skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If we took every actuary working 9 to 5, and instead threw all of their tens of thousands of daily working hours at coding a program to do their job, how soon do you think we could automate an entire industry?

This is naive techno-optimism.[1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/1425; "The title text mentions The Summer Vision Project and Marvin Minsky of MIT. In the summer of 1966, he asked his undergraduate student Gerald Jay Sussman to 'spend the summer linking a camera to a computer and getting the computer to describe what it saw' ([1]).... The project schedule allocated one summer for the completion of this task. The required time was obviously significantly underestimated, since dozens of research groups around the world are still working on this topic today."
Checkout BackBlaze's blog. Tons of useful info [1]

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/
Thank you. There should more interviewers like you and i hope to be facing someone alike the next time i am on the applying side of the table.
>"If every citizen received some minimum universal basic income, what might we do with our time instead of going to jobs we hate?"

I think you need to quantify what you mean by that. It seems that every time I hear this UBI idea being defended with a sentence similar to the one you made, the tone set implies that something "beneficial" will happen that does not because they go do jobs they "hate".

I.e. If we free ourselves from going to work we will... And then insert anything from "do art", "be creative", "come up with novel ways to improve the world", or something of the like.

(Feel free to correct me there, but that seems to be the implicit argument/idea behind that sentence you made)
IMHO low interest rate can drive a lot of people to making insane decision up and down the financial food chain. It's essentially "free" money, except the principle has to be paid back.

Much of this has been the seed of the 2008/2009 financial crisis. Funny how crisis in one industry turned out to be a boon for another.
"You can demand all you want ..."

Even better, those feeling this way can refuse to work for more time than they'd like. They don't need to force the rest of us.
I asked a question some time ago on SO [1] where Scott Stanchfield - "The Java Dude" weighed in and it sparked quite a discussion. It is well worth reading the discussion there as well as this one.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/934775/changing-value-af...
The supporting material mentioned in the article make for exceptional reading:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n05/john-lanchester/the-robots-are-...

http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/sites/futuretech.ox.ac.uk/fil...
The best way to deal with this by a substantial margin is to simply not have uninitialized variables, ever, which means you don't need null in the first place (you can replace the functionality with optionals if you really want to, but usually it's not necessary). When I write Java, I declare fields final wherever possible for this and other reasons.
I am sort of on the fence on this. On one hand, I do not like pursuing ignorance. On the other, I do not objectively know the difference between a mind that is repeatedly triggered by random noise that can immediately bring my mind back into a state of flipping between catatonia and hyper-stress/hyper-alert, and a mind that is able to control information flow and pursue it's goals (such as a phd and happiness in life).

I've been in recovery from realizing and recognizing the effects of my trauma for almost 4 years now. You talking about rape does not bring me back into the mental state it once did. But I don't know how I got here, besides through time (and sheer determination to be the best I can be, and not let my past haunt me). But that said, if you reminded me of my abuser, I don't think I could control my reaction so much. And hyper anxiety / reactive shutdown is not something that is easy to remove oneself from.

I think your attitude is very intelligent, but I think you need to add a little more empathetic wiggle room for things you may not understand entirely.
Workers should be given an hour or so to sit and listen to some rhetoric about a heavenly next life; it might stimulate their opioid receptors and reduce these pesky demands.
Work had, keep advancing your skills and get to the job where you will have more decisions to manage your own time. We are in the Internet Revolution, no one said it was going to be easy.
No, the article was right.

You can't do a generic swap without 3 deep copies.

If you change temp to be a reference, then once you do "arg1 = arg2", you just lost any way to get arg1's value back.
The author blames the capatalists but the consumer and competition for goods and services are the culprit. If everyone could live where they wanted to, put their kids through good schools, did not have to pay student loans, save for retirement, and could afford vacations all with 30% less money than they make now then they you would see people seeking jobs that allow them to work less hours. When I take a Lyfy and a driver tells me that she has another job and is making extra money for any number of reasons she is not complaining that she is being overworked by Lyft, but that she doesn't make enough money (except for the occasional driver, like the one driving the landrover, that was driving for fun). Similarly, many engineers could pick up and move to Thailand and live like kinds doing some remote work (our designer does this), yet most would do anything to work at places like Google or Apple.
I think for casual games, MonoGame (XNA but for platforms besides Windows) is a very attractive proposition, since it's pretty easy to release a multiplatform game with.
practicing and non-practicing are concepts specific to christian cultures and not a general concept applied to all beliefs
I work in Sweden to, where do you work 50+ hour weeks and how much money do you make to get 65% tax?
I don't think we will, and that is because no one cares.

People don't seem to realize that working extremely long hours was the norm in the early 20th century. It was a long sustained effort by labor unions to those hours down from 100 a week to 40 a week.

We're regressing fast, but there will be no change in the US because everyone in this country believes they'll be the capitalists one day.
I am unsure how someone might think lobbyists don't generate value. With their lobbying they convert causes which can't be easily utilised in the democratic process to be more addressable (which means: can be targeted by polarising groups in either gov or opposition)

They do extend the capacity of democracies dramatically.

eg: Nobody linked mahogany with dying rainforests before Greenpeace.
I receive, at absolute most, 2-3 US checks in the mail each month. It's not worth paying for such a mail-forwarding service, when I can just tell people, "Go to the post office, ask for a stamp to Israel, and hand it to the postal clerk."

Plus, the US number comes with free unlimited calling to the US, so I can call my clients (and family, to be honest) as much as I want.
Yes and they are Capitalists. The US has a better quality of life when compared to all of Europe which is why a tiny Nordic country is usually used.
Free OCR. It's possible
And I'm guessing the only reason you're guessing that is because you think Apple products are the greatest and you could never imagine anyone not liking their stuff?

No, I actually have a Macbook Pro sitting right next to me and we have iPads, iPods, iPhones, etc. throughout the house. I actually recommend them to users who don't care as much about control, which is most people. They're just not for me though.
You are correct that all models are imperfect, and you can compute second order corrections to my sketch of rents (e.g. subtract overhead for offshore operation).

None of this changes the conclusion that Deepika (a real person and a friend of mine, albeit not named deepika) has escaped poverty thanks to her job at a call center. Based on our previous conversations I know you dont consider her as valuable as a hypothetical american (ugh, dirty foreigners with animal gods and spicy foods), but that's simply a normative difference.
You honestly can't be so arrogant so as to assume that if you can't see the benefit of an activity, that it must not have any benefit, right?

Lobbyists are critical to the functioning of the American system of government. They're even mentioned in the Constitution.

Private equity firms make retirement possible.

PR researchers enable companies to not have to deal exclusively with the populist swaying of public opinion. Public opinion, generally speaking, is an awful way to do business and to make decisions. Mobs are cruel.

I could go on but this method of dealing with your issues is unsustainable. Suffice it to say that you're just going to have to live with the fact that you don't understand everything and that's okay.
This is the way I learned to do it in grad school. There a lot of litterature out there and most chances are 97% is irrelevant to what you're interested in. So, a lot of "reading papers" is efficiently figuring out if it is interesting or not. You'll never realistically have time to read everything.

First read title and abstract. This is where you'll likely eliminate a lot of stuff.

Interestingly, I've found that the best point to go from there is the conclusion. A good conclusion will generally tell you the results (which is generally what interests you), plus a good summary of the motivation and approach/methods.

From there figure out what is interesting to you. Go through the background or motivation, specific areas of methodology you're interested in, or detailed analysis of the results.
>"[..]but the reality is that most countries have mandated retirement savings mechanisms that efficiently funnel employee pensions and savings into the industry."

I wouldn't quite use the word mandated. But at least in the case where I am currently, South Africa, all sorts of financial instruments such as the ones you mention, are heavily "pushed" by government via various means. I.e. tax-exemption benefits, incentivizing insurance/financial brokers into pushing by making it a regulated license industry (protected status), and plain out funding the industry by using it to give government employees plushy "retirement packages" in the form of these instruments.

It's such a sad state of affairs (at least in this small subset of discussion). I've actually been wondering about it quite a lot recently. While I watch perfectly smart, educated individuals being effectively "tricked" into putting huge amounts of their monthly earnings to save up for "retirement" because it's "tax-exempt". Ironically, all those savings get taxed as "income" anyways when they withdraw from it in retirement. Wait, it's not funny.

Meanwhile, whilst they are busy being coaxed into this scheme due to "tax exemption" benefits, they're paying mounds of interest on car and home loans that they could pay off ridiculously sooner. Those loans that are constantly funding financial institutions? You could argue that it's another way in which the government is "funneling" capital into it.

</rant>
Except they don't completely behave like they are passed by reference (see swap in the article). It is only ever correct to say "they behave like they are pointers which were passed by value".

Continuing to say "they act like references" is wrong and how this mess keeps perpetuating.
I don't have any numbers, but it is not entirely unfeasible that they would be. Police tend to react strongly if someone acts confrontationally with them, and this is something that autistic people might do more often. They don't mean harm, but how would the police know they don't?

Police can be trained to recognize various disorders and understand how to deal with them non-violently, but in the end, it may be difficult to see quickly that you should act differently if a non-compliant and threatening-looking person is autistic, compared to other non-compliant and threatening-looking persons.
Close Relationships at Work Bring Value and Risks
I have found the most reliable measure for a candidate is looking at their public interactions/contributions. Seeing what projects they choose to work on in their spare time, how they speak at user groups, how they interact on an "issue" online. Blog posts are also great. For me, ability to communicate is such a huge part of being a successful developer, that being able to see how they communicate is always a very strong signal of intelligence, mastery, and interpersonal style.

So this works great for people that partake in such things, but there are clear still many great developers (perhaps the vast majority) that don't have this type of extensive public profile. These are the applicants that I fear false-negatives for the most, and the candidates for which I am not confident of my interview techniques.

Could it be that the proper way to technically interview such a candidate is to offer them a "fellowship" to work on an open-source project? Point them at any project (used by the company or a favorite project of their own) that they'd like to contribute to, and offer them a small stipend and enough time to make a legitimate contribution to open source? And use that as the technical portion of the interview?
Tomb Raider Reborn review
Marx (like Freud) established a language of concepts as well as theories. While the initial theories may have failed - we continue to use the language of related concepts in the on going discussion.
> Also it's hard to take an article seriously when it cites Marx, whose theories obviously don't work in the real world, as humans are competitive to varying degrees by nature.

Marx's "theory" was a method of analyzing history by focusing on class conflict as the main driver for history. By applying that analysis to capitalism, he predicted that the proletariat would inevitably come into conflict with the bourgeoisie. Das Kapital was a deep dive into how and why this conflict comes about (both economically and philosophically).

As for what happened next, those are "implementation details" which Marx didn't write too much about. We've seen a few implementations (Bolshevism, Stalinism, Cuba, Maoism) and a few modern contradictions (current China, North Korea, etc.) and most have been flawed.

However, not every implementation of capitalism has been successful, either. There are plenty of fascist and repressive states that are capitalist. Nazi Germany and Italy during WWII, Argentina during Pinochet, hell, you might even say ISIS is capitalist.

So, I'd argue that many implementations of communism have failed in the same way that several implementations of capitalism have failed, but there is a large space for experimentation as there has been with capitalism. For example, democratically planned economies with analytical input is a space that hasn't been explored too well beyond very tiny experiments in sectors within Latin America.
I would recommend employing the Agile approach to development. Create and test a wholly working prototype of whatever you're working on, be it a new feature or extending a function. The key is that the prototype should not by any means be the final product, instead aim to create something that is working and accurate to a small step of the problem; an iterative approach to development. This way, your tests grow with the functionality of your code and if your code is well tested, it should function properly at every step of the way. Thus, by the end, you have a fully implemented whatever that has solid tests and should "Just Work".
If this seems too slow or tedious, you can take the move fast and break things approach, in which you simply create a rough prototype of how you think the code should look, and work through the bugs until it does what you want. You should still write tests, especially to help determine when you've properly fixed the implementation. Keep in mind this involves a stronger sense of underlying problems in bugs and needs good debugging skills to be effective. It can take more time though if your initial prototype is too far off.
Your equation leaves out the technological contribution to making the jobs possible in the first place; the innovation, the science / R&D, etc.

The rent is not 90k in that case. The rent is negative, in favor of the US; the US economy has benefited most other countries far more than those countries have benefited it. Most of the world gets a vast free rider benefit from what the US economy accomplished in the last ~140 years.
Except they are different things, and others (me included) have seen bugs related to the confusion.

Technical correctness is always best. Java is pass by value, and even variables holding object references are passed by value.
You feel you don't have control of your MBP? You just need to do some research, it is more congigurable than you realize.
life would be awesome with a 3-day weekend, every weekend. time to make it happen.
Criticism and Ineffective Feedback
yeah, I guess that was rude, sorry.
Pterosaur: Full power of Vim in each Firefox text field
Is there any useful argument to be had around this, for pragmatic purposes?

No one disagrees about what Java is doing here (that I know of).

Naming is a problem if people are writing bugs due to the poor explanation.

But I can't think of the last time I've actually seen bugs caused because anyone who thought that, for example, a swap() method would work in Java.

It's something that brand-new developers might muddle up, but usually they'll learn how it works within the first year, no? If they keep track of how to treat primitives vs. objects in methods by saying "Java passes primitives by value, Objects by reference", and that works for them, that's okay. I think a senior dev should know a bit more about what's really going on, but I'm not waste the time of a mid-level programmer because, even though this code is correct, I want to talk for 20 minutes about the reason why it's correct wasn't worded quite right.

I'm far more likely to see bugs caused by people misunderstanding Java's auto-boxing/unboxing of primitives for method calls ("how the devil is this line throwing a NullPointerException?").
Wear Yellow for Seth (please)
Creating a better User Experience
Lighting design theory for 3D games, part 1: light sources and fixtures
Kinda doubling down on the whole "they're not real canadians" thing aren't ya?

Here's an interesting study from U.Ottawa in 2010: http://sciencessociales.uottawa.ca/grei-rgei/fra/documents/W...

Of interest: 1986-2010 only 130,000 individuals gained citizenship via the immigrant investor program. Of those about 32,000 were the primary applicant, and 97,000 were family members (on average 3... so wife + 2 kids).

This bit is also pretty telling:

> Contrary to popular belief, a majority of respondents (82%) reside in Canada on average between 10 and 12 months a year (Table 4). In addition, another 11% of respondents indicated that they stay in Canada for 7 to 9 months a year. The only official and comparable figures on this topic come from the province of Quebec, where about half of all immigrant investors who landed in Canada since 2003 still lived in the country in 2007 (Figure 12). Our survey results give a higher estimate on a national basis of the proportion of immigrant investors who reside permanently in Canada compared with statistics from the province of Quebec

Trusting the Conservatives to tell the truth about immigration issues is foolish. The minister's comments are directly refuted by this study. Especially his "or making a positive economic impact"... here's a quote from the start of the study:

> The Program clearly constitutes a positive economic initiative for Canada. Considering that about 2,500 immigrant investor families enter Canada each year, this means that the Program provides an annual economic contribution of $1.9 to $2 billion to the Canadian economy
At least C and C++ have proven that programming languages do matter. Otherwise I don't think they would've done anybody any good for the last decade.
Nice! That's what the world waited for :-)
I think the author is referring to control in a slightly different way. I know a lot of people who having switched to a Mac feel a lot more in control (my dad, for example). Previously they didn't have much of a clue what was going on, they were constantly bombarded with strange messages and alerts and now they have switched, most of that has gone away.

It's about feeling in control, not about having 1000 options.
The same group of people that would support "democratically planned economies with analytical input" are the people who would blame the same sorts of analysis for the Great Recession.

I wonder if they think that if only the bankers were democratically controlled, their risk modeling wouldn't have gone berserk. The experiences of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should serve as a counter data point to this assumption.

This is a general problem with Marxism. Embedded very deeply in Marx is the idea that if only the correct social class controlled everything, things would be better, and that violence and injustice--which Marx explicitly advocated--are acceptable ways to achieve this. The idea that social class and morality are economic forces is a good one, but Marx wasn't the first guy who thought of this--he actually very deeply studied earlier economists and used their ideas--and we would do ourselves a service by not paying attention to someone who repackaged these ideas into a loathsome story about the inevitability and rightness of the "dictatorship of the proletariat". (I'll add further that mainstream economics has moved on from many others of these ideas because they turned out to be dead wrong--like the labor theory of value.)

Edit: Intolerance of informed criticism is not a convincing defense of your ideas.
this is the better idea. With commutes, it doesn't make much sense for me to spend less than 8 hours a day in the office if it takes me a bit over an hour each way just to get there, but the 4 day work week is very appealing. Tree House has already implemented it
> what is wrong with a real puppy?

Why do you demonize video technology so?
Associationist Theories of Thought
I'd argue it's hand-holding presented as 'control', because that's what good hand-holding looks like; it's the opposite of clippy.
Allow me to turn it back on you: what if your sentiment had prevailed at any time during our current revolution in automation? Say a group of factory workers protest automation not because it puts them out of a job, but because they like what they do (a totally unnecessary distinction - part of the reason I like my job is that it lets me eat and pay bills). Are you sympathetic to preventing automation then? Or is our current level of automation just right because it has presented you with the least amount of challenge to your job?

No, we should encourage automation full-tilt. Jobs are lost every day to automation, and the promise of a world where the workweek is short to nonexistent is one we should embrace, not reject because some people like their jobs. If we work hard enough to bring this to fruition, the actuary can crunch numbers on his own time if he wants -- or is free to explore thousands of other hobbies.
Perl 6, a new language inspired by Perl, is coming. ;)

IMO; Neither it or Perl 5 provide particular advantages as a general career path at this point...aside perhaps from getting out in front of Perl 6 on the chance it suddenly becomes the next big thing.

That's not to say Perl and Perl 6 are not worth knowing and using. I find The approach to errors in Perl 6 to look like an attractive future. But a lot of Perl's traditional strength in regular expressions appears in other languages. and I'm not sold on the idea that Perl's contextual evaluation semantics outweigh the textual complexity it introduces when reading source code.