skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you looking for alternative, you can also try Cloud 66 (Heroku on any cloud or on your own server). Have a look at the guide how to migrate http://go.c66.me/1ygYjfm
> Nobody cares how good you are

> All they care about is overqualified warm bodies

Seems conflicting, no?
The Three Hats Game
Nope, "number of pawns" is only a notional number, it's a score calculated by a chess engine. Being 1 pawn ahead may just mean a particular position where one side has an equivalent advantage though not necessarily being a physical pawn ahead. Another aspect is sometimes you're a physical pawn short, but the position evaluation may only show -0.3 pawns against you, meaning you've got positional or counter-play advantages to compensate. Often players will sacrifice pieces for counter-play and activity.

Chess engines also implement a heuristic called 'contempt' where they may make a sacrifice in order to avoid a drawn position, when faced with an inferior opponent.
The only thing I've discovered that's missing from this page is a variation of the 'Chaos' pattern, but with an extra 'corner' added at the center of the shape. This way, a square which normally looks like a grey square starts to have some pretty interesting patterns.

There's a playground for this here: http://stestagg.github.io/Sierp.js/ - chrome/ff only
Cloud Computing Definition
I noticed this after we got bought by an American corp. They suck you dry and toss you.
The days of the BBC being a "Perl shop" have long gone.

But they do still use Perl, for e.g. BBC Genome is a new project written in Perl - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/cedd1f30-ac95-32...
The front page isn't intended for end users in the sense of "people looking for a map or directions", it's mainly focused on people who intend to map.

People find it hard to get out of the "Google Maps" mindset, just as everyone approached Linux as a "Cheap Windows" when in reality it can be so much more.

OSM's strategy (and data) aren't perfect, but they're growing the pie rather than fighting for a larger slice and doing pretty well with it. Just like using Linux has become a no-brainer for all sorts of projects from smartphones to supercomputer clusters to educational toys OSM is well on it's way to being the default peer-produced commons for geographical data. Whether that usage happens on one site or a million different commercial, government, non-profit and amateur sites isn't important.
Actaully, animated rotating 3d pointclouds are quite interesting too: https://github.com/stestagg/Personal/tree/master/Sierp.3d/sa...
My biggest career regret is to look for a better career rather than "building" one on my own.
>Back when we were kids there was
only one type of Lego

A web search tells me that whether this is actually true depends on your age in a somewhat odd, nonlinear way. Lego has tried having a product range specifically for girls
on and off since the late '70s. Their first attempt didn't last very long but the followups did better. Apparently Lego Friends is the most successful one yet.
This is a brilliant kind of emotional branding! Chapeau!
> The sad bit is that many full-stack developers are actually better that specialized developers in respective skills.

But those do not call themselves full-stack-developers.
Don't we already take a risk by trusting our income (for most of us, our financial security) to a single company?

If profits go down for your employer, your job may be at risk even in companies that operate in a rigid post-industrial revolution management style where you are forced to be at least 40h in the office.

As to why we don't have more business owners, I think that is caused by cultural and educational pressures to conform which then causes us to believe there will always be someone else who will take initiative for us, lead us, or give us a job. But, this is just my opinion of course.
"people might discriminate against me since I look older": young men are afraid of being discriminated for their young age. So you could experience positive discrimination instead.

When I was in my late 20s and became a manager, I worked to lower the pitch of my voice, to sound older...
Sticking with my first start-up for too long after it became obvious to me that it wasn't going to work out with the team I had. We were almost dead, then received a flurry of interest from accelerators, accepted an offer and spent another year going solidly nowhere.

I learned a lot from the experience, but there was a point at which I should have called it quits. Then again, I guess I learned that as well.

I don't regret having done it, and I accept the time lost as a necessary price, but looking back I think I could have saved myself a lot of time by calling it quits a year sooner.
I took an easy job (UK financial software) when I was downsized from a job that I loved (Embedded systems). I told myself I'd quit within one year and either move to somewhere else in the commonwealth (NZ, SA, Canada) or do a year of university in Sweden on a course I found really interesting, with a view to getting back to Embedded work. I did neither, and I'm still there.

I'm moderately well paid, I have a plan to save money + quit, I moved to a new country and now have a lovely girlfriend, so I'm still in a happy situation - but I wish I could have had these things and pursued my career a little better.
9!!!!!!....!!
factorial
Obviously the tone wouldn't do at HN, but this Reddit post in /r/unitedkingdom mentions a lot of the problems with the new mobile site and the Android app.

http://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/2vymm2/does_a...

Re: Android:

>Jackal___ 121 points 1 day ago
>Their new Android app is very very slow to load the news and uses a fuck load of background data.

>Quagers 72 points 1 day ago
>Also it doesn't download the stories when you hit refresh, just the headlines and then downloads the story when you click the headline. Completely bloody useless on the tube!
You don't want companies to decide what products you buy? How does that work? I mean, you can only buy something if they'll sell it...
The last box I bought for my kids was a "lego classics" box. Just blocks.

http://www.lego.com/en-us/classic
The optimal strategy to maximize the odds is this:
-Spoiler-

There has to be at least one guy that sees 2 hats of the same colour. This guy has to speak and say that his hat is a different color. This maximizes the odds of winning over 50%.
> Every time I see someone quote that JavaScript was designed in ten days I cringe.

Well, the fact is, this does not seem unlikely.
A person under the influence is always entirely responsible for their behavior, be that assaulting a stranger or driving a car into someone else. Being drunk doesn't remove the responsibility if you cause a crash, it makes it worse.

I do however think it make for a bad move if a taxi company has a open bar for cab drivers who is on the job. Its a design for disaster. The taxi company would have made a bad decision, and the drivers are still 100% responsible if they drive drunk. The one do not exclude the other.
This does crop up all the time.

You should also mention though that Lego still make and sell a lot of universal building sets.

In Lego stores there are walls of bricks where you can select any bits you want.

Yes, there has been a big rise in themed and licensed sets, and yes, some of them have specialised building parts that you can only really use in the set.

But that's just part of the trend over the last few decades from generic products to branded products. Everything has to be branded... I even saw a "frozen" branded loom band set. I guess the loom bands are just colors associated with the movie? Even buying kids shoes these days they're mostly branded with superheroes, princesses, etc

You can enjoy building predefined models, and creating your own from buckets of bricks though. Both can co-exist nicely. The best thing is that Lego is still going strong.
Javascript type coercions might make sense if you realize it was originally designed for a close integration with HTML forms using a simplified proto-DOM ("Level 0").

The idea was more like "isNaN(myForm.myField)"?

For all I know, the above might actually still work. But either way, that explains Javascript type conversion logic.
There's a trick of using DNS rebinding to bypass CORS and gain Javascript access to services on 127.0.0.1. Just another reason to make sure you check the Host header!
This may turn out to be a theme of this thread - you, me[0] and another person [1] so far have roughly similar "I took a job for money" regrets.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061451
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061437
When I was around 14 years old I was baby sitting a kid who was 3 or 4 or something. He came up to me and said "I bet I can say a bigger number than you." clearly proud of what he had just learnt in preschool. I accepted the challenge, he took a deep breath and said "Five hundred!", so I said "Five hundred and one". He looked determined and said "Ok then! Five hundred and fifty hundred and five hundred million hundred five hundred" (Or something that makes no sense like that). So I said "Five hundred and fifty hundred and five hundred million hundred five hundred, and one". He looked horrified and said "Can you just say 'and one' for any number?" I told him yes, and he said "Cool!".
The complete issue on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/zzap64-magazine-079
Essentially, the BEM website is the worst possible rule for learning the underlying principles of BEM (ie what makes it good), instead it's all about their tool that attempts to manage it all for you.
I've added another example using Cython to call API's that are not exposed via IDAPython.

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/james91b/ida_ipython/blob...
The major differences in my methods, which were originally based on Internet searching but I have just gone with, are:

-Brew time: I do 7 minutes, but I tend to go longer because I either forget about it or forget to check the time when I start. I have done up to 10-15 minutes and haven't really noticed a significant effect on quality.

-Stirring: I stir my grind/water relentlessly. I don't like to see a bunch of the grind sitting at the surface of the water.

-Water temperature: I've checked the temperature after boiling and it drops pretty quick. I've read recommendations that it is brewed below boiling, but still 180-200 degrees. I use my water very quickly after removing from boil and haven't had a "burnt" taste.

-Coarseness: I set my Coffee Mate grinder to the coarsest setting, as the author says because I don't like the grind slipping through and getting into my drink. I've even started fingering out the fine grind that sticks to the front of the container so as to not get it in the french press.

-Beans: I recently started thinking it might be a good idea to try some more freshly roasted beans. I went to the local coffee shop and asked for popular beans that they go through a lot, and also tried a cup brewed at the shop (I normally get espresso-based drinks there). I just feel that my Trader Joe's Bolivian beans taste even fresher for some reason, even though they are probably roasted months before I buy them. Maybe the seal they do on the cans really does keep them fresh regardless of roast date? Still willing to try out other options.
These boxes only have standard pieces, which is why the truck and house look boxy.

Today's boxes include too many specific pieces. Car hood, top, helicopter nose, etc. Pieces that can't be used for anything else that what they're designed for, and can't be replaced if lost.

So you can't take it appart to build something different.
Thanks Stephn_R

I did not think anyone would take time to answer so many of my questions. I agree with you on lots of points you mentioned above. Regarding the documentation I usually trust it if the module or the system is new, but if its old enough, i assume its outdated, architectural drift exists and only take that as a reference of how the system was planned to be like.

This also gives a lot of use-cases to begin with and understand the control flow. Regarding test cases, integration and regression tests help a lot in finding failures but I feel more confident about them if written by the same developer as the original thought for the code change is more pure with him and the reviewer.

For knowledge tracking, I guess there is no easy way, one learns from experience and time, but it would be great if there were some great tools to capture thoughts and map them to a definite state in the application without making any change in the codebase.

I have been in my academics for 6 years doing my bachelors and masters and less than a year in my professional career. The sheer amount of stuff one needs to know about building scalable and distributed applications is just amazing and nerve-wracking at the same time and I will keep your secret in mind :)
Staying in a job for too long. I started fresh out of school at 18 and stayed there for over 10 years. During that time I got very few pay rises and always felt like I was being treated as a kid still despite my experience. When I finally left my pay jumped by over £15k. In the 4 years since I left my pay has nearly quadrupled and I'm in a much better position at a much more awesome company.
I feel the same with syntactic sugar. Every feature added to a programming language it's a new source of potential errors.
I prefer write two lines of nice code, than one line of magic tricks.
A company that slurps all contacts and calendar entries from customers' smartphones without their explicit consent and without a way to opt out from it is talking about privacy.
Becoming a software developer
Facebook Patents Method of Advertising to Important People Only
It's worth noting that the OSM community has been aware of the routing deficiencies for a long time, so this isn't something that an outsider needed to tell them. See for example this 2009 project which ran a router on the data between the 250 largest cities in the US and found (primarily due to the Tiger sourced data) that entire counties could be cut off from neighbours at boundaries.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER_fixup/250_cities

They just started with the most important connectivity problems and worked their way down. As the data improved more and more corporate users found it close enough for their needs and started contributing the fixes they needed in a positive feedback loop.

There's now various commercial organisations either fixing the map directly for their own benefit or providing lists of issues for the community to address through projects like Maproulette (http://maproulette.org/) which can point you to random (or nearby) issues for you to fix based on various automated checks (e.g. rivers running uphill) or open data like a list of soccer pitches in France.
i can't get past 5 min. Is 5 min the hard upper limit of how long you can play this game?
Only if you believe qualifications are a reflection of how good someone is.

Thought experiment: You meet two software developers who each have 10 years experience of C++. One has a CompSci degree. Does that in any way help you decide which is the better developer?
"What happened with Legos, they used to be simple. Oh come on, I know you know what I'm talking about, Legos were simple. Something happened out here while I was inside. Harry Potter Legos, Star Wars Legos, complicated kits, tiny little blocks. I mean I'm not saying its bad I just wanna know what happened."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVCOAFKjaoY
Viewpoint: A Long-Term Memory for Light(2013)
> FAE requires an alternate explanation where the behaviour is justified and the assumption it's the result of a character flaw is the error

No. FAE is pointing out that no one internally says "I'm an asshole, therefore I should drive faster." ie FAE points out that character determined action is a mode of reasoning that's guaranteed to misunderstand the other person.

For a different classic example, consider a negotiation where you determine the other person is "greedy". If you catch yourself committing the FAE, you might instead determine "the other person seems to want money for something", and inquire. Perhaps by making sure they get the thing they think they need (which may or may not require as much money as they thought), you can cause them to no longer be "greedy" in your eyes. It's very rare that a person actually wants as much money as possible to be spent on nothing in particular (ie is actually greedy)

> Your character is determined by the totality of your actions, not by some imaginary inner version of yourself - although that's a very common delusion we all use to avoid acknowledging our character flaws.

I think the point of FAE is that human action is context dependent, and not some enduring trait. How someone acts in college basically isn't predictive of how they will act when they have grandchildren. If character traits really existed, this wouldn't be the case.

> There are no charitable explanations based on unknown circumstances we can reasonably assume here.

As I already said:

dlss> For example, you're assuming that the actions were intentional on his part and that he understood OPs wishes/desires/state-of-mind

I think if you assume the hug's outcome was not intentional, or assume the investor was mistaken about OPs wishes/desires/state-of-mind it's quite easy to come up with charitable explanations. Did you try this?
> Back when we were kids there was only one type of Lego, the type that was meant for everybody.

Lego homemaker predates Lego City. Since there have been Lego themes there were some that were some who were preferred by one gender over another.
This doesn't make sense to me.

See below chart -- The probability that my hat is M/O is the same (50%) regardless of what the others are wearing.

Others	Me

MM	M

MM	O

MO	M

MO	O

OM	M

OM	O

OO	M

OO	O
Jeff Preshing gave a really good introduction to atomics at CppCon 2014.[1] He explains it so clearly that 1 day later I had a fully tested lock-free work stealing queue and a queue. One of my favorite talks of last year.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1T3IQ4N-3g
> we'd be sacrificing progress and innovation for a quick and ephemeral dollar.

until the low hanging fruit all got picked.
>Aside from as a learning experience or display of prowess, what's the point of implementing A yourself?*

Because for people working in those kinds of problems we're talking about (we started from Valve and games IIRC, but it could also be Google, Facebook engineers etc) you don't just download some off the shelf API.

You'll need to create something of your own to:

- have the whole IP

- mold it specifically to the domain logic you need

- take control of it's memory and performance characteristics based on your constraints

- implement it in the language your company uses, for which no ready made A* (or some other algorithm) is available

- you'll need to make it talk to different infrastructure, libs etc

- you might be the one writing the library API yourself

As I said, this is not about what a CRUD programmer will need. But as you can see everyday in HN, people write these and other algorithms all the time in their jobs doing more serious engineering.
Or you can buy something else and the company can go bust.
Not meeting more interesting people outside my discipline in college. My network is mostly limited to people in my field because I spent too much time with people similar to me because that was easy and comfortable.
Having grown up in the 80s, when Spider-Man's superpowers were attributed to a radiactive spider rather than the modern day genetically engineered spider, in the latter days that prospect of nuclear war with the Soviet Union was discussed as a possibility, radiation holds a special place in my heart.

Criticality accidents are my favorite type of disaster. For a time I was led by a morbidly curiosity to research these incidents. Reading these, I sure am glad I picked a career that's much safer than being a nuclear scientist! Eyestrain and standing around all day is definitely preferable to a job where if you move two pieces of metal together too quickly, you might see a blue flash, feel a sensation of pins and needle sticking you in the face and mouth, start vomiting and die two days later.

The article mentions the Demon Core, definitely a classic.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

Los Alamos has put together a couple of documents describing each known incident. I find it fascinating to follow exactly how each miniature disaster occurred. It's surprising, sort of, how dangerous these materials are and it seems that certainly, one needs to take great care when reflecting neutrons.

https://www.orau.org/ptp/Library/accidents/la-13638.pdf [PDF]

and an older one...

http://library.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?00314607.pdf [PDF]
Actually, even back in 1981, there were multiple lines, though not nearly as much as now.

Here's a list of the sets released in 1981: http://brickset.com/sets/year-1981 . Out of 58 sets, 16 are designed for generic use. Much of the rest are buildings and vehicles from the modern world, like houses, fire stations, tow trucks, ferries, helicopters, dune buggies, etc. But there are also sets with medieval knights and space themes. Plus, Lego created their own characters for a theme they called "Fabuland". There was even a tie-in series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keJua4D2Ymg

In summary, back in 1981, there were generic sets plus four different themes.
The patent is filed on March 3, 2011 and published in 2012. To me, it seems that either this has been already implemented or the plan to implement has been already dropped.
> What do you get when you methodically build a Lisp on top of symbolic replacement semantics?

TCL? :P
SObjectizer: a tool for working with actors in C++ and some slides about it
I would have to say that I don't actually like the cold :-) What I like is the contrast. The sun is nice. The sun shining down on you in a protected area (or through a window!) on a cold day is indescribably wonderful. I never used to like soup particularly much, but on a cold day I practically die for it. That kind of thing.
Sure. I wasn't exactly criticising Lego, just pointing out that the appeal of the ad is inextricably linked to the ideal behind the product.

Lego is a business, of course. Those ABS plastic blocks are practically indestructible, so they're not going to grow by selling replacements for universal blocks...
The guardian have also similarly screwed up their mobile implementation, with at one point they broke the back key because they had expandos that couldn't remember their state.

But both these sites still suffer from "the flash", where it renders once, and then renders again half a second lafer with everything moving. It's disorientating and simply a bad UX.

Also the BBC used yo have this terrible experience for a few months where it would flash up a load of code, but they finally seem to have fixed that.

IMO both these sites are presently advertising that the responsive trend sucks ass.

I have started to realise that compared to the desktop sites it's almost impossible to get information out of these mobile sites at anywhere near the speed or information density I previously used to simply using the built in pinch and zoom and desktop layouts.

Like you scan broadsheets and desktop layouts, but the mobile you get a big, useless picture and a story title.
Scott Adams illustrates why 'goals are for losers and passion is overrated'
Sure it is: anytime you enrich uranium beyond 5%, you're trying to make a bomb.

Iran was proudly announcing enriching over 60%, which is the highest amount anyone, anywhere, ever, needs to do (60% is for neutron-optimized research reactors).
Sony SmartEyeglass Developer Edition SED-E1 Augmented Reality Glasses