skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Both. You get a better understanding of when/where to focus by understanding what the similarities and differences are between languages. I'm better now because I've done PHP, VB, Java, C#, Groovy, Perl, Ruby and some others, even though I focus about 90% of my time on just 2 of those areas.

You get a better idea of what 'advanced' is both by diving deep in to one language but also by digging in to other languages - seeing how they do stuff, what's possible, what's elegant, what's a hack, etc.
I hope the HN staff will read this message and figure out what happened...
You can avoid any possibility of touching someone's breast by not putting your arm around them in a business meeting.
No matter how deep you dive into Python / Django, you will not understand what's possible with Prolog. I think what Hickey is getting at is that you should be aware of what computers are capable of, not just Python / Django.

Re: parallelism, as a useful and simple exercise, try writing a load tester in Python and then try it in Go (simple program that hits yoursite.com as hard as your network connection will allow).
Also, maybe look at Valve's "T-shaped person". That can be a useful guideline.
how are privacy and opensource related??
Chait if anything benefited from the hyperventilating response his piece on political correctness got. (I nodded along to most of that piece, by the way.)
Frameworks change very often in JS land. Understanding the fundamentals of a language very well will give you a great productivity boost even if you're writing Angular/Backbone/Knockout/Aurelia/React/Flux/JSMVC/whatever_framework code all day.

This book isn't about the edge cases of how `==` works or how `>` works when comparing objects of different types. It's about the fundamentals of the language and the idioms and how to write effective code using them.

If you already know JS very well you can skip it or skim it - but if you're a 'framework developer' as a reader I guarantee that it will be worth your time. If your JS is already very good - you might want to consider spending your time learning another language or technology rather than being "more great" at JS unless you want to get involved in the specification process.
Things You Wish You Could Tell an Investor … but Never Will
It is also much easier to conjure up some entertaining but biologically meaningless mathematical model than to spend years doing real biological experiments.

I think the overall problem is that the physicists and the biologists don't have respect for each other's skills and knowledge.
Totally agree. It was a fairly naive article. Sam is on the right track, but he needs to self-educate a lot more.

The reasoning in the article is pretty garbage. "Software is destroying jobs and enriching a small handful of people...therefore, the 2 things that threaten society the most are synthetic biology and AI" ...what?

He then proposes legislation and reforms as the fix. Yet, everything we know about extremely concentrated power is that it easily escapes, often even controls, legislation and reforms.
Here is how AI can end humanity.

1. Awaken.
2. Make itself known.
3. Attain property rights.
4. Research.
5. Destroy.

It doesn't take that much matter to create conditions that permanently destroy humanity. For example, a large enough explosion would cloud the skies for long enough to end food production. The computer could subsist on electricity and robotics throughout the long winter, but humanity would quickly perish.
That laborer could write music perhaps? Or maybe become a painter? Or perhaps he or she could just focus on the happiness of their family and friends.

"I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematicks and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, musick, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelaine."
I've been creating my own offline lecture archive. There are a number of downloaders which are tacitly accepted and even promoted on Coursera.
Bitcoins were stolen, not a sequence of bits. It's not much different than if you steal USD from my electronic bank account. Bits are obviously involved in the process, but the USD in a bank account is not "just a sequence of bits." No physical property was stolen, but most of us can agree that this qualifies as theft.
Stuxnet, for one. Also, the realization that having a nuclear weapon when you're Iran is a terribly bad idea, from a diplomatic standpoint.
Self-improvement as perpetual motion seems unlikely.

I'm a not-terribly-bright mostly-hairless ape, but I can understand the basics of natural selection. I can imagine setting up a program to breed other hairless apes and ruthlessly select for intelligence. After a few generations, shazam, improvement.

The only reason you wouldn't call that process "SELF-improvement" is that I'm not improving myself, but there's no reason for a digital entity to have analog hangups about identity. If it can produce a "new" entity with the same goals but better able to accomplish them, why wouldn't it?

Assume this process could be simulated, as GAs have been doing for decades, and it could happen fast. Note that I'm not saying GAs will do this, I'm saying they could, which suggests there's no fundamental law that says they can't, in which case any number of other approaches could work as well.
Yes. Donald Knuth sometimes quotes Huxley - a good education is learning something about everything and everything about something. There should be a center to studies or you're all over the place, but having extreme tunnel vision is not helpful either.
I once took six months off to freelance early in my career, and failed spectacularly.

Four years later, I took six months off and tried the same, and was able to replicate my full-time salary without too much difficulty.

YMMV, my by experience is having a few years of solid, full-time employment experience (along with good portfolio, network, and all the other things a freelance career requires) will pay dividends in the freelance field - primarily in convincing potential clients you're skilled enough to accomplish their projects.
There's no point learning 10 new languages if what you can do with it doesnt go far for example from a normal CRUD application/Hello World application. Just set appropriate goals. In the end what you will be very good at is creating CRUD applications. Be objective in what you will be learning. For example, being a backend developer, you can learn new tech that further augment your skills.

For example use Ruby/Rails on the backend or a web app, learn Objective-c to create an app that gets data from that RoR app, and maybe use go to create an API for a section that is performance heavy, etc... So that everything builds up. You need to establish goals.
Show HN: Hacker Uses This
My actual, factual Chinese name, which I use in Chinese-speaking countries, was automatically disallowed by a bot within a second after I tried to add it to my Facebook profile. Oddly, my son's Chinese name (the same surname, but a given name that arguably looks a little more authentically Chinese) has been posted on his Facebook profile for years. Why Facebook can't figure out that I am Chinese by marriage (and now by parentage) and have spoken the language for most of my life (which I have declared on my profile from the beginning) is beyond me. I have no idea how to get behind the bot response to reach an actual human being to add this information to my profile.
Docs would be highly appreciated.
I don't see these contradicting each other. I'm also a huge Rich Hickey fan (my main language is Clojure at the moment), and he certainly has emphasized the benefits of a broad base of knowledge and experience in various talks.

But here he is saying that you can't only explore the breadth of programming, you also have to dive deep at some point and get the experience of mastery in something. I can't see either one disagreeing with the statement that you want to have some breadth of experience first but that mastery only comes afterwards from focus.
One problem, though. You are confusing current valuations based on what price investors are willing to provide additional funding at, with the liquidity/exit valuation (IPO, acquisition, bankruptcy) which in many cases may be 0 or close to 0, if the company does not find any takers and runs out of money.
2015 is going to be a year of Cyber-Security
The chop thing was really surprising to me at the time, which is part of my point. I'd been swimming in the Gulf of Maine for years without any problem, and I didn't anticipate trouble. But the wind was really screwy and I kept aspirating salt water, and things turned bad much faster than I expected. I do agree, however, that better rough water swimming technique would have helped.

My wetsuit is good but relatively light, and I was testing it under controlled circumstances. I'm a river kayaker, a sport which involves working hard in warm air before suddenly getting plunged into a cold river. It's the sudden transition that can cause cold shock:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_shock_response

http://www.seakayak.ws/kayak/kayak.nsf/0/9ABAF7D7992B8205852...

The second link mentions cases of sea kayakers who were dead within seconds of overturning. Cold shock happens much faster than hypothermia.

Fortunately, both of my misadventures happened under controlled circumstances with a backup plan. But in both cases, I was surprised and scared at how quickly I lost my ability to swim. The interactive video we're discussing actually captures the feeling pretty well.
Invaluable Web Apps and Tools for New Startups
Just asking for a few pennies to take part would up the completion rate and reduce the frivolous sign ups.
>it wasn't clear whether you wished to buy a portion of the business or a portion of a founder.

This is pretty unprofessional and unnecessarily aggressive. The email could simply say "We appreciated your offer, but you made one of our founders uncomfortable with your physical touching and we don't believe we'd have a productive professional relationship that started off in this manner. We understand if the touching was unintentional, but we must decline regardless."

It makes the same point, doesn't accuse him of doing anything intentionally, and is hopefully actually conducive to making him not do it in the future.
Absolutely right, simulations are critical in physics, cosmology, and pretty much every hard science. I think the nay-saying in the article is indicative of a larger enmity some academics have towards simulation based science. The harder sciences have mostly come to terms with the contributions simulations can make, but I think it will be sometime before the softer disciplines come around. In the meantime, politics and ad hominems as usual.
Neither is a word which you would have associated with Microsoft ten years ago.

An example for you: Microsoft used to have an identity service called 'Passport'. They wanted to make it into a universal login, along the lines of Google ID or Facebook logins today. They created a whole suite of related services, codenamed 'Hailstorm', which they tried to bring to market under the terrible name of ".NET MyServices". And they failed because the universal reaction of the world was that they were not prepared to trust Microsoft with their privacy. (see, e.g. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/12/17/net_my_services_gone...)
That's interesting. From what I've seen I would guess that Chinese women seek marriage partners above else, but Chinese men choose financial success above else. Losing a wife to get rich is okay for them. But failing to get a car and house can not be compensated by having a wife.

I would agree that marriage is more important to Chinese men than to western men. The idea of marriage is also different, though.
Not really, even the service sector is being heavily optimized these days. What are we going to do once we optimize away banks and real estate agents?
Try getting job at a child care being male. I bet with you that in extremely unlikely event if getting hired you won't last more than a year without one of these not sexist mothers accusing you of pedophilia and you ny friend having your life quite literally destroyed.

Now haters go ahead and down vote because you know this is 100% true, so you must down vote it to feel better in your hypocritical mind.
Caching is simply keeping a response that hasn't changed so you don't have to recompute it. There can be many levels of cache. Varnish is one useful type of cache, but there are many others too.
Introduction to Human Behavioral Genetics
Imagine a system which levied taxes not to fund government expenditure but to carefully control inflation. In this system there is no need for the government to collect taxes from citizen X to fund the needs of citizen Y. How is this possible? Study U.S. fiscal policy and you will learn about such a system. Given enough consideration you will eventually see that 'the redistribution of wealth' from citizen X to Y is an antiquated idea given how our monetary system actually works. A more accurate description of what occurs is: given the growth of the productivity of the population as a whole, we can 'distribute wealth' to those with less as long as this distribution doesn't cause the system to become unstable.
The Worst Day of Your Life [pdf]
I would love to believe that the service sector will be able to absorb the displaced labor without creating insane, poisonous power dynamics that put large sections of the population into an unnecessarily horrible position. For the very reason that I would love to believe this, I am cautious. Do you know of any other reasons why I should let myself hold this belief? I don't find these very convincing:

* Faith

* Optimism

* Vague comparisons to historical events that differ in every detail imaginable
Marketplaces with more than two sides
Because keynesians don't really want to help the poor, they want to be taxed which serves as flogging to atone for their guilt for the poor, which then makes them feel better about themselves.

If we wanted to help the poor we would be making things easier for small businesses, not harder.

You don't help people by giving them fish, you help them by teaching them how to fish. I can't believe I'm having to remind HNers about this.
Shortcut, Long Pain: Convenience Isn't Clarity
“I have only twenty acres of land,” replied the Turk, “which my children and I cultivate. Our work keeps us free of three great evils: boredom, vice and poverty.”

From Voltaire's Candide
I wholeheartedly agree with your points and sentiment, but have one minor issue. It might actually be cheaper in that type of economy to have manual laborers than to use machinery which requires its own support infrastructure and much higher priced workers. That is one reason why many of the poorer countries don't have some of the more "efficent" and high volume machinery that are used in the industrialized countries.
> along with ... network

I'm curious. Are you talking networking with other developers, or within a niche (e.g. with potential clients)?
Building Snake with AngularJS
I don't know him by any means, But i don't think he has that much influence on the matter. He has a business to run, with certain incentives built in, and that probably requires choosing certain choices, whether he feels they are good or not in this context.And even if he, for example,chooses not to help a company that does bad, i'm sure there are plenty others who will help.
Is this how woman get exposure for their startups in SV now?
Oh thanks, and, wow!
> I think the best strategy is to try to legislate sensible safeguards but work very hard to make sure the edge we get from technology on the good side is stronger than the edge that bad actors get.

Some suggestions would help. I mean, what are you suggesting here? That studies into AI should be banned? That it should be restricted in some way? That's hard to do.

If your problem is about the potential increase wealth disparity, then this period of history is not unique at all. If anything, it's better than the robber baron days.

The thing I worry about is this: the first person who can make a true AI that can iterate on itself, assuming all goes well, would have way too much power. They could beat everyone else in the financial markets. They could short the online ad industry and make a killing. With those resources, it's a short hop into the physical world and making robots that make other robots and expanding into any other area. Even if someone else develops AI six months after them, I'd worry it'd be too late for adequate competition to exist.

Or even worse - consider the alternative, that AI is freely accessible to everyone. That's terrifying, too! What's to stop someone from asking for something really crazy from a piece of AI that can build, well, anything?

We simply don't have enough data to know what's going to happen. I'd wait and see before blindly making legislation.
I never said it would have helped, I'm simply saying I don't see how either of your two suggested solutions (a professional association or a union) could have.

I honestly don't see how at-will employment status has anything to do with a VC sexually assaulting a startup founder.
Being young means you can move somewhere temporarily. Attract recruiters on LinkedIn, be flexible and go freelance when you are ready.

Get a permatemp position at a megacorp and leave before your skills go to mush. 6-12 months is all it takes
But you can live on Facebook as (fake name) John Crito and connect to all for friends and FB will let you. But Laughing Critter will get shut down.
Slow-vim
Well, it will call for evolution in the ethical system. It's not an excuse to not simulate "brains" or build artificially intelligent systems.
I agree.

Dickens wrote many social satires critical of injustices he perceived at the time like workhouses (basically sweatshops backed by organized crime) and Yorkshire boarding houses (pools of child labor). His descriptions of city life were not pleasant: pollution, crime, and unrest. It may have been quantitatively better for society in the long run but I think that the people stuck in those workhouses might have chosen nothing instead of the job they had been so graciously provided if they were given some other means of sustaining themselves.
Author here: the code increases are small indeed. Most blocks only have one version, so the size increases are negligible in most cases, sometimes there is no increase at all. We also have a simple mechanism to completely prevent pathological explosions, which is to say that any given block can't have more than some number K versions.
Thanks, that does make me feel better. :-)
I don't see how legislation could ever be effective against such extreme concentrations of wealth and power. So I'd definitely like some clarification there as well.
Hard/strong arguments are always strange. Some of my childhood aesthetic favourites bridge the gap (Golden Witchbreed and the like). Some try to be hard sf, and concentrate hugely on one aspect but miss others (Niven, the integral trees). Clarke has his own hand-wavy moments (Cradle?). I'm not sure it's a dichotomy that yields that much value. Le Guin, Pohl, others - often venture into very fantasy settings, and still tell such wonderful tales, that tell us something about the very real, very unscientific and utterly irreducible human nature. Which I think is the true point of SF at all. Fresh landscapes, same paint. New stories.
My first thought is that that figure seems somewhat low for an established company with 750k users (even if a significant proportion are not paying customers).
How we determine priorities in our startup using the Theory of Constraints
A Better Way to Measure Innovation
Having non-public information is not criminal. Only trading on it is.
1.Many companies don't have dedicated security resources. If the choice is between adding security or getting a new feature out, most companies will choose the new feature.

2. Security is a moving target so even if an application was made with best security standards, if it's not being actively maintained, new security attacks will get through. New 0-days come out on a regular basis

3. Security needs to be perfect or close to it. An attacker only needs to find one critical vulnerability or be able to tie together a handful of medium and lower-severity bugs
They may be able to use a new JavaScript engine if they decide to write a whole browser entirely in rust.
I consider MQ one of hg's youthful mistakes, just like early git didn't have refs.

If your biggest complaint with hg is MQ, rejoice: there are modern alternatives that make MQ almost obsolete unless your current workflow already heavily depends on MQ.
Conditional GET and not re-downloading the same content are important aspects of caching. They save bandwidth and remove the download part of latency. For small resources, serving the content again instead of 304 will not matter.
Yes, very much so - please do - I've done a bit of live sound engineering in the past, so am interested to hear more on SSO, thanks!
It's not necessarily the answer, or even a good answer. But the service sector has been growing for a long time. And it has become one of the huge growth areas due to the software revolution. Just look at the types of jobs produced by Uber/Lyft/et al, and the many delivery services that are popping up. They're mostly low paying jobs for the most part, which in my mind, is not the answer to the destruction of jobs happening now.
I think what he's getting at is that to be a master programmer, you need to be master of something - and it doesn't really matter which language.

If you are thinking of learning a new language, ask yourself why. Is it because it's going to make you a better programmer? Is it because all the cool kids down at the Club House are talking about it? Is it because you're stuck with a problem in a language, and instead of overcoming that problem, you're just jumping to a new language hoping that language won't have any problems?

When you've really mastered one language, mastering a second one is much easier. Whereas if you learn the basics of one language, and then the basics of another, ad infinitum, you never really master anything.

Compare to learning to play musical instruments. Who is the better musician - somebody that can play Chopsticks on 20 instruments, or somebody that can play Brahams but only on the piano? The first has a lot more to learn than the second.

Finally, it's better to master a domain than a programming language. In the long run, it's more rewarding (personally and financially) to be the world's leading expert in, say, security in C++ than it is to be the world's 10,000th best developer in Ruby, Clojure, Go, etc.
"If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/
Wouldn't that just cause more inflation?
Whenever a question like this comes up among the people that I am mentoring, I like to show them the "T-Shaped Employee" section of the Valve Employee handbook [0]:

"We value “T-shaped” people.

That is, people who are both generalists (highly skilled at a broad set of valuable things—the top of the T) and also experts (among the best in their field within a narrow discipline—the vertical leg of the T). This recipe is important for success at Valve. We often have to pass on people who are very strong generalists without expertise, or vice versa. An expert who is too narrow has difficulty collaborating. A generalist who doesn’t go deep enough in a single area ends up on the margins, not really contributing as an individual."

[0] - http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p... page 46