skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are there any good wiki softwares that use Asciidoc?
While I don't notice it because I, by default, deny all scripts.
I'm in college right now and I've been wondering...do professional programmers actually think about sorting algorithms on a day-to-day basis? How relevant is this knowledge when it comes to actually making something?
Did you hear about the student hackathon in Waterloo Ontario, Hack the North? The organizers purposely did not announce anything relating to prizes for the whole event until the end. The funny thing was that nobody even asked! For the finals they ended up giving the top 10 teams equal prizes; there was no 1st 2nd 3rd etc.

An organizer from Penn did a nice writeup of Hack the North here: https://medium.com/@bclaypoole/what-made-hack-the-north-grea....
Regarding the notion of not raising taxes on the rich, that's coming up every now and again.

From a 1976 musical, for example: "Don't forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor." (Peter Stone)
"Siri" -- Apple, closed source -- amended with "us" -- the community. Not a clever hack but a pretty awesome statement.
Typography that maintains a relative width to the rest of the page content and scales with everything else. Similar to how it's desirable to use CSS shapes over images.
This is such a horrible idea, I don't even know where to start. I'm not even worried about the long term consequences of this service, it is going to fail gloriously. How do I know this? Because it has has happened so many times before. Anybody remember long distance? That is what this is - and it might be the funniest thing I've seen all week. Thanks for the laugh Zuckerberg.
Just turn off twitter and Facebook and you can reach that kind of level.
I would venture that many of the jobs in any large (where large means > 10,000 people) corporation are bullshit jobs. For example, take Human Resources. Yes, you need a certain amount of HR to make sure that labor laws are being followed and that hiring/firing paperwork gets processed. But at most large corporations, the vast majority of HR's output appears to have no justification save to justify spending more on HR. Employee "engagement" surveys come to mind as the prime example of this.

I would be willing to bet that you could halve the HR workforce at many corporations (especially with some effort invested into automating HR functions) and not notice any drops in productivity.

More generally, a lot of "middle management" falls into this category. From what I see, it really looks like a lot of management work is really just make-work created by... other middle managers. Yes, some level of management is necessary to coordinate teams, but from where I sit, I see my manager spending literally 8 hours a day creating PowerPoint presentations that have no meaningful content whatsoever. And the funny thing is, he hates it more than I do! He's a (ex)programmer. He'd rather be writing code! But somehow the organization has decided (as a consequence of some managerial fiat, far above my pay grade) that it is more "productive" for my manager to be making PowerPoint presentations than writing code.

Yes, the phenomenon of bullshit jobs is far worse in government than in the private sector. But it's still here in industry, and the larger and older the industry, the more prevalent it is. Software companies haven't accumulated as much cruft, but that's largely because companies in software tend to die before they have a chance to accumulate the cruft that's present in industries with higher barriers to entry.

EDIT: Tyler Cowen [1] has an excellent term for this phenomenon: "zero marginal product" work.

[1] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07/zer...
ISP's have to buy license from government.

But a HN post showed a way to tunnel normal traffic through FB chat[].

:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946
I actually wonder if Apple is actually getting worse, or

1) so many people are now using their software that the 'few' who have had problems with the software are becoming loud enough to actually make a dent in the companies marketing and PR story

2) so many people are now using their software on different hardware that they are unable to keep up with managing the the overall experience.

My initial experiences with OSX were horrible, I had to restart my Mac Mini a bunch of times, and it wouldn't connect to the internet, lots of general issues that it turned me away from Mac pretty quickly. Everybody told me I was crazy, but now, we're seeing lots of people at work switch to linux, give up on Mac and even ogle my windows set-up.
Hah, I'm actually quite grateful that you didn't actually link to his blog (presumably[1]?) -- not because it's not interesting, but because if I hadn't tried to find "chris' blog" on truffle/graal, I wouldn't have come across:

http://cesquivias.github.io/blog/2014/10/13/writing-a-langua...

I've yet to read through [1], but the series above (so far up top 4 parts) gives a nice overview of truffle/graal -- and some ideas as to how it is different/similar to rpython/pypy. Be sure to also skim the comments, as they provide some input to why things are/starts out slow, and how to fix it (if it can be fixed).

Didn't realize there'd actually materialized any actual released code from the graal project -- glad it has (quite a while ago, apparently)!

[1] http://www.chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_%28pricing_policy%29 for one example of how giving something away for free can be net worse for the economy/world than charging a fair price for it.

Another issue is what is given for free. If free access is given to something that is 80% of what they need, people will have reduced incentive to buy 100%, shrinking the market for the 100% solution, raising its price, and keeping it out of reach of most people. As an analogy, giving people free low quality food could discourage them from high quality food, and the lack of market for good food could drive up its price further.
"Saying this was common knowledge in 1996 is attributing your specialist knowledge to the entire population, who couldn't, and still can't, really be bothered by said knowledge."

Bad effects from smoking were know for years, same with the effects of asbestos, DDT. These days, it's fracking, global warming, junk-food and lack of exercise.

These ideas were all and are currently in the media. People being the irrational beings they are pick and choose what they want to believe. Belief doesn't change the truth.
I found VPN configuration complicated, routers you have no control over sometimes have problems with VPN bypass, paid service doesn't let it through and so on. Instead I am using the SOCKS5 proxy in OpenSSH together with redsocks and iptables. For me this seems to be simpler and works everywhere. If you have a dedicated IP or your server runs SSLH then you can SSH to port 443 which is rarely if ever blocked.

Also, this allows for easy bastion hosts. While some tutorials still miss it, ssh has -W for 5+ years now and it makes creating bastion hosts even easier than when you needed nc in there. Hire a cheap physical server, put OpenBSD on it, run OpenSSH and absolutely nothing else. Firewall off everything from the sensitive servers except this server and there you go. Of course the bastion host does not have any credentials on it, agent forwarding is your friend.

Put your SSH key on a Yubikey NEO, the NEO on your keychain and never ever ever depart with it. Make it a habit not to be plugged into your laptop more than for the few seconds when actually log into a server. Stealing your laptop is pointless now.

If you work remotely then the exposure to social engineering is bigger as all chat facilities become an attack surface. Practice. Create a Skype account with a disturbingly similar screen name to your own Skype account and try to coax passwords out of your colleagues. If there are no static passwords to be had then you automatically win.

To me, full disk encryption was always of dubious value. You are sitting in a cafe someone walks in and suddenly grabs the laptop and runs out the door. What's good your FDE? Instead, have nothing stored locally and work over SSH. Now at worst what the brazen attacker has is the files open in your IDE but can't open any other files since the connection dropped and the yubikey is still with you. Also, when at the border you are not facing any issues since there are no passwords to be revealed (I do not want to get into a legal debate with anyone whether I can be forced to reveal a password. It's easier to not have the issue.). Your laptop boots, runs etc. Just there's nothing interesting on it.

I like the Yubikey as 2FA better than having some sort of 2FA on my phone because the keychain and the Yubikey is a much lower profile target than a phone. You probably have your keychain affixed to your belt/pocket by a carabiner or similar solutions so ordinary pickpockets, casual coffee shop thieves won't easily walk away with it and honestly don't want too much it either -- phones and laptops are too easy a target. (I do not wear it on a neck chain when showering but you can since it's waterproof. Pick your level of paranoia freely.)
Glassdoor is as good as it gets. The challenge is that such reviews need to be anonymous. But majority of reviews are going to be from unhappy people.

IME, the test requests primarily come from startup tech firms and technical people who think they are better than 'most' even if they are not.
Yes. I'm not sure if describing that as the "Verb World" is strangely accurate, or just strange ... should we adopt it as another term for immerse object-oriented, programmable, mediated, augmented and virtual reality? It has a nice ring to it: Come join us in the Verb World.
Ask a simple question, get a simple answer: no. While there are some programmers who develop libraries, the majority will just consume well-understood sorting algorithms which are baked into their languages/standard libraries/etc of choice. If you find yourself coding mergesort and you are not in a job interview, a nightmare, or a nightmare of a job interview, you are probably doing something wrong.

That said, most of the reason we teach sorting algorithms is to teach algorithms in general, and particularly the consequential lesson that "There are often many methods to doing something that work; these methods are often different in extraordinarily consequential ways; the right method for certain problems -- even ones which look trivial on the outside! --may require literally years of R&D to develop."
No, but we do think about efficient computational solutions to our problems. These sorting algorithms are simply starting points for you to start thinking how algorithms solve problems, how to optimize them, how to construct data structures, and how to apply asymptotic analysis on your computational solutions. If all goes well with these algo courses, you should end up thinking like a computer scientist ;)
Yeah im really looking forward being able to compile c# to native code and have things working well on Linux.
(ie what mono didnt really achieve, but that you can do on windows right now with a recent VS)

Even thus I know all the hype is on Go (and Go is great), C# is pretty sexy too.
Open-Book Management:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-book_management
This article is phrased very awkwardly.

It reads like giving away free access to certain sites, is the same as making premium internet access. Am I missing something? Facebook hate aside, this is a change meant to give something away. Right?
Basic telecommunications infrastructure in India is heavily regulated by a government that once actually proposed banning all VoIP services apart from the ones they offer at premium prices. Thanks to a high degree of corruption and bureaucracy, it is near impossible to enter the ISP game unless you have serious monetary or political clout. Simply starting a competing ISP is not really feasible.
The Ultimate Networking Apps for Meeting People Over Coffee
I don't get it, it is free, and worried about being charged to access it beyond the free version?
Sure it is, Beam telecom (ACT now), You broadband, Spectranet (citycom now, although it is older).

If you are implying that serious investment is required to setup the infrastructure, you are correct. This is the nature of the telecom game.
Ugh, there's 10 syllables in that. Maybe they should call it o10d?
I'm Indian and I'm deeply frustrated and disappointed with this. My fear is that other mobile networks like Airtel will pick up dumb ass half-baked ideas like this and start charging for data from other non approved sources and for high cost paid wireless Internet to become the norm. I know Reliance is way too greedy, but this really is a new low. While wireless data costs in other countries are coming down, here we see the opposite trend. Fucking disgusting.
i think its great for people who don't have access to the internet especially poorer sections but they should've included better sites for learning expanding their knowlege etc.
Ask Netscape how they feel about Microsoft giving Internet Explorer away.
Maybe I misunderstood. But I think the alarm bells are pre-mature. You HAVE to pay for internet access, what this announcements says is that if you visit some websites you will not be charged.
How is it any bad? The websites are paying the telecom company to bear the cost of the traffic. The customer, like always, is bearing the cost of traffic to internet.
Funneling people to a restricted number of websites by making them easier to access (and money matters for a large number of Indians, spending ~2.5 USD a month for 500MB 3G internet is considered a luxury) and then profiting off advertising on those websites definitely feels like it skews the balance in favour of these who run said 'approved' websites.
Don't forget a privacy filter for the screen. Amazing how much information you can glean just from shoulder surfing.
Yes, it gives away free access of 38 sites. But by doing so, they also encourage more people to forgo purchasing complete internet plans and hence accessing all of the other millions of websites out there. This indirectly drives traffic to this 38 sites that they’ve picked through a very skewed and opaque process, and undermines the concept of net neutrality.
Google has a similar one on their projects[0] that is used for checking for CLAs. Seems like something that might benefit from being built into GitHub.

[0]: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes/pull/5484
> The upshot of all of this, according to Kuhn, is that the criteria for scientific truth are always caught up in certain historical assumptions and that we have to take these assumptions into account when assessing the veracity of a given theory.

If your historical assumptions are true in a useful way, your science will progress to the point where you have more-useful engineering; if they're wrong in an important way, your science will stall out, or give you the wrong answers. If they're neither, and they don't affect the ultimate utility of your predictions one way or the other, it all becomes a bit academic: Is it even useful to say your theories are wrong if they keep making good predictions and allow scientific progress to be made? Note well that atomism (pre-quantum) and geocentrism eventually stopped making good predictions, stopped being a gateway to more complete theories, or both. (For example, geocentrism is probably impossible to integrate with universal gravitation.)

"Truth" is something mathematics has access to, not physics. Truth-With-A-Capital-T is Absolute, Perfect, Incorruptible, and utterly inconsistent with reality as it is outside of the symbol-games we play in our minds, because Platonism is downright insane.

Therefore, "scientific truth" is contingent, sure, but it's contingent on more than mere fashions. It's contingent on experimentation and experiments don't care if your histories are contingent one way, the other, or the other way entirely. Nobody's histories were contingent enough to imagine the Earth repelled small rocks.

So Kuhn agrees that there is a universe and that there are, at least potentially, facts about that universe humans are capable of discovering. That puts him a few up on some philosophers. However, I don't agree that our criteria for scientific truth is fully entwined with our historical accidents as long as we rely on science to predict what the non-human world is going to do.
As a fellow Indian, I'd find that frustrating too.

Think of the alternative - suppose the government or judiciary finds this practice illegal and outlaws it. Imagine how unlikely this is and even if it does happen, how much bad press would be generated about "job-killing License Raj" etc.
If you are a startup trying to compete with any of those 38 sites, thrn you start with a massive disadvantage. Zuckerberg is essentialy creating a massive walled garden where the walls are held in place by economic pressure.
As usual, the S looks strange.

No wonder Knuth dedicated a whole chapter to this one letter in "Digital Typography".
>Some principles to guide people toward wise activities and away from unwise activities.

The paternalism inherent in categorizing some activities as "wise" and others as "unwise" is exactly the sort of thing the article argues against. If I want to spend my days playing a video game, and I find genuine fulfillment in it, who are you to say that it is a "wise" or "unwise" activity?

>Addictive, abusive, and destructive patterns of behavior are bad.

They're "bad" because you're coming at it from a reference frame that says that every hand and every mind is needed to ensure the collective survival and prosperity of the community. In short, no work, no food. But that hasn't been the case for quite some time. Moreover, it also looks like you're taking the view that addiction is a choice. Empirically, it is not. Drug users do not choose to be addicted to drugs. They are addicted because of a poor choice they made years (or, in some cases, decades) ago. Thirty years of experience has shown that treating drug addiction as a moral problem is ineffective, expensive, and corrosive to society.

>"compulsively binge-viewing TV will keep you from your studies."

And why are we studying? To get a job, which is exactly the problem that UBI seeks to solve. If compulsive TV-watching (or heck, even compulsive novel-reading) is more interesting than your studies, then maybe the problem is with the studies, not the TV.
Baggage? Do you want to say 'garbage'?
Fair enough. I suppose it is more accurate to claim that entering a business with high infrastructural costs is not possible for most people (where will the money come from?) and my guess is that only a small number of people who are in a position to start such a business would actually know and care about net neutrality.
I had exactly the same history: started with the Microsoft trackball (guided by the fingers), and when that died, switched to the wired Logitech trackman (ball is under the thumb), and now that's unavailable so have the wireless one. Both trackmans work the same, but I'm stationary so prefer the wired version.

In the end, I prefer the ergonomics of the trackmans better because of the thumb ball. I even put a small bean bag under it so it is tilted backward and easier on the wrist (like my Microsoft ergonomic keyboard).
>True, any job has value; this is evident from the fact that the employer pays for it to be done.

Value to the employer != value to society != value to the laborer. We're using one word to describe three concepts, and running headlong into the confusion that results.
Currently using an iP6+ with the new Logitech Keys-To-Go which is similar and probably even thinner but not folding. Keyboard's great but every manufacturer seems to be missing the fact that you'll also need a decent stand for the phone and I have yet to find something that's slim, adjustable and not 3$ eBay quality.
Death of the net predicted!

But the Internet defeated walled gardens before, because people actively chose "the whole shebang" over AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etcetera.

And, continuing improvements in networking keep making it easier, at the margin, to just offer everything.

Any fixed-menu-of-N-services, even if regularly updated, will be blatantly missing some emerging content or app that friends are talking about. That will drive people to upgrade to (or creatively tunnel!) to the real, full Internet as soon as they're technically or financially able. And that ability arrives fast, given whetted appetites, social pressures, and the rapid progress in networking tech.

Don't panic. Build. Any net barrier that's just a matter of puny business models will be temporary, and melt away from competition & Moore's Law.

Watch out, instead, for the net barriers enforced by ideologues with badges & guns. Those blockades can hold out against technological and economic forces much longer.
Das Neueste Aus Dem Netz, Virale Hits Und Epic Fails
Regardless of the press, a level playing field would in fact be a boon for upcoming businesses. Bad press is inevitable - look at the recent uproar in the US over net neutrality. There are still some people who want to make it look like the FCC is somehow restricting private enterprise which is A Bad Thing.
Whatshudoin Social App
What is the chance that these creatures didn't evolve on earth but on some other planet and comet and instead got transported here on a meteor. That would explain a lot of things as to why they evolved to stand 6 times the maximum pressure, temperature colder than ever recorded on earth, and their other attributes which are too extreme for even the most hostile environment on earth.
Yeah, when the reference (and the concept) of a word shifts, it becomes a fallacy of equivocation.
Hacker News is now more mobile friendly
In most complex jobs (that is, jobs with a theoretical component someone writes books about), the theory part mostly comes to the fore when something goes wrong, and you have to diagnose and fix the problem.

So, in this case, programmers would use this stuff when a sort takes up too much time or too much RAM for what it's meant to do. Then you need to know what big-O is and how to fix it.

It seems a bit odd to spend all this time preparing for things that don't happen every day, but, really, that's what people pay the big bucks for: Someone who can smooth over life's little difficulties, at least in that specific realm.
I love my Microsoft wedge keyboard,seem to fit your needs also.

See http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/p/wedge-mobile-keybo...
Thanks for the links, they make it clearer what it can do and how it feels. Looks really interesting, and I like that it doesn't require some third-party server somewhere on the internet.
If you're swayed by that logic, should perhaps Google be forced to charge users for web search, and Android, and their other "free" offerings that put smaller competitors at a disadvantage?
Show HN: I made a Twitch floating player with floating chat (for Chrome)
Aren't we past Kuhn these days? For instance, Imre Lakatos take it further than Kuhn in his "Research Programs". And Larry Laudan takes it further than these two: research traditions and problem-soloving. Well, we have all -isms (positivism, empiricism, constructive empricism) pragmatism, realism), which are to explain the progress of knowledge (natural sciences, that is).
Are those competitive ISPs going to give the audience we're talking about access to the net for free as well? Because for a lot of people in this world, they will never be connected to the net unless they don't have to pay; they simply can't afford it.
This is an early beta, feedback and suggestions welcome
Simplicity is never simple

And is most often ruined by the real world and its exceptions
Ask Microsoft how they feel about Linus giving Linux away.
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." — [likely not] John Steinbeck