skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is not a nice job.

The first "issue" is that ``DoSomething accesses x directly rather than through the parameter'', but then goes on to talk about types.

I think this is a big part of why we are bad at programming: A because 6 therefore Go Fish.

I have noticed that when a program is small enough that I can see all of it, then I can reason about all of it, and when I cannot see all of the code, then I cannot. I may resort to note-taking or trying to remember while flipping tabs quickly, or even outright guessing, but I certainly am not reasoning about it.

I do not buy that typing variables, or lambdas, or long method names (like `Equal`), or having "compile time", or `null` or "function signatures" offers anything like the gains had by able to see all of the program, so I'm disinclined to waste energy on what I view as premature optimisation.
"You can make that application work but what's happening beneath the surface? Your code is duct tape and string and, worst of all, you don’t even know which parts are terrible and which are actually just fine."

I commonly get to this point after just wanting to proof out a concept and get something working. And then I realize I need to go back and do the unglamorous work of getting it right. But I learn the most then, and helps enormously on future projects.
And Comcast still wants to merge with Time Warner, so there will be a certain amount of playing nice (at least for a while).
That's funny you say that. I am a computer programmer and I also do a once a year pop up restaurant. I cook on the level of some very good chefs without the formal training so I'm more wasteful and slower but create great dishes just the same.

I started thinking of design patterns in cooking when I took a class on stocks, soups and sauces. In traditional French cooking you see the bones, shells and carcass of any animal you cook used to make a base liquid that can then be transformed (refined) further.

Take a chicken for example. I'll debone it and use the bones, feet, head and excess skin to make stock with it. I'll either grill it before dipping it in water to extract the flavour or do a "white" stock by dipping in water without browning. To this I'll add aromatic veggies and spices. Once you understand how to extracts taste from the carcass you can expand on that and concentrate the flavour by reducing it and then you have a liquid with many good properties. You can then apply the same technique to any mammal, bird, fish or seafood you can think of.

Perhaps my favorite "cooking pattern" is the demi-glace. This takes the (usually veal) stock, concentrates flavours further with tomatoes, mushrooms and a standard mirepoix but adds a roux to thicken it. You can then use any tasty liquid you can find to mix with it and you have an instant high quality sauce. I've made demi-glace that I've used for mushroom sauce, bordelaise (red wine), tarragon poultry sauce, porto and cherry sauce, etc...

The reality is that a lot of the idea of patterns have been codified by the late Auguste Escoffier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Escoffier. His influence is huge in the cooking world. Kitchens and cooking just wouldn't be the same without him.
High-Tech Fashion Redefines Meaning of Revealing Clothing
What exactly are your golden handcuffs? I assume you are a developer in the US? Unless your handcuffs are paying like 300k+ yearly then one thing to consider is that you can probably find another similarly paying job without too much work. You definitely don't want to miss out on a huge IPO but sit down and do the math.
Motivation.

If you don't have the motivation you'll never be able to do it. If you can't sit in front of a computer for 8 hours a day reading documentation and hunting for syntax errors you're not going to be able to do it. If re-writing algorithms doesn't give you an intrinsic satisfaction, you're not going to be able to do it. No amount of everybody can code tutorials is going to help. They should all be, "how to find the motivation to keep coding" tutorials.

Unrelated, but related to the article, the word sociopath get's misused a lot and this article is no exception. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sociopath
Not to dive too off topic, but the telecom industry has been heavily regulated and in no way represents a free market.

Through franchise fees, fighting public right of way sharing, and other forms of lobbying these large corporations have used law and regulation to their favor. This is not a position libertarians support and it is not a market anyone would point at and call "unregulated" in any sense of the term.
It is not ignorant to be sketical of a political appointee, on the contrary, anyone is wise to be skeptical. Observe the tremendous difficulty of either political party to find and appoint suitable people to these positions. Color me cautiously optimistic, but not yet ready to abandon all Wheeler/FCC skepticism. There are so many things in politics that are not what they appear to be; and, there has to be a tremendous amount of pressure on Wheeler from all sides. If Wheeler turns out to be a political appointee who manages to be a reasonable advocate for the citizenry despite the considerable pressure from all competing interests, I'll call him a remarkable exception.
Maybe. It's a high price to pay for that, though. And with the rise of JS-as-target tools like asm.js and WebSharper, that toolchain doesn't necessarily have to be Javascript.
Distribution is inherently a low margin business, that's why I don't think they ever will start making significant profits.
As I am searching now for a legitimate source, I generally come up with Yemen's attempt to negotiate the surrender. [1] However, as far as the Father's attempt to negotiate, I can only come up with a CNN article. [2]

>"I will do my best to convince my son to do this (surrender), to come back but they are not giving me time, they want to kill my son. How can the American government kill one of their own citizens? This is a legal issue that needs to be answered," he said.
"If they give me time I can have some contact with my son but the problem is they are not giving me time," he said.

I am sure the lawsuit would detail all attempts he made with the US to begin negotiations.

[1] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
[2]http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/01/10/yemen.al.awlaki.fa...
In this context, "lawful" is probably intended to refer to categories of content than any particular instance. That is, it leaves the door open for blocking known categories of unlawful content like child porn, pirated software, malware, and maybe spam. Depending on implementation, this could definitely be problematic -- e.g. will Comcast interpret this as carte blanche to block BitTorrent if the majority of BitTorrent use is unlawful?

But it's still a huge net gain for startups, most of which fall safely on the lawful side of the line.
FreeSlick – Free software continuation of the Slick MS-SQL driver
I agree, but the financial barrier to entry is pretty high. Even if you remove the bureaucracy.
Interesting discussion on the relevant GitHub issue here:

https://github.com/slick/slick/issues/1052
Amazon Discounts Philip K. Dick
The captcha one? As a Tor user for casual browsing it is really a slap in the face to see that on websites I considered supportive of privacy.
Being an engineer is about more than just technical skills, though. Engineers get it beaten into them that their first duty is to protect the public; their employer comes second. That means having the backbone to say "No" to unsafe demands, even if it costs them their job.

If he's as good, and as experienced as you say, he should be able to just do the legal/ethics stuff and get a license. Unfortunately, the professional associations are streamlined for people who take the usual path through university. At least in my jurisdiction, it is technically possible to have the experience counted, rather than the degree, but it's much harder.

The system is clearly not perfect, but when you ask the average engineer whether it's ok to do things like lie about their experience, you will get very different answers than if you asked the general public. The gatekeeper is doing a real job, even if they don't do it perfectly.
The shields would themselves increase both drag and weight. It's probably very challenging to land on the back of a truck due to the airflow around the truck, it would require a drone which can withstand high winds, turbulent air, and has much more powerful motors to perform the mavouvre. That would increase the weight of the drone significantly, so you're unlikely to see energy savings.
Thanks, glad you liked it enough to spend your hard-earned cash!

We're using Stripe for the payment back end. Highly recommended - so simple to integrate.
Right. And software developers usually don't realize that engineering is all about design and implementation tradeoffs that fit within quantitative tolerances that deliver a specific level of accuracy, precision, and reliability. Software 'engineering' is nowhere near mature enough to do achieve this, and all too often, unaware of it.
You're creating a straw man. I don't disagree that he's copied you. I disagree that it's stealing. I don't think what he did is wrong.
I Visit Libraries to Sell Bitcoins to Random People from the Internet
They might - some already do (block or throttle torrent traffic, that is).

The difference is that right now if your ISP blocks torrent traffic you have literally no recourse besides going to a competitor (if one exists, which odds are one does not). You are after all not legally entitled to torrent traffic.

The change here is that if an ISP unilaterally starts blocking torrent traffic, you (or more likely, the EFF or similar org) can sue to have torrent traffic declared lawful, after which the ISP is legally bound to open the traffic.

The trick here isn't that ISP shitty behavior will be impossible under the new rules, but rather that there will be more power to the citizenry to combat many categories such shitty behavior.
This may be thinking back on things with rose tinted glasses, but I learned to code in qbasic when I was 12 or so at a Boys and Girls club after school and fell in love. It was entirely effortless and fun to me. I think the difference is at that point I wasn't trying to program to enter some lucrative career and be a startup guy (where are these "coders" going to be once the market dies down and a new industry is hot? probably trying to do that). For me it was something I loved immediately, and while obviously there are really hard problems, the coding part was effortless
Prismatic releases API for interest tagging, in free beta to all developers
I had the same initial impression. All I can think is that he was in "the business" for so long, he was able to see its pitfalls and shortcomings, and chose to take the high road and do right by The People. He sounds like a genuinely good person, rare in American politics.
Looks interesting. But surely there are such things available at universities already?
You're obviously much more versed in this than I am, so I'm probably missing something here. But your comment reminds me that, if we could get the cables to stop killing muni wifi initiatives, that'd be a great start.
I don't think 2 is especially compelling unless you've also bought into 5. For mutable objects, object identity is very important, and a default comparison that obscures it is much less appealing.

I'm not arguing against those two conclusions as a pair, just with the order in which the article presents them.
If you are in a position to quit, I'd put it at 0%.
The President can still veto though, and Obama's been pretty supportive of net neutrality recently. So we'll at least have net neutrality around for a little under two years. After that, the hope is that sheer inertia keeps things from reverting.
Removing directories is simple.

http://git-scm.com/docs/git-filter-branch

But you can do almost anything via custom scripts.
Can you elaborate on "the SOLID principles [...] are in fact anti-patterns"? I don't see this point of view exposed often, can you point me to some resources in this regard?
Well said.

Smart people tend to avoid getting into a "I have to be lucky every day, they just have to get lucky once" situation -- especially when it involves their life or freedom.
Is This the Real Roswell Alien Footage?
At Backblaze, we've done a lot of our own analyses on our hard drives to look at which ones are most reliable, whether temperature affects reliability, etc. However, we kept being asked for the raw data so people could run their own analyses.

This data set releases 500 million data points on 41,000 drives. I imagine you guys here at YCombinator/Hacker News are the ones who'd find this data amongst the most useful. Enjoy and let us know what you find!
Totally unrelated to this, but I was interested to see how often the Dunning-Kruger effect is mentioned on HN, since it seems like the comments on almost anything will inevitably yield some reference to it (the opposite, impostor syndrome, comes up quite often too, but has a more obvious and less interesting name); a quick search yields 730 results for "Dunning Kruger" over all time, and half a dozen in the last week alone... which was perhaps a little less than I was expecting, but still rather a lot.

Totally unrelated to that, Algolia's HN search really is magnificent - supremely fast, accurate, and even quite attractive. Impressive.
Migrating Our Continuous Integration from AWS to Platform9 Managed OpenStack
Is something wrong with your system? This is what I see: http://i.imgur.com/9yWsXIx.png
Machine Learning + NLP Tutorial – Lesson 1
If you haven't already come across Backblaze's series of blog posts based on these data sets, they're worth reading. Invaluable in helping me make an HDD purchasing decision and full of well presented data.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/
"To know but not to do is not to know."
A Software Engineering Perspective on Cryptocurrencies
Did your previous leveldb approach perform way worse on reads, writes or both?
Aurelia Q&A
It's only hard once you realize the commitment required, partly due to the pace of innovation, the depth and breadth of information available and the fact you're competing with the entire world, not just people in your city/state, and there's nobody regulating the influx of competition. A significant chunk of your life will be spent looking at a screen and there's a chance you could end up with a crippling case of carpal tunnel. It's a sacrifice and most people won't make it. In the same amount of time you RTFM, you could have learned to be a brain surgeon, a rocket scientist and a lawyer. And once you have it all figured out, half of everything you learned gets flushed down the toilet because there's some new platform. If you think it's hard and you're not enjoying yourself, don't even bother, there's easier ways to make money.
Atom – Built-in 6to5 support deep dive
> I'm hesitant to cram into a time series database data that I consider boolean.

A boolean can be treated as a 1 or a 0. Sometimes you can even go richer than that, such as with a count of affected processes from your example - which you could convert back to a 1/0 if you wanted in the expression language.

> That architecture or configuration of this exporter isn't documented yet

The node_exporter as a whole still needs docs. That module is pretty new, and it's not exactly obvious what it does or why it exists.

Labels/dimensions are supported too, it's the same text format that Prometheus uses elsewhere ( http://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/exposition_formats/)

> if just magically sent numbers upstream from text files that I keep up to date

Pretty much, you'll also get the rest of the module of the node exporter (cpu, ram, disk, network) and associated consoles which http://www.boxever.com/monitoring-your-machines-with-prometh... describes how to setup.
Can state taxes currently be pain in New Hampshire with anything other than USD?
> This is unsubstantiated. Has anyone met a 40 year-old in Silicon Valley that's gotten plastic surgery?

How many would admit it if they had? It's probably overblown, but last year there were a number of news reports about a boom in cosmetic surgery in the tech sector. It was even on the Colbert Report: http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/1ypxfz/silicon-valley-...
Great question! Some top tier universities do have things they like to say do automated grading, but even students and teachers I've talked to at Stanford, UC Berkeley, etc. say that they don't work well and are very difficult to use. They also don't have any of the awesome code feedback tools that GradeTrain does :)
Mysterious 'Apple Electric Car, Inc.' Files for Patent
America is simply much more sophisticated in its methods of mass control. China deploys primitive ham-fisted stuff like web controls and their "great firewall," while America is much more skilled in the fine-grained use of soft power and propaganda to achieve the same effects. American oligarchs know better than to whack people indiscriminately with crude mallets or to show their hand too overtly. My guess would be that they learned this from the British elite, who are probably the undisputed global masters at weathering social and political storms through flexing and employing soft nuanced mechanisms to hold power. Britain still has a royal dynasty while most of the rest of Europe's royals lost their heads.

America excels at creating the illusion of freedom and at permitting enough freedom at lower levels of society to sustain that illusion, but at the top American corporations and the American national security state are almost indistinguishable. Ex-vice-presidents serve on the boards of major VC firms, and Google is basically the state department. That's not that different from China. When American financial elites get in real trouble, unlimited public funds suddenly materialize to bail them out. The same thing of course would happen in China. In both nations if you are sufficiently connected, neither laws nor the ordinary rules of economics apply to you... unless you are so crude and reckless that you overtly tip your hand in which case an example is made of you to preserve the illusion. This also happens regularly in China's "corruption crackdowns."

Americans value freedom of expression, and that's a good thing, but at the end of the day we have no real choice but to elect a Republican or a Democrat and our media is remarkably complacent and docile. I'd say the vast majority of our media are akin to BuzzFeed for government propaganda, and the rest are too chronically under-funded or intellectually out to lunch (e.g. conspiranoids) to make any difference. I highly doubt the condition of our media is an accident. The public is free to converse, but most of that talk is impotent.

I'm really not familiar with any large-scale society that is not an oligarchy. That being said, some are pragmatically better places to live than others. I'd rather live in the USA or another Western "democracy" than in most other places. Soft nuanced mechanisms of control generally don't kill you or send you to camps.
And for Amazon it was nothing but a PR stunt to get 60 Minutes to do a piece on AMZN the night before Black Friday.
start writing my own programs

Indeed, you can only get good at programming by doing it.

As someone who learnt programming in the 90ies, one of the difficult things nowadays seems to be that there are so many languages, libraries, frameworks, hypes, etc. Of course, if you know your CS and have experience, most of it are variations on common themes. However, I can imagine that it can be very difficult to focus on one thing and learning it well. There must be many copy & paste programmers out there who never learn anything in depth.

At the beginning of the nineties things were much simpler. If you had a home PC (obviously without internet), you could get started with QBasic, or shell out some money for a compiler and get Turbo Pascal or Turbo C++.

I did quite a bit of Turbo Pascal programming at some point and it was all very understandable. A simple language, a small standard library that's probably all that you'll have, good documentation, and an IDE (which had a very nice debugger and profiler). And you just crafted tools with that.
I know that very well. The same goes for the term "President". I didn't say the terms are mutually exclusive, the point is the way they choose the terms to describe those considered allies and those considered enemies.
> Variables should not be allowed to change their type.

This is the preservation component of the formal concept "type safety". Thus any type safe language must achieve this.

> Objects containing the same values should be equal by default.

This one really depends on a lot of things. You may have abstract types in which case equality should not be implicitly defined. You may also have codata types where you cannot merely compare "value containment" since it's no longer a concept. These are both important things which are sometimes called "objects" and shouldn't be eliminated from languages.

Really, this is a lot more complex than it seems. But at first swing: "structural equality should be everywhere and reference equality isn't a genuine concept" is pretty great.

> Comparing objects of different types is a compile-time error.

This is a-OK so long as it's easy to prove when two dissimilar types are actually the same. In cases where that's not true there are other forms of equality which are useful.

> Once created, objects and collections must be immutable.

This is a little overly strong. Regionalized mutability can be made to be referentially transparent from the outside.

---

But man, yeah, this are tiny nits. This list is great.
> I'd love to see drones just hitching a ride

Except that it might be the last thing you'd see, before the drone fails and comes crashing through your windshield. Seriously though, if you're in the car behind a drone trying to land on a car ahead when it fails, there's no failsafe.
I just want to reply to your first point. Verizon is not "throttling" traffic to youtube/netflix, it is just allowing peering links to be saturated because the providers are out of compliance with their peering rules.

You can read their peering rules here: http://www.verizonenterprise.com/terms/peering/

We can argue that it is just semantics but it is more in-depth than "throttling."
I'm also a coder who has recently started attacking his kitchen incompetency! (but on the order of months ago, not years ago...) I prefer baking because I can rigorously follow directions in the worst case and get something acceptable, and because it feels a little alchemical and magical.

Something I wish recipes would discuss is "why do we do X?" or "what would happen if we did not do X here?" Like, say, the recipe calls for one teaspoon of salt. What if we added zero, or two? I think this is a little different from the pattern recognition discussed in the article.

These explanations would help beginners understand what is essential and what can be omitted (if necessary) or substituted. It would also foster creativity in the learning process. I don't want to experiment blindly and fail and have spent lots of time and effort on something inedible, especially given that I'm a novice who needs all the encouragement he can get. But if I understood the reasoning behind a particular step in the recipe, I'd be more willing to mess with it.
The lesser-known member of Facebook's original team is ready for the spotlight
Fundraiser for walker with killer commute reaches $230K
You'd be an excellent candidate to get a lot out of a coding bootcamp. If you have like $10k in savings or money you can borrow, you'd be in an excellent position to try something like that.

PM me if you'd like to talk about my experience with one.
Both. When I switched our production Prometheis over, the consoles rendered more than twice as fast for a simple test case.