skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You see this sentiment come up about every few months here. We're not rigorous enough. Or we can't estimate our build time well. Or we don't have any liability. Or we don't have a codified set of morals that govern us.
BS.

I don't see the BS. Coming from a traditional engineering discipline, I'd agree with each of those. The scariest to me is on professional standards and ethics: it seems to be an almost point of pride among some HN commenters that they operate outside of any formal standard. That baffles me.
Why wouldn't you just take the direct Lille-Montpellier train that leaves Lille at 09:00 and arrives in Montpellier at 14:01?

I don't understand your contorted itinerary. You start by taking a 2hr Thalys instead of the regular TGV that goes from Lille to Paris in 1 hour. One of these leaves Lille every 30 minutes or so.

Then somehow you go from Paris Nord to... Bercy instead of Paris Lyon? Bercy only serves regional trains, TGVs leave from gare de Lyon. Then you look for a train that goes to Barcelona instead of one that only goes to Montpellier?

Voyages-sncf.com, Capitaine Train and Bahn.de all show the direct 9812 TGV that I have already taken a few times to go to Lyon or Montpellier. It doesn't go through Paris, stops in a few places like Charles-de-Gaulle airport and Lyon. It actually departs from Brussels, not Lille. It's moderately expensive, at 144€.
C++ in the modern world
Text streams are just an ad hoc structured format. Even an out of date format is better than one you have to invent or decode on a per case basis.

The whole xml vs json debate feels pretty pointless, they are for all practical purposes equal (in size, complexity etc). Sure xml has some weird design decisions around namespaces and so on, but if you use it as a simple hierarchical markup it's pretty much equivalent to json with different brackets? and often easier to parse for humans because of closing tags instead of }}} and of course, comments.

The xml-hate I think isn't really xml-hate it's the reaction against the xml-y things from 10-15 years ago: the IBM/Struts/Blah we all had to wade through. These days it feels frameworks pick json over xml even when it's clearly an inferior choice (such as for config files). Json is an object/message markup, not a good human readable config format.
The problem with that is: Once you build this service, how do you give access to the impoverished people?

For instance, I would be homeless sleeping on benches if not for my parents and my computer is almost 8 years old, my mobile phone is over a decade old. I would seek people who feel like I do but they also look after themselves first, since the conditions are "eat or get eaten". There was also one guy who just surrendered to his fate and all he did was abuse the fact that his parents provide him with a soft pillow to stand, only to play video games day in and day out. The very definition of NEET.

My point being, someone else has to provide them with internet access, and even then, there is not much that you can do.
My, lightsail is yar.
Easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, bright, everything a ship should be.
weworkremotely, careers on stackoverflow also has a remote search option.
“A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”
You have a good point about timing. I often bring this up myself. The major fields of engineering have hundreds to thousands of years of work that went into them. They also went in the same direction more. I challenge any architect that mocks our work to build his next house using methods that existed in their first 100 years then live in it.

None have taken me up on the offer.
I think the biggest difference is tradition engineering systems are mostly linear, while software rarely is. Even non-linear mechanical or electrical systems can typically be modelled.

Modelling is a key activity of engineering - it allows predicting the behaviour of a final system. Linear systems are handy because they are scalable. A bridge to hold 10 people can be scaled to hold 100, 1000, or 10,000 people (usually) quite easily. A software processing scaling from 10->10,000 will often fail in all sorts of interesting ways in the process.

Software often fails silently. In mechanical systems, there is often noises, vibrations, or yielding to give warning and insight to where problems are happening. Software often doesn't have this inherently, but can be overcome with debugging and testing.

I think a large part of this is the newness of the field. People were building bridges, houses, and carts long before Newton. But after we had the modelling tools and theory, we were able to go much further.

(I'm a mechanical engineer, who tends to do a lot of software for controls and models, and increasing web development)
Why aren't we asking why this is even a degree? It's not an expensive form of entertainment, it was designed as a fallback mechanism for the college to make money.
This is a surprisingly low-quality essay for the front page of Hacker News. Accusing everyone of communism? Claiming that Adria Richards’s job was to go to conferences and “fuck them up?”

And that comparison is extremely suspect regardless of the hyperbolic ad hominems. That issue was around what is and isn’t a violation of a conference’s explicit or implicit code of conduct, and what is or isn’t an appropriate response with respect to the persons involved and those that report them.

Whereas, this issue is around a person who has not violated a code of conduct. Massive difference. A far better comparison might be to the fate of Brendan Eich, who did not publicly espouse views about same-sex marriage on or off the job.

There’s an excellent essay to be written about the dividing line between someone’s personal views and their professional conduct, but this isn’t it
As linked at https://twitter.com/puredanger/status/606663407635283968
Your principles are admirable, but might only make a change in the very long game. If one takes a job with a household employee(s) perquisite, then someone like you can make an immediate, actionable change in someone's life right now. And you have the opportunity to extend that change into their family.

Much of success is embodied in modeled behaviors and attitudes. By dint of employing them, you have the opportunity to model for them success-oriented attributes, and let them pick and choose what is culturally and socioeconomically prudent to adopt into their lives. If you want to go a more activist route, if you and they have children you can intertwine their lives together and sponsor (tuition, fees, clothing and supplies) their children (if they are young enough) to the international school and after-school activities that expatriates usually use, and give your children a cultural exchange education second-to-none in the process. The possibilities to make positive change are endless, and only limited by your resources. Just be careful of fostering dependencies, and be open with those who you partner with in the endeavor about the probability of you getting assigned out of your host nation and abruptly changing their situation.

By contrast, advocating against "facilitating apartheid with a brown face", through various political means at your disposal as an individual citizen in the developed world, helps to eventually effect change through policy circles, but usually only at a very long game timeframe. Typically in the years to decades scale.

We need BOTH kinds of advocacy to effect humanitarian change. But if you are already in a position to make a personal, first-person, actionable, on-the-ground change, I urge you to grab it with both hands; there are too few people in this world with your principles, perception, and opportunity. Whether you are facilitating apartheid or making positive change depends upon the deep nature of your interaction, not the overall first-blush official description of the relationships.

Very rarely is this kind of change a binary switch, and it almost always involves a "getting from Point A to Point B" transition that has the trappings of distasteful practices, but the on-the-ground reality for most individuals (even highly privileged ones like most of us on HN) is resources are limited, and we have to get creative with how we re-purpose (and overload, to borrow OO lingo) normal, everyday interactions with positive change payloads.
Interest over your payments are waived for the first three years, after that it is capitalized. After twenty years, ten if you work in the government or charitable sector, the remaining balance is forgiven.

The current interest rate for new undergraduate debt is 4.29%.
Could you explain why you find Atlas Shrugged mind blowing? I read "we the living" and "The fountainhead" and found them quite annoying. Haven't read Atlas Shrugged, just curious if I am missing something.
Who would you blame for ramping up the availability of debt for students so that colleges could charge more?

A) Lobbyists for the financial industry and for profit college industry

B) Your Grandma
I don't think it uses science, other than scientifically studied development processes, and how many start ups use thast? If you count computer science, I'd kick the can down the road and ask if computer science is a real science? Does it use the scientific method? It seems more as applied mathematics.
Best line:

>That’s why pepole are uneducated.
I can't follow the comparison.

Linux is just a Kernel, most distros use the coreutils package which is developed/maintained by GNU [1].

So any comparison is not between Linux and Unix, rather the GNU part in GNU/Linux

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/coreutils.html
Well said. There are people who are screwed by the system, and there are also people who just screw themselves. I think it's important to hear from the first group, which might help to affect change. The second group should STFU. Yes, these kids are only 18 when they make these decisions. Yes, they're ill informed and vulnerable to much more sophisticated people trying to manipulate them. I'm sure there are many sad stories to tell, but telling them isn't constructive. It only reinforces the stereotype of all student loan defaulters as being irresponsible and overcome with their own sense of entitlement like Lee Siegel. That reduces sympathy, and therefore reduces the likelihood of positive change. The assumption that every story needs to be told doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Some just don't.
Great point. Modelling and understanding what's being built are certainly important aspects of engineering.
Sure, I’m responsible for my debt because it’s in my name. Did I know that as a naive 18 year old trusting my not-financially-savvy parents that this was a wise decision that wouldn’t wreck my ability to produce wealth for the next decade?

Nope.

Sometimes we’re expecting not-yet-adults to make adult decisions and live with the adult consequences. And sometimes they don’t have enough information/support to make those decisions.
Do we?I thought there were clear differences between web dev, in-house corporate data mining, mobile dev, scientific computing, NLP, DSP, infosec and crypto, and so on.

Management doesn't really care what tools or environment you're working in as long as things get built, and they (mostly) work.

You could argue that the more rigorous the math, the more "engineeringy" the programming. So DSP and crypto are very mathematical, data mining and machine learning have strong elements of pure math, and so on.

But what about web UX/UI? The reason they seem lacking in rigour is because they are. There's the infrastructure layer which is usually an ad hoc collection of bolted-together toolkits imported from elsewhere, with varying amounts of glue logic. And there's the user layer which is supposed to create a persuasive customer experience.

Ad hoc infrastructure is hard to formalise because the technology keeps changing. It's not like materials science and structural engineering, which have a core that hasn't changed for maybe a century and are - relatively - trivial to model.

At the top level, creating experience is what the arts do. So you're not going to get much mileage out of expecting them to be amenable to formal methods.

So in fact there's no such thing as software engineering. There are a lot of slightly overlapping disciplines that happen to use code as a raw material, all of which use different models and techniques and have different requirements. There's actually no equivalent to materials science, because the best you can hope for are a few standardised best-of-breed algorithmic solutions to common problems, like search/sort/learn.

But more, when you build something out of atoms, it stays put. Chances are you know the range of temperatures/pressures/forces and other conditions under which it has to work. So you have a well-defined problem.

Code is always a symbolic processing machine, and the range of possible inputs, and the timing relationships, are practically infinite. You can only build a full model when the range of inputs is very constrained - like DSP, which takes an array of floats and produces an array of floats, but doesn't work so well with text strings.

If you're dealing with general user input, it's impossible to build a general model, because you always have to account for as many inputs as possible - explicitly. Some of the inputs may be malicious.

It would be like trying to build a bridge that spent most of its time dealing with cars and foot traffic, but everyone so often someone would try to spill a truckload of acid in the middle, or a nuclear war would break out, or someone who was wearing the wrong kind of shoes would make all the cables snap on Thursdays only, because one of the developers forgot to guard against that brand of problem shoe leather.

It's a completely different class of problem. The reasons it's not rigorous is because it's impossible to be rigorous when your inputs can be infinitely variable, but you still have to account for as many as you can.
Fremium only works with high retention apps. The goal with a high retention app is growth, not revenue. You want people to use it a lot, tell their friends and they use it a lot. If you can hit 4%+ week-over-week growth then this is a good candidate for fermium.

Anything that has low retention should be charging up front.
The tone of this post is strange to me. The author says things like, "To them, it is an absolute requirement that anyone who utters opinions they consider unacceptable must be excluded from their society." and "They “would not feel comfortable” being forced to treat him as a respectable human being. As a matter of tactics, this is perfectly reasonable. ...the people we are talking about are communists." and "...the ideas that almost everyone in communion with Harvard University believes are communist ideas" and on and on in this vein.

The author clearly has a curiously well defined political ax to grind but to conflate the issue of this speaker being banned with what looks like a 1950's style anti-communist fetish is bizarre. There are so many assumptions and leaps of extremist faith in the post that I'm surprised something like this would get so highly ranked on Hacker News.

As someone who has attended the conference in the past and who is diametrically opposed with the political views of the extreme right (being a moderate, normal, person), I don't have a problem with someone like Yarvin speaking about tech at the conference. What's more, we can discuss his banning without the issue turning into a ridiculous red baiting diatribe framed in terms more suited to the crazy wing of the extreme American Right.

p.s. look at the comments on that post! It's just ridiculous that such insane extremism (of any sort) should elbow its way into such a topic.
The United States supreme court is the closest thing we have.
`foo.bar` is always a call in Crystal. If `bar` is just an accessor, then the method will be inlined and there is no extra cost compared to make an explicit field access.
I think there are a few red flags here with the way you are doing scrum:

I have never heard of individual velocity measurements, they are wrong and should not be measured. I also think that burndown charts and velocity are for the team, not the stakeholders. This is because story point estimation is volatile and turning it into a feedback loop would turn this estimation into a meaningless thing.

Thus, there is room for transparency with the stakeholders in the sprint review and the setup, all else should be in the team's responsibility.

Scrum guides are usually very specific about the fact that the daily scrum is not for reporting.

Devops work should be priced in as a story in the sprint. If the Product Owner does not want to give such a story the proper priority, you should transparently explain how lack of such work will decrease sprint velocity in future sprints.
I'm simply going with the definition of true "engineering" taught to me as a software engineering major at university... and specifically that we don't do that formal definition of engineering. Of-course, other fields (mechanical, civil, etc) don't always follow all the formalities either, but there are ways of modelling that simply aren't available or aren't used by software engineers.
XML hugely complex and difficult to parse despite not being any more useful than JSON as a means of representing or transmitting data.

YAML is a far superior format to XML for config files, and is basically JSON in a readable format.

There's literally zero reasons to choose to use XML where you could use JSON/YAML instead.
Alan Turing: Creator of Modern Computing
Properly understanding intricate financial arrangements while also being able to see far into the future just to make sure you will get a well-paying job and never get sick or get laid off, and to make sure there won't be a banks-created global financial crisis, and wrapping your head around the default-interest-fees schedule that can have you owing 5x your loan 20 years later if something unexpected DOES happen - is difficult at best for someone with decades of adult life experience. Now you want 18 year olds to have that understanding and mystical future vision.

Yelling "personal responsibility!" while having been relatively lucky in life (if you're active on HN, you're one of the lucky few among your 8 billion peers) feels like ostrich syndrome to me.

Edit: I'm also a bit sad that you want the author or young people like him to accept that the social situation they're born in to dictates what level of education they can afford and pursue. To me that's akin to saying "well, your parents are poor and on welfare, so you should probably just accept that your high school in your poor neighborhood has decades old text books that need to be shared." It's not entirely analogous I suppose - you'd say something about personal responsibility again - but looking at the photo negative of your statement looks to me like "only rich kids can go to rich college, you have to accept your position in cheap college."
I've never read that particular Gould book but I have to agree his ideas on biology are pretty mind blowing and more relevant than ever.
Bernie is not suggesting nationalizing all american colleges. That would be absurd.
opendns.com is the answer.
Your comment is breaking the formatting of the entire page.
You should not charge anything if your app is semi-viral. I've done the experiments and charging kills growth for high retention apps.
Horizontal Censorship
You are not accounting for the fact that IQ is heritable, one of the more obvious truths we're tempted to ignore. Pinker's The Blank Slate is a good book on the topic.

At this point improving nutrition does not add much to IQ. Ours is a well fed nation. Soon, the cheapest means of raising IQ will be iterated embryo selection, later direct genetic modification.

Iterated embryo selection could raise IQ by 80 points:http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/embryo.pdf

I look forward to when Singapore makes it available to its citizens and ideologues here try to insist that vitamins will do the same.
Yes because you stopped using Twitter it is no longer significant. Seriously cracked me up.
Just to pick an obvious, big one: there is no choice besides pants. More subtle? try lace, but without giving a sexual orientation connotation to it. Color choices seem to be more neutral now, but only for older segment of the population. Under 10 years of age pink is definitely not well seen for boys, but blue is "ok" for girls to wear for an outsider.
We had a reservation. Almost everyone else was Japanese, not foreign tourists
>“The consumer has turned the definition [of healthy] upside down,” she says. “If it is non-GMO, natural, or organic, but high in sodium and high in sugar and fat, it’s okay.”

True and important to note when you're grocery shopping. Organic, natural, non-GMO do not mean that thing you're holding in your hand is actually good for you.
Could you provide some pointers to your work? I googled a bit and searched on github and could not find anything.
> And what the fuck kind of concept is "out of state" tuition anyways? Seriously?

Huh? You and your family didn't pay the taxes that allow for the in-state rates. Why should you be able to move there and take advantage?

Also, if you were in CA why not just go to one of the fifty UCs or CSUs?
To sum it up- poverty brings you the experience of a thirld world enviroment.

Western poverty does not do this. Most folks suffering western style poverty have an abundance of food, clean water, power, sanitation, leisure, education and health care. Having just come back from India, it's not even a close comparison.

Any stress/existential crisis/dread is purely based on status envy or pathologies caused by other (relatively) poor westerners.
This is a cryptography training exercise and not an actual extraterrestrial message. https://allegedlyapparent.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/nsa-29-me...
For my small business, I have a supplier who's website looks like it was created by a teenager in the 90s. For instance all of the navigation buttons are weird little animations. And yes, there's colored, blinking text.

But it always puts a smile on my face when I use it, because it's perfectly functional yet tacky in a good way.
Oh, I'm well aware of that, but thanks for the ad hominem. I came from a background no more privileged than his. I had to make some hard choices, which among other things is why I don't even have a degree. I'm sure Lee Siegel had different opportunities and different aptitudes than I did, but those don't seem to have been the dominant factors here. Even with those opportunities and aptitudes, a better attitude would have allowed a better outcome without the need for a loan default. He wasn't willing to compromise on his choice of college or his choice of a first job. Other people who do make such compromises often do just fine, and eventually get into the career they wanted, despite an equal level of opportunity or aptitude.

It's unfair that some people have to make such compromises while others don't. I've written plenty about that. Nonetheless, those who choose poorly deserve no sympathy from those who were faced with the same or equivalent choices and still managed to do the right thing.
> Because of this, I am sorry that I must rescind your invitation and I will not be able to accept or include your talk at the conference. My apologies if this causes you any inconvenience.

At least give a straight apology without mealy-mouthed "if..."
Coming soon: left and right wing tech conferences.
Probably shouldn't just be using HTTP for a password change.
I'm confused though. If they support MST[0], how did they rip out daisychaining specifically? I don't understand MST well enough to see how a computer connected to one large monitor with two MST regions would be different than two monitors daisy chained using MST.

It really does look like Apple specifically has disabled it because there isn't an apple product that supports it, but that may be due to my own ignorance of MST.

[0]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202856