Hacker News Reader

logingoneon Results of Rust Survey 2016 – early draft for internal usage

Yes, put something interesting in its place please, rust-related.

logingoneon Coursera shuts access to old platform courses

thanks to that MOOC I was able to get a machine learning job building recommender systems for a Canadian company straight out of high school

This amazes me. Are you leaving out more significant details? I cannot begin to imagine this happening where I live, in London. Being hired based on a MOOC? Did you go on to do some impressive projects which got you the job?

logingoneon Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail

I think that would have been an absence of support.

logingoneon Millennials and the Working Class Are Leaving America's Expensive Cities

The boomers are starting to be ushered along. The next 10 or 20 years might be quite game-changing.

logingoneon Future Screens Are Mostly Blue

I don't think blue is as rare as green (if you discount the vegetation and water).

logingoneon Are you a grammar pedant? This might be why

I find such errors are like bum notes in a guitar solo. They're just wrong. A sign of incompetence, and I don't want that incompetence rubbing off on me, nor do I want to experience other areas of potential incompetence. The errors are warnings. The job was to install a bath. You've installed a toilet. You were painting the sky, but you've painted it green, unintentionally. Most of these things should be drilled into us by now that we shouldn't be having to think about them. I know I make mistakes and would welcome every correction, but no one corrects because correct is not a goal. Unknown unknowns. Some errors are more acceptable than others. The "tea's and coffee's" example in the article is embarrassing to me, comma splices often slip my notice. I'm reminded of the tolerance thresholds regarding dirty dishes in the sink. Some people happily walk past while others, unable to bear them, end up doing the washing time and again.

Does this mean introverts prefer the consistency of opinionated frameworks and languages? Is Go preferred by introverts, Scala by extraverts?

logingoneon When It Comes to Age Bias, Tech Companies Don’t Even Bother to Lie

Makes sense. These days the inquisitive hacker stereotype is no longer relevant, diluted by the masses flocking to the tech fad ("hacker" now redefined to replace "code monkey", so cool) which in turn results in the tech industry having more fads as it comprises mostly people with a tendency to jump on a fad.

logingoneon Go 1.7 toolchain improvements

but in this case it's suddenly totally fine

Not at all - it was one step back while getting on the right path, then speeding up again.

logingoneon Building Web Apps in Go

I don't agree. After two weeks people are still unaware of lint, vet, -race, haven't even begun exploring how error values can be managed, ... Interviewees with 6 months of Go are regularly rejected - how is that possible if it's so quick and easy to learn?

logingoneon Some Rookie Mistakes in Go

A bit too literal. My point was rookie vs experienced.

logingoneon Some Rookie Mistakes in Go

Why does Rust get articles about eg an operating system written in Rust, but all the Go posts are how to tie your shoe laces? Somebody explain, please.

logingoneon With book on Go, Kernighan guides students at Princeton and beyond

exported identifiers begin with an upper case letter and those that are private are lower case

I'm not sure that should be considered a nugget, as much as a fundamental.

logingoneon Golang: channels are not enough

Why isn't Go the same as the other languages?

Because then it would be the same as the other languages.

logingoneon Commuting Takes Its Toll

In London the argument for companies being in zone 1 is that meeting with people from other companies is easier. So for the few who have external meetings the entire company has to drag itself every morning and evening through the overcrowded, unpleasant London underground, arriving at work late, flustered, or miserable. What a way to start the day. If the companies moved only slightly out of centre, zones 2 or 3, the majority would be happier, and the few who meet outside would have a 10 or 15 minute, relatively pleasant, tube ride to get to a meeting.

logingoneon Go by Example

I have to agree. It's not unlike submitting w3schools.com.

logingoneon The removal of road markings is to be celebrated. We are safer without them

I found that cars passing me would drive closer to me when I wore a high vis jacket than when I didn't.

logingoneon German Forest Ranger Finds That Trees Have Social Networks, Too

“You see how the thick branches point away from each other? That’s so they don’t block their buddy’s light.”

Would be nice if there was more info on this. Without any, I would suggest the trees below are growing because of light reaching them as a result of the higher trees' branches facing other directions from some other cause. Presumably the smaller trees sprouted after the taller trees, in which case the above is suggesting the branches of the taller trees changed direction when the young trees arrived, so the branches should have a curve.

logingoneon German Forest Ranger Finds That Trees Have Social Networks, Too

why can't we use similar terms as ours to describe the trees' interactions?

I haven't read the article yet, but presumably because doing so is inaccurate. The inaccuracy isn't a problem for people sufficiently familiar with the topic that they understand the anthropomorphism, but for people new to the topic confusion ensues unbeknownst to them. Natural selection is a classic example of anthropomorphism leading to people not having the slightest understanding of what they're talking about.

logingoneon Request For Research: Basic Income

Being unemployed isn't the same as feeling unemployable.

logingoneon Entrepreneur porn is a dangerous fantasy

There's been something related in the UK recently - Tesco not paying their suppliers.

"...dating from middle age..."

I've been noticing increasingly, while technology is buzzing ahead, just how many mechanisms and interactions in society are unbelievably outdated. Is this what sociologists are supposed to be advancing? What are they doing?

logingoneon Glittering Blue

Europe’s weather authorities are extremely stingy with their nearest equivalent data – their attitude is that the observations are for science or for money, not for silly websites.

Feel free to provide an email address for us to complain.

logingoneon The Secret of Immigrant Genius

And requires companies to hire dead weight in the form of people who are not up to the job, instead only have the correct skin colour, and have to be paid sometimes significant salaries to spend their days playing solitaire.

logingoneon Caltech Researchers Find Evidence of a Planet Beyond Pluto

I don't seem to have a grasp of our visibility of our solar system. We can see a number of the planets with the naked eye, a number of the moons with binoculars and a few hundred $/£/€/.. telescope. Yet even with these great big radio telescopes, antenna arrays, Hubble, etc, we seem to be quite unaware of what's in our neighbourhood. Anyone have figures of how much we've surveyed?

logingoneon Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

That works both ways. In the UK, presumably elsewhere too, there are long running themed adverts - they drive me nuts on the occasions that I don't hit the mute button soon enough. Brits will know the mongooses, and the two marathon runners, supposedly humorous - incessant, for years on end. Never, ever will I use those services.

logingoneon Brave: Brendan Eich's clean-ads browser startup

I don't adblock for privacy, security, or speed. Those are just nice-side effects. I adblock because I do not want to be manipulated into buying things I do not need.

Interesting. I'm the opposite. I've yet to encounter an ad that has a hope in hell of manipulating me at all. I couldn't be more dismissive of them. And if I encounter one too often my dislike of the company starts to grow. "It's show time, and you've been coding like a beast..." really pissed me off. They're throwing garbage at me, they want my money, I want my money, I'm at war with them.

logingoneon Are cities the new countries?

Telecommunications and airplanes allow people to literally bypass the countryside and hop from city to city. Telecommunications were supposed to let us bypass the city, so that we could live in the countryside.

logingoneon French drug trial leaves six hospitalized, one brain-dead

There's a train on the tracks, heading for a group of people, and on a fork on the tracks one person.... etc. (trolley problem).

logingoneon David Bowie’s Top 100 Books (2013)

Have you read much Camous?

logingoneon New finding: 600M years ago, a single mutation changed everything

I'm giving you an up-vote for knowing the difference between begs the question and raises the question.

logingoneon Japan Keeps This Defunct Train Station Running for Just One Passenger

Actually, there are not many, and some of them have misunderstood the story, so they are not totally right, making it seem the big deal it's being made out to be. I hope this line doesn't have as many reasons to stop between stations as British trains do, in which case the stopping is even less of a deal.