skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two words: "Python Koans".

Basically, these are coding exercises (floating about in various forked versions) that do a pretty good job at testing your working knowledge of core syntax (much better than staring at online tutorials, anyway). Including, importantly, a lot of the fussy stuff you don't think you need to be familiar with, but actually, you do (and would probably neglect entirely if you tried to sharpen your skills just by working on personal projects, thinking in terms of the idioms of whatever language you were most recently working with).

Just find a good weekend, roll up your sleeves, and push yourself through them. No one will be able to kick sand in your face in an interview or a phone screen ("What? You don't know about named tuples?") ever again.
Grandtheft Auto V Goes First Person
Yes, he makes that point in "Debt" - but most free-market people would consider volunteerism, as a 'free-market' activity, because internally an individual makes a choice (based on personal utility) to do activity X versus 'something else' which is a micro-market.

I thought it was a stretch for Graeber to basically call everything socialism in the (roughly speaking) second section of Debt - especially since there is a categorical distinction between Marx's tagline ("to each... from each...") to what actually happens (in families etc), which is, "to you according to what I perceive to be your need, from me, according to what I can afford to give".
Gates was unequivocal: Machine Learning is the technology to watch
Our team chose to use angular admittedly because of its popularity (it's also why we chose bootstrap over foundation, though that probably had smaller repercussions). Most of the rest of the team then ran off to work on other stuff, so I ended up with most of the angular work. It's been at least 8 months now, and I've gotta say the article is pretty spot on.

But I don't really mind anymore for two reasons: I know most of the gotchas now (probably after some loss/whitening of hair), and I haven't used any of the other major frameworks (like ember) to really be able to make an informed comparison.

I don't know if there's a real takeaway here. Maybe "evaluate major contenders even if one is super popular" or "be more vocal when someone tries to blindly railroad in a candidate"?
Everybody plays the 'racism' card when talking culture, for some reason. Clearly there is a norm when talking about large populations; behaviors are not the same everywhere in the world. So its appropriate in a discussion to bring that up when talking practices across the globe.
So, this is going to sound like I'm determined to find a reason to hate the NSA, but.. this doesn't make them look good either. It's the most accessible and widely-deployed memory disclosure bug of recent years, if not ever. Surely there are at least 1000 vulnerable (at the time) servers they'd specifically love to have this window into, for intelligence on the "bad guys." Surely they know the "bad guys" would love to look into and attack American servers the same way. Exploiting and defending this kind of thing is exactly what the NSA is supposedly for, but they're telling us they didn't know about it.

I guess all their good talent and money was tied up in domestic call metadata social graph analysis. But at least they had someone smart enough to do the trivial patch once the vulnerability was known![0]

P.S. I also notice they didn't mention "Shellshock". Why not?

[0] https://twitter.com/agl__/status/530004568784916480
https://github.com/azac/sublime-howdoi-direct-paste
This is one of those moments where I'm utterly distressed by the lack of a solution to curb all the frivolous consumerism of the world.

It's scary to consider how many others are just like Xu and how many more, us included, are only slightly better off.
Get Kate Moss' Signature Beauty Look
You might enjoy http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/urscheme/ -- it's by someone who'd just written his first compiler, with links to other sources he found inspiring (one of them mine).

C89 I think has too much complexity for the amount of power it offers. lcc is a nice example: Norman Ramsey said he asked one of the authors what he learned in writing it, and got an answer like "Not to write a compiler in C." But anyway the book about it https://sites.google.com/site/lccretargetablecompiler/ is very good. http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/ is my favorite general text.
Astonishingly, they cater to the needs of their customers and fully support linux.
I think it really depends on what kind of data is stored. For something like a chat it is a really nice solution in my opionion. If you have to apply complex queries and need full control over your data I would recommend a "real" backend.

For instance, we use Firebase for our community feed on http://spotpot.co but I would not use it to store user accounts there. In the end it is always a trade off but consider that for heavy real time applications a service like firebase can not only be convenient but also save you load on your infrastructure.
I did, and it's really cool, but I felt the same way. So I wanted to bridge the gap.
And to make up for it, they threw in some even worse parts. Like breaking the syntax of HTML with their templates, making it impossible to edit, validate, transform, generate or consume templates with any of the thousands of existing HTML and XML processing tools.

That, in my opinion, was one of the most terrible ideas I've ever heard come out of the Angular community. And even worse, they refuse to acknowledge that it's a bad idea. That's a very bad sign indeed.
Yes, it's a practiced habit.

I found that when I first started writing regularly I would spend a lot of time doing constant editing similar to the example shown in the linked article. This would become distracting and time consuming, then I'd forget other things I had wanted to say. So I found it better, for me, to just kind of write things in my head first and then sit down and write -almost more transcribing vs. "writing".
The most interesting notion is that of using complexity, a dimensionless metric that can be measured from within, instead of entropy, which can only be estimated from within, can only be measured from without.

Since our universe doesn't have a "without", we can estimate entropy. But we can measure complexity, as it used in this article.

Intriguing. Reformulating the Laws of Thermodynamics could make for a promising avenue of research.
And what are the alternatives? I've always wanted a parser object (in C++ anyway) that I can add constructions to, feed it scanner output and have it build a symbol table and semantic tree. Does such a thing exist?
Websockets were mentioned in the blog post. Has proxygen been deployed with websockets at facebook scale? How much support for websockets is there in the opensourced proxygen?
I got a lot of flak when pig SARS came around.

A few weeks after the news of an outbreak came around, a vaccine was available in Finland.

I refused the vaccine under the premise that I didn't believe it had been properly tested. People called me a nut, claiming I was "anti-vaccine" and some kind of right wing wacko and that Bush was the devil, etc.

A couple years later, it turned out the vaccine gave a bunch of Finnish kids narcolepsy, but by this point nobody was focused on pig SARS and my "See? I told you so!" fell on deaf ears.

I think vaccine-hesitance is too readily labeled as anti-vaccine, and there is a confirmation bias where it is easy to point out that someone is sick with an XYZ infection but it is difficult to show correlation between a vaccination that occurred 5 years ago and some symptoms that end up appearing as a result of that vaccination.
Facebook/proxygen
Hear everyone, listen to few, follow no one [On startups and feedback]
That's a pretty interesting way of looking at it, machine pareidolia.
Suicide is a tragedy and people should always do what they can to prevent it. However, it is also something that will always occur in some portion of the population, typically as the result of depression. We should not ignore the fact that the suicide rate in, for example, the United States is an order of magnitude higher than it is at Foxconn. Foxconn employs over 1.2 million people, so the number of suicides will appear high compared with other, smaller companies. Working conditions are tough, the cultural environment is difficult for people with depression (which can be said for almost every culture), and the company could invest more resources to provide help to those in need. But we cannot 'fix' depression, and it's irresponsible to divert attention from the underlying mental health issue to blame the employer for all the employees who have committed suicide.
Well you can get a general copy paste detector on a code base. CPD from PMP is one package. Language support isn't that great although, you mostly only get C/C++ & Java.
Managing the Prophets of Rage
Previously on HN, when this article was originally published:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs (http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)
528 points by gu
351 comments
Well now I just feel stupid for not being able to figure that out.
Something like 8% of prisoners in the US are in privately run prisons, which could be a problem, but it's not the massive number that is often implied.

Quick, off the top of your head: do you have any idea just how many people are incarcerated in this country, in both absolute and per-capita terms, and how those figures compare to, say, every other country on Earth?

8% of the US prison population is a HELL of a lot of people.
>There have been fairly long-term experiments on BI, and people who choose not to work do things they enjoy - learning to paint, going to school, etc.

How are those things not work? They require focused effort, just the same as any job does.

Does something not qualify as "work" just because it is enjoyable?
Language is an extension of war without violence
Maybe. What you're saying is a tautological conclusion of the fact that large companies tend to have a lot of employees. None of your employees cost much individually, but if you don't fire anyone, the aggregate cost is a lot.

Besides, if you thought that the point of a company was to provide you with a job and sustenance, you were delusional to begin with. The fact that they're paying you is a side effect of the fact that you're doing things for them that they need. I'm not saying it should be that way, I'm just saying that no one's really hiding that fact.

How this ties in to what the parent is saying: not everyone is fired because they inherently suck. It's possible to not suck and still not be useful to the company. So the stigma here is a bit irrational. I know a company who hired a C-level executive and then very soon realized that they didn't need that person yet, and went through many pains to keep that person onboard on the paperwork. They made it look like they left after a year on their own accord, all in order to not ruin the person's career.
This isn't an Apple thing, it is an Industry thing.

> Major customers of Foxconn include or have included:

Acer Inc. (Taiwan)[49]
Amazon.com (United States)[12]
Apple Inc. (United States)[50]
BlackBerry Ltd. (Canada)[51]
Cisco (United States)[52]
Dell (United States)[53]
Google (United States)[54]
Hewlett-Packard (United States)[55]
Microsoft (United States)[56]
Motorola Mobility (United States)[53]
Nintendo (Japan)[57]
Nokia (Finland)[50][58]
Sony (Japan)[59]
Toshiba (Japan)[60]
Vizio (United States)[61]

Everyone and their mum. I would expect companies missing from this list to still be using another `instanceof Foxconn`.

<sarcasm>But worry not, they're right on top of this problem</sarcasm>

> Insiders report that thereafter, although the frequency of suicides decreased (_mainly due to Foxconn's installation of nets making it more difficult for workers to jump from their dormitories_, along with the development of workers' collective resistance), such suicides have continued to the present.
(from article)

Wow. How's that for a "FTFY"?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn#Major_customers
There's probably some stickiness and deception in exploitative workplaces. From the outside they may seem better ("Make $X per hour! Guaranteed hours!"), but once you quit your existing job, move away from home, and work at the factory long enough to realize you were happier before, you may have lost the opportunity to go back to your old life -- your job may be gone, the cost of moving may be too high, you may not be able to take the reputation hit for returning home a failure.

But yeah, you are correct. There are many shitty, hazardous, dangerous, health-destroying, depressing jobs paying next to nothing out there, where it is a rational decision for many people to work there, their best option. And if the companies involved had to make the jobs not suck, they'd probably be better off automating away most of the jobs. Or more realistically, moving to a country which was willing to let the shitty jobs persist, because hey, jobs.

But "better than subsistence farming" shouldn't be the bar we're trying to clear in the 21st century.
No need to go overboard there Don. In fact, my statement was really intended to mean "minifiable" in the sense of an angular application. That is, following documented best practices for writing a minifiable application in angular as described here: https://docs.angularjs.org/tutorial/step_05
E.T., Atari games found in Alamogordo up for sale
I view it as an icky hack. I much prefer the `model.on(...)` explicit wrapping of model data/eventing in an object. It's a lot more performant and easier to look at and say "that is a model" vs "this is a javascript object, but I don't know if it's being listened to or not."

Forgetting to set up your eventing fabric is not a great reason to choose a framework. If you forget to hook up the wires, the view doesn't render properly. This is easily debuggable.
Except I am married with three kids (all under 5) and a mortgage, so it can be done. I think it's an easy cop-out to say you can't do things because of your family. Yes it's hard, and there is a lot of pressure, but if you are worth something you will make it work.
Please give us links to all the articles criticizing Angular that you think make this article redundant?
Sadly, it doesn't look like it's capable of working with masks and layers.
Congress makes the laws, the Executive enforces them, SCOTUS determines their Constitutionality. So in fact, one check that the Executive can have on the Legislative is in not enforcing laws.
Sixth time's the charm!
Launch Desktop Applications from Google Drive in Chrome
The point was indeed tainted by attitude, but a solid discussion point none the less.
Self-hosing, haha. Not that I can think of. My https://github.com/darius/ichbins is shorter but it's a self-hosting Lisp compiling to C.
> Any such make-work jobs proposal is obviously paying a premium over the actual value of the work (which is why the same job isn't available in the market already)

Wouldn't the government be providing these "make-work" jobs? The government regularly creates jobs, like research and infrastructure development, that would not be profitable for any private entity. Value can be calculated either from the perspective of the employer, or from the perspective of society at large, but the market only creates jobs which are valuable according to criterion #1.

In my view, this is the essential function of government. It is fascinating that, if you look back 2-3 years, when unemployment was still quite high, the private sector had recovered completely in terms of employment -- all the unemployment was actually being caused by reduced government spending (mostly on the state or local level).
> My emotional opinion is that Docker trades on trends in startup-world, systems engineering and the open source movement for the sole purpose of eventually generating revenue. This capitalistic perversion of what were before two idealistic and noble things (open source, engineering) is, quite honestly, abhorrent to me.

Except that the last thing anyone with a monetary stake in your business will do is tell you to open source your main product. The Docker project has fought damn hard, and continues to, to make sure that a carefully curated line between business and the open source project exists (see for instance the creation of the Docker Governance Advisory Board).
It's true. It's been my experience that Indians, the few hundred I've worked with, are willing to put in long hours. Many of which were spent playing ping pong, talking, getting coffees. They also were working, but, the long hours in the office weren't all work.

They also held the belief that they were harder workers than non-Indians, and preferred greatly to talk in native languages, likely unintentionally excluding non-Indians.

At some level, race is a factor.
The Phases of Titan
That would be harsh. Who's doing that?
11 takeaways for tech from last night’s election results
We love what Segment is working on. It's a big step towards different companies sharing a common schema, which means that analysis built on that schema can be portable across companies, and doesn't have to be redone by everyone. To that end, we partnered with Segment by released a series of open-source queries and visualizations that work for any Segment customer (or anyone with a similar schema): http://about.modeanalytics.com/playbook/
Xamarin is now free for students
Agreed.

I've used Firebase for a couple internal company projects (right after they left beta) and I was able to quell any misgivings our AMs and PMs had about relying on 3rd party startup services by explaining the sheer amount of time saved by not building their functionality ourselves.

I've been holding back on using it for client work as the same people can't get past "only a year old service so not ready for production", but now with Google's backing and them making it clear it's not just an acquire-then-abandon startup I have more ammunition to sway pessimistic minds when a Firebase backend is warranted.
There were extremely few instances where Microsoft was affected by Heartbleed and was running very few Linux servers (in noncritical functions). These very few instances were enumerated and closed almost immediately. There is only one team I know of that was affected - however a scan was done to confirm this.

Patching for customers in Azure can be done through normal OS channels, though patches can be forced and base images an be modified to close holes (this was done).
A plugin like eclim would benefit greatly from the new multi-process model.
No. The thing is that gravity is a conservative force; that is, energy is conserved in a gravitational interaction (ignoring radiation of gravitational waves). Because of that, if I reverse the direction of time, gravity stays attractive, and the objects trace the exact same motion in reverse.
Can someone recommend a good web hosting site
SO my friend got asked to find a good free web hosting site, he normally find good hoster, he found a good one for www.iigers.com, but the owners of this new site he got dont like anything he showed them so any recomendations ?
If we take it back to the original point - it was that the true innovators were the engineers hidden away at Apple; Woz was/is one of them. Before Job's passing, he made some very famous exclamations of things Apple would never do.

1) Never will have a small form factor tablet

2) Never will have a large form factor phone

3) Never will produce "cheap" plastic-component phones

4) Never will embrace NFC

Towards the end, as we can very clearly now see, Jobs stood in the way of his team and innovation. Every single one of the things he said Apple will never do, they have done. And as we can see, they have been very successful with each line item. In fact, they've sold more iPhones now than ever during his tenure.

Jobs could put together a management team -- but he couldn't produce a product. During his first tenure at Apple, the company produced some of the worst garbage the world has ever seen from a modern company. It wasn't until his second chance that his management team finally got the right engineers hired. Like I said earlier, Jony Ive wasn't even a Jobs hire - Ive almost left apple when Jobs returned!

His management team were the ones that put together the engineering team and production teams -- and ultimately turned Apple into what they are today. People like Woz deserve the credit Jobs takes and gets.

~

regarding your question about pixar, the information is readily available on their wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar
I've talked to some employees of TrueSec (the firm that just discovered the Yosemite "rootpipe" exploit) and they told me that many security research firms are "on retainer" with intelligence agencies. They didn't share specifics but they said that they have friends who are paid to share exploits with, say, British Intelligence and to not report it to the vendor with the exploit in it.

I assume this is why Stuxnet had so many zero-day exploits in it. The agencies behind it had security firms feeding them.

http://www.wired.com/2014/11/countdown-to-zero-day-stuxnet/
Batteries last 5 years in very dry packages under 90 degrees Fahrenheit, but this might be a nice place to mention new coats for batteries; PD&D Magazine mentions them as cutting the electrical damage bit out of the swallowed batteries risk. Then I would ask about the naivety of supercaps, now with catastrophic conversion -over- 110 degrees Celsius (or when ingested, I suppose.)
One of the PIs is a Goedel award winner (M. Vardi). Track record matters in getting funding.