skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Does the law allow you to act as a Good Samaritan in the course of committing a felony?

I don't think any jurisdiction has a "Good Samaritan" law which makes it so that trying to provide assistance after the fact negates liability one would have for criminal acts that make you liable for the injury in the first place, including effects of injury that the attempt to provide assistance was intended to prevent but failed to.
Uber Rival GrabTaxi Opens R&D Center to Lure Engineering Talent
"I don't think its right to impose a penalty, there is already a process to determine if police acted appropriately"

Yep, and its clear this 'process' doesn't really work too well, so by all means this is a welcome step
OP is James Long, a really well known + awesome and insightful writer and thinker on topics mainly around JS.
I tried that at one point with a coworker: https://github.com/alokmenghrajani/nomic

We added a way to vote using public keys and then we got bored because nobody else was geeky enough to join our game.
There isn't much anti-immigration sentiment in the US. What we have in the US is anti illegal immigration sentiment.

In terms of European countries there was an article about a week ago regarding Americans going to Germany for free college. The Germans were hoping they'd stay.

I think people worry about the quality of immigrants. We want more young Sergei Brins and fewer middle aged guys with a sixth grade education.
The IA machines are optimized for storage, they don't have that much CPU.
Just map Alt-Gr to control
> If they don't happen to see me move my task around, they probably noticed my Pull Request being put into GitHub, and various comments and discussions going back and forth on the code and feature. Additionally, we use HipChat, which receives notifications of GitHub activity as well.

Yup, because only developers should be at standups. Designers, UX, BAs, data guys, etc... should not be allowed to come to standups.

And your project is so small, you can track when everyone moves their cards.

> I can tell you what I'm planning on doing today

Yup that is fine. If you are being constantly prevented from finishing that, then that is a problem.

> Waiting for the daily stand-up is a terrible way to deal with impediments.

You are doing it wrong. Deal with the impediment straight away, and then start tracking it on the board. Keep everyone informed about the impediment, so that if it touches other people, they know about it.
"Nothing to report" is both longer and more boring than saying "quack" and having it received as "I have nothing to report."
" I shouldn't have to babysit and micromanage what they're doing each day."

But the standup is not about you micromanaging. The standup is about the team. It's not about having an accountability red-flag to force people into labour, it's about creating a benign cultural incentive to work. Some people actually like discussing what they've done. And if someone is having a slight episode of procrastination then knowing one needs to tell the next day gives an extra motivation to sharpen up.

It's not about putting collars and leashes on people. It's about giving visibility to work. Often visibility without explicit punishments nor rewards is sufficient to give an extra boost to efforts. It's an automatic reminder to people on what is important, without being irritating or nagging.
>there is nothing i need that is not already done

So, you don't have anything to do. Relax and enjoy a coctail.
Right now in Europe and the US we have boatloads of people sitting around without jobs. How does it make sense to import more people to compete for the few jobs that are left? Automation means you need a smaller percentage of working people to maintain society. We can't figure out what to do with the people we have.
Why do I get:

> unknown unit 'millilightseconds'

Is this one of the embellishments that just makes the story more entertaining?
I agree. I feel that we're kind of forced to use them at this stage, with new browser APIs etc, but they don't actually seem to make code any less verbose or more maintainable.
I think its fine. From time to time a question or comment will come up related to something I've done. I've never had anyone complain about it. Usually people are happy to hear about possible solutions to a problem they're having.
If it takes several seconds to set up a test, I would give this a try:

- start a test from the IDE,
- wait a second or so,
- manually pause all threads,
- look at the stacks of the threads.

Might take two or three attempts, but likely should learn you a lot. Alternatively, use a real profiler to find the call(s) that take lots of time.
Right. I'd imagine it working well on reddit where content is just reposted automatically and receives normal upvoting. Makes it more organic.
Show HN: Breaktime – A CLI timer forcing you to take breaks by locking your Mac
Sounds like we already have exactly such a system, no?
This always reminds me of the email around the world: http://phrack.org/issues/41/4.html
Paul Graham once responded to me asking a similar question.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7180744
Did you have to attend other meetings during the week besides the daily standup?

15 min is the limit of the standup but it should rarely get to that. A well run scrum team does daily standups in less than 5 minutes.

In agile, the team self manages and decides how much of the process they want to follow: if some higher up comes down dictating "thou shall be standups", I would be giving my notice too.
I found the raw video awesome enough to submit a few days ago, but the super-detailed explanation in this blog raises this to a whole new level of epic.

I wonder if youngsters who didn't grow up thinking 1 MHz is a perfectly acceptable CPU speed and that 640 KB is a whole lot of RAM will understand what the fuss is about here...
I wonder how much of the median salaries for those industries are driven up by licensing and accreditation to practice.

If you were to implement a license to practice software engineer (thereby eliminating many jobs at the bottom performed by people who wouldn't be able to earn a license, how much would the median income for software engineers go up?

Conversely, if you eliminated licensing for dental hygienists and let each practice determine the criteria for hiring, how many people would be employed handling dental hygienist roles and responsibilities that you don't need licensing to perform? How much would increased employment by less qualified individuals bring down the median income?
I don't think this is a bad thing. It was either 1 or 2 years ago when I first read about this - newcomers to the community have to find out about things in one way or another.
The penalty is designed so that you will not gain more points than you deserve if you guess and had no idea which answers were wrong.

If there are 5 choices and you randomly guess, you have 4/5 chances to get -1/4 and 1/5 chance to get 1 point. That means if you had no idea which answer is correct, you will net 0 points over the long run, and this will be the same as leaving the question blank. 4/5 * -1/4 + 1/5 = 0.

If you are able to eliminate 1 choice, you will on average get 1/4th more points by picking a random answer among the remaining choices. If you are able to do that, then you deserve the extra points, because it took more knowledge for you to eliminate it.

Anyone that doesn't realize this deserves to have a lower score, and if you can't eliminate answers then you also deserve a lower score. Bringing in racial and gender biases into this is ridiculous.
Did you fucking read TFA?

It's title literally is: "HPC is dying, and MPI is killing it".

His comment shows more understanding of the article's main point (about the demise of HPC) that your "it's about MPI"...
Allergies have killed people;
Thank you for posting this, because it's cool and inspirational. Unfortunately, for what I do, I really do need something that works with Xcode. Does anyone have experience with Mac dictation software other than OS X's built-in thing?
That was great out-of-the-box thinking, and I wonder if that could be used as one of these job interview questions:

Q: "Your email server for some reason is only working for addresses within 500 miles of the server. What may go wrong?"

And let the candidate think logically and reach some sane answer, even if not 100% accurate (i.e. check routers first, connectivity, DNS, timeouts...)
There're seldom the cases where Haskell can convince people it is more suitable for doing something, or can do it better.
What about the Islamic calendar? If your software handles anything having to do with dates and is being used internationally then it seems to me you have to take that one into account: eventually somebody will want to see their calender or input a date in their local date handling system.

Edit: I am confused about the downvotes. I point out that he can't assume there is only one calendar system in use, even for general software.
"Webdev" is not fundamentally any different from any other kind of development that involves a client and server component. It just happens to be served in a web browser. You need the same underlying knowledge as for other (common) types of software development.
I disagree with "A good candidate who frequently leads, salvages, solves problems better than the rest probably doesn't store a list of these occurrences".

Unless one is talking many years prior, these situations are still in the memory. The question isn't meant as an approach to rehash a particular solution. It is meant to set ground work to explore decisions, options presented, etc.
If you're on a mac, try $ brew install gnu-units - it's probably using a very incomplete library of units.
This looks like a really bad post.

I don't think this is what a window manager is:

> For those of you who are unfamiliar with what a window manager is, it’s a way to snap individual windows into sections on your screen.

A window manager is a software that manages your windows for you. It need not necessarily 'snap' them. It can position your window according to however it pleases. It is also responsible for transferring the control between windows and providing window decorations and other controls to the user.

This I believe is in the X11 context. Could somebody with a Mac expand on if this is the case on the apple computers too?
Why does the system go down if a node goes down? Shouldn't the system keep chugging along at a slightly reduced capacity until the node comes back online?

Sorry, I'm not involved in HPC at all. I know a little bit about Hadoop. I'm mostly interested in building online message processing and blended real-time/historical analytics. Our problem domain wouldn't want to lose all capacity if part of the system became unavailable.
Where do you find content to share on social media?
Looking some names like "toxic" or "stay out/bad things will happen", makes me think about "Rythm 0"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Abramovi%C4%87#Rhythm_0....
In my experience rarely is Scrum/Agile implemented into an organisation in its pure and intended form. I think companies start out with the best intentions, but the nature of modern software/web development is things are sometimes difficult to plan for. In the beginning it can be great, but once again, things start to derail. Sometimes companies want to implement process, but they realise the amount of organisational work that goes into adhering to Scrum & Agile, they get half of the way there and half-implement it.

If a debilitating bug is preventing your users from using your app, you're going to make the team go out of their way to fix it (even if it was not planned). If "higher ups" want to implement a last minute feature because an investor meeting is coming up and a competitor just launched said feature, no manager is going to firmly say "no, you can't have it unless we plan for it" to the very person(s) that pay their salary. Sprint planning meetings and poker are great for estimating new features most definitely, but they fail to really and realistically take into account that sometimes SHTF and no amount of planning can accommodate for that.

In the real world developers don't get to go into sprint planning meetings, get a set amount of work and no that's all they'll be working on. I mean, that's how Scrum is supposed to work, right? But how many developers can honestly say it stays that way? Scrum/Agile does not stop people going outside of the framework (and in my experience there are always people that do) and assigning you work or asking you to do what they think are "small tweaks" and "quick changes" which usually blow out into one or two day tasks that take you out of the sprint workflow, then the burndown graphs start looking bad and your manager starts wondering why the graph is not looking so good.

The issue with Scrum/Agile is not the fault of the methodology itself, it is the implementation. On paper it looks great, but in the real world and this I need it now society we have created, it becomes increasingly hard to stick to set fixed processes when things need to be done right now. I don't doubt that some places are doing Scrum/Agile right, but from what I have discovered and again this might just be on account of bad luck, most places are not doing Scrum/Agile correctly and it only takes a little imbalance from the methodology to throw everything into disarray.

In my experience sprint planning does not equate to less work or more balance, it doesn't reduce the stress. Yeah, you know how much time you have in your sprint period, but usually there are tasks that only specific members of the team can work on. Meaning someone is usually doing more than someone else. Once again though, maybe I have just been unfortunate in the places I have worked which haven't implemented the pure and originally intended form of Scrum/Agile.
25 lessons i learnt by hiring 100 people – Annkur
There are much cheaper ways to do it if you look around, but anytime I do this the document is worth a heck of a lot more than the postage, so I just use FedEx: http://www.fedex.com/us/office/online-printing.html
https://github.com/Tzbob/python-windows-tiler

It works pretty much like xmonad or awesomewm once you edit the keybindings. Unfortunately it doesn't have the same phenomenal multi-monitor support xmonad provides on linux. It works within the usual windows confines[0]. With xmonad/linux, each workspace is independent of the displays. With pwt/windows, each workspace uses the entire logical display surface.

[0]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms6...
Germany's trade surplus is a problem
Maybe the next 150 will do it...
Did you just say that allergies are never genetic?
Costs vs benefits.
Awesome C/C++
Chef Excellence would be proud.
Could it reduce (or simply eliminate) the need for more complicated ownership sharing schemes?
Verbal communication is far richer than written. You gain insight into how a developer feels about aspects of their work. Is there something they're not happy with but aren't comfortable talking about, are they enthusiastic about something which motivates other team members? Team dynamics can't be distilled into written communication. The standup can surface things like tensions between team members or a drop in morale. It's not just there as a status update, it's there to solve softer problems to help turn a group of developers into a great team.
The first time I used Promises (and really, the first time I did any serious work in Node), I prototyped an isomorphic web server:

https://github.com/appsforartists/ambidex/blob/master/src/Am...

In three different places in that file, you'll find a Promise that ends in ".catch(error => console.error(error.stack))`. Before I learned that bit of boilerplate, I'd spend an hour staring at my screen wondering why things were silently broken.

It's mindblowing that errors are implicitly suppressed by default with Promises. console.error ought to be automatically invoked for any error that makes it to the root scope without a .catch() (just like it is with sync code).
> There is only one calendar system in use at one time.

This is useful, but technically false. Go tour graveyards around Boston. You'll find stones with two death dates on them from the mid-1700's (most of the US changed in 1752).
TL;DR The last paragraph. As most the water crisis articles are pointing. Crisis is due to farming.
Not an embellishment at all.

Via 'man units': "The conversion information is read from a units data file that is called 'definitions.units' and is usually located in the '/usr/share/units' directory."

Via definitions.units (L. 223), you can see the milli- prefix: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/f06769de95e0c7f9e658#file-...

Via deifnitions.units (L. 1060), you can see the lightsecond unit: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/f06769de95e0c7f9e658#file-...

Maybe check it for completeness?

Edit: Spelling
have done retrospective after reading this article; my "what needs to go" is:
- not opening rants.
Let's improve color-space handling
I love graph theory. Neat writeup!
Loving the feedback, thanks! That's a good point about destructuring the returned type of a chained zip, I'll need to take a look at that. And I'm happy that you've found the IRC channel, don't be a stranger if you need help or have any more feedback (especially wrt stdlib APIs that you'd like to see).
It probably did save energy once, back when it was first introduced because I doubt most people used electricity for much more than a radio and lighting. Sure the rich likely did, but there aren't that many of them.
JAMAICAN MUSICIANS DOES TRIBUTE TO POOR PEOPLE and Slaughtered Ones in Nigeria
Can we get a nice "HN Classic" tag to put beside annual stories like this? I'm fine if stories like this pop up every year, actually.
The above issues are MySQL specific and have nothing to do with RDS. ALTER TABLE commands lock tables. There are various strategies to work around this. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/alter-table.html
I suspect a lot of the "unnecessary chaining" that occurs is really a problem of people (A) making something that requires jQuery and they don't want to think about how to ensure that dependency, while (B) liking the idea of associating their little thing with a big-name project.

Then you get things like $("#target").MakeBobsFancyBoxWidget()
That was a beautiful deflection. Your career is in politics tptacek.
Like this? http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/stupid/man-says-wife-...
Substitute Constitution for Revolution and I'm in full agreement.
Presumably this already happens to a large extent. It hasn't seemed to had much effect on the trajectory of companies like Facebook and Google. Someone doing a PhD in Econ should write a paper about the effects of people leaving post IPO.

Good point about adding risk to the IPO.

edit: BTW working at companies like Facebook and Google is pretty good from a lifestyle perspective so I'm guessing most wouldn't leave.
Suohpanterror: Propaganda posters from Sápmi
Tech Workers Have Heads in the Sand, Ruin Neighborhoods [video]
From their article it looks like what they are doing is pseudo-science at best. Hopefully not harmful pseudo-science, but it could be actually harmful. If one is not careful enough it is rather easy to replace more-or-less working common sense with some horrible pseudo-scientific approach. For example, optimizing for 'individual employee performance numbers'? Without consideration that, say, adding yet another employee with 'a good number' may actually diminish the total sum?

Regarding prediction of 'employee performance numbers' based on 'interview scores'. It is not surprising that the result is completely random. As far as I understand it, in the big companies performance numbers don't show actual contribution of an employee. At best they are showing "how this person was able to use the resources around them to achieve goals", note, mostly via using human resources of informal social networks. But usually performance numbers are just random. And at worst they could be negatively correlated with actual contributions.
Check out this BuzzFeed article on Ares Drones and its Kickstarter
Just wanting to add to this - bluebird indeed solves many of the problems in the post (even the 'unimportant' ones like having to call .done). It is absolutely worth looking into.

I should also point out that while bluebird doesn't crash the process on uncaught exceptions, it does print a stack to stdout - and you can fairly easily have a catch-all handler in whatever framework you are using to display/process uncaught exceptions in the desired format. This is what express-promise-router does, for example.
Accede Holdings MS Access Consulting Company in Australia
Unfortunately not eligible
The point is that the harder it is to do something, the less likely it will be done.

If you have to post officers throughout a metro and distribute lists of plates to look out for, you have to contend with

1) The limited number of officers you can pull off of other police duties

2) The limited amount of space in each officer's head to keep that list of plates

3) The limited amount of focus each officer can give to the task of checking each plate that passes by

This means that you'll either put out APBs for only the most important cases, or you'll move more manpower from other police duties to surveillance. There's a natural limiter in play.

On the other hand, if you have your tireless friend whose powers of omniscience and perfect recall are only limited by the number of installed cameras in the city and hard drives in his array; you'll put out APBs for any case you feel like. Your friend will watch for all of them, 24/7/365.

Because you don't need assign more manpower to watch for more plates, there is practically no upper bound to your ability to track persons of interest [0] within your city.

I agree that improperly vague laws are a pox on all civil societies, but there's much more to this case than the Terrorism Act. The vast, inhuman ability of Those In Power to cheaply and easily surveil vast numbers of people is an issue that's no less important.

[0] No matter how small the interest.
In your example, "I washed the dishes once or twice" is not going to impress the interviewer and is quite revealing. (This is true for the more general version of your anecdote as well.)
Perhaps this clarifies the possibilities of promises a bit? https://coderwall.com/p/ehzcuq/concurrency-in-js-is-easy-wit...
If you have anymore left, I would appreciate one: rahool @ tuto.io . Thank you!
A Taste of Haskell (2007)
Kamcord is looking for a lead back-end engineer
I don't agree with the term anti-pattern in this case, but I find standups boring and a chore. I also think standups drive a culture of velocity instead of progress, which can be a little maddening.
You're right, you are moving the goalposts.

People screw up all sorts of compliance issues. All but a tiny handful of software licenses out there can be violated by sloppy practices or mistakes of one kind or another. The GPL is not unique in this regard.

You should try your attempts to paint a different picture in another forum: all but the greenest programmer has far too much experience to be convinced by your argument.
I can't believe my eyes. 256 colors on CGA?! HOW?!
Show HN: CLI for executing code in many different languages with Docker