skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Electric cars will eventually replace petrol cars, it's a fact.

No, it's one of the potential future scenarii, but certainly not the only one. It will be a fact when it has actually happened.

It's just like people predicting the death of the PC and its total replacement by tablets - but hey, after several years of tremendous tablet growth, looks like 2014 was not so hot.

Let's not be too hasty in making predictions.
> I will certainly never say "anyone can learn how to code" any more than I'd say "anyone can become a concert pianist" or "anyone can become a master painter."

I disagree respectfully with that statement. First you devote a lot of your time to try to teach peeps about CS and I think that's great. But I'd argue that music and coding, to your comparison are essentially languages (former is a language of rhythm and melody and wielded by a physical/electronic instrument, latter is a language of algorithm and logic and dictated by a PC) and learning them is akin to language acquisition.

So IMHO, there is an illusion of talent when you have native speakers who can speak with perfect accent, grammar and fluidity; just like there are "native" musicians who have perfect pitch, can transcribe and improvise on the fly, play with speed/style. Because they have internalized the grammar, and that language's vocabulary and phrasing are by definition the native's first nature.

But non-native speakers can learn a foreign language albeit very painfully, perhaps with an accent and pauses that they'll never get rid of. But they can still express themselves successfully. Put it simply, I believe anyone can be taught the basic's of web development/CRUD, OOP, basic flow-control just most people can be taught how to play "Chopsticks" or conversational English. The programming equivalent of writing "The Great Gatsby" or composing a sonata, I'll concede that to the real talented.
Interesting read. In 2008, with the help of the US embassy in Baghdad, my family and I were admitted as refugees. An American friend of mine who I worked with back in Baghdad helped us rent a place in Reston, a small town in Fairfax county. The rent was $1250 for a small 2 bedroom condo. For refugees like us with over 20K in debt, the rent was extremely high, but we wanted to be in this area because there were a lot more opportunities compared to other places we could have gone to. I was 23 years old at the time, and within five years I went from being a support engineer, to a support lead, then a manager, then a director, then a CEO of a Bain Capital Ventures backed company to now attempting to build my own company. Compared to many other Iraqis I know who were admitted as refugees and lived in other areas of the country, I am doing better than most (career wise). Granted, I had lots of help, and was lucky to have had the chance to work with and learn from many bright people, but I truly believe that being here in this area is one of the top reasons I had more success than others. Obviously I am not saying this the best area in the country, but it's a pretty good place to be in and start from.
Here's the taste test for any burger.

If it's tasty without putting anything on it, then it's worth eating. If you hate it unless you put a bunch of vegetables and condiments on it, then it's defective.

You may actually prefer your burger with all that stuff on it, and that's fine. I'm just describing the minimal acceptable experience. If you have to (as opposed to want to) hide the burger to make it edible, then it's defective.

McDonalds burgers are defective.
Your points are very reasonable. However, I think that unless some government funds electric car tech research, the only way is to approach it top down, in a capitalist model. Make an electric car that's expensive, with a very high profit margin. Sell it to the rich. Use the profits to drive the tech advancement. If you approach it by making affordable cars, it will be quite a while before you accumulate enough capital to invest in the technology.
During May Day or other Chinese holidays when out of town folk come into the city, you can get stares even in Shanghai. Last time I took my kids (mixed Chinese) to the World Expo, not only was almost everyone in the line staring, but many many people from the country side continually came up and wanted to take photos with them.
Bartolomeo Cristofori (inventor of the Piano) Doodle
If you want to consider that the statement "We’re treating hundreds of thousands more people each year for these diseases than we ever have" refers to total cases then well, that's always going to be true.

Besides, I am more interested in the statistics of mortality.
> I agree the concept of 'non-nil' vars is very useful (

non-zebra numbers[1] are also very useful. But why have a "non-zebra number" when I can just have plain numbers?

[1] A "number" which is either a number, or a zebra
I find it slightly disingenuous to write a comprehensive article on wasteful medical care and yet barely mention the extremely litigious environment that doctors face.

It's not just doctors that remember that one patient that didn't get scanned. Lawyers do, too.
I normally stay out of these debates, but as a teacher, you may be in a unique situation to appreciate this view point: How about "learn to code"=="learn to play the piano" == "learn to paint"?

I don't think that you learn to code "just in case." I learned because it let me automate some things and later, let me make my own games. It turned out I've been good enough to get paid for my level of "talent," but I'd still be happy I learned, besides the joy of the mental excercises, I've also been able to automate alot of (ussually self imposed) challenges in my life.

I also learned to play the piano in my teens. I'm a sucky digital-artist as well. It was obvious I'd never be a concert pianist or master painter or even get paid for either. It baffles me that people can go through life without being able to play an instroment or paint, but I didn't learn "just in case"; I've been making use of both for my own enjoyment and unpaid sharing with others.

I think a great many of your students who lack talent will get great use out of the ability to automate processes on a computer and maybe gain life long enjoyment, even if they don't have the presupposed talent.
Totally. This is Facebook assuming control of what entire populations can see and hear, under the guise of charity. No effing bueno.
My personal experience. Plus, I quit reading most of books I ever bought, not considering it worth my time (comparing to other activities, or - other books).
> The goal of driving (for most) is to get from A to B, not entertainment

Sure, I agree. but having an automatic car is a barely better experience than a petrol car in that regard. Sign me up when the self driving cars are out, but until then driving in heavy traffic will suck no matter what.
And if I had responded with an absolute you would have attacked that instead.

It isn't really about me using weasel words or swapping the i/e in your name, it's about you using character assassination in your head to convince yourself I can't possibly have a point.

Good day to you.
"I know."

Then I don't understand your earlier comment.

"But even then, I kind of like being able to append values to a mutable buffer that is in scope without having to rewrite everything to use monads."

We can agree to disagree, there.
Funny, I was just thinking about that.
Yahoo is dying slowly.
See all the extra work that had to be done here: https://github.com/Ogeon/rust-on-raspberry-pi
No, if there is a definition of "high performance" in colloquial use, it's number crunching on a supercomputer e.g. weather forecasting and so on. Guess what, thats a very important application of computing, and once again, rock stars are notable only for their absence.
Mike Bostock Leaves NYT Graphics to Work on Visualization Startup
Microsoft is on par with Linux and BSD machines. Until you are reading all the source code, there's no point in switching to Linux or BSD if you're already using Microsoft. Microsoft has the best and robust tools for the job.
> I will certainly never say "anyone can learn how to code" any more than I'd say "anyone can become a concert pianist"

I would certainly say "anyone can learn how to code" in the same way that I would say "anyone can learn how to write", or "anyone can learn to run", or "anyone can learn to play piano".

I wouldn't say "anyone can learn to become a concert pianist", in the same way that I wouldn't say "anyone can learn to become the technical lead of a software firm that revolutionizes the industry" or "anyone can learn to be an Olympic sprinter" or "anyone can learn to be professional novelist".

But programming is, IMO, a bit like writing (though certainly not as foundational) in that you don't have to be a professional programmer to get professional benefit from having some understanding of programming, just as one doesn't need to be a professional writer to get professional benefit from writing (even piano is a bit like this, though the domain in which it is beneficial is somewhat narrower and definitely centered in a different place than where programming is beneficial.)
I don't think that Chinese would think of racist here.
Reputation on SE is very, very dependent on the amount of time you put in and your choice of which questions to answer. It's also somewhat zero-sum in a crowded field, as you need attention to get upvotes.

(I should know, I'm one of the 50 people on electronics.stackexchange with more than 10k rep, and no formal qualifications in electronics)
Rap Lyric Generator (2009) [pdf]
I don't know what you do. I get stares all the time here.

I'm probably in 100s of pictures too. Last dozen in a square in Dalian, though. :)
Well, at the point that you have a bill, you are kinda beholden to the people that sent it. You can't easily dispute a charge with our system. It would definitely be useful to understand the bill later on, if you could actually do something about it. My point is not being able to know the estimated charge before you choose a provider makes it impossible for the market to work, because competition can't happen, at least not with costs.
The person posting it is the owner of the site so no need to feel guilty.

It's a great resource though so people should think about subscribing.
Yes, I will be hiring bimodal and it's worked very well for me. Whenever I relax my process and hire someone I'm not sure is a great developer I always regret it later when they can't perform and their work brings down others. The more experience I have, the more I stick to working with the best people I can. There are just too many ways to fail and having a team of experts is the best mitigation you can have against it.
I'm a little disappointed in this article, in that upper face movements are generally (as far as I've read and seen) very reliable indicators of emotion. The only two common misconceptions I've read about are this, which is a confusion likely caused by brow furrowing and lower eyebrow tensing used in some anger faces and while concentrating, and when some women crinkle their nose when they enjoy something, which is also used when feeling disgust.

In general, people (especially men, who perform less well in face-reading tests) are more likely to miss a emotion on someone's face or not know what it means than misinterpret it (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2273571/Why-men-ha...).
Hi,

I work for Google's Cloud Platform team. I was wondering as you ramp up your eng team if you or others would like to be briefed on the latest with our offering.

Thank you,
Brittany
Economic growth doesn't create jobs, it destroys them
As someone that works in the game industry and interacts with programmers and artists (not only graphical art, I am also counting here writing, music, etc...) daily it is BLARINGLY OBVIOUS that both skills require certain brain patterns.

Although there are some rare people that are both great programmers and great artists at the same time, usually the person is a programmer, or an artist, they might know skills of the other side (example: I am a programmer, but I have a design bachelor's degree, and know how to use lots of artists tools and correct art made by others, but I would never call myself a good artist) but they are clearly one thing, not two.

This usually is also reflected in their behaviour, for example programmers frequently act in more logical or common sense manners (or sometimes in a extreme logical manner that go against common sense, but still logical), and can be viewer in some ways as "boring", and tend to prefer things rooted in reality.

The artists are not uncommon to do things that are unexpected, or to like outlandish stuff, for example when playing an RPG with extensive character customization you will usually see the programmers min/maxing the stats or trying to go for realistic stats, and outfit the character in realistic clothes, or the best equipment in terms of stats. Now when you look at an artist character they frequently are different, for example you might see a orc magician, or a space marine with low accuracy stats, high charisma and that paints his armour pink with yellow dots.

Then when we get to real work, the need for talent is obvious: Innate programmers frequently make boring art, IF they can make good art at all. Innate artists sometimes can make some code, but usually it is badly engineered code (prone to bugs and breaking), and that is, sometimes, most artists can't code at all, you can try to teach them all you want, and they just don't understand, even those that might grasp the syntax still end never getting past basic logic.

Of course, sometimes you find some people that are exceptions, for example the Falanghe brothers:

Felipe Falanghe is the creator of KSP, he, and his twin brother, studied with me at university, they are clearly artists, during university their highest grades were always in pure art related classes, they could make amazing drawings, and they had a band and were both fairly good singers and guitar players, yet both of them decided to learn Flash and Unity coding, and although their code was frequently broken, hard to read, confusing and had huge amount of memory leaks, clearly it was possible to do something with it, since KSP is a success, and Felipe Falanghe started coding it by himself in Unity.
It's just another variation of the "intelligent discourse" idea that gets bandied about quite often on these sorts of boards.

We have every right to communicate, no one has verbally attacked anyone else, if it really bothers you just skip on by instead of taking the time to make sure we're aware that you're judging everyone involved in the conversation.

Is that unfair? Well, so where you :)
> Oh, so that's why the author is so confused.

So for anyone wondering about this, phpclasses was the answer to PEAR, which itself was trying and failing to be CPAN. PEAR ended up being laughable and underwhelming, while phpclasses ended up being a breeding ground for some of the worst PHP code on the planet.

Nobody should be using it and anyone pointing to anything on it as a good example should be laughed at.

Meanwhile, the article author probably needs to read this slide deck from the PHP6 team explaining exactly where the breakdown occurred:

http://www.slideshare.net/andreizm/the-good-the-bad-and-the-...

The postmortem starts on slide 60, but the rest is worth reading.

It had nothing to do with second system syndrome at all.
Why Facebook launched add campaign in the UK
It's pretty amazing how much disinformation is out there with regards to EV batteries. There are a lot of misconceptions about degradation, environmental impact of manufacturing, and toxicity. I think there must be a concerted effort going on to deliberately misinform people, as is the case with e.g. climate change. (Not blaming anyone here for being part of that effort to deliberately misinform people, but there are probably victims of it here.)
I don't believe you are painting a clear picture of the average person's "mental block." Most people I know would love to own a EV but they "aren't there yet" for most people I know.

I drive very little on a day to day basis. Very very little. That's great for someone who only needs to drive to work and run errands in town. (Me). I pretty much never leave town day-to-day. The big issue is I make a lot of road trips around the East Coast on the weekends - so I need my car to have a very long range once in a while and I make enough road trips were it isn't economically feasible to rent a long range car once a month (or so) for that. It also isn't economically feasible to buy a second vehicle and pay all the ownership costs of that. My spouse and I carpool, we both work in town and it makes sense economically and ecologically to only own one car. The minor inconvenience of it is more than worth it. If I were to get an EV I'd have to also buy a second car.

Seriously, I would love to own an EV - absolutely love to.

Plus many people live in apartments and park on public streets.
Right, maybe I should have said that instead. In my mind locality implies arithmetic intensity, but intensity may not necessarily imply locality.
I'm sorry to be so dismissive, but I've heard Mexican people say the same bullshit, that it's about social class, not about race (as if that made it any better).

First of all, India's full of racist and sexist bullshit. Evidence of this is arranged marriages in the papers and job ads that specify appearance or sex. There's a long way to go before all members of Indian society can truly have political and social equality.

Second of all, I hotly contest that genetics or appearance has no bearing how you're treated in India and only your social class does. If you're dark but wealthy, you're still seen as inferior to someone who is white and wealthy. And besides, when people first see someone, you can't immediately always guess their social class by their appearance, yet people will still use their appearance to decide how to treat someone.

In Mexico we have a very widespread and very invisible racism, institutionalised centuries ago by the Spaniards (to be fair, the Aztecs before them weren't that nice either). Mexicans can't see it like fish can't see the water they swim in. India has the same problem, and Indians try to deny it by saying that it's not about race, but about class, just like Mexicans do.
Data viz: how many people do you recognize on public transit?
> The company culture is great; co-workers are all extremely talented people; Management likes me...

There's an old rule, people don't leave companies-- they leave bosses. Question for you, can you up manage-up? Can you assert to management that you're ready for more interesting, challenging work? Can you help your boss with his agenda? Can you challenge your peers to up their game?

If you can do that, then definitely stay. Incidentally, it also makes you more valuable to the company and will certainly justify a salary increase.
> Why are the working poor and middle class families being taxes to make luxury $100,000 cars cheaper for the top 10%?

2 points here - 1) there are electric cars that aren't 100k Teslas and 2) the 'working poor' don't typically wind up paying federal income tax in the US (as long as they file a return properly - which sucks but..) In fact with the EITC low income families may actually see a negative income tax...
My own experience just does not agree with this at all.

First, I think we have to distinguish between two ideas here:

* The first is the question of whether anyone can learn to program. I think that for the most part everybody can, just like for the most part everybody can learn high school calculus.

* The second is the question of whether programming ability is bimodal. This is not related to the first question, and confusing the two questions is a significant error. It is entirely possible that programming talent is strongly bimodal and that 99% of people can learn to program.

I've been programming since I was 11 and have interacted with other programmers all through high school, college, and now working life, and at every single point of my career -- both academic and professional -- I have seen that some people are drastically faster and better at programming than others (but the others are still capable of learning). In introductory programming courses at college, I've done labs with very smart people who took 10x longer to figure out the lab than some others. They figured it out, but they struggled a lot compared to others, despite being very distinguished undergraduates (Goldwater fellow, etc.).

At work, we've brought on people with 10 years of experience who were 10x slower than someone else with 2 years of experience.

At school, there were master's degree candidates who were significantly worse than many undergraduates despite working just as hard and longer.

I could go on and on and on with examples. From my own life the evidence is simply overwhelming that programming talent is bimodal.
Test system for Adventure Games
Rural population is <20% of the total population of the US, so in the scheme of things I don't think this matters much. It sucks to be on the wrong side of that, but Tesla doesn't have to cater to every market.
Distribution probably (almost definitely) kills the runtime cost, I can't imagine how it couldn't. I'm much more interested in the causality guarantee in the context of the distributed systems.
Five Reasons to Use C++ Threading
Obviously this post is not interested in car-geeking, but I agree, the sound of combustion engines can be wonderful (VW Beetles).
I can't speak for the painting side of things, but no, not everyone can learn how to play a piano. For one thing, left-hand / right-hand independence isn't a universal trait, and isn't something that can always be "learned" (there's a reason why chord / melody books are so popular). Finger independence is even trickier. Sight reading, relative (or even perfect) pitch -- these are _talents_ that make a good performance possible that often can't be learned by those who lack the talent.

Designing algorithms, debugging, interfacing with hardware, finding efficiency -- the myriad of things that go with programming, these things can be done by a layperson the same way a wealthy hobbyist pianist can plunk out "Music Box Dancer" on their $10,000 grand piano -- but will they be done well? Will the hobbyist pianist give a great performance? They might be happy with it, and that's fine. But will they get to Carnegie Hall? No?

I'm not saying the hobbyist pianist shouldn't try any more than I'd say anyone who wants to write a program shouldn't try -- but the article suggests there's no real benefit to "talent" and that's just silly. There _are_ rockstar programmers, and we should acknowledge them, just as there are great concert pianists. And everyone should be encouraged to try both piano and programming. But not everyone will be successful at either or both of them.
iOS 8.4 hailbreak
The bimodal distribution that people talk about seems like a dramatic simplification of a series of continually developing sub-competencies.

So, the only real weakness I've found is when someone considers themselves to be done learning. At that point, they are basically done being a "programmer".
Is speed really the most important metric?
I keep imagining a world where Solar is our primary source of electricity and I keep seeing that world lose its mind when a volcanic ejection leaves us powerless.

I get that it should be part of a much larger plan, but Solar in its current iteration doesn't seem like that safe of a bet.
Not exactly, but I am quite familiar with the issues involved. My point is that we need to make shopping and selection easier and better, instead of focusing on what all you were billed for. If we fix that problem, the most important part aspect of the bills is that they are close to the estimate. The health system as a whole is moving away from billing from individual services anyways, hopefully that will continue.