skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Certainly it is always a judgement call. I was just saying to my colleague yesterday that where a developer really makes a difference on a project is by consistently being able to make the right judgement calls. One can say there is no silver bullet, and while it is impossible to make a project go faster than it can, it's very possible to make it go orders of magnitude slower ;-)

On that note, a few things I try to keep in mind: As you say, don't gratuitously change code. You may hate the design, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. This is probably the biggest mistake that "change the world" programmers make.

Second, try not to rewrite code -- ever. Usually there is no business case (see "don't gratuitously change code"). Even if you think there is a business case, it dramatically increases risk. My rule of thumb: anything that lasts longer than 2 weeks has a very likely chance of being cancelled. If you must rewrite, it has to take much less time than that.

Finally, keep in mind that refactoring is not rewriting, nor redesigning (though it is closer to the latter than the former). Refactoring is transforming the code so that it performs exactly the same function (bugs and all!!!) with a different "shape". Ideally you will have tools to help you refactor in such a way so that you can prove that the resultant code executes in exactly the same way as the original code. With or without the tools, you should have a suite of unit/integration tests that will alert you when you have made a mistake.

Refactoring allows you to slowly migrate code from one "shape" to another over time while not breaking it. People who are skilled at refactoring can evolve efficient design even starting with really badly written code.

Why do you want to do refactoring? While, as you point out, the cost of doing a work-around from a sub-optimal design is low, the cumulative cost of these work-arounds over time can be quite substantial. A work-around introduces complexity to the code. This complexity makes everything slightly more difficult and slightly more risky. It also makes further work-arounds more likely. These work-arounds compound the problem. Because poorly designed code usually has high coupling, problems in one area of the code can manifest in other areas without warning. As the work-arounds increase, the complexity can increase exponentially. As an example of a worst case scenario, I once worked on a project where the programmers averaged 1 line of code per day (Yes, LOC is a poor measure of productivity, but no matter how you slice it, that's just incredibly bad).

My experience has been that teams which refactor effectively outperform similarly skilled teams who don't refactor by a very large margin. Although productivity metrics are impossible, the difference is quite startling. Interestingly, I have also had some experience with teams that have very high test coverage, but which don't refactor consistently (or effectively). These teams also do not seem to benefit from dramatically improved performance. My current theory is to write tests to support refactoring and don't worry about any of the other benefits.

YMMV :-)
this already exist... one of many examples (and probably not the best one but I can't find the one that I have in mind): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uXoGDQGRdo
I'm not sure if "better", but more versatile for sure since it accepts Git and Mercurial.
New social media launch
Rad. Did some clicking around, here's the upstream https://github.com/rfc1036/whois
This is a bit of a non-sequitor.

"21 times greater" is a great sound-bite but I honestly don't know what you'd expect. Take white males, make them 10 times as likely to be killed in general, 5-10 times as likely to be murderers, make them stronger, more likely to come from extreme poverty, give them a 50% high-school graduation rate, increase their rate of illiteracy, increase the rates at which they carry deadly weapons, increase how often they are violent in general, increase their sense of despair and hopelessness, break their family structure so many of them turn to street gangs for acceptance and give them a culture that openly glorifies violence against the police.

Now they're still white males, how much would their chances of being on the losing end of a violent confrontation with the police increase?

In other words there are many other causes and conditions that are at play here and assuming it's because cops are racist is absurd.
My comment wasn't intended to make you bite.

HipChat is playing catchup constantly with Slack (except the @here feature; Slack was behind the ball on that one). Slack's channel integrations are incredibly smooth. Message delivery is so much more reliable on Slack mobile than HipChat's app ever was (perhaps this was iOS specific?). Message management (stars, pinning, history links I can take from Slack and throw into Github issues, commits, or other SaaS team tools). The management of multiple teams in one interface on both mobile and mac desktop app (Slack handles this extremely well).

Github issues are enough for me to stick with GH. It Just Works. So you don't have to provide me with Github, Slack, etc as an employer. But it'll effect my decision to work there. I've interviewed people at my previous job, and they have flat out decided not to join when they were told we weren't using Github and had no plans to move to it.

When you're spending 8 hours (or more!) a day in tools, you expect them to be the best/easiest/most productive to use.
Good questions. tx

No we don't report to DnB. We have found that a percentage of invoices get paid from an email reminder, then another percentage from a follow up phone call. So you can get a bunch of invoices paid without having to go through the Debt Collection process.

Good point on differentiating the friendly / firm calls – the difference with firm phone call is the person we use (she's a bit more clinical in her approach) plus it also includes a follow up phone call. I agree adding an example of the phone call would help a great deal in giving you confidence.

Paying for results is something we could explore - maybe no result no pay? Although our value proposition was more about you not having to take the time and pain to make the call yourself.
Yes, every other windows update I had before either:
a) Failed on the first try
b) Deleted files/software

Windows 10 was the first time I didn't lose anything (except the games that stopped working)
Yeah, I came to post the same thing. What /exactly/ is this code doing that makes turning off optimisations faster? What does the assembly look like, with -ffast-math and without? Can these differences be used to draw a hypothesis, one that could be tested empirically?

Despite the title, which promises an article with some interesting technical depth, I just don't feel like I learned anything. On the whole the piece comes off like a glib anecdote; lazy and not very informative.
At the time I wrote that comment, his most recent tweet was "Okay, now where's the rest of this Boeing 777?". Engineers have confirmed it is a 777 part...the only confirmation now is a serial number match. And from his most recent tweet, I can only gather the only way this isn't MH370 is if a 777 flaperon was parted out to another kind of aircraft? Just haven't been that many 777 lost of the years.
How would you teach Grade 9-12 level Science to students falling behind?
I am taking a year off from work and planning to leave to teach Math and Science in a school of a third world country. It's located in a very bad neighborhood where students find it hard to grasp simple concepts (I have visited before).

My question is: What kind of material can I use for teaching these kids?

Obviously, I have lots of good standard material. But it is very dense for them. I am looking at books that use analogies, good examples.

Can you suggest any resources?

P.S. I'll also be researching and writing year-round. I'll be collating these innovative teaching concepts and compile it into a website so that others can also use it for free.

Thanks
My co-worker once found that someone had posted the take home problem on one of those freelance job sites. Needless to say we didn't move forward with the candidate.
Aw I read the title as "WHY GCC’s “-ffast-math” isn’t" and was confused as to the missing explanation. Also, smart quotes in the title, ugh.
As long as the user needs to opt-in & agree to some kind of specially written dating/match-making, must be 18+, etc. sounds reasonable :)
If it's well-known it's not forgotten.

(Not really sure it's forgotten, either; it's used regularly for heavy objects, or when speed is absolutely critical.)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_honesty
Yup, people believe what they want to believe and then construct stories that reinforce those beliefs.
> Don't get me wrong - I think that sexism/racism is about malevolent actions intended to harm or belittle or otherwise negatively discriminate against another group. But I'm of the minority opinion. Benevolent actions are considered sexist/racist nowadays, chivalry is extremely sexist. Always opening the door for women - but not always for men - is sexist.

Same here. There are actions that one can take that are overly sexist. Kitchen comments are common, as are "make me a sandwich", and the like.

There's also the class of subtle insults like "I didnt know you could program". They're harder to correct, but with some self discipline, they aren't that hard.

Then as you said, there's the "Not an insult at all, not even a subtle insult". I've been yelled at by a raging feminist for opening a door for her. Next time, I let it slam in her face, whilst leaving it open for her boyfriend.

I would also define myself as a staunch egalitarian. Aside pregnancy and birth, there are no differences between what a man and a woman can do. Even breastfeed....
Sites that turn words into link adverts are so annoying. And the ones that turn every company name into a stock quote. Equally so!
Techniques for migrating to a new platform
Yeah, it depends on how big your teams are. There are some perf issues on the on premise solution, but when you're dealing with dozens of teams, each about 5-6 engineers all following scrum or kanban, you really need something like Atlassian.
Mike Volpe fired from Hubspot over book scandal
That a software engineer does not make.
I'd never expect such an option, no matter how "unsafe," to affect code outside of what was built with it.
low 6 figures as in 400k and below or as in 140k and below?
I've seen floating point 'optimizations' cause issues with iterative methods that depend on the specifics of strict IEEE754 behavior (causing massive spikes in the number of iterations and thus hurting overall performance).
Pooling and in-place reuse are two different things, to be sure.

This was a fun thing I remember writing: https://github.com/newobj/ffwd/blob/master/Src/Core/Std/Allo... When returned to the pool, each object used the first 4 bytes of itself to point to the next free one in a list, so there was no additional overhead.
Environment Canada's Temperature and Precipitation Probabilistic Forecasts
Too long? Read anyway. (2013)
Regarding suicides (separate to this article, where cause is unknown) - there is nothing particular to tech which means suicides. Suicides cut across all demographics, though it is particularly prevalent amongst young adults. People who work in mental health and related areas understand the reasons behind suicides pretty well.

When it comes to avoiding them, the answer involves lots of tax dollars thrown at a demographic with little political power. Suicides will never be eradicated, but they can be reduced with well-targeted mental health programs.

Understanding and solutions are available, it's just that it's a complex problem with no single solution, so the general public isn't really interested in understanding it... and as they don't understand it, they're also not really interested in funding it.
In 1984, the mobile phone market was tiny compared to everything.
I agree with all of those sentiments.

At the same time, I prefer the idea of presenting previous open source work instead of having a group of potential employers agree on a project that they can all judge. One benefit is that the work is less arbitrary, potentially useful for others. Another is it's more likely to be unique than an assignment is. Finally, do I want to work for any of those other employers?

Applying to a group that way would seem odd to me; part of me thinks that choosing companies is important, but another thinks that there's some chance that that's just because I haven't tried it.

Which, of course, leads me to agree that the OP is great as an experiment - it might well be a better solution in many cases. The fact that, in the OP, it's opt-in is a big deal as well. Though I'm still very skeptical of take-home interviews in general.
Only $2B. It's definitely worth way more than that.
I'd probably argue seat at the table is a prerequisite for any change.
I'm on a team of ~40. Doing fine with Slack, Github, and Trello (and no Atlassian products).
Putty is a fine piece of work. All respect to Simon Tatham for his efforts.
I agree, the solution is terrible, but the problem is real. Whiteboarding is an awful way to measure someone's skills.
as long as they don't assign you actual work that is useful to them....
Huge market.. e.g. look at Domo. Same idea.
Yea, I think you're talking about chaos, whereas people are gesturing at something different when they talk about emergent complexity. Vaguely, the idea is that the "regular" degrees of freedom (i.e., the ones that are relatively predictable and from which the important objects are constructed) at large scales are not simply related to the microscopic degrees of freedom. There are probably more rigorous things to say, but it definitely requires more than just unpredictability or sensitivity to initial conditions.
In theory, areas with demand but no drivers will go into surge mode, encouraging more drivers to pickup fares in that area.
Any thoughts on why this was down voted? Just curious about what violated the HN policy.
Semver Regular Expression Denial of Service
Interstellar Citizens – Indie Developer Derek Smart Rants about Star Citizen
I've always loved TAP-style testing over xUnit because it gives me more information in the event of failure: instead of bailing out of a test function as soon as an assertion fails, TAP continues on, providing more failures and more output. When the tests were run on a system you don't have access to, that can mean the difference between being stymied and successful debugging. Sure, you can code up xUnit tests to meet that requirement but it's not idiomatic.

Glad to see PgTAP is still going strong!
word2vec isn't "deep" in the relevant sense. The both skipgram and CBOW forms have a single hidden layer.
Really cool!

Yet another feature request: support moving backwards
One thing I always found interesting in these discussions is how the same people who are quick to cite The Mythical Man-Month when it comes to the futility of adding new people to a late project will also claim that working 1-3 hours on some trivial problem is "doing free work" for a company. How much value do you think your 3 hours of work with absolutely no context can possibly add to the company? A company trying to get meaningful work done by secretly farming it out to interviewees is beyond ludicrous. Interviewers are only interested in finding good hires, not in conning you into doing their homework for them.
It wasn't murder. I watched the entire video. The officer was very nice to the person he stopped, I didn't detect any attitude, etc.

After the final time he asked for his license, the guy drove off and tried to run the officer over. He shot in self defense.

The officer did nothing wrong. He defended himself and it's sad that someone had to lose a life in the process.

It's also sad that we have to keep defending criminal behavior in attempt to fit this narrative that cops are racist.

The only result will be more innocent people getting hurt or killed when officers stop being able to actually do their job.
Sure. But somebody has to start having the conversation about actually implementing those requirements.
Bell Labs was massive. It had 11,000 people who were involved in pretty much every nukes and cranny ranging from cosmology to transistors to UNIX. Microsoft research probably comes closest to modern equivalent of Bell Labs and it has only 1000 people. So Bell Labs was like 10 MSR combined in to one!

It's really a pity we don't have anything like Bell Labs any more even though profits have grown by leaps and bound. As it is investors would be more than happy to shutdown something like MSR and constantly force the company to "justify" its existence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Origin_and_historica...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research
Made me think of some sort of bloody monument a species of spacefaring conquerors might leave.

(Did some back-of-the-envelope calculations out of curiosity and found that the amount of blood in the current human population would be sufficient to paint a surface area roughly the size of Germany. I wonder if any grimdark Warhammer 40K story featured such a thing.)
Am I missing something?
I'm creating a service where users can search for AirBnB lodging and cheap flights. I have plans to add Uber, Luggage service and even cheaper flights in the future. My goal is to combine these services to make traveling cheaper and more fun. The site is called http://www.airplu.us for those that are interested. Any suggestions on what to add will be greatly appreciated!
As a currently "retired" (i.e., downsized) Aerospace Engineer, I have applied for the inaugural YCF batch with my home-grown, prototyped idea, zejoop.com. The Zejoop story is told in the blog at blog.zejoop.com.

Having applied twice, unsuccessfully, as a single-founder to YC "proper" sessions, I was highly enthused and excited to hear about the offer of such an opportunity. My happy reaction was tied mainly to the advice, evaluation, counsel and network-expanding aspects of the YCF program. This is because I think those very aspects are EXACTLY what I need to make sense of where I am at. Whether that means, carry-on, commit to a giant pivot, or even abandon this idea, I know I'd benefit from the YCF experience. I need these because I lack a well formed community where I live in Santa Clarita CA. Although possible communities to fill that role do exist (Santa Monica and Pasadena) they are just far enough away to make them impractical commute-wise, on a day-to-day basis.

Also since the Y Combinator stake is lower in terms of cash outlay, and in lesser demands (that'd I'd place) for time and attention, I thought I'd be a better match to YCF, and I might have an easier path forward to acceptance than one of the highly competitive YC sessions. Basically Zejoop, and I, as a single-founder, are seemingly lower risk, and easier to take a chance on.

The prospect that YC hopes to create a 100-fold increase in entrepreneurship was also exciting - again, Zejoop seemingly a lower risk with such a big pool. Since submitting however, I am disappointed that the first batch will likely be on the order of 20 fellowship offerings. Gah! Sadness... Back to square one, with giant slabs of applicants and only a few slots.

Since no feedback is given during the YC Sessions application process I have no clue whatsoever if I simply, and outright, have a bad idea, or if the single-founder status is the obstacle that has been holding me back. I fully realize, and I am willing to accept that success will likely require me to find a co-founder; my current community is simply not providing any such candidates. I'd take a co-founder if I could find a good one.

Regardless, the YCF sounds like a great idea and I hope it is successful (oh, and also, that I am accepted!). There are scores of thousands of people exactly like me who have been prematurely displaced from Aerospace/Defense. People who have good ideas, lots of experience and wisdom to share, and who need a productive outlet for their energy, skills and creativity.

Wish me luck, and I'll do the same for you!
This is the same as saying "we must become immortal before we can become God-like".
Everyone should remember that the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos while reading this article. Even the title is propagandistic in style "...can fly safely over U.S. skies"
It was surprising how long that stayed on the front page: it was still there when comments were ~550 and upvotes were at least a hundred less.
Wait, what? What is wrong with the Atlassian suite?
No "Enterprise Customer" is using github without a fallback plan. Github is in no way stable enough to rely on for business-critical work; fortunately, git is distributed and cnames exist, so it's easy to seamlessly fall back to competent hosting as needed.
Skater Frogs
While it's cool that Github is valued so highly in a business sense, some part of me worries that they'll fly too high and burn themselves from it, leading to the end of the service. I hope this does not happen.
For one, Uber penalizes drivers who refuse to accept a fare. In theory this may be the case with cabs as well, but how are you going to go after a cabbie who just drives off when you tell them you want to go to the wrong side of the tracks? (assuming you tell them before getting in the cab).

This would also work to penalize drivers who are assigned a fare after dropping someone off in a bad neighborhood, and want to just GTFO without picking up the return fare.

As mentioned, surge pricing should also help. Basically: Folks in less desirable neighborhoods may end up paying surge pricing more often (when being picked up at least). Of course, surge pricing is illegal for cabs in the name of "fairness". But if all fares cost the same amount, why risk it in a sketchier neighborhood?
my apologies if my tone come across as combative.

Slack:
1. I agree on the part about multiple teams, but since I only use it for work, it hasn't really been much of an issue.

2. I never really had any issues w message delivery, I'm on Android though, and it seems like you're on iOS.

3. I also don't remember having any issues w integrations, do you have a specific example of something that it wasn't able to do?

4. What exactly do you mean by "stars, pinning, history links I can take from Slack and throw into Github issues, commits, or other SaaS team tools"? Do you mean a bot or something that performed those actions on certain keystrokes?

Github:
1. I don't really care for Github issues to be honest. We don't use them at work, and for a lot of the open source repos, it's just a bunch of +1s with the occasional constructive comment sprinkled in somewhere.

2. Also, the comments on the PR don't have a way to mark someone's suggestion as accepted, and the comments aren't threaded either.

3. My biggest concern is that anyone can accidentally force push, though I don't know if Gitlab has a way of preventing that either.

My point is that for all the talk about meritocracy in the field of technology, when it comes to success and adoption, marketing and visual aesthetics usually outweigh the actual quality of the product. (also see: mongodb, beats etc)
Nasty Truths About U.S. Fintech