skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amusingly human, if I may add. Reading "Thinking, fast and slow", by Daniel Kahneman, one key idea that I got was that even knowing against biases you are very, very likely to suffer from those biases. Disheartening results were gathered from studies done on well-trained psychologists and people prepared for the experiment, to no avail. Can't remember the details right now, but just read the book, it's awesome. Another good one was "Influence" by Cialdini, but they gave you tips on trying to avoid those biases that, upon reading Kahneman, I don't think anymore that are very useful.
People sue Ford and other car companies on a somewhat regular basis.
Life in Bucharest's tunnels
Go look at the portfolio page for your average Venture fund. The overwhelming majority of the companies are doing really boring stuff, like compliance management, lead generation, staff management, sales tracking etc...

And most of the founders are older guys who are also boring, they don't do exciting movie star CEO stuff. They just found a super specific niche and are filling it really well and making great money doing it.

So when I go and talk to these same investors, it is clear that most of them don't really care about moonshots or big market shifting ventures, despite what they say. They want cash flow positive companies who might have a reasonable chance of being acquired and don't really need that much work - because make no doubt, all of those unicorns or whatever you want to call them take a ton of work from the investors.

But I have no desire to be a part of one of those companies. They generally aren't particularly ambitious at global scale - they aren't trying to change human behavior or move markets like airbnb, uber, facebook, google etc...they just want to make good money, and are generally pretty good at it. Might as well go work for Oracle at that point.
It's not a conspiracy theory, but common sense. Which you seem to be lacking, seeing as you thought one of those parties was actually decent.
the pebbles on the ground looks quite real. But the larger boulders in the background is too textured and not enough bumpiness and also too uniformly flat. That's what seems to make it fake. also the water looks great, but too uniform and perfect. Real water has lots of little flaws and it's usually not as clear too (things like muddy water is hard to render i guess).
It's very easy. By being a boring developer! You get boring by not leaving things up to chance, but by having a strict set of process and guidelines you follow.

What exactly is a great software developer? For the sake of this discussion, let's say a great software developer is one that knows how to finish a project. Have the finished project working "correctly". Have the finished project is a decent shape where future maintenance and understandability is reasonable easy.

1) How do you finish a project?
By understanding that you live in a world of constraint, you have a limited amount of time, knowledge, money, etc. So you must place a limit on the features/scope of the project. You must understand what you are trying to build, what are the least more important amount of features that will deliver value and work on those. Folks usually call that building an MVP. Being a good listener, able to empathize with your users helps a lot here.

2) How do you know that your finished project works "correctly"
You get feedback from your userbase as you develop, you have Unit tests. You abstract the problem in a way that is so easy to reason about logically. You have a strict acceptance of what it means to work correctly.

3) How do you make sure that your project is easy to maintain and understand?
You follow good software engineering development guidelines. You name things well, you organize your code/source file correctly. Your code is self documenting. You use the correct tools for the job. You avoid "clever/shorthand/magic" code. You anticipate how your code will change in the future and code in such a way that it is malleable.

This means you have a strict process/checklist that you live and die by. You will feel almost like a robot more than an artist. This is "boring." But I personally this is what separates an average software developer to a great one.

To know the right tool, and process, means you have to constantly study. Have a well balanced approach to the SE field, don't just study programming languages and frameworks, study design, study the business side of things, study your tools.
"I don't even know which Marcus you refer to"
Are there so many Roman Philosophers named "Marcus" having written in Greek?
Well it was found to legally correct. Similar findings have been found in other cases involving websites that can be publicly accessed.
This project just means the GUI is drawn natively rather than via a browser rendering engine.

Which isn't that impressive on the face of things, but bare in mind that Go is really known more for command line applications and web serving. So the ability to draw anything natively - be it via OpenGL or using Window et al's own toolkits - isn't a concept that's been explored by many.
This article mostly seems to be about companies going public later than they might have a few years ago. What about companies that never go public?

To ask an admittedly naive question: is it possible to get funding and remain private? Does that even make sense?

Obviously investors want to make money, can profits at a private company serve that function? Or are tech investors mostly (only?) interested in > 100x ROIs?
Botched in Design as in expression of intent since the intent was as you stated misguided. As I grow older I have a harder time separating technological merits from economic ones.

As a piece of hardware... yeah, that's a different thing entirely.
Neat - as others have pointed out, I feel that being familiar with unit testing would help in this situation. Having negative test cases is just as important, if not moreso, than having "happy path" tests.
Either it will rain today OR it will not rain today.
> Frankly, I'm a lot more worried about criminalizing slander than I am about criminalizing copying. Slander law actually does clamp down on free speech. Copyright law just prevents free-riding.

Indeed, I think the area of IP with the most significant impact on free speech is the one that hardly gets talked about: trademark. Causes of action for dilution and tarnishment have major free speech implications. IMHO, 15 USC 1125 is unconstitutional to the extent it allows an action for tarnishment.
I like Salvatore.
Great stuff.

I miss the days when solutions could be that tight. You could have written that .com file with a hex editor back then. Now an ELF header and symbol table is bigger than edit.com
I don't think it is a big surprise. C++ programmers like features that Go does not have. Ruby/Python guys like out of the box performance that Ruby/Python does not have. :)

A good summary of Go here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9267211

As a systems language Go is ok, as a business domain language Go is subpar based on the current state of the language. CSP makes Go great for Ruby/Python guys because these features (channels, go routines) solves lots of problems those languages do not have a great solution to.
I'm an "engineer", went through Web dev, lead dev, CTO, and now Senior Technical Architect. But I don't like coding much, I'm good at it, but it's nothing more than a mean to an end for me, which is solving problems.

Same goes for the business side actually, most of it is pretty boring/unchallenging, but it's a mean to an end, and if I want to meet that end I must do the best I can to be great at all those aspects.

Or hire someone that will fill that in for me. But in early stages, I'll give my fullest on all angles.
Even the New York Times is using click-bait headlines now. Sigh...
My second guess was 0, 0, 0. My third was -1, -2, -4.
I tend to end up writing `Expr` objects directly when I'm building larger macros as I find them much easier to reason about. It's clearly not as convenient/clean as Lisp though. (David Moon actually sent a PR last year to make hygiene much easier.. unfortunately it got stuck for a while, but the PR was recently rebased and hopefully will be merged eventually).

Regarding the learning curve: we rewrote the first half of the Metaprogramming section of the manual a few months ago to try to provide a more gradual introduction, especially for people without a Lisp background. Objectively I don't know if the change has helped, but I tell myself that the number of macro-related questions has gone down :)

We would really like to make these tools accessible to people both with and without a formal CS background (probably the majority of Julia users will fall in the latter category). So, if you have any suggestions for doc/pedagogy improvements in this area, I would be very happy to hear them!
"Barely eek out a living" is my favorite malapropism of 2015. "Eek! A living!"

Also: someone did get a home run from a bunt, in MLB no less.
Good old IEEE 64bit floating point numbers =)

That also means that for(i=0;i<j;++i){} doesn't necessarily terminate for an arbitrary j smaller than infinity, which I find hilarious.
ban robots!
Steve Jobs the Film
The Encrypted Mailbox
I don't know where the line is drawn. One could certainly argue by those metrics that most countries that consider themselves democracies do not fit that definition.

That said, I do think that when less than 1% of the country has voting rights, it's hard to call that a democracy by any measure. Is a dictatorship a democracy if the one person in power holds a "vote" for himself? What if there are two people that split the power?

> One advantage of limited voters (e.g. "landowners") is, that the system is less likely to run into an out of control socialist redistribution system.

I'm not sure how to respond to that. I suggest you read up on the history of Icelandic politics, I particularly recommend reading up on "vistarband" and related concepts, if you really think that this system is somehow more fair than allowing universal suffrage. The result was that this small group of landowners passed laws making anyone who did not have land (and therefore voting power) into indentured servants.
Peter Thiel invests in another Germany tech startup (Kreditech)
Today they don't generally get a share of the surplus, so by your argument they should be working even worse.
> If we were to assume that toothpaste commonly began to contain fluoride after the mid or late 1970's

Not sure, but that sounds wrong according to wikipedia:

> Fluoride was first added to toothpastes in the 1890s. "Tanagra", containing calcium fluoride as the active ingredient, was sold by Karl F. Toellner Company, of Bremen, Germany, based upon the early work of chemist Albert Deninger.[31] An analogous invention by Roy Cross, of Kansas City, Mo., was initially criticized by the American Dental Association (ADA) in 1937. Fluoride toothpastes developed in the 1950s received the ADA's approval. To develop the first ADA-approved fluoride toothpaste, Procter & Gamble started a research program in the early 1940s. In 1950, Procter & Gamble developed a joint research project team headed by Dr. Joseph Muhler at Indiana University to study new toothpaste with fluoride. In 1955, Procter & Gamble's Crest launched its first clinically proven fluoride-containing toothpaste. On August 1, 1960, the ADA reported that "Crest has been shown to be an effective anticavity (decay preventative) dentifrice that can be of significant value when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toothpaste#Modern_toothpaste
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Hmm, I had thought the upside of freelancing was to make more money, at the expense of doing all the stuff listed here. The same amount of money plus all that is not really an appealing prospect. Though I suppose you could argue it's a better position overall because your name is "in the market" so to speak. But for me I would feel dumb if I busted my ass a lot harder than I do now just to make the same money.
I think what matters is: outside the organization where the certain language was invented what is the the most users use it for.

Aka: outside Google what is Go used for? Mostly web related project and low level IO, databases, data stores, etc.; based on the popular Go projects on Github, if somebody has time it would be good to see some stats on this

outside Mozilla what is Rust used for? This is a more tricky question because the most programmers I know of do not consider a language for anything before 1.0. Rust 1.0 just got released recently so they have years to go to have relevant stats about the usage patterns.
Well they did keep their Soyuz and other space programs. I think even the wasteful Socialist bureaucrats realized this is not a project worth pursuing.
Funny how this made it to #1 on Hacker News only to get bashed. It falls into the class:

1. I did something.
2. I want to share my experience with you.
3. This is about what I DID, not what I THINK.
4. Take from this what you want.
5. Hope it helps.

I'm a programmer, not a writer, so this advice isn't a perfect fit for me, but it's pretty damn close.

If one good idea from a 5 minute read is gold, then this post is platinum. Excellent advice, even more valuable because it comes from hard earned experience.

Thanks Joel for the bulletin board material. Keep it coming.
I certainly see the need for Rust, a better, stricter and more modern C designed for low-level tasks where both performance and correctness matter, e.g. layout engines, game engines, OS kernels.

On the other hand Go seems more suited to system/server tools where good-enough perfmance and quick startup matters more. I've noticed that people have been converting Python and Ruby code-bases to Go, and its use in system tools such as Docker, CoreOS, and Kuberentes. We're working in this area and have considered jumping on the bandwagon and rewriting our Python prototype in Go for the same reasons - performance, minimal runtime, strong ecosystem, some 'typing'. (Python made/makes sense atm as we're still very exploratory so doesn't get in our way).

However upon investigation I was a bit disappointed with Go, although it has an incredible ecosystem and active community. Perhaps its simplicity is also an advantage although I found it counter-intuitive at times. However I can see why it found use in a way that 'better' (IMHO) tools such as OCaml were unable to.

We're still undecided as to what to use when/if rewriting our code. Funnily enough I'm wondering if maybe C#/F# would work, now .NET has been open-sourced and has a native compiler. A good language/runtime, stronger type-system, lots of libraries, and potentially good performance with quick startup. I guess it would be quite amusing if MS's tooling ended up as the best way to write Linux system/server tools within those particular constraints.
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Nanogenerator Produces Energy from Tires Rolling on Pavement
Your entire rebuttal consists of one infrequent exception to just one of OP's statements, which was not meant to be absolute anyway.
There's a Tshirt that you'll see around gyms: "Lift heavy shit."
Misleading title, something that always bugged me with questions. An anthropologist explains in "The Democracy Project":

"Democracy was not invented in ancient Greece. Granted, the word "democracy" was invented in ancient Greece—but largely by people who didn't like the thing itself very much. Democracy was never really "invented" at all. Neither does it emerge from any particular intellectual tradition. It's not even really a mode of government. In its essence it is just the belief that humans are fundamentally equal and ought to be allowed to manage their collective affairs in an egalitarian fashion, using whatever means appear most conducive. That, and the hard work of bringing arrangements based on those principles into being.

"In this sense democracy is as old as history, as human intelligence itself. No one could possibly own it. I suppose, if one were so inclined, one could argue it emerged the moment hominids ceased merely trying to bully one another and developed the communication skills to work out a common problem collectively. But such speculation is idle; the point is that democratic assemblies can be attested in all times and places, from Balinese seka to Bolivian ayllu, employing an endless variety of formal procedures, and will always crop up wherever a large group of people sat down together to make a collective decision on the principle that all taking part should have equal say."

(He goes onto explain why political scientists ignore such assemblies... a confusion of voting — which has many problems — with democratic decisionmaking.)
Any idea why? Could it be an error from the input being too large? Or is there some other magic at work here...

Nedit: One of the other responses nailed it. IEEE standards on 64 bit fp ops
I second your words. Me, being freelancer for years, on my own and doing also for more then a year work in office showed only that I am way more productive in my own environment, on my own schedule. I don't chase money, but life, and having good life makes me more happy, thus more productive and then again company benefits more from me, so more money and success for them too.

Irresponsible person and/or unhappy worker will be less productive no matter where he works but I do think that remote work is the future if we want to have a sustainable life and don't have a new age slavery that is dominating in today's capitalism.
His variable names really bother me. I can live with "lat", "lon" if I must, but "d", "md", "trkpts"? Readability would be greatly enhanced if he just spelled those out.

Programmers shouldn't be wasting brain power deciphering cryptic variable names. Save that energy for where it counts (solving actual problems!)
Fun fact: Buran was the first fully automated space shuttle. It did a complete flight cycle without human intervention. I believe our space shuttle could that that too eventually but not at the time.

Even funner fact: There is a remnant of software that powered that shuttle still around. In the form of a visual programming language DRAKON (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON)
Greek democracy had problems, but I wonder how much of our picture of them derives from source bias. Thucydides, Aristotle, Plato, Xenophon: none a fan of democracy (and Plato to me seems actively dishonest). Writings in its favor would face obviously greater trouble making it to us through Roman and medieval times -- and most of what was written did not make it, on any topic. What do we still have from democrats of the time? I'd like to know.

(Am not a historian.)
“3taps and craigslist have reached a global settlement”
> "He had a stellar, 15-year career of taking bribes and withholding assets from the DEA, and had flawless execution except for this one blip." FTFTFA

I expect that this agent has been a bad apple for some time, and has only recently got lazy, or maybe technology was better than he thought it was.
> For instance, many old style terminals could do fields

And often had a next-field key distinct from the tab key.
As cipher papers go, not especially interesting. The best ones have long sections explaining each of their design decisions. This paper starts out by pointing out that GOST is much slower than AES in practice, but never acknowledges that any conventional block cipher that isn't AES is probably doomed to inferior performance (because AES is hardware accelerated).

It would be interesting to see a country adopt a native stream cipher instead of a block cipher as their standard. The performance of stream ciphers is more competitive, you lose the requirement to define 8-10 "official modes" (most of which are insecure), and stream ciphers are virtually always what you want anyways: in 2015, block ciphers mostly exist in order to be transformed into stream ciphers via counter mode.
22 Technologies That Every Mobile Developer Needs to Know
HN community also bashed Dropbox when it was new.
Why data preparation frameworks rely on human-in-the-loop systems
Nicely written and inspiring. I like how it shares his failures and how he recovered from them, putting the needle back on the record. I also like it how it defines success to the individual with only comparing to other people for inspiration but not validation.
I believe Netflix's Falcor, which seems very similar to Relay, uses JSON.
> The money has to come from somewhere.

That's the thing: the money is already there. Most countries already have an extensive (and expensive) social security system. The problem is that they tend to have a lot of administrative overhead, and they effectively punish people for working, because they lose the social security payments once they get a job.

Basic income is basically the same thing, except that it's also for people who work. Same rule for everybody.
Eh, government bureaucracies in first-world aren't as inefficient as some people make a living claiming. In the US, administrative expenses for Social Security run less than 1% of the budget. Medicaid and Medicare run with similar margins. Compare this to private-sector insurance in the US, where 80-85% "medical loss ratios" (ie, the fraction of premiums paid out for medical care, as opposed to the fraction kept for administration, advertising, and profits) are common; even in the good old days (before the excesses of modern executive compensation, profits, and advertising) MLR peaked at around 95%.

The simple fact is that many social welfare programs are just expensive, because there are a lot of people being helped and the quantity of money you need to spend to make any difference is just adds up.
I always enjoyed XPath as a lighter-weight mechanism for querying trees. It turns out that there are a set of pretty straightforward changes that can be made to XPath to have it support graphs. To wit: add a notion of a named 'traverser' (depth- vs breadth- search; pre-, in-, or post- order; how nodes are marked; etc.); then, change the notion of 'parent' to 'in' and 'child' to 'out'. XPath can then be implemented as syntactic sugar on top of this lower level "Graph Path" mechanism.

I'd always intended to convince my advisor to have the grad students do a graph-path implementation on top of boost::graph, in his generic programming course; alas, never happened. The 'masters' version of this would be to do a lazily evaluated version of graph path in C++ and Haskell to "teach them the students a lesson".