skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I wonder if Uber is fighting this because it will cut into profit margins and raise overhead costs, rather than because it is an existential threat.

Uber is a young company, and they have yet to learn what most mature companies have learned.

Big businesses like regulations. They don't mind jumping through whatever hoops are imposed by regulations, because they can afford to drop the money on it, they can treat the cost of compliance as part of the cost of doing business and pass it on to the consumer, while their smaller competitors can't afford to pay for compliance. The competition gets priced out of the market, and big businesses sweep up all the customers who would've gone with the smaller competition, making regulation a net financial gain for them.

The only big businesses you'll see who don't like regulation are monopolists and near-monopolists, like ISPs. Look at the hissy fit the big ISPs are throwing over Net Neutrality. Why are they so upset? Because there's no real competition, no smaller players who will be priced out of the market by NN, so the established players just see it as a straight-up cut in revenue.

The only sensible conclusion is that Uber either a) thinks like a small player or b) thinks like a monopolist. Both are worrying, though for different reasons (reason A makes me doubt their competence, reason B makes me think they should be squashed sooner rather than later).
Id disagree the "engineering" isn't about solving problems obviously not everyone is working at JPL or NASA. But back when I worked for BT I was solving a problem when I recovered over £2 million by fixing a bug in or BACS transfer - never got a thank you mind ;-)
its also easy to keep it secure when it doesnt use the internet
WOW. Talk about a lot of assumptions. Actually the bike was a piece of crap hand me down that I got for free. I don't race, and I was probably going about the same speed you would if you were running. It was a nice Friday afternoon and I had just finished up my last class of the day. I was relaxed and in no hurry, enjoying the ride home.

I hopped down a short bump, maybe 2" where the pavement turned into cobblestone. I don't remember what happened, but based on the blood stain that was baked into the concrete a few days later, I ended up about 20 feet away. I know I went over the handle bars. I imagine you get one or two bike lengths in the air, and then when I hit the ground I skidded a bunch.

Anyway, compared to the way most people bike it was a slow speed crash. The X factor was the mechanical failure so it was so surprising I didn't have any time to expect it. Arguably the key contributing factor was riding an old shitty bike.

So you probably should aim your ire at poor people biking instead of the US. It has nothing to do with the US or how I was riding my bike, just with the fact that I didn't have enough money for a nice one at the time. But by all means, ignore the relatively uncontroversial point that wearing a helmet is a good idea and continue blaming the victim.
I worked through parts of the book (especially the functional programming section). It is very well thought out and presented logically and clearly.

This has to be the effect of him doing live confresses and being a professor while also knowing the packages as only an author can.

It is also great how approachable Hadley is in the community. I still remember making a short tweet on dplyr and within 10 minutes he replied back to me and answered my questions.
This is interesting for many reasons.

Tech is not inherently obnoxious. Government research labs don't have cultures that repel women or where microaggressions (also known as "pissing contests") dominate. Tech is this way because it comes from the top (VCs) down, and because it's private-sector tech oriented toward products that mostly don't matter but might make a few individuals rich... and the scramble for position, to be a founder instead of an engineer in one's next gig, dominates any technical focus because most of these startups are actually technically boring and sloppy.

I admire the OP for having the courage to stand up and speak the truth about the state of this industry (to be fair, it's worse in California than almost anywhere else) but the questions that come to my mind are... (1) who's going to stick around and fight? and (2) how do we fix it?
"NPC firefighters and EMTs would extracted injured drivers from the wrecked cars and put them in ambulances, which then drive away to hospitals."

That happens to a small degree in Grand Theft Auto games. It tends to be more for comic effect than simulation, but it's a nice detail nonetheless. I hope one day games reach the fidelity you describe. It would be a fun world to wreak havoc in.
I recently read the book "How to Win Friends & Influence People", bad title great book. My main take away from this is I've been talking to people really badly for the last 27 years. I wish I had read this book in middle school.

But this blog reminded me of some of the concepts from the book, its far more productive to give positive encouragement than to give negative feedback, and just adding a complement isn't enough if you follow it with a "but".

"Hey pretty cool program! Its a great start. I bet we can make it run faster if we changed the way files are imported to something like this... nice work"

will get better results then this

"Hey pretty cool program, but you're reading in files wrong"

which even that is better than this

"You're reading in files completely wrong, try googling for a better solution" which unfortunately among engineers seems to be the most common reply.
the "code" is just a tool to do interesting things is how I always looked at it.
That's all true, but the cartoon is still funny!
My friend put it up on his blog until I get around to making mine again. http://curtis.io/others-work/open-tooling-for-fpgas
What kind of project is it? Genuinely curious.
The Natural, UHF, Spaceballs, Hoosiers, Hero
Thanks, that seems very sensible.
Not sure what you are getting at, s/sites/clients/. The definition of 'pretty good' depends on how slow that 1% of clients are, as the parent said, 1 second out of 60 (or even 30 or 10) would not really be anything of note.
I haven't found an ideal one. I sticked with solarized, though

https://userstyles.org/styles/92693/dark-hacker-news-solariz...
Maybe it's just the people I know, but I can't remember the last time someone played music from their phone without headphones. The only time I do it is by accident.
Introducing the Big Red Button for Apple Watch (humor)
Programmers are not artists and have no "creative block". What is he talking about?
Windows ME? In all seriousness I've witnessed people shame over bad code, yet later when other people looked at their code was just was bad. We all write bad code, hopefully we're able to make it less bad the more we write it.
Not to mention we're told from a very early age how smart we are so inevitably we begin to not only believe it but also believe we're smarter than everyone else.

Here's a hard-earned lesson for any newly-minted developers out there: Yeah, you're smart. But not as smart as you think you are. And regardless, it doesn't give you license to treat anyone poorly.
I get the impression that it's more of a joke than a serious tool. It is actually quite funny, but I can't imagine anyone using it seriously.
org-mode is decent for LaTex markdown substitution.
* = Section
= SubSection

Etc.

I think I still prefer to just write it in markdown. Word can't come close to the typesetting ability of LaTex.
My light at the end of the tunnel remark was more of an analogy that at that point I'll be able to use the language with minimal competency. >.<

I can see with things like Idris and dependent types even more of the same of the whole, well I thought I understood computation to a minimal degree, here is another bit of it that totally changes how I view the world.
Sticky Documentation, Part 1: Code as Documentation
Taking the assertion as a given, which of these 3 predominate:

1. Firms exist in which author would have been satisfied and productive, but author and one of those firms never found each other: search failure?

2. Firms could exist in which author would have been satisfied and productive, and those firms would have a competitive advantage over firms with culture/management making author's career unsustainable, but those firms have not been created: knowing-doing gap?

3. Firms in which the author would have been satisfied and productive are at a competitive disadvantage to firms with culture/management making author's career unsustainable. If those firms have been created, they have failed quickly. Making author produce for capitalism would have lowered overall production: the system is working?
The whole thing is something of a joke, and the name is just part of that. I don't think it's meant to be taken very seriously to begin with.
Interesting that Wikipedia has no entry for RethinkDB.

I do see that RethinkDB has some "Overview" and "FAQ" links on its website. However, when I encounter a new technology, I like to read its Wikipedia entry first. Wikipedia is usually more impartial, informative, and actually makes it easier to get a high-level sense of a technology than the tech's own website in most cases. This has grown more and more true over the past five or so years, as even developer-facing websites have devolved into "startup-y" marketing nonsense.

I wonder if there WAS a Wikipedia entry, but it's been deleted by some moderator with an axe to grind? I personally haven't contributed in years due to how unpleasant it is to add new content through all of the Wiki-lawyering. I've also noticed that 5 years ago, when you did a Google search you could rely on the Wikipedia entry being one of the top 2 or 3 results. Lately I see more and more instances where I have to scroll to the second or third pages of results to see a Wikipedia link.

Anyhoo... apologies for the tangential aside. I'm just wondering whether the lack of a Wikipedia entry says more about RethinkDB or about Wikipedia?
Wow, IMO with this comment you nailed it!
>Does it write to a disk or to a log? If it writes to disk, it may still not be completely fail-safe unless it also writes to a log before writing to disk.

why we still discussing it at a tech forum in 21st century in Silicon Value? Shouldn't it (together with isolation, ACID, CAP, etc...) be a base knowledge taught in elementary school? Like you can't expect Daddy to buy you a firetruck that Mommy promised if Mommy hasn't been able to talk to Daddy yet... though until Mommy talks to Daddy you probably can convince Daddy to buy you a railroad...
For my thesis, I would write paragraphs in a plain text editor, and then insert them into a word document. No distractions while writing, and then all of the formatting / footnoting features when I needed them.
Why don't I get any errors when I execute my Python script with Perl?
I agree they're the biggest nuisance, but.. they're just a nuisance. I'm not fearing for my life from bikes like I do from cars all the time at almost every intersection.
I don't know about all government research labs - but I do have friends and family doing Ph.Ds (or postdoccing, or even on the tenure track) where the culture is far, far worse than in Silicon Valley. Get close enough to scientists and you'll see that those fields (and it's not just one...I've heard this about molecular biology, physics, and computer science) are doing their own soul-searching about oppressive cultures.
"Hey pretty cool program! Its a great start. I bet we can make it run faster if we changed the way files are imported to something like this... nice work"

I usually hear this referred to as a "criticism sandwich": Criticism surrounded on either side with compliments.
Just intonation is just a theory. In practice slightly detuned intervals sound good. Imo they can even sound better than when they are perfectly in tune.

Sometimes musicians deliberately use detuning to create a sound, for instance in the "chorus effect".

http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=68007
http://www.dancemusicproduction.com/forum/index.php?showtopi...

EDIT: Another interesting fact is that pianos aren't actually tuned to equal temperament. The intervals are tuned slightly bigger than it would dictate, to accommodate pianos' slightly inharmonic overtone series.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_tuning#Stretch
Is Slack Really Worth $2.8B?
I haven't used React (or related projects) because I prefer Ember, but with the new, non-offensive patent grant I will definitely keep them in mind.
I say leave it as is, in those example you can almost hear that intonation you say it (in your head or out loud) when mistyping :)
Where does it pull the photos from? I'm sure there's one of my photos there.
So I have a question for you all. But first a little background. I have been playing with PouchDB, an in-the-browser implementation of CouchDB that is mostly compatible with CouchDB. What I really like is its sync function, this sets up no-brainer practically real-time sync between my local (offline) PouchDB database. It is very cool!

I am very impressed by RethinkDB's cluster management, etc, so I would like to explore it as an option, but is there an easy way to sync my offline (browser based) localstorage-like database to rethink and back again? PouchDB makes this dead easy.
The amount of data per item can degrade over time.

During a wreck you have full details. Once the clean up crew leaves, you just need to record that 'NPC is hosptalized' and 'blue car (model 123) has 35% damage'. Later on, NPC goes by a mechanics, you can query the list of damaged vehicles, maybe load one being worked on in the garage, and if so remove it from the list. After a few hours items roll off the list (representing them being taken care of outside of the NPCs knowledge). The real trick is getting it to happen enough to be noticed but not enough to be seriously investigated so you can increase immersion without breaking it.

I've done a variant of this in a D&D campaign to simulate the world around the PCs, increasing detail only as it became more relevant to the PCs. Not something I recommend doing by hand w/ dice rolls.
Code is art and every artist wants to go back and redo their bad works[1]. But the best thing to do is learn and move on to create better art.

1: https://www.yahoo.com/movies/bp/steven-spielberg-finally-adm...
I kept some of my original bad C, asm, and REXX code back from my high school days after I finally moved on from BASIC in 1991. I pull it out from time to time for a quick chuckle.
I suspect people would end up getting a lot of repetitive stress injuries from such a device if used with one hand as pictured.
Not quite right. All the code I wrote last year looks bad to me; naieve, clumsy, artless. Because I have learned so much since then. It never gets any better. Not because I don't get better; because I DO get better.

I've been writing code since 1976.
Univision wanted graceful retirement for 'Sabado Gigante'
Which bytecodes do you mean? If you're talking about the jsr/ret thing they still have functionality but the compiler just doesn't generate those.
Chrome reports xkcd.com's TLS cert from RapidSSL as unverifiable
( https://xkcd.com/ ) Unsure why.
Privacy for individuals, transparency for large institutions. Like I said I don't support the hacking at all. But the data now exists, and much can be learned therefrom.
I can feel the RSI already. I was excited that this might have been a weird hybrid between a mouse and a trackpad where the tracking surface goes on your fingertip, and everything becomes a trackpad.
There is a fact that part of the world doesn't believe the Wright Brothers invented it in the first place.

In Brazil, Santos Dumont holds this title. French people also seem to give credit to him. Other countries also have their preferences and their own history.

To me, it seems there were so many people trying it that none of them really did it alone. If the title should go to the closest we have to an airplane today, Santos Dumont beats the Wright Brothers. But I'm Brazilian, so I'm biased. Not that I really care about the title...
Kinda like a dynamic voxel engine with a really high voxel per meter cubed count?
You don't necessarily need a consistent plot, or at least very much of one. There does have to be some careful and subtle design around an overarching goal, however.

In Eve Online several years ago, many of the more serious players didn't give a ___ about any of the curated stuff, other than as a source of munitions and resources for the alliance power struggle. Forces fight for dominance: that's not very much "plot" but many people definitely cared. (I would agree that you need something to structure the experience, however, otherwise you wind up with Second Life, then people's brains go right up the Maslow Need Hierarchy and wind up at sex.)

Also, in my work at the MADE museum in Oakland, I find that people might talk about notable stories and art direction in award winning past games, but do you know what they actually do? They play Smash, Mario Kart, or Super Mario. Judging by actions, it's the gameplay/interaction that most strongly draws people back to a re-experience.

In a way, assuming the need for plot in games would be like assuming the need for music/sound in cinema. It clearly can enhance the core experience, and you'd almost never have a modern commercial release without it. However, it's synergistic to and not absolutely essential to the core experience.
In the martial arts community we call this "praise, correct, praise."
You get easily aroused.
Slow compilation, many ways of doing things instead of a well-defined Scala-style, inheriting lots of Java libraries and having their perhaps very un-Scala-like behavior littered all around, two communities of programmers (roughly) the Java-alikes and the Haskell-alikes
> The industry is a lot healthier and more balanced than the OP article makes it out to be.

I think that, for some who believe it is healthy (not necessarily you, but many others I speak to who make similar claims), the conclusion is arrived at incorrectly by survivorship bias: the most visible people _tend_ to seem like they're doing alright! They're usually nice people! Good intentions all around! But speak to people who left or are leaving (like OP), and you get a more complicated picture.

I think the diversity numbers posted by Google, Twitter, Apple etc., and arguments made by a number of underrepresented people in tech make a pretty compelling case to me that the industry and its culture have plenty worth criticizing.
I spent my college years writing very little code. Burnt out; too busy; depressed? I don't know; but I was blocked. Previous to college I had written thousands of lines per year, since junior high school.

So call it what you will. But it happens.
I think this is reasonable, but at the same time, please get those million lines out of your system on somebody else's project.

If that can't be done, if you can't spend your free time honing your abilities, then accept helpful feedback from other more experienced developers. Don't just accept feedback--assume your code is garbage, and ask how you can make it better. If the answer eventually becomes "it's good enough for business purposes", then find out why that is, and learn from that.

Communication is hard, and explaining why a codebase is just wrong can be as difficult as explaining to somebody why you find them abrasive.

At the same time, it's the job of senior engineers to make the effort and try.

Sadly, in a startup environment, it's usually smarter business-wise in the short-term just to sack the inexperienced developers or railroad them into simpler work that they can't screw up, and kick the can down the line.
I like teaching. I don't think I'm amazing at it, but I like sharing knowledge and experience with my friends and co-workers and see them improve, or just sometimes for the abstract sense of helping. Of course, sometimes I fall flat and come across as arrogant or condescending, but I hope that's rare. I read "How to make friends" a long time ago, and I apply those rules diligently to my interactions with people.

Recently though, I've been assigned a guy to help me with one of my tasks, managing the build pipeline. This requires a wide range of knowledge about unix and scripting (Bash, Perl AND Python. Yup. On top of Makefiles, of course).

The guy doesn't know how to use a command-line.

I'm surprised to find myself to be very unhelpful and curt with this guy. He's the unlucky recipient of my resentment at the amount of effort I will have to put in before he can actually become remotely helpful. Of course, it doesn't help that he's in far off timezone where I'd have to stay up late to help him, and that I have trouble getting direct answers from him about his knowledge level. The communication and experience gap is too large.

Anyhow, this is just my two cents relating an experience to show how a seemingly normal and friendly human being can revert to angry "RTFM"s.
I built a string this way in java just 5 years ago. Still made it 100x times faster by using a StringBuilder.
Thanks for the feedback!! There is indeed a free plan! Currently limited to 5 services and email only. Do you think I should open up all the features for free?

I always struggle with what to include in a free tier. IE: How to balance the needs of supporting a service but also offering enough features for free to give them a taste.

I just launched a couple of weeks ago, after using it internally for months. Paid customers number in the dozens, which is enough to pay the hosting and other recurring fees.

My target is companies that are already spending hundreds or thousands of dollars a month on hosting services, so I would like to think that a few lattes-worth of peace-of-mind would be a worthwhile investment. Especially, given the time savings when you are hunting down a problem that's not actually yours.
Looks interesting! Link to source?
What's interesting is that XKCD shows replies that are even worse than your last reply- even suggesting Googling provides a course of action. XKCD's more like "My grandmother could read files faster than that."
I felt this a while back doing CGI. My mind tries to recompute the world, so my models would aim toward simulation, endlessly precise, physics worth models. Whereas people actually working in the industry (Disney, Dreamworks, etc) followed the opposite philosophy, coming from traditional movies and animations where reality is so far from reach that you don't even think about trying. They just think about a minimal set of artefacts fitting a field of view that would tell what need to be told. Doesn't matter if you only create half a builing, the left side of a face, it's irrelevant as long as it helps incarnating the experience.

Now I've seen this in video games, since the PS3, games are more and more 'real' but the gameplay isn't better, only the magazine reviews are, with these 1080 8xAA Global Lit glamorous shots.

And as with movies, I now take great delight seeing how far people could make you feel and travel with limited means. You couldn't represent much, you had to pick and organize things in a way to tickle the mind of the viewer/player.
That's a good point. Of course if you can produce tritium cheap enough it might be feasible to just start each mission with a grossly over-powered nuclear battery.
I think Open Document XML solves a problem--it's just not an immediate problem. It won't make saving and emailing around a document easier, but it will make interoperability (I'm talking even between two versions of Word--not just between word processors) simpler. Even if it's not supported you have some recourse for extracting data. Tragedy of the commons.

Google has an advantage because there's an obvious win over the old standard and they offer a big enough buy-in. GIF, for example, is generally better served by PNG. But adoption has been slow because the benefits aren't good enough and wide support took awhile to get implemented.