skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I shall reply to your reply to the part I edited out after you edited out the part my edited-out part was addressing :).

> (in this case so quickly after I made the post that I wonder if he even bothered to read it all)

I think I got used to this. Sometimes you can get a few quick downvotes (or upvotes) immediately after posting, but the score usually settles to a reasonable value within an hour. I used to be nervous about downvotes, but eventually learned not to sweat it.

> HN members worry about 'becoming Reddit' without stopping to wonder if that would be an improvement.

I hate that meme here. There are a lot of subreddits that have quality discussions similar to HN. It's not fair to use Reddit as an example of a site that went downhill, because in reality it didn't.

> From a moderation and forum software standpoint, at least, it unequivocally would be an improvement.

I don't frequent Reddit enough to have an opinion on moderation policies (I'm a die-hard HN junkie), though I will second the argument about forum software. For me, Reddit's UX seems to give optimal threaded discussion experience. I wish HN would borrow at least the ability to cancel-out accidental downvote as well as an "inbox" for reply notifications (right now I'm working around it with HN Notify - I wonder how many HNers are also doing this).

> I don't want to be a part of this community anymore.

Please stay. I actually looked through your comments ( ;) ) and I see you contributing interesting viewpoints while keeping a civil tone. We need you. Good people disappearing is the very process by which a community gets destroyed.
s/Yubikey/U2F/

(But I will use my Yubikey for U2F)

I also refuse to install Authy. I really, really do not like their creeping, creepy intrusiveness and the profiling it enables. I get the feeling that people don't actually understand Authy beyond "Hey, it backs up my secrets to the cloud. Cool!"

I recently had to renew my Google Authenticator tokens and I was tempted by Authy but the setup/onboarding sent me away screaming. Then I remembered the NEO can handle this (well except for Amazon tokens). Can't wait for U2F NFC to be standardized.
So these two things don't seem to fit together. The linked article seems to provide pretty solid evidence that women are just as successful as men when you control by numerical SAT score. But some[1] women do indeed report hostile working conditions.

How can this be? Is it:

* Working conditions are hostile to women, but this doesn't actually affect anything in terms of income, number of women in the industry and so on?

* More cynical variation: any woman who makes it to graduation in a STEM field has already taken a lot of hostility; those who hostility can affect are driven out earlier?

* Women and men actually experience equal amounts of hostility, and simply interpret it differently?

* Women are better at their jobs (or somehow have it easier) in a way that doesn't show up in numerical SAT scores, and this effect is exactly equal and opposite to that of a hostile work environment?

* Something else I haven't thought of?

[1] though by no means all, I remember lorettahe's post here a year or so ago
Those making claims are required to produce the evidence for their claims.

Nobody is ever required to prove a negative. That's not how logic works.
Why are you asking as if it's some sort of theoretical question when asm.js is in hand, right now, and it performs wildly better than raw Javascript? Of course we'd rather compile to something that's faster than Javascript than compile to Javascript.

(Sorry, I can't condone the word "transpile". Usage of it just reveals someone who doesn't understand compilation technology and thinks there's somehow something "special" about compiling to one intermediate language ("javascript") vs. another ("assembler").)

I can't believe how many people seem to believe that Javascript is a C-speed level language, and downmod anyone who observes it's not. Well, it's still not. It's easy to see that it's not. It's not even close. If it were asm.js wouldn't exist. (I mean, if you're having trouble with my claim here, stop and think about that for a moment... if Javascript is so fast, why does asm.js even exist?)
I specialize in an in-memory analytics (business intelligence) platform called "QlikView" or "Qlik". It operates on top of RDBMSs/operational databases, so it batch processes data on a daily or hourly basis usually.
Enforcement requires some loss of privacy, but living in central London is not a human right.

It is for those who already live there.
26 minutes into this talk:

https://go.innography.com/USPatent.Webinar.Replay.html
Students refuse to pay back loans to failed for-profit college
Cumulonimbus is raising $850,000 to build PressureNet – AngelList
Help Me HN: I am getting overwhelmed
I am 19, student and javascript developer, I am currently the only one working on a small developer tool that has become quite popular but I am getting overwhelmed and having hard time managing everything.
All the bug reports, support tickets, continuing my bachelors, managing sales and all has become a chore, I am currently not sure about solid business strategy and I am only earning around 4-5K per month so I can not hire anyone to work with me. Any advice would be helpful.

Sorry for my terrible english.
If you're actually interested in Hypatia you can read this series...

http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2015/02/hypatia-part-i-mean-stre...
Maybe it's just how I read this sentence, but I think "Raleigh is 50 road miles closer to Atlanta than it is to NYC" cleared things up for me.

Regardless, that's a really interesting fun fact I learned today.
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>if helium is so scarce and so important, shouldn't that be reflected in the price? //

It's like other "mined" raw materials.

Coal takes millions of years to form, requires large quantities of vegetation/animal life and large areas of land. If you charged based on replacement cost then coal prices would be effectively infinite.

As with helium. Helium doesn't bond with other atoms to make heavier molecules and so eventually leaks from the atmosphere after release. In order to recover a supply you're going to need to capture it from radioactive decay or do extraterrestrial mining or some similar high cost activity. So it's [comparatively] an infinite replacement cost. However, it's released as a by-product and we currently have enough. When we run out of natural gas sources we'll run out of our main He source too and using helium will become extremely expensive. Even at that point we'll still not be paying the "replacement" cost, just the cost of extracting from more expensive sources.

We should be, as a race, preserving helium but there is currently no economic incentive, the incentive lies in the future when our current round of magnates and politicians will likely be dead.
note that symlinking is not actually the recommended flow ;) Just put everything in gopath.... I even put non-go code in my gopath... it's just a nice way to organize - by the VCS url.
5 specialized Linux distributions for computer repair
Yea, NYC has a HUGE advantage because of the train system going into and out of the city. You can easily commute south to Jersey or north to Connecticut. Each stop going away from NYC drops ~$20K on comparable houses (with a few exceptions like Greenwich). I've heard in the bay area the train system is terrible.
Yes. Functional languages are amenable to composition. Because of their "purity". This allows trivial extraction of parallelism/concurrency. No need to reason about interleaving and shared data and such.

But, I don't know if "use FP if you want parallelism" is an acceptable solution currently. My intuition is that latency sensitive application can't use these languages because they don't expose the low-level primitives (read pointers) that make the difference in such applications. But I haven't written and profiled enough FP code to know if this is absolutely the case.
Feture size never had a completely linear relation to transistor density. Recently that non-linearity is just becomming worse.
Re 4) At least one major government department is already adopting a policy of remote working and opening smaller regional satellite commuter offices with hot desk facilities.
There is an obvious ripple effect here which your comment ignores. Oligarchs buy in Knightsbridge, pushing aristocrats to Notting Hill. That pushes the international managerial types to places like Chiswick, which pushes the mere professionals to Ealing. And so on. If the oligarchs disappear, everyone moves in one slot, and this woman gets to live in a decent but modest home instead of a slum.
Will the Female Viagra Ever Get It Up?
I don't think so. If they are treated well they won't complain and you will never hear about them.
Lovely. Just a few points:

- Reading is only problem in crappy screens. When 14" e-paper becomes norm, paper books will be obsolete

- As children I almost broke my back, because I had to carry 10 kg of books every day. Even today I still walk funny.

- In Ireland some schools banned wheeled school bags because of some school uniform nonsense.

- It is impossible to buy some digital books. You can only rent some DRM nonsense. If you want to use book for decade or longer, you must buy print

- in many professions textbooks are major (sometimes only) study cost. Good gatekeepers to keep poor out.

- for some reasons it is illegal to buy textbook from India in US.
Ok, I haven't considered that. That could indeed explain the results. Thanks.
And Boston, Philly, and most of the rest of the world :)
Sounds like the amount of memory involved is quite small. Below a certain threshold, doubling is practically free. And IIUC even over-allocating memory doesn't necessarily mean it uses all of the memory, only for the the inputs that cause the bug. The extra comparison however would be performed for all inputs.
I would go to with elasticsearch, or if you reach terabytes/petabytes of data then look into Google BigQuery there you would get a constant 5-10 seconds response time for those high volume data. BigQuery is a WORM technology, so an append-only system might help you, especially in event-driven systems.
It is widely known that every corporate developer has endless time for his work. Mundane aspects like costs of development should have no impact on our code, the pureness of which is a goal in itself.
Weather Company API 10B transactions a day
Is it possible for non-Europeans to get work visas in Prague? Last I checked, they have out 3 visas a year or something.
I don't get it. Why not just test for net sum of the directions for a finite number of iterations? If the net sum is zero, there is a loop and if not, the program halts. Am I missing something?
If you are already familiar with QlikView, then check out Google BigQuery, you already have a connector for it.
You may have noticed that everywhere commutable became 20% more expensive last year. There is only so far people can move.
Threads and stacks are orthogonal. You can have coroutines with contiguous stacks, and threads with non-contiguous stacks.

Furthermore it's extremely easy to use non-contiguous stacks in C just by knowing the stack amount used by functions, which the compiler already knows.

This is a totally absurd reason to reimplement an entire toolchain.
This is happening more and more. WTF web devs?

Me: Where are the charts themselves?

Me: Oh, I'm using noscript.

Me: Displaying PNGs now requires javascript.
Why is the most common job title "Software Engineer" at the top, but "Software Developer" is listed as the first job analyzed? Were they grouped together?
Its interesting that the only position with Ruby as a top skill was "CTO". Implies that Rails is quickly losing popularity.
Anecdote: The "average" salary reported for New York is very close to the entry-level starting salary for college graduates at most large (names you've heard of) tech employers in NYC. Companies routinely check what each other are doing and adjust entry-level pay packages yearly to compensate for competition, inflation, demand, etc. which makes data from each successive previous year not as relevant for someone interested in making a decision now. I do not think it is hard to imagine that more senior employees that are currently not interested in another job do not have any incentive to report pay to these sites, particularly if their pay is higher than what the site is reporting. (i.e. selection bias)

Related -- I believe the distinction between "engineer" vs "developer" being discussed here lately is less relevant than people think. Many people choose their own title when reporting information on sites used as sources in the article and companies may choose to post job listings using a completely different title. Even if the data could be traced back to an actual official title at each company, a large well-paying (or low-paying) company in a particular city could skew the entire number based upon whether they randomly refer to their employees as developers, programmers, or engineers internally. Similarly, a social trend to prefer "engineer" could skew all the anonymous reporting on these sites but actually had no bearing whatsoever in how salaries are determined. Given the noise in the data, I don't see how distinctions can be drawn from the outside.
I didn't see mention of the thing that always bothered me most: eye strain. I'm not sure if this is still an issue with newer "Retina"-style displays, but if I recall correctly, the human eye will constantly try and refocus on individual pixels while reading online. This comes across to the reader initially as distractedness, and after prolonged periods, eye strain.
Oops, yea, typo there. For the sake of this analysis we have treated developer and engineer (and programmer - although a very uncommon term in our dataset) as interchangeable. It could be another interesting study to look at the differences between people who align themselves as an engineer or a developer.
Do you have a forum for the users? The amount of help your users can provide to each other is massive.
Double-decker trains only increase train capacity by ~33% (the stairwells and so on take up room), and on busy lines like those in central London they can actually reduce capacity because they increase dwell times at the platform. What's needed is Crossrail and Crossrail 2, and what's especially needed is to fund Crossrail 2 now, before the skilled Crossrail workforce goes to Malaysia or China because that's where the jobs are. But as always, political shortsightedness rules the day.

You've got to remember that London doesn't just compete with Birmingham; many of the people and companies moving into London are world citizens who would otherwise go to Frankfurt / New York / Zurich / etc. Make London worse and they simply go to another country, which is worse for the entire UK, Birmingham included.

It would be great if we could build Manchester or Birmingham up to be the equal of London, to the point where international companies want to put their headquarters there, but that's going to take decades. And at the end of those decades, you're going to have a city that has all the same problems London is currently facing.
4-5 K is more than enough to hire someone to help with support part-time, via something like oDesk. As a bonus, you could probably hire someone who speaks English as their native language.
> To continue the metaphor, you can summon a demon if you know it's true name.

One of its names is Moloch, and yvain wrote a very interesting piece elaborating on many other examples where you can see that demon's influence.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Also, sibling comment reminds me of HN's cstross and his post in which he stated that we live in an aftermath of an alien invasion.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invaders...
I was wondering the exact same thing...
He's being hyperbolic, but his point stands. Fact is, there is no talent shortage, there's simply a shortage of startups who understand that you can't nickel and dime engineers or refuse to pay market rates. Whining about it does nothing to solve the problem. David "Pardo" Keppel said it best:

"There's no shortage of smart, hardworking engineers. There's a shortage of smart, hardworking engineers willing to work for very little money."

If you're having trouble hiring, it's probably because you're not paying enough. It turns out that talented people are worth paying a lot for.
How Lean Startup Gave Me Confidence to Quit My Job and Launch a Startup
While selective breeding has been around basically forever, one of the more recent "old methods" to be used was forcing mutation[1]. This involved liberal use of fun things like ethyl methanesulfonate or dimethyl sulfate. When the "atomic" craze happened, using cobalt-60 as a gamma source became popular.

What a lot of "anti-GMO" people seem to be missing is that the modern techniques are far less radical and significantly more controlled. At least now we can track the changes we make, which are limited in scope. Nothing is perfect, but I find small, tracked changes far more reassuring than randomly blasting plants with mutagens until you find something interesting.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding

...

wow - that wiki page has an interesting claim about "some" so-called "certified orgainc" growers:

"...several organic food and seed companies promote and sell certified organic products that were developed using both chemical and nuclear mutagenesis. Several certified organic brands, whose companies support strict labeling or outright bans on GMO-crops, market their use of branded wheat and other varietal strains which were derived from mutagenic processes without any reference to this genetic manipulation..."
And that's a satisfactory outcome for you?
Here at UT Austin there's a pretty big difference between the two (including pay - Engineer is higher). The Developer maintains the programs whereas the Engineer is the one who initial creates them.

They're state awarded titles, so it may be different in the private sector.
To unpack this claim:

> The value of something is "what you can get someone to pay for it." That is the only concrete, objective, and rational way to determine value.

Most if not all traded financial assets have conditional values, values that are fixed only at discrete points in time by actual transactions, and only in retrospect. Outside of that there's no guarantee that a stated value is concrete, objective, or rational at all.

The value of a given share of Bill Gates's MS stock for example is X if he attempts to sell a token amount today, and it's Y if he attempts to sell a large amount today. And X < Y all else being equal, a LOT less.

So tell me then, what is the concrete, rational, and objective value of Bill Gate's MS stock? The "correct" answer has to include a version of "well, it depends".

You claim that the value of something is "what you can get someone to pay for it" without realizing that by definition your measure of value is vague, indistinct, and subjective.

You could make an argument that the value of something is "what you actually got someone to pay for it at a specific date and time" but you didn't say that.
> its n*log2(n) running time

If you're going to talk about asymptotic running time, why specify log_2? As soon as you elide a multiplicative constant, all logs are equivalent.
Real passive income ideas
I'm a big believer in renationalisation of the railways for this very reason. When you look into commuting from outside London, the price of a season ticket scuppers your plans.
"outside of NYC or Chicago"

I've been carless in Boston (technically cambridge and somerville) for 15 years now and it's not at all been an issue.

I'm not some wackadoo outlier either, I know tons of people like myself.
Yes, I have a forum but can't reply often because I am busy working on coding part.
> Oil trades for around $100/barrel.

Wavering around $55/barrel at the moment.
Ask HN: Is JavaScript's Time Up?
The title is immediately deceiving, but I couldn't think of better wording for a title. Specifically, I mean to ask if Javascript as a language front-end (as compared to a compiler target) is coming to an end?

With tools like emscripten and js_of_ocaml, I can write C++, C, OCaml, Python, Java, Rust, Haskell, Objective-C, CIL (and any other language that compiles to LLVm bytecode[0]) and use that to power my browser scripting.

As we get closer to a Javascript as a bytecode, it seems like there may no longer be a need for Javascript the front-end. If I had to start a new app today, I think I might choose to do it in a unified language that either targets LLVM bytecode, or Javascript directly. In this way I could achieve unification of my server-side and browser-side code. Allow ease of maintenance, hiring, etc.

The only reason I can see actually "writing" Javascript continuing is in maintaining "legacy" code bases. Any thoughts?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM#Front_ends:_programming_language_support
I don't think it has much to do with Kurzweil - more likely with Bostrom's new book. But generally, I see it as smart people noticing various feedback loops we live in and extrapolating the potential consequences. In a way, bureaucracies, corporations and the market itself are AIs, just (currently) very slow ones.
I, for one, prefer a e-book to a hard to navigate book.

* And I presume I'm a "digital native" (whatever that means) since I'm 13.
Many years ago, I ran into an intermittent performance problem that was caused by a self-propagating worst case in our quicksort implementation. If you sorted a sequence with one item out of place in an otherwise sorted array, you would get an n-1/1 split, and the pattern would repeat itself on the larger side of the split.

We fixed this by picking a pseudo-random pivot, I think.
Why? Those savings are lent out to companies who produce the goods that will be consumed by these retirees when they start spending their savings. A lot of savings simply means an economy oriented towards the production of future goods.
If the Conservatives hadn't changed the law a few years ago, she might well have squatted in one.
The core goals behind Rust and Clojure are very different from those behind Go. This article/presentation would not be appropriate for those languages. I don't think anyone would say that Rust or Clojure are simple languages, or that simplicity is a core goal for them. Rust's core goals are performance, memory safety, and lack of race conditions (AFAICT). And clojure is a LISP which puts it in its own category, really.

It's like saying a jeep can't compare to a ferrari or a minivan - other than having 4 wheels, they're really not at all designed to do the same kinds of things... Sure, maybe driving to the corner store they're all pretty much the same, but which do you want in 8" of mud? Which do you want in a car chase on the highway? Which do you want to bring your 4 kids to soccer practice?
How to Work with a Virtual Assistant
I did live in London on my own, on a budget tighter than that. Admittedly, a few years ago
There are a handful of more generic crowd-funding platforms out there, so no need to build your own. A good candidate website would be more than enough to build.

As a bonus, crowd-funding your candidacy would give you early validation. And, as a comment below says, you should be able to convince enough people to scrape together £10k, if you expect to run. Fail fast, and all that.

You certainly have my donation, and my vote if I can still afford to live in London by election-time!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9100275
It takes strong personality and many years of practice to learn JavaScript well. Stuff like elegance, compiler checks, namespaces are for cowards. If one survives JavaScript, any other task will be easy.
Use lobste.rs instead and hide tags for things you're not interested in?