skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's an interesting premise but one that's almost impossible to verify. DNA would inevitably evolve in the billions of years of adaptation, rendering the message incomprehensible. Even with all relevant techniques (probability analysis, error correcting codes, ...), it's at best guess work. Despite the problems with implementation, it's still a very interesting idea that has a few good reasons supporting its logic. Any advanced life form that reaches a new planet will almost certainly analyze the planet for life and it's genetic makeup. I'm not sure we'll be able to validate or completely dismiss the idea until we explore other planets.
I'm not sure that example is the same, I'd say a better example would be "I really need to fix the giant hole in my roof, but maybe I should hold off until I find the perfect position of the pillows on my bed"

EDIT: But sure, the fact that there are other things to do doesn't mean no one should worry about anything else. I just feel like this is one of those things that doesn't really make any meaningful change, add any value, etc. Like I said, just seems like nit-picking. To each their own.
This leads to a few questions, though. First, if bridges were built just fine in the 50s, why do they build them differently nowdays? Second, why is the maintenance cost of bridges decidedly non-trivial? Third, is there any software that is that old that still works fine?

For the first question, I would only be offering speculation. Google and friends can give pretty good references.

For the second, a quick google gives "The annual direct cost of corrosion for highway bridges is estimated to be $6.43 billion to $10.15 billion ..."[1]

Third, I offer TeX as a good example of old software that has managed to survive for quite a long time. I am always pleasantly surprised when I go to typeset something from 20+ years ago and things "just work."

I think the theme here is that maintenance costs for bridges more often than not entails just keeping them working. Seems that far too often in software maintenance costs try and include complete rewrites into new technologies.

[1] http://www.dnvusa.com/Binaries/highway_tcm153-378806.pdf
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of SEO
Alan Kay may have coined the term, but OOP (as any other word or term) is what people believe it to be. Which is pretty far from CSP.
Still don't understand. Let's take the changes you need to make :

Foo.java
...
class Foo {
...
}

SomeOtherFile.java
...
Foo x = new Foo();
...

Equivalent in Python:

some_file_in_a_library.py
class Foo:
...

some_other_part_of_the_program.py:
x = Foo()

Keystrokes to change the name "Foo", in Java :

1) Position cursor on Foo.

2) Alt-shift-R "Bar" (+ enter)

Keystrokes to change this name, in Python :

1) position cursor on Foo

2) Change to bar (5 or 6 keystrokes)

3) Open some_file_in_a_library.py (couple dozen keystrokes, most people I see do this have to switch to mouse and use that)

4) Change the classname

5) Go through all the unit tests that you should have that test the class (you need 5x more unit tests in Python compared to Java as well, to have equivalent tests), and do the same. Yes, all of them.

Java wins out, by a factor of 3, maybe even 5. Even if the class definition and the usage were in the same file, it would still win by a lot.

Refactoring simply doesn't work reliably in Python. Heroic efforts by Jetbrains notwithstanding, it just doesn't compare.

So I don't see what you're complaining about. Making changes is only faster in Python in tiny programs, where you don't have the problem of interdependencies. As soon as you have some of them, Python starts losing out, bigtime.
I tried, but looks like the max field limit was hit.
25 Websites That Will Make You Smarter
Inspiring. Finding 'human knockouts' is a fantastic example of what becomes possible as sequencing gets cheap.

Steven Hyman (former director of NIMH), recently argued that this approach is also key to developing treatments for depression:

http://www.nature.com/news/mental-health-depression-needs-la...

[At Nature, but not paywalled, thankfully]
I use notmuch, but mu should also be mentioned in the same breath :):

http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/
http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html
It could be that we haven't detected the interleaved frames and the audio subcarrier.

or

Maybe we're just not thinking like a "Vega"n would[1].

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SbKE_U4b7U&spfreload=10
I believe my highest voted comment was a bit of screed concerning things my generation believed (as sampled in my peer group). It was decently written and thought-out.

The vast majority of my highly-upvoted comments (subjectively) are clever jokes or something similar. The fact of the matter is that the submissions I've made (especially technical ones) tend not to gain much karma, nor very many carefully thought-out posts.

Furthermore, the posts that usually are well-thought out and carefully worded often actually perform worse than the flippant ones, because I'm typically making a point or exploring a topic in a way that makes people uncomfortable. This is especially true now that the community has heeded pg's (really shortsighted) directive that downvotes are for mere disagreement (and unarticulated disagreement/disapproval at that!).

There are a number of ways of gaming the system if you think a bit, ranging from the obvious (downvote other posts to increase your chances of getting points) to the non-obvious (upvote posts you don't agree with so that you can get a solid word in edgewise) to the absurd (constantly watch the new section and try to mass submit your posts all at once before the throttling filter catches on). Quantity has a quality all its own.

You're better off just posting like a sane person, though. You'll enjoy yourself more, your posts will be better regarded, and you'll have a more positive effect on the community.

tl,dr: it's just internet funbucks, so don't lose sleep over it.
>A lot of the recent trend towards OOP-bashing comes from bad implementations of OOP, just as bashing design patterns is more to do with badly thought out architectures and overuse of those patterns.

sorry, but this is no true Scotsman fallacy. All these "bad implementations" is OOP, real OOP, not some idealized ephemeral non-existent Avalon. If an idea easily and more frequently than not lands itself to the bad implementations then there is something wrong with the idea. (I happen to come from a country which was pursuing what was looking like a pretty good idea - communism - which has got a lot of bashing during recent decades, due to "bad implementations" i guess, and as result it was critically rethought and now we know what it is not a good idea really)
Ideally there would be no need to talk to your driver on the phone in order to find the car. I have only needed to in a tiny portion of my ridesharing trips. But if you do need to, I think it's very reasonable, and not xenophobic, to expect the driver to be able to communicate effectively with an average American (or resident of whatever region you're in).
To all the comments about how the answer is no: I agree, and the reason I posted this is not because of the answer to the question, but because the premise and reasoning are very interesting to read.

Also, I got this link in a comment in the following thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8675078. Thanks `jonmrodriguez!
Edited, better?

They are saying that currently if there is a break in the underline it is understood that the two underlined portions of the word are two different links.
It doesn't change the basic purpose of the endeavor, which is to purport to rank the peoples of the world by intellectual capacity.

A general feature of many scientific endeavors is to measure $CARDINAL_PROPERTY across $CATEGORY - beak length across birds, speed across big cats, lifetime across mammals, etc. Do you oppose all these fields of inquiry, e.g. ranking stars by their brightness?

Or are these questions merely forbidden to ask about humans, due to some privileged position granted to us by god (or whatever)?
Yup, the best example I know of is resolving implicit scopes in Scala.
An alternative direction to head is back to the future: take the web for what it is and try to simplify AJAX interaction, rather than relearn all the hard lessons of client/server programming from the 80's, but in a hobbled browser sandbox.

This is what I'm trying to accomplish with intercooler.js: http://intercoolerjs.org/
Two links, one agreeing and one disagreeing:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/08/23/waste-creativity-and-go...
I've been using Jersey since 2010 and I have never need to write my own annotation. Maybe I'm lucky enough that Jersey fills my need perfectly and maybe you're right that once I needed to write my own annotation, I may run into a bit of trouble (though some people do write annotation only to be consumed by reflection, hence bypassing the service file) but I guess... that's like.. what... 1-5% extreme use-cases? Like... LISP macros that makes programmer reached nirvana or something?

But in my case, Jersey fills my need without me writing low-level REST code (dealing with exception to HTTP status code, marshalling objects to different formats) embedded in my controller/business logic.

> I can do exactly the same thing with a database-transaction monad, and then I can have session-in-view but in a principled, safe, zero-magic way.

You sound like programming in another level higher than mine. I applaud that. I'll revisit Spray/Scala _when_ I found a definitive use-case for this. For now, Java seems to fit the bill for pretty much 99% my use-cases and fit my taste as well (less low-level code stuff because it is built-in the framework that is well-architected/well-designed so that I can focus on business logic code).
> want to build a search engine its not enough to index the web

Yes it is. People by and large are just searching for sites.

Spell checking is easy, deep linking is easy enough to get something basic in place, answers/images/video are hardly mandatory. And business/map search I can get by buying data the same way Google did.

Google's search engine is better than Bing for example because its index is larger and its core search algorithm better. Everything else are all "nice to haves".
Porting Inferno OS to the Raspberry Pi
That's not true, population growth in Switzerland has been above 1% since 2007: http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/en/index/themen/01/02/bla...
Ok, on a PC so here's a little more detail:

In theory, aerospike engines are pretty efficient at nearly any altitude. It has to do with the pressure and temperature variations as the rocket travels through the atmosphere. (There are pockets of isothermal regions, or regions where the temperature is the same in the atmopshere, and there are pockets where the temperature varies; therefore the Mach number varies). The atmospheric pressure and temperature affect the flame of the aerospike and act like a "variable" nozzle.

Aerospikes aren't as popular because,

1) they're heavy. more deadweight mass on a launch vehicle is a big no no. By deadweight I mean everything on the launch vehicle that doesn't contain the a) payload b) propellant. Because once you burn out (or run out of propellant), usually that's when you stage (or separate) your payload from the launch vehicle. At that point, the launch vehicle is useless; deadweight.

2) they require a massive amount of cooling: you're basically heating up a piece of metal to launch temperatures during the launch sequence. You have to make sure your "spike" doensn't melt.

3) There is a bunch of research and development into other cheaper alternatives, and we already have cheaper and efficient alternatives. This basically pushed aerospikes to the "novelty" category. I'm sure if there was a big technological "push" for aerospikes I'm sure we could get something that's more efficient but that research and time will cost more than to just use the rockets we have now.

ADDENDUM; here's a video from Rocketdyne explaining aerospike engines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWf4iOMSPNc
I still have issues with people loading jQuery just to get an element using an id. I'm glad I haven't dived into the world of Angular and other frameworks.
Notice that Elon Musk sold PayPal for 1.3 billion before venturing into SpaceX. A space company shouldn't be your first startup
Gaming journalist contacts the mothers' of boys threatening to rape her
Exactly. It's not that an FPGA is better, more flexible, faster, etc. It's that you don't have the money for the NRE on an ASIC.

That is EXACTLY the reason to use an FPGA. I use them all the time for projects like that.

This is different from the software people who want a magically flexible brain for generic tasks.
This is an interesting follow up to Mr. Graham's "Mean People Fail" essay. I guess those mean people don't have the integrity to be nicer people as Mr. Buffett explains.
Growth Onion Ep:4, Sacha Greif, Founder of Sidebar.io and TeleScope
An anonymous inner class with only one method. The "inner" is important. It still has to exist inside of an explicitly declared class. Also, a variable holding a reference to a lambda function cannot be called as a function (no function pointers).

Contrast with JavaScript, where functions are first-class, can be declared at top level, can be passed as arguments to and returned by other functions, can be called by dereferencing a variable, can be nested, can be partially applied, etc.

The minimal syntactic sugar for anonymous inner classes added in Java 8 doesn't even begin to approach the power of the function support in languages like JavaScript. Language-level support for this stuff matters.
To be fair, Asians DO score higher than Europeans -- it isn't just some ploy to establish credibility. Anyone looking at SAT data can tell you that.

I would frame your objection a bit differently: finding an Asian IQ advantage is in no way incompatible with racism or white supremacism. Many of these guys (Rushton for example) believe that Asians are inferior in areas other than IQ.
What I observed in one case was that there was an arc due to the inductive kick, which eventually roughened the contacts and caused them to weld together. So under that failure mode, whatever contacts are carrying the load would be the ones to fail shut.

There are relays designed to control motors, and designs for the circuit surrounding the relays to prevent the arc. In the case of solid state relays, every one I've ever seen fail, failed shut.
singapore

usually monday to friday but 5.5 working days for some other companies (referring to white collar job btw)

so if you just assume it's 5 day week, then it would be 25 working days approximately a month, times 12 would be 300

this year we have 10 public holidays and that's again under assumption that these holidays falls on non weekend (if fall on saturday, it's considered as gone)

so 300 - 10 = 290

so ya, that's about that
> But XML is not ridiculously complicated. The 1.0 specification http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/ is not very long.

Also note that the XML 1.0 specification contains the specification of the data format and of a schema language for the format itself (DTD). Without the definition of DTD, XML could be much much simpler.

I second Norman Walsh's proposal for XML 2.0: Just drop the <!DOCTYPE> declaration [1]. XML is pretty good as it is for its intended scope (marking up text), dropping the DOCTYPE/DTD would remove the main source of complexity and insecurity.

[1] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/12/15/Drop-the-D...
My team was trying to decide what Javascript libraries to use to build our web tier for our project. After spending a few days trying to get our heads around the ecosystem, we just gave up and went running back to Rails. Couldn't be happier.
My highest upvoted comment[0] was a thought I had reading an article by the New York Times: "Space Tourism Isn't Frivolous, or Impossible". This was around the time that Virgin Galactic and NASA/Orbital Sciences had their tragic accidents.

I basically said that spaceflight is where the airline industry used to be; rough around the edges, expensive, inherently dangerous. But the airline industry today is safe and inexpensive compared to how it was back in the day.

Spaceflight is still at a young stage so unfortunately I will say that the Virgin Galactic tragedy, and the NASA/Orbital Science launch failure will not be the last accidents to come. In fact, we will need more accidents to understand where we are going wrong.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8555643
If the switches are for lights, you could consider some other options. X10 is pretty dated, but the upside is the cost of 'socket rockets' is pretty low. Anyhow, for a project like this, I don't have automation as much as I have control but I built a simple system to talk to a handful of protocols. https://github.com/dandroid88/webmote

Low cost, long enough range and not wired can be a bit tricky. If you are ok replacing sockets, putting an adapter in, replacing switches etc you can get the features you want, but probably not at your desired cost point. Those solution would steal a bit of power from the 110 lines. If you are trying to hack something with some relays, I would suggest a sleepy radio, plus a thing called a latching relay. A latching relay allows you to connect/disconnect without continuously applying power and instead only applying power when changing the configuration. Still though, the batteries are going to be a pain once you start using anything electromechanical or radios unless you are really careful at each step.
How to land your first CTO role?
Aside from founding your own company, how does a highly experienced software developer go about landing their first role as CTO with an already somewhat established startup who is seeking to fill this type of role? (CTO/VP of Engineering)
Here is the link to the actual journal article.

Absolutely disgusting that it is so obfuscated and so difficult to acquire. Information is free if we all help make it available to everyone:

https://mega.co.nz/#!O1ok1L4T!e06uUlxvYkRf0JVgpf1dvnQWQrhlSM...
Not sure why he brings up GWT so much - GWT seems to be very healthy right now. I'd probably choose to use GWT in a new project before I'd choose Angular at this point..
I shop myself. I peruse GQ, and /r/mfa for style inspiration. I actually just got back from Black Friday shopping and I'm wearing these really comfortable A&F sweatpants as I type this.
We changed the title in a somewhat feeble attempt to make it less baity. If anyone suggests a better title, we'll edit it again.
Yes it is ok to share with friends on twitter. The service is for family and close friends of Ezra's.

Service & Burial - 1:30 pm, Weds. Dec. 3
River View Cemetery - Adams Chapel
0300 SW Taylors Ferry Rd
Portland, OR 97219
503-246-4251

We will be setting up and sharing info about a trust fund being set up for his surviving son Ryland soon as well as central place for people to share their comments Ezra.

Thanks for all of your kind words and support
What you are describing is not the 35h system, but the "RTT" (the extra days off coming for the accumulated extra time per day).

There are a lot of private companies in France where the 35h do not implies those extra days off. For example, in some companies, they say the employees "can" take 15min break time every half day, but 80% of employees work during this so called break so effectively doing working 37.5h per week, paid 35h. (And lot of extra work hours are not even paid either for blue or white collars).

But yes people I know who benefit from RTT are generally truly happy with them, for all the reasons you cited.
I never used notmuch, but I was much inspired by it when I saw a talk about it at linux.conf.au a few years back. Later I ended up stealing several ideas from notmuch about how to interface with Xapian, like the one-letter prefixes.
If your type system requires explaining things to a computer, your type system sucks, not static typing.

I use types because the compiler can explain things to me.
The devil you know kind of thing?
I don't think you read the article I linked. Reducing the effective duration on the bond fund portion of your portfolio boils down to the same thing you'd do in any healthy portfolio: yearly rebalancing.

Also, the point is not to hedge 'interest rate risk' by just buying shorter duration funds, full stop. Interest rates do not pose a risk unless you had a set date to liquidate your investment. If you are not planning on liquidating your bonds then interest rates pose no risk, they just affect the growth of the income stream.

The point is, if you are concerned about getting your principal returned, decide upon how many years down the road you need it back. That is your initial duration. To maximize your return under that constraint, buy a fund at that duration. Then yearly rebalance with other shorter duration funds (while reinvesting coupons properly) to taper the net duration down over the course of the investment period. There you go, you've just simulated a single bond but now are no longer exposed to default risk.

Again: perpetuating the idea that 'getting your principal back' is a feature only found if you buy individual bonds directly is untrue and can result in terrible investment decisions. It presents a false dilemma between a 'secure principal' and diversification. Forgoing diversification in bonds is one of the most dangerous things you can do. More than any other asset class, bonds benefit immeasurably from diversification (and probably also active management) since default risk is the major risk the investor faces.
For us, CTO has less of a Developer focus, and more of an Operations focus.

Not that a software developer couldn't be a CTO, its just that they have less of a focus on:
- Costs. Infrastructure (hosting etc.)
- Disaster Recovery - if a plan isn't in place, getting one done! Then periodically testing the DR plan
- Managing the Service Desk (issue raised / closed / turn around time)

(I may be reading too much into your question) but I think you are missing a step. Something along the lines of Team Lead / Developer Manager / Project Management / Software Architect.

Any developer WITHOUT several years experience in this type of role first is just kidding themselves of a CTO role.
Digging through the github org a bit:

"The library builds and runs for the Xbox 360, PS3, PS4, nVidia Shield, iOS, Mac OSX, MacOS, Android, OpenWatcom for MSDOS, OpenWatcom for Windows, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 2013, Codewarrior for Windows, Codeblocks 13.12 for Windows, Codeblocks 13.12 for MacOSX, OUYA, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DSi and Linux." - Burgerlib[0]

I don't know why, but I find that immensely satisfying.

[0]: https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/burgerlib
I'm extremely happy with SBT.
Xapian supports a query syntax which uses a trailing '*', but it's not a true wildcard/regexp, it's a range search on an ordered index. Notmuch allows you to use that syntax, see http://notmuchmail.org/searching/
Here's how I do it: you'll notice that there's a repeating pattern, cross your eyes until you get two of the repititions to be on top of each other. Once you've done this you should find that the shapes pop out.
Definitely not kidding myself. I'm trying to develop a plan of how I should get from here to there. I'm currently a highly technical developer, recently started on my MBA, and I want to understand what are the best steps to take to get from here to there. I understand that it could take some time; hopefully something I could accomplish within the next 5 to 10 years, but I want to know how best to go about getting on this path.