skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've never been a big fan of code review for finding bugs. Sure, you can find bugs, but the question is, how efficiently?

Long ago I learned a couple simple rules that get my defect rate very close to zero: asserts everywhere, and step through every line of code. Seriously. Write two lines of code, fire up the debugger, and step through them, inspecting each variable. Any tiny 'unit' that you write should go through the debugger, where unit might be that 5 line function you are writing, or a bug fix, or whatever. It just catches a vast amount of the bugs if you are writing in a modular, perhaps functional style. Tons of side effects, well, it's less good at that. asserts do 'okay' at finding those things, but of course the time to find those bugs is longer.

This buys you a few things. First, you are 'reviewing' your code while you write, which is when it is freshest in your mind. It is hard to mentally model the behavior of the computer, hence code reviews are mentally difficult. The debugger ALWAYS shows you what the computer will do (bar things like nasty thread interactions). The debugger does not lie. You get to see nasty things like Nan or underflow that might just pass silently depending on your error handling, which is again hard to find in a code review. And, of course, the sooner you find bugs the cheaper it is to fix - so the best time is about 10 seconds after you typed that line of code. After that the costs grow either proportionally or exponentially.

I know very few people with that uses this discipline, but it changed my life when I took it up. Any time I slip and fail to do it, I rue it.

Pair programming get you similar benefits. I find it harder to think/talk/respond to another person when I am deep in thought (different brain pathways, or so it feels), so I'm more a solo programmer by nature. However, I would still step through the code when pair programming; I guarantee that your mental model of your code is likely to be flawed. The second person will reduce, but not eliminate that threat.

I understand not all code bases/IDEs/whatever allow this (long startups, 5+ minute compiles, etc), but it it is available, avail yourself of it. If you program in a dynamic language and find yourself using a REPL all the time to test your code you are doing a form of this, but it is still better to test the actual code in place.
I'll be honest, it never even occured to me that IT support would be considered admin overhead. Of course, I was shocked to find out laborers considered me management, given I'm an engineer. To me, complaining about IT overhead is like complaining about maintenance, or housekeeping: this is vital infrastructure that should work seamlessly and hidden in the background. (I'm a behind-the-stage kind of person, though.)

But, given how I've seen some bureaucrats complain about the cost of housekeeping, I guess anything's fair game. And don't even get me started on the unavoidable cost of maintenance...
David Cameron: ‘We will give the security services whatever they need’
A very good thing of the "je suis charlie” message is that it can be endorsed and adopted by moderate muslims.

Terrorism can't be combated by throwing bombs at targets, nor by elevating the discussion level to extreme confrontation; those actions just escalate the spiral of violence. Historical experiences, like the recent disempowerment of ETA in Spain, show that terrorism is defeated by insulating the radicals from the community whose interests they purport to represent.

That so many muslims in Europe have condemned the attack and shared the phrase is the best answer we could hope for. If only the same response had been made throughout the Islamic world as well, these undesirables would known that they can't claim any moral support, and soon they would find themselves without economic support as well.

That simply couldn't happen if our reaction was to place an emphasis on the images that are offensive to islamists. The ideals we value are that we're free to express and discuss any idea (even when it's despicable) without facing prosecution from authority, not that we can say things intended to hurt a different religion with impunity; the second is merely a by-product of the first, and it's OK that people may hold a strong disagreement with those expressions, as long as they are pursued in a peaceful manner.
Are Atheists Real?
'DDoS as a Service'?
It's relatively simple to create a server that can handle the traffic as long as your app is something simple. The 10k users you're talking about I'm assuming is monthly active users (means they visit your site once or more per month) I have a website (yes a "web app") with 120k active users per month. It's running just fine on a relatively small server. To get users usually you need to give them something to come back to because they feel like it's something that they can't do without, maybe something that only you can provide, and something that makes them feel good and causes them to keep coming back to you to get their dose. If your question is more about technical details, then I'd just suggest not to worry about that until you have to, ie. your server is crapping out right before your eyes, that's a good problem to have. However, one mistake that I have made is to give up eventually on something that I may not see the immediate value in just b/c it's bit too difficult to maintain. So having said that don't waste a second optimizing something that no one's gonna end up using in 3 months. Everything else is really just noise.
I think your estimate is way too low. The alcoholic beverage market in the U.S. has sales of something like $190 billion annually [1].

I think with legal marijuana a lot of people who would otherwise not be willing to use it will definitely be willing to. To a large extent recreational marijuana use and recreational drinking overlap. I would definitely consider the alcohol market to be a good indicator of potential market size for marijuana.

I don't think marijuana will get up to $190 billion or anything, and especially not in the short term. I do however think that its worth quite a bit more than $25 billion.

And that's just recreational marijuana. There is an entire separate market for medical applications that might be quite a lot as well.

-----------

1. http://www.parkstreet.com/industry/alcoholic-beverage-market...
Can it damage those monitors?
> What exactly is the restriction?

All of the below (and the parent post) is my opinion. You can disagree with me, and I'm fine with that.

You're unable to study what your computer actually does. You don't have access to the source of anything that happens in kernel space. You can take university OS courses and tinker with the educational toy operating systems, read about Windows internals but to see what you're actually running is different not only at a philosophical level but also practically.

Yes, you can get into kernel space in Windows by doing a driver DLL, so you can make your computer "do" anything, but what you, as a person, will do is a lot different when dealing with a black box rather than a white box. When doing Windows kernel space driver development, you're reading the documentation (and hope that your computer does what it says), when doing that with an open source OS, you can read the source too (and know that the computer does exactly that).

To me (you don't have to agree), the essence of being a computer is that you don't only use your computer to get work done or use it for entertainment. Computers are the entertainment (and perhaps the work too, like in my case in the semiconductor industry).
There are Clojure systems with good support for handling exceptions. Zach Tellman's has an event driven channel/pipeline system in Clojure called Lamina. It offers good support for monitoring and recovering from exceptions:

https://github.com/ztellman/lamina/wiki/Probes-and-Instrumen...

Any system that is concurrent needs first-class support for handling exceptions that occur in a thread pool. I appreciate that Lamina puts an emphasis on this.
The big list of “python -m” tools
Getting loads of core services out into third parties is really wonderful for logging. E.g. if email sending happens in Mandrill, then you never need to write decent logging calls for that and you have a reliable source of truth!
The Content Singularity
This article actually frustrates me. I rarely comment but for some reason this stirred me to comment. The fact is: the research is important not the wording. Many academics 'plagiarize' wording but change it to fit the experiments that they actually ran. Especially foreign ESL researchers who want to convey similar information. Ex/ Performing the exact same experiments just with different chemicals. The papers could be almost exactly the same wording but the data and graphs would be different. This doesn't make the research or experiments fake or any less meaningful. I do understand that this could be used as an indication that the research is not novel but by no means is it definitive proof.
very cool ! what are some of your ideas on customization?

your ancestry/family tree overlayed?

travel logs?

historic airline route maps?

Early explorer journeys?

WW2 troop/invasions?

starmaps?
Can anyone find a link to the paper?
"Authorship is being sold, but there is no indication for or against on whether the studies are actually being done by somebody."

I inferred that the studies are entirely bogus, i.e., no actual labwork is being done. I feel you can make this inference pretty safely from, for instance, the fact that the phony papers reference a nonexistent statistical methodology. If real work is being conducted, why bother citing a fictitious methodology?

I could be wrong, but I felt that soup-to-nuts fraud was strongly implied in the piece.
The idea that quantity strictly beats quality is not uncontroversial, however. There is plenty of evidence of people doing great work (usually also coming from a small-ish set of "superstar" labs), and still doing just fine. See, for instance, this list: http://www.thespectroscope.com/read/its-not-publish-or-peris...

I think the fact that all the paper mill instances cited in the OP are from Chinese groups suggests that this is a problem driven by a few broken systems (primarily in the developing world), and not the modern scientific enterprise as a whole.
JSON# – Tutorial #4: Deserialising Simple Objects
> And please, that high powered electromagnetic waves are a health hazard does not need a citation.

We've had AM/FM transmission towers spread around the global transmitting at 100,000 Watts for decades, many in residential areas. Yet we have no conclusive evidence that there are negative health effects on those living next to them.
I'm used to this?

I'll be leaving my job here in a few weeks for what I consider my dream gig. I expect to be criticized on nearly every project, because that makes me a better coder.

I'm not sure if it's just adapting to the environment or if I actually like the general cynicism. A pat on the back is nice, but I strongly believe in the "this is always shit" mantra of software dev. There is always something that can be improved, and beating around the bush with flowery language doesn't really help to fix it.

> but it’s pretty tough to come back from, “I don’t know” on your first interview question.

Argh, don't ever answer a question with just "I don't know". At least speak to how you would figure it out.
Wow, so TIL MIT has a course dedicated to mastering Google, Facebook & Apple interview questions. Thanks for the list.
What? I know I have to put in upper case for my password for WoW.

They also have authenticators before a lot of other people had them. And please use one if you do. Battle.net accounts are targets.
As free speech advocates, we mourn the use of violence against individuals who used creativity and free expression to engage in cultural and political criticism. Murder is the ultimate form of censorship

It always amaze me why do world want to practice freedom of expressions against Islam only. Why not one is allowed to mock Holocaust like things by using same tool of freedom of expression?
My choice would have been "640K ought to be enough for anybody".

(This will be understood only by those who lost countless hours tweaking their autoexec.bat and config.sys to squeeze that last KB of memory needed to run the game they were supposed to spend the weekend playing ).
Freelancing Digest: A curated newsletter for freelancers
Depends on whether you're talking about party primaries or general elections. An example of this phenomenon wrt a different topic http://www.vox.com/2015/1/5/7494179/immigration-republican-p...
First state to legalize, in fact
The problem is there's no good heuristic for determining when that "no" was a resolt of a clear flaw of the candidate, or of subjective prejudice of the interviewer. On that situation the prevailing policy is to always assume prejudice and try to discover you flaws by some other mean.
Interesting. I have a Dell 2408WFP and it exhibits the behavior.
> So there's this big space where neither party is in a position to judge, but the advocates want you to try. Somehow, that always seems to get internalized as, "they think they know better". They don't. They've found it to be a big win for them and other people, and they have an educated guess that therefore it'll be better for you, even if it initially doesn't seem like it. That's really not unreasonable.

That's fine. There's a totally reasonable case to be made for that, for Smalltalk, Haskell, and Lisp (at least). The advocates just need to express it in a way that doesn't come across as "I'm enlightened; you're ignorant. Once you're enlightened, you'll do it my way." That's counter-productive. It turns people off rather than encouraging them to try it and see.
As Police Go Idle, So Do New York City Courts
I also came across Gawande's Checklist Manifesto when creating a usability checklist for websites: https://userium.com/ As Freakonomics said: "The book’s main point is simple: no matter how expert you may be, well-designed check lists can improve outcomes".
I have learned a similar lesson over the past few months - I was thrust into a leadership position by part circumstance, and when it came to working with junior developers, it clicked that I needed to be building them up & increase their confidence in the correct approaches to engineering, not be hyper critical. I am indeed hypercritical of my own work, always striving for self-improvement, but I recognize that different people are at different stages of their lives, and it does no good to expect that everyone is the same as me.

There is a lack of empathy in the industry at large for people attempting to enter as a software engineer, and on a human level, it is an awful thing - many of them are people like us trying to make their way in the world and live a better life. It is a forgotten point, and I wish more would contribute towards the future.
Ignored expressions in Racket bytecode
Indeed. The moderate Moslem world needs to stand up and condemn/exile their radical brethren.
LA is all about the neighborhood you live in. LA neighborhoods are basically self-contained cities. if you choose the right one, you don't need a car. e.g.: santa monica, venice, west hollywood, downtown, silverlake, dt culver city, dt pasadena, etc, etc, etc. these are dense urban areas with top notch city housing within walking distance (10 minutes) of everything. it's city-expensive but not like NY or SF (with exceptions, like santa monica).

most people in LA commute clear across the entire county, which is why they need a car. most of these people are middle class, they could move if they wanted to, but they don't want to.

today, with uber and other services, the only reason you would "need" a car in LA is to commute, unless you make terrible living choices. also the expo line (downtown-west side light rail) will be done in a year.
How the Battle of New Orleans Birthed the American Character
CodeCombat (YC W14) is hiring a Chief Artisan (level builder)
The State of Mobile in 2015 [Infographic]
An Amazon Data Center in Virginia Is on Fire
That's not really something new though. Stressers / Booters are a thing for a long time now.
How to Target the Best Market for Your Startup [Part 1]
That would be for case-insensitive matching, not matching on the case being inverted.
I think it's more about the idea of grouping humans together by a generic number.
Multiple Return Statements
I would distinguish insurance vs. welfare by whether you can collect them without having paid into them first. That would make Social Security, SSDI and unemployment insurance programs while food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid are welfare programs. Whether they are paid with a special tax or from the general fund is orthogonal to whether they are insurance or welfare.
How good is PHP?
A tremendous year is upon us
Humans in general have a serious problem saying "I don't know." Someone who is able to admit that they don't know something deserves your respect, at the very least.
PlainSite (http://www.plainsite.org) has about 12K users per day on average. Most of them are just browsing for cases, not paying, but some are paying.

The main stress on the system is really determined by the complexity of the SQL queries on each page. I've spent a great deal of time optimizing them, and I know there are certain ones that need to be further optimized. I have the database (MySQL) on one server, the web server and documents on another, and static resources such as images on a third, which probably isn't even necessary. All three servers run Linux and the database server has 48GB of RAM. They're hardly new; you could buy all of this equipment today for under $1,000 total.

The biggest technical bottleneck is really RAM; the biggest expense for this kind of site is bandwidth.
Stuff Every Junior Developer Should Know
This is a bad analogy because Israel continues in the modern day to usurp land from Palestinians, forcing them to self-dispossess. So if you're going to say exportation and colonization is wrong and should be illegal, you're right, this was learned during WWII and codified in the Geneva Conventions after it and why all Jewish settler land acquired on Arab villages is considered illegal by the international community minus Israel. And yet this land transfer continues as settlements are expanded, today. So it is not moot to question the rightness of modern day Israel or any other state that forces an indigenous population to self-dispossess.
A Career in Science Will Cost You Your Firstborn
Long live the new flesh!
Yeah, I am sure they are sending the "password reset" email out intentionally even though they fully know this account doesn't exist, so an attacker wastes resetting a password for it.
When testing for correctness why would you care about timing attacks? You would obviously have multiple tests covering correctness, performance, security, etc.
Real World Cryptography Workshop Slides
If you send a hash instead of a password, that hash _is_ your password. If I steal the hash but not the string it was derived from, I can pretend to be you and log in.
My old Samsung's SyncMaster T200 sound a little at the thinner bars.
Yes - and we should do everything in our hand to facilitate it.
This article conflates programming and making a product. The example of creating 'an app that would save the planet' most likely has little to do with who programmed it, and more to do with what it is, and how it is applied in the world.
For the 2 matching cases, it only reduces to 51^n
But this is exactly the point of the article: There is an entire world in between "only interested in finding holes to poke" and "a pat on the back". It's a wonderful place, full of bridges and people working together that DOESN'T imply "I assume this is already perfect or else you wouldn't be wasting my time telling me about it."
Learning Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks
I think it's (ballpark) safe to say a story that gets frontpaged for two days will have at least its title read by a million people.[0] Most of those people aren't going to attempt to wade through the comments section looking for insight, of those that do many won't find it. A decent chunk of casual readers will read the title, see it agrees with their social views and move on with the knowledge that their social activism has the backing of modern science. This may not seem like a big deal but remember that people thinking non-scientific things were science is how the anti-vax movement started.

Take the Barbie story as an example. Even when it was becoming clear that the study was weak, that the reviewing journal shared the same biases as the researchers, that the title was misleading, etc. the mods didn't do what's common for other large subs which is flair the title as "potentially misleading" or "early study, may not be reproducible" or just something to let the casual viewer know that this isn't science in the way that what's going on at CERN is science.

[0] - http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic
The Most Valuable Django Command Ever
Don't confuse training with education.

Free job training is not equivalent to free education. The latter provides skills and knowledge for the future benefit of the student. That determination of future benefit is often made by the student. The former also provides skills and knowledge, but it is for the future benefit of the employer, and employer-directed. That represents a foregone opportunity. Any trainee could have spent the same time acquiring free education, traded it working in a job that does not require that marginal additional skill, or even wasted that time on leisure activity.

Trainees should always be paid. In this case, they were paid with in-kind services upon conclusion of the training program. To do less might have earned the author a reputation for unethical behavior.

Many companies seeking to hire within the software industry do not recognize the opportunity costs imposed by their hiring procedures. If you require candidates to waste an entire day or more on your interview process, yes, you do owe them something for their time. It need not be settled in cash, but if not, honest feedback on the results of the interview is the bare minimum acceptable payment. The interviewees are expecting their lost time to be an investment, not just a gamble.
If you want to see real delight in your work, do it for someone who needs it!

They are usually not your co-workers :)
Yeah, because no one can create wealth, especially not women...
Fire at AWS Ashburn, VA Data Center
Might I suggest a round of testing on Amazon or Rackspace? They both have 10Gb-equipped instance types with SSDs and everything, for a few bucks per cluster-hour. That shouldn't break even an academic budget. You might not be able to do your special ZERO networking in that environment, but you'd be able to explore other interesting corners of the performance space and your experiments would be reproducible by others.
This project is very close to an idea I had in 2009 I really hope it takes off:

http://justinvincent.com/page/tag/venture-matrix
Practical Time Series Visualization Using D3 + OM
Have you used these? Seems like it would be annoying to be plugged into USB while I type (especially since I have no more USB ports available!).

I use fingerless gloves and a mini personal heater occasionally in the office when it gets cold. My coworkers find it a bit strange, but I like to program in comfort.