info is not as precise as one would want, so I'd love to read comments on this!
Sounds like it'll be a fun social board!
Some other points programmers should be familiar with (not an expert here, everyone feel free to correct me)

1. In typical situations, 256 shades of brightness of a single color hue are the most we can distinguish and will form a smooth gradient without banding. If you're dealing with Green and related colors in the RGB spectrum (i.e. yellows and blue-greens, and near-white colors) it can go a bit higher, to 512 shades- This is why many compression algorithms compress reds and blues more than greens, because it's less noticeable.

2. Many artists will use opposite colors on the color wheel to darken colors- So to make a darker yellow, they'll mix in purple paint (or use purple dithering, depending on the medium.) How this relates to color theory from a psychological standpoint is unclear, but using this approach in UI design (for instance, adding purple detail to the shadow of a yellow object in an icon) often gives clean, elegant results.

3. Sometimes, when designing something, you say to yourself, "I want a red here that is just as bright as the blue over there". However, the psychological basis as to when colors of different hues appear to have the same brightness is a very complex problem- You can't just add R+G+B intensities and think that will tell you that two different colors have the same brightness, perceptually. Your best bet is to just "eyeball" colors in this case, unless you have the time to go down some very deep rabbit holes.

4. If you are designing for paper printing, expect all colors in an RGB image to look much, much darker and less vibrant than on a monitor. Going from RGB->CMYK and getting perfect results is another really hard problem out of reach for most programmers (I actually think there's low hanging fruit for people to write libraries that help optimize this conversion- Everything I've personally seen that is designed for a layman, such as Photoshop's conversion process, seems to be sub-par at helping laymen do this well.)

5. There are exotic color spaces like the TSL color space that most programmers are completely unfamiliar with and are designed for better modelling of human perception of color. We programmers should probably be using these color spaces a lot more.

6. A good rule for UI design is to only use two colors at most (besides gray tones) on the screen at a single time and maybe one extra color in a very limited way. If you don't do this, you'll end with an "angry fruit salad" interface (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=angry%20fruit...) Microsoft Metro and some of the new "flat UI" stuff is a major deviation from this rule, for better or worse.

7. When in doubt, leave the background of a website white. You should have a very, very good reason before using a black or dark green/blue/brown background on a website. (or so most UI designers will tell you, though of course you're free to ignore their advice.)
I've written in both paradigms and I mostly agree with the Go team. That it blows your mind blows mine, and I suppose it's good that we have these choices so we don't have to agree.

Could you show me a code snippet of maps and filters used that you believe is more readable than for loops? Maybe I'll get a laugh out of that. :)
It's hard to know for sure, of course, but according to the data we look at, some of these comments appear promotional rather than organic discussion.

That's not to say this isn't a great database, and we admire anyone who's undertaking a hard project. But there are proper and improper ways to get attention on HN. This one appeared to cross a line, hence my comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep
Wish Apple sees this.
Couldn't a similar technology be developed for any bluetooth speaker paired to a phone? Most bluetooth speakers also have a microphone, so software running on the phone could listen for a wakeup word (a la "Ok Google"). Then just tie into siri or Google search?
O3B uses Astrium's KA-SAT platform these are 6000+ KG with enough power to power up a whole block birds this isn't what gets you affordable internet to the 3rd world no matter how much PR they trying to spit out. Also their network so far cost over 1bln $ and it's not even nearly complete.

I'm not saying that there are no viable applications for data over SATCOM, I'm saying it's not a viable solution for providing internet to emerging markets on more than just the financial aspect.

I think i misread your post as a statement rather than a question sorry about that.

To answer your question, O3B's pricing is meant to be competitive in TOC in cases when it's not a question of which high speed fiber optic provider i choose from, but when it's a question of which of these huge contractor firms do i need to hire to lay my own fiber across half of Africa.

As far as i know their only major costumers currently(out side of governments) are the big shipping companies and maybe a couple of telecoms.
Not to sound offensive but if you are asking a question about O3B or any similar network on H/N you probably can't afford it. Also since we are talking about multi-million dollars per year contracts asking for pricing is not really possible it's not like they have data plans :)
The final price will depend on who you are, where you need to send it too, and where are you sending it.
Also networks like O3B don't really work with off-the-shelf CPE, so you also have a huge buy in cost in as you will pretty much operate a base station that probably costs mid six figures alone even if it's a small one like they put on container ships..

Just a comparison Irridum (a satcom network a consumer can actually contract from) charges over 1$ per KB for data, and they can only provide data transmission in short-data-bursts with very very limited bandwidth mostly used for SMS and maybe maybe WAP.

So yeah at current prices watching the latest Miley Cyrus music video from YouTube in HD will cost you about 300,000(tho most likely their entire network combined doesn't have enough bandwidth to stream it)
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Groovy's being heavily promoted behind the scenes by its handlers at VMWare, everything short of paid adverts. It's been sitting in the 40's on TIOBE constantly since 2007, sometimes higher, sometimes out of the top 50, but hasn't had any consistent uptake since then. It's main use case was with Grails, but like its "inspiration" Rails, Grails is on the decline. Groovy's original use was as a dynamic language with closures for scripting Java classes, but there's now many other options like Clojure where you can define a 3-line macro to eliminate some repeating code that can't be done with a function. Its backers have tried to use their Groovy distribution channel to ship other addons such as DSL syntax (2009), a parallel processing library (2011), static typing and compilation (2012), and (soon) an Android version, but like when this trick is pulled with other software from elsewhere developers aren't biting. Gradle 1.x used Groovy for its DSL syntax, but Gradle 2.0 removed virtually all Groovy code from its internal codebase, probably an indicator of their future plans regarding Groovy.

Overall, use Groovy

* if you're still using Grails

* for quick scripts that your certain won't need to scale

* in Gradle but stick to the DSL syntax
Wow that sounds like heaven. Glad the French really figured this one out.