skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"their issue"

Agreed, and I extend your remarks with its a sign of pessimism and mistrust of government. Its well earned.

In an ideal world if our leaders were angelic statespeople, I might trust them not to screw things up even worse or as a smokescreen for political corruption. I don't live in a country like that and I can sympathize with OPs quotation. His description is, unfortunately, the most likely outcome.

In all honesty, if we can't fix it ourselves, we're doomed, because the government always causes more problems than it solves, makes things overall worse rather than better, for my entire life. And I'm no young kid and I can't stand the political party OP's quote likely comes from. I might hate what they stand for but I'm objective enough to see common ground when they are, in very small part, correct.
That is engineering, software projects with today's tools and techniques are not. This will happen some day in software. We are not there yet, by far.

Sure we are, at least pretty close.

Commercial avionics software developed to DO-178B standards calls for reams of requirements, verification tests, compliance to process, internal quality reviews, external audits, and sign-off by FAA representatives.

A one-line code change can take days to implement, and might not be released to "users" for months or years.

But the software is extremely robust.

If we wanted to engage in the same level of software engineering for all software, we could. But we don't want to. Developers don't want to, and users don't demand it. If an iPhone game crashes, who cares? If a productivity application crashes, you might have lost an hour's work, but it's probably not so annoying so as to warrant a couple orders of magnitude more cost associated with the software.

But if a software failure could kill people, well, that's different. It's worth spending a huge amount of time to make it perfect.

Avionics software can be so thoroughly tested because it is thoroughly designed up front. You know exactly what it's supposed to do. Much less-critical software is designed in a more ad hoc fashion; or there might not even be a design at all! How much software has been organically grown, starting with an idea and hacking on it until it seemed to work?

If you want to thoroughly test that, you have to go back and thoroughly state what it's supposed to do.

It's quite possible, but by and large it's not desired enough to make it worth actually doing. I'm not sure how this could change, or even if it should change. Instant bug fixes on web applications are cool, even though they come with the risk of having broken something else...
The concept of "growth vs fixed mindset" is great, and relates to the advantage of encouraging children with "good work" rather than "you're smart".

I read the Mindset book a couple years ago, or should I say, I read part of it. Halfway through and it was still repeating the same mantra "be a 'growth' mindset, not a 'fixed' mindset!" without much variation.

One problem with it is that it had the approach of you having a single mindset, which isn't my experience. In some fields, such as programming, I innately believe in learning and improving. In others, such as interpersonal behaviour, I apparently do not.

I get the "growth mindset" idea, but the book didn't seem to provide specific tools to help me address the fixed mindset I have in some fields, as I subconsciously conclude "I don't need this because I've got the right mindset in $other_ field".
Show HN: Criticize My Personal Resume Site [Front-end JavaScript UI/UX and Design Dev]
I'm transitioning to front-end UI/UX and visual design programming, so I put up this resume/consulting site in about a day and a half.

http://michael.chisari.us/

I'm still working on it, but I'm throwing it out there for criticism in the meantime. Design, functionality, context. Brutality appreciated.

Michael Chisari
michael@chisari.us
If they were loading duplicate routes, how was it they were "loading routes dynamically correctly"?
> There's a ton I haven't converted yet (Option types, lazy thunks that use LINQ, Parser monads, LINQ Trees, etc.),

ahem https://github.com/louthy/csharp-monad ;-)

> Here's a work-in-progress:

Cool, I'll take a look.
Here are some specific examples:

read comments #6 and #8 on this 5 year old unfixed bug and weep:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/447654

in comment #7 on this (unfixed) bug Scott says it could be solved by having upstart use cgroups instead of ptrace to track processes:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/406397
If it's anything like the squeeze LTS experiment it's not going to be suitable for a number of people. There are a number of things they've been forced to abandon for various reasons.

And per the above experiment, it's not something you can depend on, not something you can build your plans around.
Well, you force people exactly by the means you describe.

Then again I think that maybe it's a time for an "official climate" because it's the decentralized decision making that's screwing as over wrt/ anthropogenic climate change. Someone has to make those regulations and enforce them.
"Manual" implies stuffy reference material to be referred to only when there is a malfunction.

"Handbook" implies action, portability, and usefulness.
Show HN: A Social Causality Graph – Causemap.org
Thank you for the detailed answer. Handling copyrights and exclusiveness sounds bad to me... Did you try first to sell your videos independently?
This was a really good read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks!
> I think that the original poster (the one you responded to originally) was talking about errors in the first two senses; things that you should/want to handle yourself. I guess the last thing should be handled with a panic?

Right -- I'm only saying that I want to handle the first runtime errors explicitly at the call-site. This is where I explicitly like Go's error style. Other approaches to this problem (e.g., pattern matching) have been discussed elsewhere on this thread, and that's fine for languages that want to go down this route, but the extra language complexity is a tradeoff. I can see coming down on either side of said tradeoff, but it's not cut-and-dried.

> It doesn't that you understand idiomatic uses of option-type [...]

Sorry, that came out wrong. Where the option-type/elvis-operator approach comes up, it seems, is when you need to dig a few levels deep through possibly-nil references, as in cromwellian's .getOrElse(foo).getOrElse(bar) example. I certainly understand how that can be useful, but in my experience it seems to come up most often when dealing with unvalidated inputs (I'm sure there are other cases I'm not thinking of; this is just my personal experience). Whenever possible, I tend to prefer having the inputs parsed, validated, and either accepted or rejected, by a validating parser of some kind. Then I really can just assume it won't segfault as I read through these chained methods/fields.
Blend for Visual Studio 2015 Preview
>> Eventually he fucked up the licensing of cdrtools enough that distros couldn't legally distribute it

Except that most distros DID distributed it UNALTERED, like Slackware, Gentoo, OpenSuSE, Ark Linux.

> There was no debate; the developer of cdrtools was just an asshole [...]

Abusing anonymity to vilify an open source developer who works to give us the best software?

You're a liar and a coward, and you know it.
I recently saw a lovely email sent by Travis for an offsite reminding everyone that they were not allowed to fuck their subordinates and he, by extension, was not allowed to fuck anyone. That isn't just toxic to women. That is downright scumbaggery.

That sounds like a reasonable reminder of the rules and protocols. Unless you are suggesting that the power differential can be overcome and managers should have sex with their subordinates.
The photos (mockups?) look as if they've coated the circuit board with something to protect it, but still present it to the end user. What's this process called? Who does it? I'd be very interested, since making boxes is kind of a pain!
I've always found very unfortunate that memsql is not open source. It looks very interesting. VoltDB seems to fill a similar niche. Has anyone tried both?
Of course that's your take, definitely not mine. Not easy to discuss though: the obtuseness in today's software building won't be obvious until we discover the principles that turn it into engineering.

In ancient Egypt, pyramid-building must have seemed the unbelievable pinnacle of human achievement, only surpassable by ever higher and larger pyramids. Only now we see the primitiveness of those works (notwithstanding their merit and value).

It is my take that our current level of understanding of software building is similar to the that of architecture when pyramids were built.

Fortunately, advance is now much faster thanks to the many tools that help experimentation and communication, and we should be approaching somewhere reasonable in just a few decades.
So, go fails to work on IPv6 environments, but they've gone through the effort to actually implement http2? Looks like their priorities are all messed up. :-/
Is this for real?

"It’s a humiliating experience to witness that people have so much respect and admiration for an experienced male developer, but there’s no place for you because you’re female and a beginner."
What's worse is that there has already been at least one case of an ISP rewriting links to Amazon for all of their customers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6992897
Our own solar system is outside the central part of the galaxy and a bit off the ecliptic plane. There isn't that much around us. The central core of the Galaxy could be populated, wars raging around us, and we're the equivalent of a mountain village in Laos.

But could you imagine being one of these floater solar systems? We at least can reach some star systems in generation ships. They would would need much more.

If 1/2 of stars are outside of feasible colonization distances that changes the Fermi paradox formula quite a bit.
I realise my comment is probably a bit too negative- I really like your ideas (especially the Option type). Things like Tuple<T1,T2,T3> etc. make me wonder if we would not all be better off though if we just started using F#... although I still like C#.
That's a free market solution, and probably what will happen if we don't act to change things.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Hard_green

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeboat_ethics

They don't call themselves Malthusians as such, but their ethics can only be understood by assuming a Malthusian premise.

Some people actually are disheartened by the idea that humans might be able to find a sustainable way without a massive die-off:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pentti_Linkola
> For unexpected nils, I do like the option-type/monad approach, though in most cases (e.g., when writing Go, Java, C++, or Javascript) I just let them NPE/segfault.

.. segfault some unknown distance from the place they originated. I mostly do Java, with a substantial dash of JavaScript and Ruby, and in all of those languages, i waste time tracking nulls to their source. A language which blew up as soon as an unacceptable null arose would be huge win.

Actually, having moved from entirely Java to only mostly Java, one thing i've noticed is that in dynamic languages, wrongly-typed objects can propagate as freely as nulls. I spent an unforgivable fraction of today tracking down a bug in a JavaScript app where a framework was passing the wrong type of model to a view. In a strongly-typed language, that would have failed as soon as the framework did that (or perhaps even at compile time), but in JS, it failed in a cryptic way hundreds of statements later.

For extra comedy value, it turned out that the reason the framework was doing that was because i had passed a null into one of its configuration properties - because i'd innocently written something like:

Initech.Commerce.CartView = Backbone.Marionette.CompositeView.extend({
childView: Initech.Commerce.ItemView
});

And since the views are defined in files cartView.js and itemView.js, and since the files are loaded in alphabetical order (because we're just throwing them out of Rails and not using RequireJS or similar, i know, i know), at the point at which CartView is defined, Initech.Commerce.ItemView is null!

Basically, JavaScript is a language only a Dwarf Fortress fan could love. Whereas i see Go as more suitable for Minecraft fans.
That's an interesting point.

I think the fact that an eCommerce retailer is working on technical problems that may take 1-2 years to solve would surprise a lot of people. In eCommerce you're going to be fighting against the preconception that all a CTO would be doing is trying to up-the-conversion-rate and adding new products to the lineup (snooze-fest). The fact you're tackling academically rigorous problems is an asset, so anything you can share about it will help you recruit.

A lot of people have hot-buttons for the topics that interest them, so pushing them, even in a general way could catalyze interest. If, for example, you were working on a speed/latency/performance problem that might attract a certain kind of person, whereas a big-data or analytics problem might attract someone else.
Do software developers believe the Universe is friendly?
Yes, the company is now owned by Ticketmaster, but we still received some of our initial investment from YC.
If there are really "dozens of init systems" out there that "do much more, markedly better than systemd, and are modular" how come exactly zero of them have been adopted by any Linux distro of note?
Their union type syntax looks like Ceylon's. I rather like it.

Union types with pattern matching would be the logical step, would it not? I wish for something like:

match getResults() {
case e: Error: ...
case r: Results: ...
}
Air traffic controllers release timelapse tour of UK airspace
While I agree with an indexing approach and follow one myself, classifying this in the same vein as income is a bit misleading, as another reply pointed out.

While income from side jobs can be irregular, returns from investments mainly concentrated in equities can be more volatile.

Volatility in the S&P 500 (as measured by the VIX) has been relatively quite low for the past few years, other than a few marked events. (US debt ceiling crisis, etc.) A chart of the S&P 500 shows more-or-less an upward trend over the past five years; certainly since the beginning of 2013 there have hardly been any wild swings.

This can lull investors into a false sense of security about the distributions of returns; just because returns have been steady (i.e. low volatility) over the past few years does not mean things will remain this way.

I don't dispute the long-term average yearly return of ~8%. What I am saying is that, as with many other things, averages don't tell the true story. One year, you could be down 30-40% in equities and another you could be up 30%. Getting a constant 8% return every year is unlikely.

For some long-term investors, they aren't concerned about the volatility and this is a perfectly rational thing. However, there are some people who cannot bear the volatility of such investments and will be in constant worry. Such individuals would likely have to apportion a higher percentage of their to less risky assets and perhaps miss out on some overall return.

I heard of many people freaking out just because the mini-correction that happened in mid-October. These sorts of people aren't cut out to be investing like this as they will panic and sell during downswings.
Yes. Or as I've said: memory is the new disk. This is why PMCs (performance monitoring counters) are more important than ever, to provide observability for cache and memory analysis. (I'd like some PMCs made available in EC2. :)
Free Stock Image Point – Your photo source for commercial and personal use
Thanks for the link, that was very interesting to read! I didn't know Algol (I knew the name and how "historical" it is but not the details).
Computers, Cut-Ups, and Combinatory Volvelles
Author is unfortunately conflating gender bias with experience bias.

And for what it's worth, they don't actually have respect for the male developer--they just covet them more.
I'd spent months sitting alone in libraries and cafes, blindly installing tools from the command line, debugging Linux driver problems, and banging my head over things as trivial as missing parenthesis.

Yet this illustrates a very important thing that most proponents of "learning to code" neglect entirely.

Writing code isn't an isolated black box. To write code is to interact with the extremely entangled software environments that we have cumulatively been building up for over 60 years now.

Anything beyond Fibonacci sequences will require you to spill out into lots and lots of domain-specific areas and subdisciplines. A proficient programmer in general will also need at least basic skills in system administration.

To build a real useful application intersects with areas such as network protocols (which is immeasurably vast, depending on what layer you pick and how much you abstract), widget toolkits (and the wider quandaries of computer graphics, windowing, displays, etc.), cryptography (which pretty much intersects with most bodies of computer science), the workings of the kernel, dynamic linker (thus object files and libraries), the C library...

Profiling an application will likely require you to learn some complexity theory. I/O-bound applications will require you to learn how file systems, I/O schedulers and disks work. System programming is a rabbit hole of its own, with POSIX alone just about being an independent branch.

The bottom line is that programming can mean just about anything. And since programming itself is not innate, but a member of its own in the tangled web of computing, programming is thus a vast body of theory itself, a lot of which one will need to learn, unless they intend on staying frozen.

Paradoxically, the more we try to make things so that people won't have to be specialized in order to use them, the more we necessitate huge drifts of specialization in the people that want to do more than cursory tasks.

While picking a few components and sticking with them is probably necessary at least in professional environments to maintain sanity and interoperability, it is not very realistic for hobbyists and learners.

Of course, if you just want to write macros to automate tedious tasks, you can get by with the basics. But that is pretty much something that will end up being born from necessity, and likely self-discovered rather than taught through compulsory means.
The last time I checked (~4 years ago) RabbitMQ and others didn't have good contention management. I am not sure if we can blame users all the time. I remember being involved in this thread: http://lists.rabbitmq.com/pipermail/rabbitmq-discuss/2010-Ma... and this proposal: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-ws-arch/2002Oct/0401...
Very useful collection! A few points:

- He doesn't mention benchmarking, which is built into the testing capabilities of the compiler and is very nice to have.

- The only profiling tool I've had success with is Instruments, which I find harder to use in general than many of the alternatives, so I look forward to progress on this front.

- A good REPL would be very nice to have, for more than just "programming in the small" (but maybe that is what he meant by "experimentation"). There used to be one, but it had lots of issues, so it was understandably but lamentably killed.

- Cargo is already a very nice package manager. It feels like it has learned from many mistakes made by ruby, python, and node (though I think it resembles npm the most) and hasn't been frustrating at all for me. Notably, I find the workflow much easier than go's, despite its comparative youth. It is missing a central registry, but github serves the purpose decently at the moment.
Show HN: Article Bay, for collecting articles and sharing them with your team
Amazon doesnt expose much of these statistics (how fast of ram do i get with a M3.large or a c3.med etc) . Does this mean real performance is for those who own their servers?
Small jumps in salary if you have less than college degree
“Talk to your kids about death”
These stars were formed from gas clouds in galaxies. Wouldn't a gravitational slingshot with ∆v greater than galactic escape velocity likely strip their planets?

Unless you mean the ex-planets themselves would end up alone intergalactic space. Apparently, the vocabulary used for such objects is, "sub-brown dwarf."[1]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WISE_0855%E2%88%920714
I'd love to see ABV on the main list (instead of having to go to that beer's individual page). When I'm scanning through a menu, that's one of the primary things I look at.
Great advice, thank you for this.
We refresh periodically as we dynamically deploy new UI code, which can be accessed at new routes. (/home and /homeV2 for example) This allows us to not have to restart our servers or push out new server code just to serve a new UI at a different (or the same) route.
I just threw an approximate guess of 2-3k years. If it's 6k, more to my reasoning: there's been so much time and effort to learn those that proper principles are now well known and can be taught and applied repeatedly, reliably, affordably.

I don't think people have changed at all, and I didn't say it anywhere above, so I don't understand why you assume I think people have changed significantly.

Our knowledge in a few areas has grown significantly though (read: crafts, science and technology). I don't think anyone reasonable would disagree, but who knows.
To "fix" it you'd have to go further, all Pol Pot on the population.

We'll probably just continue existing policy, which actually is fairly environmentally sound.

If you eliminate the middle class, they can't buy SUVs and take jet aircraft on vacations. Check.

If you eliminate industrial sites, they can emit greenhouse gasses. Check. Public policy for decades. See above, temporarily we've outsourced our middle class purchasing to Chinese factory production, but once we get rid of the middle class and return the USA to our agrarian roots, the factories in China will also close.

If you concentrate all capital and property ownership into a Very small, optimistically well educated group or individuals or corporations, they will have better chance of enlightened self interest than if the general population is permitted private property. Check, thats been public policy for decades.

Impoverish young people to discourage children, permanently lowering environmental load. Check. Public policy for decades.

I could go on about health care and homelessness and the highest prison population on the planet, but it all aligns quite well.

Honestly, we're already doing so much for the environment I don't know what more we can do without "extreme" measures.
I'd love to hear more of your story - seems like you have the perfect gig.
A lot of your customers seem like small/medium sized businesses. How did you go about acquiring them?
Very interesting. I heard that OpenSCAD isn't fully reliable for production use though.

We've love to integrate this into https://Clara.io in some way.
Staring at Your Phone All Day Is Killing Your Back, Study Finds
Neural Networks That Describe Images