skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is actually a big deal. Obama's code wasn't very useful or complicated but that obviously wasn't the point. The point here was that a 53 year old african american man sat down and learned to write a program, any program. It's much more unlikely than it sounds. Do you know what it would take to convince my mother to write a program that draws a square on a screen? We're talking moving heaven and earth here. If I suggest booking tickets on expedia instead of calling her travel agent she's like "What am I, some kind of nerd?"

Obama is leading by example. He and his biggest supporters are people who never in their lives imagined that they would ever write a computer program or anything close to it. There's a cultural barrier that's hard for most of us to see, a clear demarcation between most people's daily lives and the idea of writing even the simplest program. Crossing that barrier is hard, real hard, and I am surprised and encouraged that Obama took the plunge.

Code literacy is important, not so that the average person can become a 10X engineer but so that they can understand what's happening in the world around them on another level. It's the same reason that people should learn physics or chemistry or biology. Because these processes control our world and a basic understanding of them, even if we don't use it professionally, can help give people valuable context. Hopefully this kicks off more interest in learning the basics so that in ten years the sales guy won't think that coding a full featured CRM from scratch will take you a couple of hours over the weekend. We're moving toward a more automated world and the value of understanding it is increasing exponentially.
trying to reverse engineer a photo of a property from the street into meaningful information, vs using data collected from businesses dedicated to providing mapping/location data, and information provided by people expressly interested in improving the available data?

Sure, keep analysing that shop front.
Yeah last time I saw this article that's pretty much what people were saying.

It's like saying you shouldn't use a web framework, and using as an example a website where you type a word into a textbox and it alerts whatever you typed. Yeah, of course that's a simple project so there is no need for higher organization, but it's hardly an argument to stop using frameworks altogether.
Ask HN: Favorite book series for languages?
I own more O'reilly books than any other publisher. I was wondering what is HN's favorite book publisher / series?
Honestly I think the answer is micropayments. Large companies should get together to fund the creation and running of a centralized payment system with no fees. They could move tiny sums of money around to developers. Apps could charge $0.05/month to $1/month to monetize themselves. The user would be given a trial period and then asked to pay.

The way I see it, Google, Amazon, Walmart and others would create a small firm of about 10 people. The central processing system could probably handle real traffic with as little as 20 production servers. All tolled, the company would cost probably 10 mill a year. The benefit is that the founding companies would save in transaction fees their contribution to the new monetary commons. If Amazon didn't lose 3% to credit card purchases, they would save billions a year. At that point what is 10 mill to keep that going? Hell, if I'm off by an order of magnitude, 100 mill a year is still cheaper than the fees.
I would add a #4: cryptography.

You don't need to add entropy for #3. If a CSPRNG with n bits of initial entropy as a seed can satisfy #4, then it's also good enough for #3.
In this article I would like to show how you can organize your golang web project with live code reloading. It scheme can be easily extended and will allowed to write couple of line in bash to get what you want.
For the sake of Jesus, read this posts and use your brain:

"There is No Steady State Economy (except at a very basic level)"
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-stat...

Limits to Growth–At our doorstep, but not recognized
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-12/limits-to-growt...

Wealth And Energy Consumption Are Inseparable
http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-...

Galactic-Scale Energy
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...

I have not read "Economics in One Lesson" but if I remember right, it is Austrian and takes ideas from good ol' Ludwing van. Today I must say, Mises views were often very short sighted, he had little understanding of money and in the end also a limited understanding what capitalism is (and why it will end).
I am sorry but AS autocomplete takes seconds to appear on my rMBP. xCode flies. I write methods and I see the docs on the right. I can cntrl+click and see the full docs. Let's not talk about the Quality of the Apple docs compared to android's, or debugging and instruments tools.
Agreed, the ability to watch for changes and react to them is one of the better features. Plus, allowing the standardisation of practices through a team (build process, testing process) and the codification of the application's dependencies.
thanks a ton! yeah, I agree with you. The site will change to become more of a community. Right now, I'm just testing landing pages and playing with different messages. I also growing the community and that definitely takes time.

On a side note, I'm trying to validate a concept along the lines of elance-for-hardware. Thoughts?
I'm just at minute 15 for now, however I can recommend you this link [1] to start with binary trees. The picture also explains why the coefficient of z^3 is 5.

[1] http://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/binarytrees/
Interesting. The individual I am referring to oversees a pharmaceutical company.
thank you! Will change that!
Good try I suppose. This didn't really click with me.
Founders overspend once they get their first initial investment

Interestingly enough, Joel Spolsky wrote about this danger in http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/VC.html , where he discusses the relationship between revenue, PR, fundraising, and code. Any of those can get wonky if one substantially outpaces the others.
Tell that to the 98% of people who will "surely" have never heard of this and think, reasonably, that recording a cop won't put them in jail.
> Of course, to get this Grunt configuration to work you'd still have to run grunt jshint in the terminal, which as it turns out is no shorter than jshint .js.

That's only true if you're not using task arrays. I'm not sure what most people are doing but that's covered all my bases so I run Grunt once and done. Is installing a plugin really bloated? It's only 5 lines in the example but they provide flexibility needed since many projects have different directory structures and need different options.

I'd say that even if the plugin you wan't doesn't exist (and most do for reasonably popular tools), well, make one for yourself. There's plenty of documentation and countless examples.

It's strange that the author seemingly criticizes having to write a plugin for yourself and then goes on to suggest something like you writing your own (if you want dynamic options, etc you will be writing a wrapper around your package.json).
It saddens me in some ways that the UK currency decimalized before mass computerization of record-keeping took off. I think I would have liked to have lived in a world where database currency columns needed to support pounds, shillings and pence (keeping in mind that pence could be divided into quarters, of course).
I was going to cite that if nobody else did; I didn't realize it had its own Wikipedia page.
This is a great time to get a PhD to work on problems in machine learning and machine perception, especially if you want to go into industry. There is a lot of demand. I finished my PhD about two years ago, and I do R&D at NASA in machine learning and computer vision (although I'm leaving to become a professor).

Once you are in a PhD program, be upfront with your advisor about this goal and you will likely have an easier time graduating than those students that claim they want to become professors. Typically, to get a PhD you just need to finish your coursework (fairly easy) and produce about three published papers (can be brutally hard or fairly straightforward depending on a ton of factors). The latter's ease also depends on your tolerance for disappointment, because the rewards and successes in research are somewhat sparse.

A lot of the problems people have with the PhD is that there aren't enough academic jobs. You aren't seeking one, so you will be fine as long as you focus on your goal and maintain a good work-life balance most of the time throughout school (this can be very challenging to do, in practice).
The problem here is risk is ignored. If I were to rephrase the question as "Would you rather own 100% of a company with a 50% chance of success or 40% of $200 million company with a 1% of success?" then the answer we get is very different.
I wrote my first program when I programmed the radio in my parents car to change the station. I reached out, turned the knob, and instructed the machine what to do via instructions that are understandable to "human beings". Programming is easy.

Bitter sarcasm put aside, I have often, existentially, wondered "what is programming?" The word "programming" obviously carries a lot of colloquial meaning, but I'd be interested in hearing where others draw the line between programming and, er..., data entry.
PayPal vs. Bitcoin: A Filipino Tragedy
Ask HN: Uber or Lyft as a side job?
Has anyone tried to work for these companies as a driver? And is the money really legit ? I hear people can make good money just driving for them. Is it worth to maybe get into it as a full time job also?
Not being paid is integral part of open source development. It keeps the incentives to produce quality, lean code straight.
Did you not read the part in the article about de-anonymizing user ids?
True if you choose a market that has such need for speed. Lots of markets are not like this and they have the added advantage that VC's won't put money into them.
QinQ
I agree with you. So many seem willing to give this guy a pass based on the quality of his lectures. I think that's bullshit. We need to get rid of the notion that genius academic output forgives sexual harassment. Fuck that. Genius academic output forgives bad dinner party hosting skills or walking around the office in an 8-day-old t-shirt, not harassing women.

However good this guy might be at teaching physics, this "loss" to the community cannot begin to approach the loss of uncountable women who decided to avoid quantitative fields because of the male culture dominance.

Meanwhile, as we discussed a few days ago, image processing researchers continue to use the studio-lit, soft focus, 1970s slide film captured, limited color gamut, badly scanned, low resolution 'Lena' image as if it is even a tiny bit relevant for today's image processing applications.

I'm sure there are many fun and engaging physics teachers at universities big and small across the world who can lecture equally well and don't harass women online. One of them can step up.
There's a KDE astronomy simulator I've used that seems pretty good, though I haven't played with it for a while. Celestia IIRC: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/celestia-astronomy-linux-progr...
Make medical data useful for patients with PicnicHealth (YC S14)
I'm probably the minority on this, but I think innodb's docs on its isolation modes are clearer and easier to understand than postgres'. That could be because I have internalized them over many years though.

To me, the only sensible isolation level for transactions is serializable. We've had so many consistency issues because developers didn't understand when to lock and when not to. Everyone (including me) gets it wrong from time to time.

Very careful use of nonlocking selects can be correct and improve concurrency, but across a huge codebase, bugs slip in. If I could turn on a mode where the default is "select ... lock in share mode" but opt into a "select ... nonlocking" I would be eternally grateful. Judicious use of wrappers where we force the user to specify the lock mode has helped curb this trend quite a bit.

I'd still take MVCC with tons of warts over eventual consistency any day of the week. It is impossible to reason about eventual consistency because the database is literally allowed to do basically anything. Causal should really be the default starting point for AP systems.
I watch a lot of How It's Made. On many episodes you'll see an assembly line that is almost entirely automated, except for some small section. Sometimes that section involves (A) precision work that we haven't yet figured out how to automate. Most other times it seems to be (B) extremely "automatable" work (e.g. grabbing widgets six at a time and putting them in a package) that leaves me scratching my head as to why the robots aren't there as well.

I watch these episodes and think to myself that these workers are just the last portion of the line to be replaced by robots, and it's only a matter of time, capital, or both. Demos like this move the line between (A) and (B). The Industrial Revolution was only a half-step--just the "brawn" part. Now we're in the middle of the "brains" part, and the outcome is both exciting and scary.
No, you're right. The use case for Grunt/Gulp is in the name: task runners, to automate the running of tasks, to stabilise and formalise the build process to the point of repeatability across a team.

It's a bit strange to have him bash on the Grunt/Gulp ecosystem's plugin dependence and SemVer configs, and then go on to recommend using npm instead, which is also dependent on node and its ecosystem.

That said, the npm solution looks attractive for simpler build flows, but hook in a fat custom plugin to a watch task on a subset of files and I'm sure you'll get the same complexity in package.json.
I might buy something like once this if it's a well-designed desktop app, but not going to pay a monthly fee for it.
It's in fact half of a feature, because the generation method is not specified. So you can't use it for terrain generation in portable code, for example.
>math, which is much more fundamental and useful in the every day lives

That's the part those people "just don't get" and they stand open to correction, but I think it's hard to convince anyone you need L'hopitl's rule very often, out of the blue. Tha's the extend of my maths knowledge, l'Hoptial's rule, so maybe I'm just missing the bigger picture.
Not compared to my experience with other mobile platforms.
in this day and age, I don't expect privacy, ever.. with the NSA recording everything and forcing companies to comply, how do I even know if my cell phone isn't actively listening in on me?
I am not sure that spending it all on yourself is the worst thing you can do with the money. If you continue to live on raman then you will be accumulating a lot of cash that you can leverage later. I am surprised that any investor would sit back and let this happen - I certainly wouldn't if I was an investor in such a company.
Internet as Social Movement (2010)
VCs can't ask for their money back. It belongs to the company and is in the company bank account. They can refuse to give you more, and if they control the board they can try to put in a new management team, but except for cases of fraud or other malfeasance, they cannot get their money back.
Being able to automate and coordinate our complex build system at work is pretty much the only thing that keeps us all sane.... thanks to Gulp.
Productive Excel Functions I've Found Valuable
> I think you've proved the author's point better than he ever could. With serializable isolation, you don't have concurrent clients all hitting the same data at the same time...you've got locking/blocking. The two things you're trying to put together are mutually exclusive.

Not so. With serialization as implemented by PostgreSQL it's perfectly possible for serializable transactions to avoid blocking/rollback on read/write conflicts as long as there's some reasonable serialization order. Some DBs (default config of SQL Server for example) will lock in this situation, but it's not a requirement of the model.

If you have lots of clients writing to the same data at the same time, yes, you will have lock waits/deadlocks. At that point, though, unless your updates are trivial (i.e. only ever hitting one lockable unit per logical operation) you've got to deal with what is likely some extremely complicated update logic all by yourself. And if your updates are trivial, well, you can probably structure your relational DB so that you only ever have lock waits, which is often okay. Sure, there are situations where it's not (highly contended counter, say), but that's certainly a small minority of situations.

I would argue that if a developer finds typical ACID semantics hard to understand, they almost certainly aren't prepared for managing eventual consistency.

edit: If I might add to this, a quote from the Google F1 paper:

"We also have a lot of experience with eventual consistency systems at Google. In all such systems, we find developers spend a significant fraction of their time building extremely complex and error-prone mechanisms to cope with eventual consistency and handle data that may be out of date. We think this is an unacceptable burden to place on developers and that consistency problems should be solved at the database level. Full transactional consistency is one of the most important properties of F1."
It's pretty obvious when it happens but it's most definitely not profitability. Rapidly growing usage (ie, traction) with an envisionable business model is usually sufficient. While the revenues themselves are not strictly necessary, it does help to demonstrate the ability to collect them.
> If muscles could apply the full force in the fraction of time that feet touch the ground

Or if they could touch the ground for longer. We need human mounted wings to provide some downforce :)

Or more realistically an elastic belt strapped to the runner, and running on a track underneath them.
He drew a square on a screen? UI developer position now open.
I would say yes and no. What we don't really know are probability and severity. And any of us can imagine that those things don't apply to us because we're exceptional in some way, especially when we really want to rationalize getting the degree.

Probability? Dropout rates are published, but only in aggregate form. That doesn't reveal what actually happens to people. Situations involving faculty misconduct are likely to be un-reported, and it's probably easy to blame the student.

Severity? What's the actual impact of dropping out from a PhD program? You don't get to be a professor? Most PhDs will never get to be professors. Opportunity cost? Sure. I won't downplay that.

The psychological toll? I would take it seriously, at whatever rate it's actually happening. Grad school isn't just a job. It's like working for an extended period, for a lump sum payment, while absorbing 100% of the risk. The controversy over graduate education, while justified, may have the effect of further raising the stakes, if Professor and Failure are widely believed to be the only two possible outcomes.

Disclaimer: I enjoyed grad school, though I took 6 years and came very close to quitting. When it's good, it's great. It can be the kind of "good work" that many of us prefer, even if it's stressful, over easy work that's boring.

If I were to compare it to anything, it would be like starting a small business, i.e., lots of risk, opportunity cost, and massively deferred reward, with a similar implied psychological pressure: Millionaire or Failure.
You have to find investors who share your vision, trust your team, and are smart enough to know the business is capital intensive. I've been on 5 teams that did this successfully.
> "you quit your job and drag your family halfway across the US for this "golden opportunity", and then you find out that this person is by far the biggest jerk that you have ever met and you cannot work with them."

Honestly, now. If you're bold enough to take this kind of risk , be bold enough to recover from a bad decision.
> Chicago is a world class city. Sorry you had a rough time.

I moved from Chicago to (hard to have a sailboat in Texas) Florida because of how terrible the financial situation is in Illinois. Sure, great food, nice tourist city, fabulous architecture.

Cons: Property taxes that continue to increase to fund unfunded pensions. An income tax that continues to increase to close a unbalanced budget.

World class city? New York and San Francisco are world class cities.
What's the price per unit?
most of cs PhD means a good job and good future. this does not apply to most of other major.
Is it really wise to choose a random number generator based on RC4, which is known to have remarkably strong biases? Surely it would be better to use something based on ChaCha20, Keccak or Spritz if you have the choice?
They are, but they're not quite this expensive.

This isn't just a rocket, it's a rocket with paperwork certifying USAF involvement and EELV contracting and various oversight instruments, and manufactured by ULA, the consortium we allowed to become a monopoly, which will offer jobs to everyone involved in this process after they retire from government service.

Private telecom satellites, which are in fact an open market, go for any of the Russian, Chinese, or European launchers, and recently for SpaceX, because ULA's products are too expensive unless you're the US Government.

ULA in this view is effectively a branch of the US space program, which is allowed to guarantee its shareholders a profit, and is protected from allegations of waste because we have NASA to use as a punching bag, they're just a 'private sector contractor'.
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> I did a code challenge that involved ranking soccer teams, and while going over the code a developer at the company asked me if I needed the rules of the game explained to me. While it's a good thing to make sure the candidate understands what the problem is, companies need to be aware that these things carry extra cultural baggage and asking a female candidate if they understand a basic sports rule (or any other male dominated theme) comes across as belittling and sexist.

As a male, I don't even know the rules of soccer, so I would have gladly wanted to hear the rules of the game so I could implement the solution correctly.
If you've managed to gain traction with a service that has a clear business model (Twitter and Facebook would obviously qualify) then you are on the right track. Booking revenues is good but mostly because it demonstrates that you can book revenues, not because you actually need the cash.
That probably came across wrong. What I meant was that the ability to do concurrent access is the important thing, not the performance of it. CPUs aren't any good at contended access to memory cells, but they still allow it and it works. If you want your system to scale to many threads you need to break the sharing.

Same with databases. The important thing is that it gives you strong consistency when there is contention. It'll never be as performant as operating on different rows concurrently though. When you touch different rows, you don't feel the pain of locking, which is the common case.
Chelsea Manning on Transgender Rights
And in Texas, they execute the innocent and the mentally ill.. basing your view of an entire state on a few extreme outlier situations doesn't make much sense.