skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Python outcompetes C++ in the market by a significant multiple. Python is used in diverse applications, many of them quite ambitious --- game backends, computer algebra, cryptography, network filesystems, simulation code, machine learning.

So is it just that the subset of applications that still get written, for some reason, in 2015 C++ are heavily dependent on specialized Sort implementations? Or is it instead the case that really Sort just isn't that big a deal?

It's pretty easy to look around briefly and see that a fair amount of ambitious stuff is being built in Golang. Somehow, they manage to do it without sum types and generics!
I've had some interesting experiences. Years ago in addition to our internal IT infrastructure I had to support a third party platform (effectively an appliance in our server rack) which would constantly need to be kicked just due to end users using standard features. That was a nightmare as back then I was too eager and diligent and strove to be available to deal with things promptly whether it was responding to a crisis caused by another developer's code or responding to a failure in the third party platform. I had all the responsibility and none of the authority to implement any definitive fixes. As you can imagine, the stress was not enjoyable and burnout was a factor.

Since then I've taken a fairly laissez-faire attitude to being on call. I'll pick up notifications on an as available, best effort basis. That means if I'm around and get an alert, I'll do my best to resolve the issue right away. However, if I'm with friends, my phone will be in my jacket pocket hanging in a closet somewhere while I might be drinking and I'll see any alerts when I'm leaving for the night. That could be many, many hours later. I make no effort to restrict my activities so that I'm always around. And if I leave my phone on vibrate and don't pick up any alerts while I enjoy a sound night's sleep, so be it.

If "as available, best effort" on my part isn't good enough, then the company will need to compensate me appropriately for the interruption that comes from a higher level of commitment. Some physicians get $100/day and cardiologists get up to $1600/day to be on call[0] as they need to limit their plans and avoid activities which make them unavailable.

In a nutshell, if getting paged at all hours of the day and night and having quick responses to issues is important enough then the company needs to pay for your time, lifestyle interruption, and mental energy at a rate you think is fair. I suggest a minimum daily/weekly/monthly rate based on making yourself available plus hourly compensation for the actual time you put in at a 1.5x or 2x hourly rate. This all goes out the window if you're in some scrappy underfunded startup, but if you're employed in a company which has graduated from shoestring budgets and has paying customers and decent revenue then you should be getting something for what is effectively overtime.

[0] http://medicaleconomics.modernmedicine.com/medical-economics...
“Fraudsters obtained information that’s generally only found on income-tax returns.” In some cases, the fraudulent 2014 returns closely resemble 2013 returns, with only minor alterations—implying that the scammer had access to the taxpayers’ 2013 returns.

There was a data breach.
> Go provides automatic garbage collection of allocated memory. It is not necessary (or possible) to release memory explicitly. There is no need to worry about heap-allocated vs. stack-allocated storage, new vs. malloc, or delete vs. delete[] vs. free. There is no need to separately manage std::unique_ptr, std::shared_ptr, std::weak_ptr, std::auto_ptr, and ordinary, "dumb" pointers. Go's run-time system handles all of that error-prone code on the programmer's behalf.

This is not an attractive statement to C++ programmers like the author probably imagines it is. We like being in control of our memory. C++ programmers who would prefer to not manage memory have probably already switched to Java or C#.
This is fascinating concept, especially since I've always felt that my PGP key was sitting out there mostly useless since no one I know personally signs their emails or even knows someone who signs emails. However, wouldn't the weak part here be if my twitter (or other public) account was compromised somehow? Or if someone just impersonated me and sent a "unique tweet" pretending to be me?

How does HN feel about that identity aspect? Is it supposed to replaced key signing or just augment it?

I'm frankly not sure I fully get my head around the concept, even after reading this page:

https://keybase.io/docs/tracking

But it's Friday afternoon, so that could be it...
Now that would change everything.

And probably do a lot of damage to Silicon Valley. It would make startups much less risk-friendly.
Yes, that EFF scorecard is terrible.
Node.js v0.12 Is Now Available with Improvements to Clustering and Performance
And the official announcement on the NodeJS blog:

http://blog.nodejs.org/2015/02/06/node-v0-12-0-stable/
Superbowl Halftime shark outfit now on Indiegogo
Been lurking for a while, figured this'd be a good place to make my first post.

I'm a trans woman (MtF). This isn't the first time (and it won't be the last) I've observed something about gender stereotypes just from having lived on both sides.

One stereotype that's widely known in the trans community is that a disproportionately large percentage of trans women work in tech (or are tech hobbyists). The "MtF CS nerd" is probably the biggest trans stereotype I can think of.

This stereotype doesn't extend to trans men (FtMs). In fact, it's assumed that the ratio of MtFs to FtMs in tech is about the same as the ratio of cis men to cis women in tech.

In the main online trans community I run in, where this stereotype is endlessly touted as being true (often tongue-in-cheek), most of us start our transitions somewhere between 18-45 and by and large is biased towards people who started in our twenties (I started at 28, myself, and I'm 30 now). People who started before or after that are really rare in that particular community (there are other communities that swing younger or older, by the way -- I'm just talking about the group I run with).

The only real conclusion is that whatever biased us towards or against careers in tech based on our perceived genders must have occurred in childhood, definitely before college and probably before high school as well. It probably happened in toddlerhood, really. There's an excellent SMBC comic on this, by the way, but I'm new and I don't know if posting a link will get this post tossed into the spam filter.

This is why I think putting pressure on companies to recruit more and more adult women is fundamentally flawed. There just aren't enough adult cis women who are interested, no matter how much any company tries to recruit. I'm also particularly appalled by attempts to demonize Linus Torvalds for not having enough women as core kernel developers: it's not his fault that people perceived as female (i.e. cis girls and pre-transition FtMs) are told as early as preschool that they shouldn't be interested in technology. Fix that part of society instead of demonizing project leaders.
Time to warm up the test suites and see what the damage is...
No, I mean that my argument there was perilously close to said fallacy.
Was struck by how they got them out despite the lease - sure, on paper you're supposed to pay x, but we want more...
in regards to the person your responding to:

It's not nonsensical at all. His friend is arguing that if we accept losses to disease then the following humans will be the more resilient ones.

however, I thought I would mention a rather fatal flaw in this argument:

There is no guarantee that humans that can survive diseases like the measles will be "stronger" than humans who can not.

For example, Sickle cell anemia, a genetic disease, is an ADAPTION to survive malaria. It's an intentional sacrifice.

Bacteria that adapt to anti-biotics arn't necessarily stronger than bacteria who did not adapt. Adapted bacteria make sacrifices to survive a hostile agent, they don't get it for free.

So attempting to immunize humans by breeding them to be resistant/immune has no guarantee to make humans stronger. It's possible the change required could be entirely benign, or it could be catastrophic.
Everyone wants a "Manhattan Project" for their own pet technology.

The real MP was building technology that they theoretically knew was possible. Most modern calls for an MP are "just throw a lot of money at this thing," which is how it works in games like "Civilization" but doesn't actually in the real world.

From TFA:

A real Manhattan Project for cyber would draw together some of the greatest minds of our time, from government, academia, the private sector, and civil society

. . . who would proceed to bitch at each other endlessly. I firsthand saw what should have been a nice cordial introductory meeting turn into an hour-long shitstorm about which person at the table invented the term "firewall" (since more than one of them had claimed credit).
If it makes you feel any better, this would take up at least one two-hour lecture in a decent graduate-level university course on GR.

If you are going to try and comprehend it on you own, I am personally fond of Simmonds' "A brief on tensor analysis" as an introduction to the way vectors are understood here.
compare that with the long winded resignation letter from Steve Ballmer. Steve Jobs always knew how to keep it simple.

http://news.microsoft.com/2014/08/19/steve-ballmer-steps-dow...
one issue could be the study design. I can't quite tell from the NYT writeup, but it seems that the test graded by the teacher was a different test than the one graded by outside teachers. That could definitely have an impact
Perfectly fine by me. Running a business the way pg wants you to would probably make you a pretty lousy parent.
Slava created an interesting language but I never saw an explaination of why he moved away from Factor. He just stopped (writing and caring ?) about it.
It's an easy problem to solve but the solutions (Estonia style national identity cards or a flat PAYE tax on all forms of income) are not politically viable in the US.
It does not compile because of the header =\ I tried and even though it can be forgiving of null characters, it definitely doesn't like the stray bytes.
That is an awesome result. It is incredibly complex.

I have always been curious what causes the cycles of glaciation, humans emerged at the end of such a cycle, and I have always expected we (as a species) will see the start of the next one. But the mechanics have always been a mystery.
Heh... I think that's why the announcement hasn't been made on Twitter and such just yet. Waiting to see if they need to immediately release 0.12.1
States also claim they weren't breached. They just said data was filed through "third party" tax filing services.

As others pointed out, it does look like one of those two entities above were breached, as data filed in forms is very similar to data from 2013.
I'm ready to show my ignorance. Cryptocat bad? I had been using it to help people get their feet wet for OTR. What must I read?
The tax-software company said that after a preliminary examination with Palantir Technologies, which provides security and antifraud services, it believes there wasn’t a breach of Intuit systems and that "the information used to file fraudulent returns was obtained from other sources outside the tax preparation process."

Did you read the article?
I check up on you from time to time. Virtunova's been offline for ages as well.

I'm kicking around ways of making email more reliable, one option that occurs to me is key negotiation at transmit time, or as part of the delivery process. That is: a user's home mailserver would be key-aware. Though that too is subject to skulduggery.

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The robot that takes sick children to the zoo
Here’s the Trailer for Silicon Valley Season 2
Just use OTR. ChatSecure on iOS is fine. Cryptocat is not safe.
This basically sounds like the lean-startup equivalent in the non-tech space. I suspect it's more possible than before because it's easier for the coops to outsource the legal bits than it used to be. It is ironic and perhaps even naive to pitch this as a reaction against capitalism when it is the efficiencies of capitalism making it possible in the first place.

And if these people really think this is a reaction against "capitalism", in its capacity as all-powerful bogeyman rather than description of how economic transactions work...

"but to Henry Lezama, the goal is to keep growing, to bring more people into the cooperative."

... they're in for a shock because as they bring in more people, in the limit this just becomes another form of business, and as more regulations kick in based on their size they won't be able to help becoming a "business", to say nothing of how "flat management" becomes practically impossible pretty quickly and hierarchy will set in. (It's a human thing, not an ideological thing or a government thing or a "capitalism" thing. We instinctively, and I mean that fully literal, structure ourselves into social hierarchies.)

It's fantastic that people are starting to realize this and move the gains of this sort of business structure down the economic ladder. It's a powerful and flexible structure for both the members and society itself.
Have you considered getting some help to finish it faster? It looks great, by the way.
This function is fully typed: http://i.imgur.com/xHWlJVn.png

Types are optional and they can be also inferred.
That sounded a bit odd - I can see the issue from either side, but why were they still paying a rent negotiated 15 years ago? Did the landlord actually sign a 15+ year contract? Did they fail to bump the rent over a couple of renewals?

I'd think there's gotta be a better solution before things come to that.
Thanks mate ! We really appreciate it :)
Yea, just close completely the app, re-open it and here you go. Sorry about that, but that's how it is.

Enjoy the rage ;)
I'd be curious to take a look.

I have plans to do something similar but in the browser in Javascript. Basically, build up the AST based on the commands that are issued against the stack. Then use the Mozilla Parser API to generate Javascript code.

Additionally, with the example arguments supplied you have test driven develop built right in. Not only do you get tests, but it helps you visualize things as you program.
Just to make sure, when you say traditional companies exploit workers, I presume that means that your coop would pay more than these "exploitive" companies? Or is this a thing where you use the "coop" selling point to vastly underpay your workers?
I think your right, we should probably focus on refining project & dev methodologies, which would free up some "space" (logistically and mentally!)
Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes Interview
I imagine that not being too unlike a small startup where only one or two or a few people are responsible for making sure the service works.

In my case, I ran a startup for a few years which was quite profitable, but was set up in such a way that I often had to drop anything else I was doing and rush to respond to the service being down, at any time of day... In addition to already having more than enough to do between programming, sysadmin work and customer service.

Being up adjusting to a change in a data providers JSON or figuring out why MySQL is cripplingly more slow all of a sudden at 3:30 am isn't a pleasant experience, especially if you also have to be up again at 9 am.

In our case, there was little to do about it as the service provider we depended upon for almost everything frequently surprised us with breaking changes or temporary bugs. That led me to find the entire affair rather stressful.

So, like everyone else is saying... Depends on how often you're paged, and whether you have any influence over the root cause of the errors you're being summoned to fix.
Well, there was a breach -- just not at TurboTax. If I were Intuit I'd be pissed about that headline, but it's not technically wrong.
That means you could brute force your way into getting someone else's tax return... scary
It goes hand-in-hand with the thought on 2+2 that the key to being a long-term successful poker player was not about being the best player, but about having the best bankroll management. Without it, you'd see these guys who would make big scores and then blow it all on games outside their core competency.
> Sometimes I wonder if the key to a successful startup is controlling expenses

it's necessary, but not sufficient.
> There's an excellent SMBC comic on this, by the way, but I'm new
> and I don't know if posting a link will get this post tossed

This one? http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1883

(Upvotes to the parent, if so.)
Including your key signature everywhere you post your email address (homepage, business card, email signature, etc.) is a good practice. It's not perfect, but it's better than teaching users to go straight to a keyserver.
Out of curiosity, if someone e-files fraudulently for you, are you held liable by the IRS if you are audited?
Show HN: XMap – Replacing your walls of sticky notes
Could you give some examples of those that do well?
In the US, buildings can be designated as historic landmarks and so cannot be altered in a way that would destroy that. Often it's the building owner himself getting it so designated, in exchange he gets tax breaks.

It's not perfect, but it's a workable system.
The article implies it was because of delivery time. My marginally informed $0.02:

They wanted to become an ecomm giant. But every sale they ran originally was fairly small-batch. One step up from an etsy store. You can't really scale that up. They decided they wanted to go big, and to do so meant holding inventory and selling more mass-produced things.
No mention which version of V8 they use. Did they sync with what Chrome is using nowadays?

Anyways, I've already switched to iojs. I'm sharing part of my code between server and client and it has become increasingly painful to work around the lack of progress on the nodejs side of the network.
People were talking about potential weaknesses in Cryptocat for some time. Cryptocat ignored those people, then bickered with them. Then someone released a PoC and Cryptocat it turns out was really broken.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6990602

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5990288

Edit: this is a nice walkthrough of a simple RNG bug https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/07/09/anatomy-of-a-pse...
So who's ultimately going to pay for fighting this fraud? Lemme guess: probably not Anthem.
Could not agree more. And they are not just using the time that you spent on the call. When you are on call for the week you are on call for all those hours whether there is an issue or not - your time is spoken for. No trips to remote areas or anywhere where connectivity is suspect (both phone and computer).

In my case it was a slippery slope... there was never on-call. Then one of our key (financially) customers had to go through cuts and we had to cut our support personnel and the support onus shifted to the developers. Since then this has become the norm across all customers. And the customer who had those cuts recovered and went on a 5 million dollar project with another vendor. So this year my company decides to offer us $500 for the week we are on call. It translates to $5/hr. There is no option to decline the money and not do call.
Exactly. The manhattan project was throwing money and brains at a specific idea, knowing it was theoretically possible and a game-changer if it worked. What's the Cyber Security equivalent?
Yeah, I didn't mean it in the context of this particular discussion - I'm sure Blow knows what he's doing, and there's nothing wrong with trying to go past C++. I dont' disagree with the poster I replied to either - I was just venting my irritation at this increasingly popular but frequently empty truism.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some kids that I need to eject from my lawn :-)
I'm not dismissing optional typing at all. I'm completely for that. I have used it in JS when performance is needed when dealing with large data sets. It's forced static typing that I am against.
Care to elaborate on that? I'm in the habit of more or less trusting the EFF, but I don't use cryptocat (no need for it) and I have heard that it is insecure. My understanding (possibly flawed), is that it was mostly tied to the JS Crypto implementation.

What about the rest of the scorecard?
You've traded one hazard for another there, now you have a bug at runtime if the container size is between the range of signed int and unsigned int. Hope that container size isn't user controlled.

I'm guilty of a few C-style casts, but certainly prefer catching things at compile time than runtime. So +1 unsigned types for me. At least the compiler helps with catching signedness issues.
is it possible to find this nowadays? things like that are always wonderful to come across.
It would be wonderful for me, personally, but otherwise abysmal for the industry.
In general I agree with that, although having enough money "hoarded" such that you can collect a monthly stipend to cover basic necessities (like food, shelter, and utilities) makes spending all your time on investing your creative energies a lot less stressful :-)
> coding will be mandatory

...people want this? what's good about it?
How to file fraudulent tax returns:

Step 1. Take someone's W2.
Step 2. File.

Why would they stop all state filing because of this?
It just means that Go isn't memory-safe by default.