skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In most jobs the tenants of what made WoW so addicting and powerful in its hayday are inapplicable - in WoW, a lot of the game is a skinner box, designed around positive reinforcement of desired collaberative behavior. Especially in the vanilla incarnation. To have that same effect in a workplace, you need tangible and discrete goals, with real rewards for accomplishment.

It actually really translates well into software, and most engineering disciplines, but not well in less productive professions like law or business. Your quest tracker is the issue tracker, your gold reward could be a bug bounty or bonus or team praise. Your sense of accomplishment is in shipping products, the way a guild has a sense of accomplishment for slaying a boss for the first time or clearing a raid.

I think the greatest barriers to this kind of thinking, at least in the domain HN is concerned, is that your goals and objectives are not always discrete and manageable (ie, your quest log has an unknown mob kill requirement) and figuring out the next boss to kill can be difficult.

If you had that information, I think software can really play out like a video game. When I bug fix in the KDE projects it really is a quest, the goals are discrete and the payoff is seeing my changes in the software I use every day. And I have the same feedback loop I had playing WoW from 2005-2009.
If this is not a joke then it's a massive failure of morals. How will they feel when the thief steals a bike for their 5 year old daughter?

“And (as for) the male thief and the female thief, cut off (from the wrist joint) their (right) hands as a recompense for that which they committed, a punishment by way of example from Allaah. And Allaah is All Powerful, All Wise” [al-Maa’idah 5:38]

Enough said.
Awesome. Great to see more good work out of Michigan!

Great idea as well
His point is that while the pilots failed, they were only called upon because the autopilot had already failed. In other words, Air France 447 is not evidence that autopilot is the superior choice.
I don't know that violent crime per se is a symptom of mental illness. But if a young man walks into a school cafeteria and shoots five people and then himself for no discernible reason, I think that qualifies as a symptom of mental illness. I think the author of this study relies too much on a clinical diagnosis or some prior evidence of serious mental illness. Imagine if a similar study explored the link between hearing voices and mental illness, and concluded that there must be no link because most of the people hearing voices for the first time had no previous clinical diagnoses or any other previous symptoms. The difference is that someone hearing voices for the first time can then go on hearing them for years, while someone who commits gun violence is generally not free to continue committing more. I am also curious why drug and alcohol abuse is not regarded by the author as a form of mental illness.
Batteries are currently at $250, best case. Up to $500, depending on who you talk to.
Mozilla just formed a partnership with Yahoo, but I don't know if that says anything about the life of Coolpreviews

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice-an...
Sounds like the molton salt systems that are already deployed. I assume this is better?
Spollow was one of the ideas we incubated. Our other project has gained significant traction with over 5m pageviews and 1,000 registered users in about a week. So we want to focus on this only going forward due to resource constraints. And selling Spollow will create more runway for us...

BTW, we did not spend $50k :) By expenses I meant actual time spent on building the software.
I suspect that the reason for the perpetuation of this myth is that, if a manager is doing their job really really well then all of that stress and BS is hidden from their directs.
That'd be really fun actually. But I'm still having mixed feelings about how dumbed down the game got over the years. The complexity of it during vanilla + the first two expansions really made the game fun for me. But with the homogenization of stats, and removal of lots of skills, the game just isn't fun for me anymore. Then again, I haven't played Warlords. I stopped playing when patch 6.0.2 came out.
Crazy Celebrity? LOL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJzg6W2f7Ng#t=1975

The sad thing is you can hear the cockpit alarm say STALL STALL STALL and the pilots never even acknowledge it.
WoW flattened MMORPG gameplay into a linear experience that bored me right out of the genre.

Ultima Online, on the other hand, was such an expansive and interactive world. You didn't choose your interactions based on personal preference. There was always the threat of another real life player coming to kill you, which created a sort of camaraderie in hunting grounds. You may not know someone, but suddenly he'd come to your rush if a murderer approached, and if you were lucky you both ended up outnumbering the murderer and you'd walk away with his loot. You wouldn't even know the person but you'd end up sharing an intense experience together where the stakes were high (if you died, you lost EVERYTHING). So many friendships were made that way.

It was a different experience that was about more than levels and raiding groups and elite loot. It was a true social space where your actions affected other players experiences, for better or worse. To me, this is the soul of the MMO, and exactly what WoW lacks.
Anyone know what they used for the map visualizations? They're beautiful...
I think our friends in Nevada should consider taking one for
the team on Yucca Mountain. Waiting around for a disaster
is gonna cost a hell of a lot more than just hoping the
problem's gonna fix itself.
> So if you have a 100kWh system with ~60% throughput efficiency, you'd need 160kWh of input at your standard energy rates and then the energy coming out would be 'free'

I think the idea is that this is storage for renewables. As such, you wouldn't need more "input at your standard energy rates" than what it might take to charge the system for overnight use.
The difference here is that Rich Hickey is explaining a fundamental computing mechanism that many programmers have come in with but few think about enough to give a name: the finite state transducer [see Wikipedia].

The name "transducers" is not an invention, it's basic computer science. The idea of using transducers to abstract over an input is not really controversial in the sense that it's the essence of what turns source into executable code on digital computers. Sure, Ther are tradeoffs relative to which flavor of Turing machine underpins any abstraction, but at least this is an area where we can achieve clarity.

This is something Hickey implemented, not invented. Like all of automata, understanding the concept is likely non-trivial for some pretty smart people since it requires thinking about first principles of computing.
A lot of software development and engineering is designing and figuring out what to do next; even bug fixing is often more about how to fix the bug than actually just fixing it. In that case, it is just as unproductive as law or business. This becomes more so as you advance to the senior technical ranks (though I never found any work I did to be so straightforward).
Not necessarily git - see IPFS http://ipfs.io/
The author is simply ignorant. This kind of evolution of simulated amoeba-like organisms was done over 20 years ago with Tierra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation)
Hardly. Google could simply ask the children to fax in signed permission statements from their parents, as websites that actually make an effort to support child users do. Neopets had this figured out 15 years ago. Google chooses not to do that despite having the resources, and they are responsible for the consequences of that decision.
Why would I be reading the compiled code?
But what if you are worth more, managing a group of engineers?

Sure, it is a bit of a new skill, but the ace engineer who can guide a team with his engineering wisdom is way more valuable than the engineer who just works by himself.
>Types are optional

For me, this is show stopper which negates all other stuff. After types are optional, then type errors turn into warnings, and you get the same mess you have in JS. Another annoyance is lack of real generics.
Well, that's more or less how it works today. Airline pilot's job is basically hours of boredom punctuated by minutes of terror. Computers do most of the work, pilots are there for takeoffs and landings (which could be automated) but more importantly for when things really go wrong. Airline pilots flying scheduled flights (Part 121) are in constant communication with the dispatcher on the ground. Dispatcher is trained to pretty much the same standard as pilots and helps with the planning, safety and can help with workload during flight. Having all three in place is probably why airline flying is so safe these days.

On the other hand, I could see freighters (e.g. likes of FedEx fleet) fully automated in the near future (5 years? less?)
Everything's trending to Node.js (unfortunately). Ruby has been steadily declining over the years. The web development industry seems to shift really fast.

Server side web technologies/languages change/shift in popularity really fast. As a freelancer, the best thing you can do is learn how to learn things fast. Most of the patterns translate over between languages and technologies though.

Client side work is even more wild. I remember when everything was just jQuery spaghetti. Then things moved to KO/Ember, then to Angular in around 2012, and now everyone I know seems to be moving towards React. A lot people were disenfranchised by the Angular 2.0 announcements over the past month.
Here is a less radical question: if the plane was capable of flying itself, do two pilots have to be in the plane? Could we get away with just one pilot and still be at sufficient redundancy?

And if the pilot had nothing to do, how the heck would they not go mad from boredom?
arc4random has a larger range as well up to 0x100000000, whereas rand/random top out at RAND_MAX of 0x7fffffff?
He doesn't have a strong argument. Perhaps he knows more than he's saying but most of those tasks could be done in advance or by remote (not time critical, like navigating around storms), or by suitably trained flight attendants (medical emergencies and miscellaneous busy work he alludes to).

If 1% of landings are on autopilot, why not all of them? He doesn't answer this except "setting it up is hard". But setup can be done remotely, if not in advance, by someone who's also controlling several other aircraft, so there are efficiency gains.

We have had driverless trains for decades - see London's DLR. The ticket inspectors can ask the passenger sitting at the front to please change seats so they can unlock the control panel and handle abnormal situations.
I don't disagree there was a pilot error. However, this error came after automation failed.

And I wouldn't call pilots incompetent. I am an instrument rated pilot myself and flying on instruments in a lousy weather at night is hard by itself. Add an unexpected and unexplained failure on top of it and you have a situation that can simply "overload" your brain. There are good lessons from this tragedy and Air France adjusted its training program almost immediately after the crash details have been uncovered.
I think its probably a combination of companies moving away from rails and a huge flood of newer developers into the market who have picked up RoR.

Here are some stats on the demand trends: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=rails%2C+django%2C+node%2C...
I saw Brian's presentation at SEAGL[1] this year, it was excellent! He's a very dynamic and expressive speaker and takes something that could be dry and boring and makes it interesting for all experience levels.

[1] http://lanyrd.com/2014/seagl/sdfgdw/
>Edit: Feel free to disagree with me, but personally I wouldn't see WoW on a resume and think, "This person has experience doing hard work in the face of adversity".

I played on a PVP server, and the spontaneous PVP that occurred was almost never fair. I'd often explore the world alone, and get attacked by groups of enemy players. I fought back despite near-impossible odds; not giving up allowed me to improve. So when the game's arena system came out, and the playing field in PVP became more fair, my team attained the top rank (gladiator) in the most competitive battlegroup (bg9). Only the top 0.5% of teams earned that rank. I was one of only a few (less than 10 IIRC) hunters on US realms to get the gladiator rank for the first 2 seasons when they were underpowered and still had a dead zone. Most of the matches I played were against pros who also played WoW in e-sports tournaments.

I was a long-time member of a great guild, and although I wasn't the leader, I was chosen to be the player pursuing the Scarab Lord quest line for the guild. The quest took weeks to complete, and many parts required the help of my entire guild. I was one of two players out of 10,000+ to complete the quest on my server and open the AQ gates.

Initially at least, there were some parts of the game that took hard work and collaboration of an entire team in the face of adversity to reach some elite achievements. I don't disagree with you about the resume part though. Most wouldn't view WoW accomplishments on a resume as positive, and that's why I've never included them on mine.
What is the second worst?
How website localization methods impact SEO
Thanks for the longer explanation of my point :)
Not yet, but a decade or two out, maybe. It requires much better sensors. For one thing, you need all the gear for automatic driving to get from the runway to the gate. Landing on an airport without ground aids may be necessary in an emergency.

What we'll probably see first is larger one-pilot aircraft, able to land themselves in case of pilot failure. Also, unpiloted fighter jets are almost inevitable, simply because modern airframes can pull more Gs than pilots can stand. Boeing is modifying old F-16 aircraft into the QF-16, which is unmanned. These were originally intended for target practice, but DARPA is interested in using them
for other purposes.
I suspect that Nodejs is taking market share away from Rails and Django. It makes sense though. You can do your entire stack in a single language and the event loop in Nodejs scales better, than a Django WSGI deployment. I'm not sure how you can deploy a Rails application, but I suspect that it scales similar to a Django WSGI deployment.
To say something is pseudo-intelligence or true intelligence, one has to define intelligence rigorously. That is more philosophical than people think, because how little we scientifically understand about intelligence, or consciousness, or even life.

For most of people, the intuition of intelligence is a bit naive, and nowadays intuition is often at the opposite of the truth. It often is along the line of "looking intelligent and knowing what it is doing”. Something like turing test describes the first part intuitively. But we soon found out that we wouldn’t call something “intelligent” even it passes turing test since the machine is unlikely to know why it is saying something, hence the latter part. But again, this is about consciousness or “strong AI”, which is even further away from our understanding than “intelligence”. How do we know that the machines that “look intelligent” don’t “know what they are doing”? Consciousness is very hard to define and even harder to inspect, and maybe someday machines begin to have consciousness even before we realize it? In fact, we already did this to most animals, thinking they are not intelligent or self-conscious while they are.

But to me, the psychology behind these definitions is very interesting and maybe quite important. No matter how we try to define intelligence, we wouldn’t call machines intelligent until they very much behave like us. Because to most people, intelligence is what defines humans, so they intuitively use their feelings of “does that feel human” to benchmark intelligence. And psychologically, we are exceptionally good at telling something “not human” from “feeling/looking/speaking like human”. But this is a very narrow and, if I dare to say, ignorant and self-centric view, because it implicitly relies on the thinking of “we are far more intelligent than any other life form, and human's intelligence is the only way intelligence can be work”.

Think about it, if there’s a super-intelligent being that observes our world, maybe to it, human’s intelligence is as primitive as fish, and trees aren’t far behind; and maybe, entities such like countries or the internet are actually of more intelligent “life” forms, just we haven’t realized that yet because they don’t look like us at all; and maybe, on the scale of intelligence from 0 to that super-intelligent, humans, birds and machines are clustered in a small range, though significantly larger than zero, still not far from it.

Although the research on human brains and a lot of our own stuff inspired the research of AI quite a lot, it is perfectly possible that we create something truly intelligent or conscious without us understanding human intelligence or consciousness fully. We can have a different kind of “intelligence”, and our researches are well on their way toward that. It’s very hard to see because we don’t understand intelligence, and maybe our hardware isn’t powerful enough to fully utilize our theories.
I can understand your complaint here, and I agree with you that people can easily go too far in the direction of 'when to implement' versus 'how to implement'—but I'm pretty sure the key is (1) Both are required, (2) it makes more sense for one of these things to precede the other.

However, I think that you’re also conflating two approaches to learning ‘context.’ One gives people an elaborate index for finding implementations when required, so that they become capable ‘solution googlers.’ This is unquestionably an inadequate approach to education. However, there is another approach to context which emphasizes principles. ‘Principles’ can be a vague word itself, but I’ll try to be more precise about it: you have understood something ‘by principles’ when you first understood a more general structure, then, in order to learn the more particular thing, you understood which parameters must be supplied to the more general structure in order to get the more particular one. E.g., you learn principles of programming languages first, then can understand new languages as parameterizations of your prior, more general knowledge. I think the context material in ADM serves as a nice guide for acquiring principles in this sense. The bit I quoted is largely significant because of their emphasis on principles.

It’s interesting that you think ADM would be the book for faking an interview. I have the exact opposite stance. If I wanted to impress a typical software person (e.g. a yet to be determined interviewer), I’d learn a lot of the details from CLRS, rather than going for ADM.
Given Node.js was released in 2009, I don't think those stats are very accurate.
I don't want to disparage the whole management class but I think part of it is that manager types don't really get the motivation to solve problems. They think that if someone doesn't have a manager telling them what to do then they won't do anything, but that is just psychological projection. Fred was one of the happiest (and busiest) guys at this company and many strived to achieve his status.

Regarding respect; After this meeting technical colleagues praised me for bringing Fred in to get the problem resolved. Manager types praised ME for resolving the conflict. It was really a big deal and really advanced my career and Fred was happy to let me get the credit which is why he made me do the presentation but he got respect from the people "in the know" and that is all he really cared about.
I don't think it is that the pilots did or did not realize the stall. The stall alarm went off 75 times. The problem was they were not aware of their pitch for some reason. They must have thought they were heading towards the ocean due to the stall alarm combined with seeing very low air speed reports from the sensors when in fact it was the opposite as the airspeed was fine but the junior pilot kept pulling back on the stick which induced and worsened the ascending stall.

This is why I was asking about gyroscopes in the planes in enough locations to accurately tell a pilot "hey, I know your airspeed reads very low and the stall alarm is going off but you're not stalling. Lock the throttles and hold the plane level until the airspeed returns."
I'm technical and I'm not that naive. The good bosses pull way over their weight in gold in what they do. Its not for everyone though.
Oh, that surprises me. What are the figures on that?
> Flying is already so safe that there's no harm in doubling the fatality rate.

The marketing campaign writes itself!
This article makes a number of very bold claims about poorly defined concepts, and provides zero evidence to back anything it says up.
I am glad you liked it. I know HN doesn't like the supposedly contentless "thanks for sharing" type of comments but I appreciate it and think it is important to express such sentiments. In fact, about half way in to writing my comment I almost deleted it -- thinking no one would really care. I am glad I was wrong and that I completed it.
As a freelance developer, the big opportunities lies in sectors outside of internet startups. (manufacturing services, clothing, import/export, finance, construction, home services, agriculture). Those are the areas where a skilled programmer can provide the greatest needed value.

Most of the time, you pick your own programming languages and the clients trust your expertise. Plus, these jobs are often less demanding than working for startups.

Personally, I still find Rails as one of most efficient and fastest tools for developing web apps.
That's a false dichotomy.

You can guide a team while "just" being a member of the team. Leadership and management are not the same skill.

I guess what you are saying sort of makes sense in teams with a high ratio of junior:senior engineers. But I'd question whether that is a good way to structure a team if you are working on complex tasks.
True, it should probably be "node.js" and not "node" since that can have other meanings.

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=rails%2C+django%2C+node.js...
A lot of the most popular/profitable U.S. bootcamps have seemed to focus on Rails, so I imagine that might impact the number of available novice Rails devs. But I'd be surprised if the market has simply crashed...In the past two months I've gotten unsolicited recruitments from well-funded/known companies...and considering I'm not a particularly noted Rails dev (but happen to have a lot of Rails-related commits in my Github), I see it as anecdotal evidence that things aren't completely saturated (though maybe the impact is more on remote jobs?)
I think the latter point absolutely is unreasonable.

That marketing tagline you pulled could just as easily have come from Sling (i.e. "Put an antenna in your house and hook it up to a Slingbox"). But nobody seems to think that would be a public performance.

By your logic, Aereo should have been legal if the website said "User-controlled, individually assigned remote antennas and DVRs in the cloud".

The way you market yourself has nothing to do with copyright law. You need to look at what's actually happening under the hood – not just base your decision on whatever the "user perception" is of the service.