skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tiny but nicely world crafted vs dull but gigantic place ?
There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that it is indeed destroying relationships. I suggest you browse the pornfree subreddit and see what people are saying. I know it's not science, but it's suggestive nevertheless.
Bad code is a great wedge for business people to get programmers obsessed with individual relative ranking and prevent any sort of collective action.

I certainly had jobs in the past where I got angry over bad code when, in fact, I should have been bad at the businessmen making me use the bad code (instead of putting time on the calendar to write things properly) and setting the deadlines that caused the bad code.

For sure, there are some sloppy, borderline-unethical engineers who write shitty fast code to get promoted away from the maintenance messes they generate... and there are definitely some incompetent engineers. For the most part, though, bad code is a symptom of bad leadership rather than bad programmers. Under a tight enough deadline, everyone's code will be shit.

And, of course, it goes without saying that the proper response to bad code isn't to flip out on the person, but to teach him how to do it better. One of the reasons why I like using high-productivity languages like Haskell rather than Java is that it selects for people who genuinely want to improve.
I don't get the downvotes.

If I complain about business regulations people tell me I'm in the wrong and I should move out of the country, because people here have decided they will be complicit in regulating companies.

Same with Sony, I say. The people have decided to be complicit in leaking company data. Sony was the target this time. If companies don't want to ever have their data leaked they can leave the country.

Don't the people decide the price companies must pay to do business here? We force them to comply with regulations, and now the populace, acting as informal lobbyists, are forcing companies to be OK with leaks once in a while as part of the cost of doing business here.

Actual lobbyists make much worse things happen than to cause some company to leak some data. But when the population lobbies, through tacit, implicit compliance, then everyone is suddenly holier-than-thou. I guess you need a lobbying license to avoid being judged by the HN crowd.
I have only fallen sideways when stationary so no, this is not the case (the worst one was actually in my own driveway).
GIF this days is almost always used as a moving-picture format, which is not something standard PNG does. The number of actual GIFs being passed around these days that would be better off as PNGs is virtually zero.
on the other hand, would you like to work with someone that doesn't take criticism well and whom jumps on the defensive about random pieces of code, of all things?
I'm a junior dev, I have a ton to learn and I don't for a moment think I know more than our senior dev. But working with this guy, and trying to learn from him, is a nightmare.

When I ask "why should I do this rather than that?", I either get a muddy explanation, or none at all.

Worse still is inconsistency. Just recently I was working on a project, went through several reviews without comment on the approach, was told "almost done just fix these tests". After waiting a week for review of those last tweaks, the review was "this is fundamentally flawed and shouldn't be done this way at all."

Now I'm not saying that's wrong, but it would have been better to hear that three weeks ago. Nor is the explanation of _why_ it's flawed the slightest bit clear.

Further, the new approach does _not_ support the business need motivating these changes in the first place. I am figuring out how to support that need within the directed approach, but it is harder than the first design would have been. Again, that doesn't mean I was right -- sometimes there are choices where you put the ugly stuff. These changes are pretty deep in our architecture, and so touch a lot of code. If being clean there means that some top-level stuff is more complicated, that is probably the right trade-off. But it would be nice to have a "sorry, I didn't think this through soon enough." And no, I am not the idiot I'm made out to be because I didn't, as a junior dev, immediately and fully understand how all the pieces should fit together.

Nor is this a two-way street. I've had moments where I've pointed out what seems like problems, been told I'm wrong, or ignored . . . and then find that the issue is quietly fixed a few days later. We do some stuff that is just flat wrong because that's how he likes it.

I'm not the only one, the others with more experience than I have similar problems.

I'm learning. The guy has good instincts, so his critiques usually lead in the right direction, so I roll with it and figure out the principles for myself. But it is absolutely zero fun working with this guy. I've become averse to submitting code for review, because I never know when the process will take 180 and stuff that was fine becomes crap. And while I think I'm getting better, I have to figure out how to build confidence in those skills, because I'm not going to get it from this feedback loop. Probably that will be working on my own projects, taking what I'm learning and using that to make them better. And at some point I'll move on.

Tough feedback, even insulting feedback, is ok with me. I'll work with it. But if you're going to be tough, then you have to be fair, you have to be clear, and you have to be right.
Postgres 9.3+ is fairly straight-forward too. Here is go + github.com/mgutz/dat

// one trip to database using subqueries and Postgres' JSON functions
con.SelectDoc("id", "user_name", "avatar").
HasMany("recent_comments", `SELECT id, title FROM comments WHERE id = users.id LIMIT 10`).
HasMany("recent_posts", `SELECT id, title FROM posts WHERE author_id = users.id LIMIT 10`).
HasOne("account", `SELECT balance FROM accounts WHERE user_id = users.id`).
From("users").
Where("id = $1", 4).
QueryStruct(&obj) // obj must be agreeable with json.Unmarshal()

results in

{
"id": 4,
"user_name": "mario",
"avatar": "https://imgur.com/a23x.jpg",
"recent_comments": [{"id": 1, "title": "..."}],
"recent_posts": [{"id": 1, "title": "..."}],
"account": {
"balance": 42.00
}
}
Unfortunately I'm not able to find a public source to confirm that. My information comes purely from knowing and hanging out with drivers.
That's actually the route I've been trying to follow, but that's where the experience gap becomes a problem. I can give him some ressources on how to use Git or learn Python, but it's been so long that I don't even know where to start for the CLI :|
Jobukyu – Node.js Job Queue
Instead of blindly applying a tool you don't understand, you'll need to build a statistical model, explain why it's valid, and then construct a meaningful measurement based on it.

Then the referee and reader will be required to understand it and will have the ability to critique it.
If so then just move it to a natural position. For example in a nostril.
I don't see anything wrong with the "mean-spirited" humor in the XKCD comic. The cartoon is funny. It's supposed to be a joke. Anyways, it's not like those remarks are directed at anyone in particular -- just a fictional stick figure. I don't have any ethical qualms about laughing at his expense.
I gotta wonder, do you actually have such confidence yourself that you assume that everything other people _does not_ comment was good? If so congratulations! A suggestion though, on how you could improve the confidence in people like me - who aren't sure everything not mentioned is good - would be to actually point out the positive parts even if you don't feel that it is necessary.

I have to admit though, it took many years and a few courses in psychology until I finally could admit to myself and my surroundings that I actually need positive reinforcement, that negative reinforcement, even if true and relevant, could even be detrimental to my performance.

I do agree on the importance of not just "say something positive", it has to be real, most people have probably filled their quota of obviously false/exaggerated complements in preschool. I myself struggle with finding the right balance between sounding patronizing and being overly critical.
I was wondering the same thing -- I've tipped a few times but it's always been a couple bucks cash since I've never seen any option for it in the interface. Maybe there used to be a way to tip from the app that they've since removed due to such complaints?
Fight-or-flight response
I’m self-taught with 10 or 20 years in industry, depending on how you count, and my problem with the poor CS majors is not the ones who don’t understand source control — although that’s an important skill! — but the ones who can’t write a for loop, or who use global variables when they should be using local variables.

That is, my problem is not that certain CS majors don’t know things they’d never studied, but rather that they don’t know the things they did study, either.

I also don’t have much patience for self-taught people with 10 years in industry who complain that tech interviews expect them to know that a B-tree lookup takes logarithmic time, or to be able to write correct syntax (of a language they supposedly know) on a whiteboard without an IDE. I probably should have patience for these people, because, objectively speaking, spelling is hard for most people, and complexity theory is rarely used in practice. But, I feel, if you’ve been self-teaching a subject for ten years, how do you manage to not teach yourself such basic things?

And yet, I’ve been self-teaching Spanish for ten years, and I constantly come upon words and senses of words that I don’t know, let alone errors of gender and incorrect idiomatic expressions in my speech. Like, maybe one per sentence.

So, I think I really need to have more patience.
How ZenPayroll processes billions of dollars in annual payroll
Aweosme, I can't wait till they pull the plug out from under me.
Would it work to say, "Added test coverage, refactored code to increase future maintainability"?
>which confuses users

So users are why we can't have nice things.

Also, on Nokia N900 they simply didn't do an app at all. Lots of them were quickly written by community and everyone was happy.
Thank you for assuming things that are, in this case, entirely untrue. Presumably you have seen an abundance of poor actors which has primed your perspective, but I would ask that you not be so quick to judge someone who you don't even know.

I have never raced in traffic and abhor reckless riding behavior, running redlights/stoplights, and the like. I only ride straps or flats in the city.

I use clip-ins in the hills and long straightaway rural routes with ample shoulder area (ex: Canada road by Crystal Springs).
Sound like you haven't been working with outsourced talent and a boss that says "this is all we've got, deal with it." ;)

The "interesting" thing here is the cultural gap, where these folks have had all initiative beaten out of them throughout their education, where the cost of failure is higher than that of not trying. It's really disheartening.

My point is, it's heard to blame the person when you know how flawed is the system they come from.
Python 3 did solve a bunch of Unicode issues (some of the fixes were backported to Python 2). The most important one is probably lack of consistency - while it's possible to enfore the bytes/Unicode barrier in Python 2, it's not intuitive and many programmers just ignore it.

There was a recent LWN.net submission about the other carrots:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9378898
UEFI's secure boot enables Microsoft to force out other operating systems in hardware:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_In...

(+1 for the RMS reference)
I find this whole backlash against p-values pretty confusing. That is probably because I come from particle physics, where we also use a lot of statistics, but in subtly different ways.

Hypothesis testing is not too hard [1]. You pick a cutoff, say p < 0.003 ("3 sigma"), and then if your p-value is below that, you call it evidence for your signal - otherwise you just don't have evidence. By doing so, the probability is 0.3% to have data this or more signal like, assuming there is no signal. With other words, if you follow this prescription and are looking for something that isn't there, in 0.3% of cases you will (wrongly) claim evidence (error of the first kind).

Since we are a cautious bunch, we actually put the threshold for discovery at 5 sigma - p<0.0000003 - which sometimes gets us ridiculed by statisticians. This hyper-strict standard shouldn't be necessary, but in part it's a hedge against the case where you get your systematic errors wrong (you believe your prediction for the null hypothesis is more accurate than it is - so if you see a slight fluctuation, it seems to be many (wrong) standard deviations away).

One other thing that we have to take into account - and many people forget this - is the look-elsewhere effect. If you perform one search, looking for e.g. a Higgs Boson with a mass of 126 GeV, you expect N events in your experiment if it is not there, and N+X if it is there. You know how N is distributed, and the interpretation is straightforward. However if you perform a scan, looking at 120, 121, 122, 123... GeV, then you have to adjust your p-value, since you are basically performing a bunch of different experiments, and by chance alone some of them are bound to turn up "significant".

The same thing applies when hundreds or thousands of Master and PhD students and postdocs do their analyses - even if no one makes a mistake, some of them will "find" a 3 sigma or larger effect that isn't there, just due to the sheer number of independent statistical tests performed. I've "found" new particles myself this way, but when you keep calm, put it into context by looking at other analyses, and try to add more data, you'll often find that your result melts away.

------------

[1] explaining it is hard, and I will undoubtedly have messed up, especially since I'm tired.
The Primer director, Shane Carruth, released a new film last year - Upstream Color. Exceptionally strange, beautiful film. One of my favorites for sure.
Oblique: command line tool for suggesting an Oblique Strategy
Ask HN: Free alternatives to UserVoice
As a bootstrapping entrepreneur, I am wondering if there are any free alternatives to UserVoice?
Once I discovered Torx, I never looked back. To me they seem superior to all of the alternatives, except for availability and assortment of screws. Are there any
disadvantages I'm missing (besides cost, which isn't inherent)?
That was a beautiful article and a great read - thank you for linking it.

Most important quote, IMO:

If you tell me that your goal is systemic change toward radical acceptance, and I see that you treat those you perceive as lesser-than with the same kind of scorn and derision that pushed me toward this insular little subculture where I feel comfortable — and I do see this, every day, to the point where I’ve had to cull people I genuinely like from my social media feeds because it was that or get mentally knocked back every few minutes into the headspace I spent my K-12 years in and was only too happy to leave —then you’ve successfully convinced me that your acceptance is not radical and the change you want not systemic.
Tropical tea party
I've been running Debian Wheezy Linux for years. A few minor issues in Word 2010 (it always opens on my top screen!) and playing GTA4. Never had a BSOD. :)
Personally, the sooner the Nouveau people throw in the towel the happier I'll be. Yeah, I get that it scratches an ideological itch, but it's crap. What good is hardware I can't use? Nvidia's drivers and software stack are top notch and always just work.
Created a pull request for a `fuck -dry` option.
Did not test nor store the command so when it is ran again it is recalled, but the base is there for it to be fully implemented.
"Let's say that today I wanna very subtly change the color of an accessory that I'm wearing when I enter or exist a certain social scenario"

This puts a smile on my face... but come on, there must be better uses. Surely touching the accessory is easier. Also, the lettuce stirring while scrolling seems like a problem that is most easily solved by speech recognition. It's not that I don't like the idea but if it is that hard to come up with a situation where it is the one and only, superior interface... Perhaps someone will think of it...
>>Several journals are trying a new approach...in which researchers publicly “preregister” all their study analysis plans in advance. This gives them less wiggle room to engage in the sort of unconscious—or even deliberate—p-hacking that happens when researchers change their analyses in midstream to yield results that are more statistically significant than they would be otherwise. In exchange, researchers get priority for publishing the results of these preregistered studies—even if they end up with a p-value that falls short of the normal publishable standard.

It's not exactly the same issue as the one addressed by banning p-values, but this would help a lot.
The evolution of the interface, from text through touch
I'm not sure what stock prices have to do with "profiteering".
I wrote a similar Sudo History Invocation Tool to do this: https://github.com/christianbundy/shit
R is a lot like javascript - seems like voodoo until you 'get it' (get comfortable using it) ... and then it's the obvious choice for many common tasks.
If you're just an engineer(no seniority/management required), you'll be fine, but wages are low in my country.

If you wanna be an senior/lead/head engineer, many assume you weren't competent enough to manage the development of a product, even if it wasn't the reason the startup failed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dweN_7vhhk
Neil Gaiman's 1994 Safe Sex PSA Starring Death from Sandman and John Constantine
Robust-First Computing: Demon Horde Sort
Two Things I Learned About Vim from an Emacs User
A new study of ritualistic cannibalism in the Upper Paleolithic
I agree that mean-spirited feedback is not helpful/constructive. I can see how that would discourage someone who is new to programming. In fact, "feedback" is probably not even the correct name for that... maybe "bullying".

However, I have to disagree with the notion of having to write a lot of shitty code to learn to write good code. Granted, that is one way to learn, but not nearly the most effective way to learn.

For years, when I started my career, I wrote lots of shitty code. I feel badly about having done this because I unwittingly caused quite a bit of havoc in the products I was working on, and even pissed off a few customers along the way. Writing shitty code can have really bad effects on a team and on a product.

Fortunately for me, I eventually ended up working in an extremely talented team. They were not only talented at programming, but also highly skilled at teaching others good programming. Their method was simple- they accepted nothing that failed to meet their high (and documented) standards of readability and testing, but were extremely thorough in spending time showing you what you did wrong. They were never demeaning and always constructive- they always had a high level optimism in every new-comer's potential. Given enough time, it was clear that some new team members weren't going to work out, but those who had it in them to patiently improve their skills flourished and enjoyed very successful stints with this team.

After a rough first few days on the team, I heeded their warnings and agreed to check my misplaced ego at the door. Then, and after a couple of months of embarrassing ineffectiveness, I gradually became a better programmer and went on to become a great team member. I'm really grateful for the patience these guys had with me and the other noobs. They really made a difference in my career and in the career of my peers!
Does it really matter? Learning is pretty much always mimicking others, whether it is you learning from others before you or our ancestors mimicking their predecessors like Australopithecus, Neanderthal or others. That's essentially what evolution is, adopting characteristics of preceding organisms by various means.
(You're very welcome. Meant every word. :D )
For which part?

For the last part, you can find hundreds of papers on high level optimization of programming languages through compilers, without breaking a sweat

THere are entire books on it.

Here's the first one google found:
https://books.google.com/books?id=u38h_fV3UqgC&pg=PA173&lpg=...

I expect you can find this stuff dating back to the early eighties without too much trouble.
Poor Internet for poor people: Why Facebooks Internet.org equals economic racism
Also, fix command might help

$ fc
Do you think that it is really that binary?

I think that this quote from the article is apt:

>U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, who is overseeing the Lyft case, said that existing labor law doesn’t map well with these companies’ business models. Lyft drivers don’t seem exactly like employees or independent contractors, he wrote in his motion. “The jury in this case will be handed a square peg and asked to choose between two round holes,”

Just because we have two clearly delineated buckets to drop people into doesn't mean that these accurately describe those individuals.
Haven't chimps already been evolving in tandem with our last common ancestor for millions of years? Why should they suddenly fast forward their evolutionary progress now that we are observing them?
Wrapping a binary blob and then saying
<xml binary=start> ~~~~ <xml binary=end>
doesn't make something XML. It's still MS proprietaryness wrapped in an open transport.
Excerpt from the article, "The researchers noted that female adult chimps made and used spears more often than adult males. The males relied more on their size and strength for hunting. Female chimps are almost always hindered by infants that ride on their backs or bellies, so spear hunting is far more effective for them than attempting to chase down prey."
This is why my handle is "moron4hire". It's supposed to be a daily reminder to myself that I'm not that hot.
MongoDB poised to play a key role in managing the Internet of things
Those whip antennas are for FM broadcast. For the AM broadcast, the bar antenna has a coil of wire wrapped around an iron bar to compensate for requirement of a longer antenna to receive AM broadcast. It'd be actually size prohibitive to make an antenna like FM radio, but designed for AM.
DBI-based adapter for Presto for R
RFC 7569 – Public Key Pinning Extension for HTTP
> ...chimps that we can accelerate to near light speeds.

Isn't that the wrong way round? The first generation of chimps would return after hundreds of years [have passed on Earth] having barely appeared to have aged at all.

If you want to see the future, it is you who has to accelerate to near light speeds and then you will return to an Earth far in the future.
A good and informative read. While I'm new to programming, I have began to judge my productivity in terms of lines of code I remove, not add to a project.
If you accelerated your terrarium to a high fraction of c, time inside would appear (from our perspective) to slow down, not the other way around. What you want to do here is accelerate us to near light speed instead.
More discussion from a month ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9202858
I imagine that wouldn't be very likely in this case—this is much less like Google's usual "let's build some random thing and see if customers like it", and instead very much in the vein of the way Amazon treats AWS: as a set of infrastructure services they themselves consume, but also happen to expose to the public.

Now, they might make it private in the future, but as long as Google are using containers for everything, I don't think the service is likely to just go unmaintained and fade away.
The Dawn of Mobile VR – John Carmack [video]