skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What are your best “soft skill” resources?
I'm at this point in my career where I'm in a good groove improving my technical skills, but I'm starting to require more and more time into my softer skills (communication, negotiation, persuation, et al). What are your favorite resources (classes, websites, books, blogs) that you use to develop those skills?
I do not try to hide it -- see other comments. I have no problems saying that I am an aircraft instrumentation engineer, nor am I under any obligations to hide that fact.

I got that feeling because it seemed as if you might have been trying to say that my affiliation with the industry made anything I say suspect. Not all of us are shills, or have some ulterior motives. I just have knowledge of what's being discussed, and I wanted to share it.

What could have been malicious? I didn't know. Probably nothing. These are emotional responses I had, they do not have rational bases.

I have no idea what you were trying to achieve, to be honest. But you have addressed that you meant nothing personal, and I accept this.
What is really interesting is when parties sue each other in court over Ethereum contracts. Courts will always be involved.
Pretty handy for quickly iterating on things. Especially complicated expressions within matrices (or things like that which quickly turn into a jumbled mess in TeX). I remember using this site a few years ago during graduate school.
"advertising platform" is a terrible example of "straight business". The fact that such non-straight businesses pre-date the internet is irrelevant.
China can retaliate by going after American economic interests, but ultimately they'd be cutting off their nose to spite their face. China is not a friendly environment for non-domestic companies, and American companies are going to need to understand sooner or later that this is a dangerous market to pin hopes of growth. Google got out of China and now they're liberated from China's coercion tactics. Retatiation would inflict some short term pain on American companies, but ultimately they'd rebalance and it would be China that would suffer from their economic withdraw.
> any more general purpose implementation of generics would, to be orthogonal with existing features, necessarily slow compilation (because it would have to take over the job of slices and maps today, and would become prevalent in our APIs).

It would not slow down compilation. Slices and maps are just built-in generics. Generics would codegen exactly the same way as slices and maps do now. Slices and maps compile down into calls to builtin runtime functions (using intensional type analysis IIRC); a generic version of them would, if implemented properly, call down into those exact same functions.

> There is a generics dilemma that programmers pay today and it should be possible to turn that into a language feature with the same tradeoffs.

Yes, it is possible and many languages have done it. All Golang needs to do is what Swift (just to name probably the closest analogue) does, with interfaces for runtime dispatch and generics for compile-time monomorphization. Or, if you want to continue using intensional type analysis to reduce compile time, implement that as certain variants of OCaml did (though you'll pay a performance cost to do so and I don't think it's worth it).
Better displays and SSD's have been ThinkPad options for several years now. Buying a box with spinning rust and modest display quality was a purchasing department decision. They're not manufacturing quality issues. Their imposition reflects IBM corporate culture or your department/division/team microculture.
IBM is wise to do so. The Thinkpad W540 that developers hired in summer 2014-summer 2015 got is terrible for Linux: graphics driver problems, the trackpad is a horrible piece of junk that wholly depresses 1mm into the body and has a texture that wears off after several weeks (most folks who have them, and there's a lot of them, carry mice instead), and they weigh a ton. A coworker just got a Thinkpad W541 and it improves on the trackpad by readding the missing thumb buttons under the spacebar.

The W530 and W520 weren't much better: they didn't have the terrible trackpads. IIRC the W520's graphics stack worked better, but that was three years ago. I helped an intern set up a W520 and it still had some issues before we got it stable. I wouldn't call myself a super expert Linux admin, but I do remember a day when I had to manually configure XFree86.

I came into IBM through acq. I'm a Mac guy these days, and was before the acq, where I'd used a HP machine with Linux when I first joined the company because there were no Macs to spare. When my pre-acq Mac couldn't run the Linux binaries I needed for work, I switched to a T420 and disliked it. I used R4x series in college and LOVED them.

I'm seeing more and more Macs around my office. We were probably 60% Thinkpads with Linux, 30% Mac, 10% Thinkpads with Windows going into 2015. I had been seeing Mac growth for a while, but it was all BYOD. Now that the deal went through, most folks up for a machine refresh are choosing Macs, mostly because that's what they own themselves. Some of the few die-hard Windows folks are even getting Macs and dual booting Windows.

Like others, I can't really comment on the purchase quantity, mostly because I'm not privvy to that information!
HAHA yes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5UbCRrlmlE
Totally this :)
Doesn't IBM have nicer stuff available? I have an i7, 16GB of RAM with a 3k display (but I prefer the nub, so I can't speak for touchpad quality as much) which seems to complete the package. It's the standard laptop they give developers at my job. We have the option of a Mac, but people end up using Bootcamp with frustrating experiences.
This is absolutely amazing. I'll definitely be using it extensively.

I'm also incredibly curious about how it's implemented though. As far as I know, reddit doesn't have an API point for all new comments, do they?
Windows 10 is said to be running on 67M PCs already
Good points though I can't see why anyone would pay to pay solitaire in any form but for those who want to I'm fine with it.

Canonical didn't make Unity to innovate for the user as much as they did to have a unified interface that could run more easily on phones and tablets operating on the same concept as Windows 10. Whether people want that, time will tell though it was innovative thinking even though Unity is still a bad experience for experienced users, we can't even right click a Launcher icon and edit its properties. That's pretty stupid.
> just movies on Netflix or Vudu

So you do want something.

Edit: sorry if this come off as a little snarky.

I think it's relevant because Netflix and its ilk are actually some of the best cases for advertising: they have a high customer LTV and were once not well-known at all. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising every year.

Just because most advertising is irrelevant to a3n doesn't mean advertising is irrelevant.
I likewise buy very few consumer goods, but I do appreciate advertising both as a consumer and an entrepreneur.
Isn't fuzziness a feature of most legal codes? Treating the law like an absolute immutable contract sounds anathema to a healthy judicial system.

I'm not sure why some technologists have such a fascination with legalism.

I'm not against the idea of digital government and having laws be distributed under a free documentation license with the ability for citizens to discuss and amend laws. A standard version control and issue tracker model sounds much more appropriate, however. Perhaps even just email and diffs, so as to have a barrier to entry.
Ask HN: How would you expand a startup internationally?
Hi Growth Hackers :)

Let's say you need to expand a successful startup/service to a specific country {I know every startup will have its own techniques}.
But in very general - what would be the strategy you will have to expand a certain based country startup - to a different country?

Also, are there any resources and case studies to learn from? Similar examples to any of these will be terrific! Uber/Groupon/Airbnb/etc.

In short:
Techniques and examples of first ways for how to bring a well known startup/service to a specific country which no one there knows about it..and what would be the first steps.
Thanks!
Here's another great paper on long range / short range steering: http://ijssst.info/Vol-05/No-1&2/TOMLINSON.pdf.

The paper has excellent illustrations and it really helped me gain intuition for how pathfinding/steering algorithms can come together as a whole.
Because of the formality and good intentions, the failure modes are in general less harmful than the failure modes of outraged mobs.

And when it fails consistently in some manner, the better answer is generally to figure out how to get it fixed rather than just ignore it in favor of mob action.
Ha ha ha why have you quoted "people"? Do you disagree with the term or not think he's a person because he has different political opinions to you? Ha ha ha lunatic
I think it's interesting how much people's aesthetic preferences differ on lisp syntax. Personally, I think the parentheses are visually appealing, but it's probably an acquired taste. Even more than that, I actually now find it much more difficult to parse infix notation for math, equality and so on (and not just operators in syntax-heavy languages like Haskell). Prefix notation, while requiring a different reading style, is incredibly clear and unambiguous as long as no one's gone macro-crazy on you.
Forty Minutes with a Fields Medallist
Expert electrical analysis: $340 audiophile cables test “marginal”
Yes, the problem is about not what happens on one machine, but N machines globally. That is a system that scales linearly and does not use proof-of-work. One needs to solve the Byzantine General Problem in a more general way than Bitcoin does.
I (not original poster) have a Dell Latitude E5430 with the upgraded backlit keyboard and I like that keyboard a lot (vastly better than the standard one on my old D620).
Yes!

When I want to buy something, I rely on reviews. And I look at enough reviews to identify the biased ones, which are often based on the same press releases.
Yep, you caught me. :)
Android Developers Can Now Do Staged Rollouts of Google Play Apps
Then take german model Claudia Boerner instead.
I'm a huge fan of Text Secure, been using it for a while. That and Red Phone (also by Open Whisper) makes your life indeed more secure on Android.
Are you saying that Ethereum is a web hosting platform?
Well, flying in aircraft mode means it can go much higher (12000 feet) and much faster (250 knots cruise speed), so it spends less time in threat areas. I don't believe any have been shot down by MANPADS, but I also don't know if any have been shot at by MANPADs.

The CH-46 served so long that no complete public accident record is out there -- many of the sources are still on paper in obscure filing cabinets.
The Trillion-Dollar Ripple Effect of Autonomous Cars
yup, normally I'm all for new projects but this just seems like an overkill. You could achieve this with even just a css. I don't think it's worth it at all to be using a specialized library for it.
I recently flew from NYC to Seattle. When I arrived in Seattle, I wanted to use Uber to reach my destination. However, the driver it booked for me was still in NYC. We talked for twenty minutes until I just asked him where he was at, and he replied "La Guardia".
Doesn't libcurl encourage allocating linked lists on the stack for passing options to functions? IIRC a lot of functions take too many options to be practically specified as arguments so they have a datatype something like

struct opt {
enum option_specifier id;
void *val;
struct opt *next;
};

And the functions that accept these option lists don't take ownership of them, so they're safe to allocated on the stack.
Forgot about this strange one: I own all System of a Down original and explicit CDs but iTunes Match got me the clean versions instead.
> But in reality, those ads work, which means that people are more likely to make a voluntary economic transaction after seeing them than they would be in the base condition.

That's precisely why I make sure to never see them :)

I wonder what the system thinks that Mirimir wants?
>>would make sense in this context<<

Not really -- "I don’t want to start an argument about the speed of SBCL vs C++ here, my point is that CClasp has come a long way from being hundreds of times slower than C++ to within a factor of 4."
$LANGUAGE_I_HATE is $CRITIQUE_1 and CRITIQUE_2.

And I know, I know, bash is even less elegant and more boring. Haha.
> outsourcing of third-party verifiers

Since people using the network will be in control of constructing their own contracts, they will have an incentive to draft the contract in such a way as to make sure they'll have control over this "outside verifier"; it could even be same company which it chooses to be the "verifier".

> trusted third-party institutions

The defeats the previous attempt at decentralization, by re-centralizing the information the network needs to do it's job.

This is what the network hinges on to gain information about the outside world (and remember, companies will have an incentive to build the contract in such a way to control these trusted third-party institutions as mentioned above).

(I'm aware of schelling coin/contracts; I'm don't think it will work unless it's made a mandatory part of all contracts for all third-party verifiers. For applications that need data that is publicity verifiable, such as the weather or sports outcomes, it could work, but if the information is not is publicity verifiable, e.g. a transaction amongst private parties, I don't see it. And that's only if you force the use of Schelling coin/contracts, which is usually never the first thing Ethereum folks talk about when pitching this; I'm not sure if there are actually plans to implement that.)
http://intheoreum.org
I recommend "Soft Skills: A software developer's life manual" by John Sonmez

http://www.manning.com/sonmez/
In order to keep things on topic I'll ignore most of what you wrote and just talk about purchasing housing here. My wife and I just bought an apartment in Zürich and found it very different than the u.s. One must put down a minimum of 20% always, but we ended up having to put down 30% because the bank calculates your payments on a much higher interest rate than reality as well as higher maintenance fees than reality. We also had to have life insurance.
When anyone can publish something that goes viral, what is the difference?
This is legitimate as they do the same to us. They're one of the most capable countries doing espionage against U.S. military and industry. They've stolen plenty of I.P.. At one point, NSA intercepted a communication from Mitsubishi that contained President's Daily Brief. We have to spy on countries like this to even out the negotiations or else they become quite one-sided without us knowing why.
HNRank – Google 検索
Once the sub got nontrivially popular I realized I couldn't hope to keep up with everything.
The thing is, it doesn't need the media at all to be "fanned".

A single Reddit or 4chan post can assemble thousands of vigilantes.
Ugh.

It's comments like this that make reading comments so much suck.

You took one tiny misworded part of his entire post and highlighted it to make an issue out of it. When you knew dang well what his overall argument was and what he really meant with that tiny badly worded part.

Stop adding to comment suck.
I feel like you get a feel for this as you grow gray. 98% of the code I write is not tdd.2% is instant tdd and I am happy for those times.

Things that make the tdd cut for me? Writing an algo. Maybe a maze solver. Maybe a payroll tax calculator. Maybe a monthly bill calculator.

I want these parts of my system rock solid, and it is super easy to make wack a mole where you fix one bug to regress a previously fixed bug. Love very solid TDD tests here.

Other 98% if my app? No way. Tdd adds cruft and can steer you to local maxima aND away from the optimal solution.
There's no dishonesty, except perhaps to people who don't realize that news DOT Y COMBINATOR dot com is primarily a YC-startup job board, and always has been. There has never been any pretense of fairness that non-YC companies can post job ads, which are a different sort of entity from stories/text posts: no comments, no votes, no flagging, etc. I'm not sure why you put "story submission" in quotation marks; it's a very different sort of entity.
> Programmers respond by attempting to stamp out the gets() function in working code, but they refuse to remove it from the C programming language's standard input/output library, where it remains to this day.

gets was deprecated in C99 and removed in C11.
http://pybenchmarks.org/
Nobody in this thread actually cares what Ayn Rand said or didn't say. The thread's not about her.
Good observation. There is a continuum in legal language between expressive power in the natural language and the legal formal language. "Absolute immutable contracts" are however very desirable in many cases where people interact with or through machines. Consider that modern computers, in terms of the hardware are extremely deterministic on a macro level, but a lot of the software is fuzzy (UI).
In what case is a government a good idea?
The customers and customerOrderGroups are intermediate.

I would expect in reality to do something like this in Java 8 (Disclaimer probably not exactly correct syntax, not near a Java compiler)

getCustomerList()
.map(c -> tuple(
c.companyName,
c.orders.stream()
.collect(groupingBy(order -> order.orderDate.year)).entrySet().stream()
.map(yearGroup -> tuple(
yearGroup.key,
yearGroup.items.stream().collect(
groupingBy(order -> order.orderDate.getMonth() + 1)
)
))
.forEach(Log::print)

Further it looks like we should probably have domain types for MonthGroup/OrderGroup etc instead of tuples, which would make it still cleaner
Sorry i don't understand the point, CSS is not programmatic
I've never heard any actual stories of LuaJIT being used in games as opposed to stock Lua, but I know it was ported to power processors. Have any big games claimed to use LuaJIT? It would certainly make sense if the memory and gc pauses were no worse than Lua.
They are not pushing the platform forward; just messing about with the GUI. There are lots of things they could have done to extend what an OS can do for the benefit of users but they didn't. Instead of trying to copy web apps they should have provided the facilities needed for native apps to outperform them.
In several countries it is legal for Cabs to individually define their rates.

Then they prey on tourists who didnt get that the rate was bumped up by 10x.

Hard to watch out for in certain areas if you dont know the local currency that well (esp if the 10x shift looks like they show cents values) and often they group up to make places look like legit normal cab waiting spots.

Completely normal and legal in eg Rumania and Bulgaria. Stuff you know, learn, have to watch out for but is still highly annoying.

I can relate when someone doesnt want to hazzle with this adventure on eg business trips.
Yes, I now have one of the higher-end macbooks now, but my point was that Lenovo has a lot of "standard" options that are below-par and really don't have any business being in a computer in that price-range.
It's common to say a car is powered by fuel. It's also common to say a car is powered by its engine. The latter is indeed is a device that brings fuel and air close together (and does some more important things). It's less common, but certainly not wrong, to say a car is powered by combustion.

Similarly, I think saying both 'the sun is powered by gravity', 'the sun is powered by hydrogen' and 'the sun is powered by fusion' is reasonable.
I work in the IBM Design Studio and all the employees have MacBook Pros. It's been working out pretty well actually, even with respect to integrating with some of IBM's legacy software that we have to deal with.
"This is legitimate as they do the same to us."

Can we talk about this not being okay (for a long term human future)? Imagine a world where groups of people didn't constantly put effort into undermining other groups in secret.
No, the actual incentive to work is that you get homeless, sick, and hungry if you don't. This is in contrast to other countries, where the unemployed (especially the long-term unemployed) receive social support. In the USA, people on parental leave from white-collar, salaried jobs don't even necessarily get paid -- to avoid incentivizing pregnancy, you see.
1. People care about how much they think an advertiser is spending on ads? Really?

2. I had my ad-blocker turned off for quite a while. I turned it back on when I was watching lots of short youtube videos, and seemed to be getting almost more video ads than actual content. If there was an option for "only block ads on these sites" (as opposed to "only allow ads on these sites"), I'd use it.

3. I don't care what some bigco that thinks I'm one data point out of a few million thinks about me. I would care what targeted ads (or content) show up if I'm doing something in an in-person-social context. So if I sign up to give a talk at a local UG, or go to a hackathon or something, I have a second browser that's not used for irrelevant stuff. And so doesn't have tracking cookies (including login cookies for anything social).
For a less instrumental account, my article with Bill Maurer might be of interest: http://kingsreview.co.uk/magazine/blog/2015/06/23/ledgers-an...

It interrogates the intersections between law and contracts as it pertains to the shift from Bitcoin to Ethereum.
That is very insightful.

To add, one could extend the argument to many situations. An alcoholic friend, for example, who caves when you pressure him.

Edit to add: my comment above demonstrates that you guys who jumped on the comment about rape and flagged it, you didn't bother to actually think of the logic behind his comment. All you did was have an emotional overreaction and freak out tantrum. Well, mine used peer pressure instead of rape, but it's the exact same argument. Let's see how you can drum up a freak out about mine. Lol. Morons.
... but what percentage of current C code is C11. More importantly, how much new code is written according to C11?
You're right, the dead man's switch is interesting here. I wasn't thinking about the ability to reference a fairly precise point in the future via block number instead of an external input to the system.

Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty excited about smart contracts. It just seems like there are a lot of things that we don't think much about currently because our current system is generally pretty forgiving in its fuzziness, but that could have big consequences (and introduce new incentives to act badly) in the world of script-controlled, irreversible contracts.
This convinced me to not waste another second on Ethereum. It serves a self-defeating purpose, and I think it's diametric to the hacker ethos. Bitcoin is neat because it can't be controlled, nobody can tax it or pose fees on it. It's free market at it's very best. The bitcoin protocol is weak, but luckily developers are strengthening it all the time.

Laws as a general concept are diametric to human nature, and they should be avoided whenever possible, especially in regards to social realms like bartering and contracting and the like.
Gamergate, as far as I can tell, is not an “online harassment campaign”. I can see a lot of things that could be considered online harassment campaigns directed _toward_ that group(and anyone they can claim to be associated with them), for certain.

It has not been a movement of targeting women in technology, only people who seek to upset it for speaking fees and nervous group applause.

Sounds like a bit of doublethink, if you ask me.