https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17856700
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/9a7usg/d_i_dont_like_notebooks/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/9aoi35/i_dont_like_notebooks_joel_grus_jupytercon_2018/

others:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/4q9ev0/is_it_only_me_that_thinks_jupyter_is_horrible/
https://towardsdatascience.com/5-reasons-why-jupyter-notebooks-suck-4dc201e27086

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18511760
Pinboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1941823
https://web.archive.org/web/20170707135337/http://blog.pinboard.in:80/2010/11/bookmark_archives_that_don_t

https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox
https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox/wiki/Web-Archiving-Community
https://github.com/iipc/awesome-web-archiving
https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/grab-site

very cool, "React" + Jupyter
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21158487

syllogism (spaCy author):
I think it's probably a bad strategy to try to be the "NLP guy" to potential employers. You'd do much better off being a software engineer on a project with people with ML or NLP expertise.

NLP projects fail a lot. If you line up a job as a company's first NLP person, you'll probably be setting yourself up for failure. You'll get handed an idea that can't work, you won't know enough about how to push back to change it into something that might, etc. After the project fails, you might get a chance to fail at a second one, but maybe not a third. This isn't a great way to move into any new field.

I think a cunning plan would be to angle to be the person who "productionises" models.
...
.--
...

Basically, don't just work on having more powerful solutions. Make sure you've tried hard to have easier problems as well --- that part tends to be higher leverage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14008752
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12916498
https://algorithmia.com/blog/introduction-natural-language-processing-nlp

mainly analysis of in-demand skills (particular languages/libraries/frameworks, not general skills)

similar: https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/todays-top-tech-skills/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620687

https://jessesw.com/Data-Science-Skills/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9287491

old (orig in multi here: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:a4e6f5b80faf):
https://www.latitude.work/trends/july-2017

Nobody Understands REST or HTTP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2724488
Some REST best practices: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8618243
REST was never about CRUD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17563851
Post-REST: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18485978

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16360351/get-http-request-payload
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/978061/http-get-with-request-body

Ask HN: Were you happy moving your API from REST to GraphQL?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17565508
From REST to GraphQL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10365555
REST in Peace. Long Live GraphQL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14839576
GraphQL Didn't Kill REST: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17572154
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/five-common-problems-in-graphql-apps-and-how-to-fix-them-ac74d37a293c/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4244266
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9648916

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/d65upt/how_did_you_know_what_niche_to_go_into/
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/7yb9ol/how_did_you_find_your_nichespecialization/
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/58qr8d/what_specialization_tends_to_have_the_biggest/
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/b4jp0k/what_are_some_worthy_job_specializations_to_get/
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/awabf7/what_are_some_underrated_specializations_in/
We’re in the Middle of a Data Engineering Talent Shortage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12454901
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/a4rhgu/is_programming_languages_a_good/
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/ahyyib/recommended_areas_to_specialize_in_if_youre_not/

https://web.archive.org/web/20170315133208/http://www.danieljosephpetersen.com/posts/programming-and-stenography.html
I think at the end of the day, the Plover guys are trying to solve the wrong problem. Stenography is a dying field. I don’t wish anyone to lose their livelihood, but realistically speaking, the job should not exist once text to speech technology advances far enough. I’m not claiming that the field will be replaced by it, but I also don’t love the idea of people having to learn such an inane and archaic system.

Ask HN: What do you use for authentication and authorization?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18767767
Ask HN: What's the recommended method of adding authentication to a REST API?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16157002
Authentication Cheat Sheet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8984266
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37582444/jwt-vs-cookies-for-token-based-authentication
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39909419/what-are-the-main-differences-between-jwt-and-oauth-authentication
https://medium.com/@sherryhsu/session-vs-token-based-authentication-11a6c5ac45e4
this is clearest explanation of session vs token to me (seems to hinge on anything is stored in the server's database, as opposed to just cryptographically signing user's permissions so they can't be forged and don't need anything from DB to be checked): https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/81756/session-authentication-vs-token-authentication
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40200413/sessions-vs-token-based-authentication
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17000835/token-authentication-vs-cookies
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/350092/cookie-based-vs-session-vs-token-based-vs-claims-based-authentications

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21430321
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8j0gz3/build_your_own_x/

recommended multiple times by HN: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:3232e424b9d9

Advantages
- All data has to be available via some sort of API - this is a big advantage for my use case as I want to have an API to my application anyway. Right now about 60-70% of my calls to get/update data are done through a REST API. Doing a single page application will allow me to better test my REST API since the application itself will use it. It also means that as the application grows, the API itself will grow since that is what the application uses; no need to maintain the API as an add-on to the application.
- More responsive application - since all data loaded after the initial page is kept to a minimum and transmitted in a compact format (like JSON), data requests should generally be faster, and the server will do slightly less processing.

Disadvantages
- Duplication of code - for example, model code. I am going to have to create models both on the server side (PHP in this case) and the client side in Javascript.
- Business logic in Javascript - I can't give any concrete examples on why this would be bad but it just doesn't feel right to me having business logic in Javascript that anyone can read.
- Javascript memory leaks - since the page never reloads, Javascript memory leaks can happen, and I would not even know where to begin to debug them.

--

Disadvantages I often see with Single Page Web Applications:
- Inability to link to a specific part of the site, there's often only 1 entry point.
- Disfunctional back and forward buttons.
- The use of tabs is limited or non-existant.
(especially mobile:)
- Take very long to load.
- Don't function at all.
- Can't reload a page, a sudden loss of network takes you back to the start of the site.

This answer is outdated, Most single page application frameworks have a way to deal with the issues above – Luis May 27 '14 at 1:41
@Luis while the technology is there, too often it isn't used. – Pieter B Jun 12 '14 at 6:53

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/201838/building-a-web-application-that-is-almost-completely-rendered-by-javascript-whi

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/143194/what-advantages-are-conferred-by-using-server-side-page-rendering
Server-side HTML rendering:
- Fastest browser rendering
- Page caching is possible as a quick-and-dirty performance boost
- For "standard" apps, many UI features are pre-built
- Sometimes considered more stable because components are usually subject to compile-time validation
- Leans on backend expertise
- Sometimes faster to develop*
*When UI requirements fit the framework well.

Client-side HTML rendering:
- Lower bandwidth usage
- Slower initial page render. May not even be noticeable in modern desktop browsers. If you need to support IE6-7, or many mobile browsers (mobile webkit is not bad) you may encounter bottlenecks.
- Building API-first means the client can just as easily be an proprietary app, thin client, another web service, etc.
- Leans on JS expertise
- Sometimes faster to develop**
**When the UI is largely custom, with more interesting interactions. Also, I find coding in the browser with interpreted code noticeably speedier than waiting for compiles and server restarts.

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/237537/progressive-enhancement-vs-single-page-apps

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21862054/single-page-application-advantages-and-disadvantages
=== ADVANTAGES ===
1. SPA is extremely good for very responsive sites:
2. With SPA we don't need to use extra queries to the server to download pages.
3.May be any other advantages? Don't hear about any else..

=== DISADVANTAGES ===
1. Client must enable javascript.
2. Only one entry point to the site.
3. Security.

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/287819/should-you-write-your-back-end-as-an-api
focused on .NET

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/337467/is-it-normal-design-to-completely-decouple-backend-and-frontend-web-applications
A SPA comes with a few issues associated with it. Here are just a few that pop in my mind now:
- it's mostly JavaScript. One error in a section of your application might prevent other sections of the application to work because of that Javascript error.
- CORS.
- SEO.
- separate front-end application means separate projects, deployment pipelines, extra tooling, etc;
- security is harder to do when all the code is on the client;

- completely interact in the front-end with the user and only load data as needed from the server. So better responsiveness and user experience;
- depending on the application, some processing done on the client means you spare the server of those computations.
- have a better flexibility in evolving the back-end and front-end (you can do it separately);
- if your back-end is essentially an API, you can have other clients in front of it like native Android/iPhone applications;
- the separation might make is easier for front-end developers to do CSS/HTML without needing to have a server application running on their machine.

Create your own dysfunctional single-page app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18341993
I think are three broadly assumed user benefits of single-page apps:
1. Improved user experience.
2. Improved perceived performance.
3. It’s still the web.

5 mistakes to create a dysfunctional single-page app
Mistake 1: Under-estimate long-term development and maintenance costs
Mistake 2: Use the single-page app approach unilaterally
Mistake 3: Under-invest in front end capability
Mistake 4: Use naïve dev practices
Mistake 5: Surf the waves of framework hype

The disadvantages of single page applications: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9879685
You probably don't need a single-page app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19184496
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384738
MPA advantages:
- Stateless requests
- The browser knows how to deal with a traditional architecture
- Fewer, more mature tools
- SEO for free

When to go for the single page app:
- Core functionality is real-time (e.g Slack)
- Rich UI interactions are core to the product (e.g Trello)
- Lots of state shared between screens (e.g. Spotify)

Hybrid solutions
...
Github uses this hybrid approach.
...

Ask HN: Is it ok to use traditional server-side rendering these days?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13212465

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/cp9vb8/are_people_still_doing_ssr/
https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/93n60h/best_javascript_modern_approach_to_multi_page/
https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/aax4k5/do_you_develop_solely_using_spa_these_days/
The SEO issues with SPAs is a persistent concern you hear about a lot, yet nobody ever quantifies the issues. That is because search engines keep the operation of their crawler bots and indexing secret. I have read into it some, and it seems that problem used to exist, somewhat, but is more or less gone now. Bots can deal with SPAs fine.
--
I try to avoid building a SPA nowadays if possible. Not because of SEO (there are now server-side solutions to help with that), but because a SPA increases the complexity of the code base by a magnitude. State management with Redux... Async this and that... URL routing... And don't forget to manage page history.

How about just render pages with templates and be done?

If I need a highly dynamic UI for a particular feature, then I'd probably build an embeddable JS widget for it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13952007

Revery (Reason/OCaml): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18994837

You’re Missing the Point of React: https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/youre-missing-the-point-of-react-a20e34a51e1a
- Dan Abramov
https://reactjs.org/blog/2013/06/05/why-react.html
https://blog.gyrosco.pe/facebook-just-taught-us-all-how-to-build-websites-51f1e7e996f2

The main thing is to not fall into the "productivity porn" trap of trying to find the best tool instead of actually getting stuff done - when something simple is more than enough.

https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/modern-javascript-explained-for-dinosaurs-f695e9747b70
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16139791
https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/a32a3a/modern_javascript_explained_for_dinosaurs/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35062852/npm-vs-bower-vs-browserify-vs-gulp-vs-grunt-vs-webpack

Ask HN: Best way to learn HTML and CSS for web design?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11048409
Ask HN: How to learn design as a hacker?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8182084

Ask HN: How to learn front-end beyond the basics?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19468043
Ask HN: What is the best JavaScript stack for a beginner to learn?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8780385
Free resources for learning full-stack web development: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13890114

Ask HN: What is essential reading for learning modern web development?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14888251
Ask HN: A Syllabus for Modern Web Development?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2184645

Ask HN: Modern day web development for someone who last did it 15 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20656411

Author mentions this took a long time to arrive at.
I recommend "Web Design in 4 Minutes" from the CSS guru behind Bulma:

https://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/
[ed.: lottsa sensible criticism of the above in the comments]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12166687

Ask HN: What is your ideal note-taking software and/or hardware?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13221158

my wishlist as of 2019:
- web + desktop macOS + mobile iOS (at least viewing on the last but ideally also editing)
- sync across all those
- open-source data format that's easy to manipulate for scripting purposes
- flexible organization: mostly tree hierarchical (subsuming linear/unorganized) but with the option for directed (acyclic) graph (possibly a second layer of structure/linking)
- can store plain text, LaTeX, diagrams, and raster/vector images (video prob not necessary except as links to elsewhere)
- full-text search
- somehow digest/import data from Pinboard, Workflowy, Papers 3/Bookends, and Skim, ideally absorbing most of their functionality
- so, eg, track notes/annotations side-by-side w/ original PDF/DjVu/ePub documents (to replace Papers3/Bookends/Skim), and maybe web pages too (to replace Pinboard)
- OCR of handwritten notes (how to handle equations/diagrams?)
- various forms of NLP analysis of everything (topic models, clustering, etc)
- maybe version control (less important than export)

candidates?:
- Evernote prob ruled out do to heavy use of proprietary data formats (unless I can find some way to export with tolerably clean output)
- Workflowy/Dynalist are good but only cover a subset of functionality I want
- org-mode doesn't interact w/ mobile well (and I haven't evaluated it in detail otherwise)
- TiddlyWiki/Zim are in the running, but not sure about mobile
- idk about vimwiki but I'm not that wedded to vim and it seems less widely used than org-mode/TiddlyWiki/Zim so prob pass on that
- Quiver/Joplin/Inkdrop look similar and cover a lot of bases, TODO: evaluate more
- Trilium looks especially promising, tho read-only mobile and for macOS desktop look at this: https://github.com/zadam/trilium/issues/511
- RocketBook is interesting scanning/OCR solution but prob not sufficient due to proprietary data format
- TODO: many more candidates, eg, TreeSheets, Gingko, OneNote (macOS?...), Notion (proprietary data format...), Zotero, Nodebook (https://nodebook.io/landing), Polar (https://getpolarized.io), Roam (looks very promising)

Ask HN: What do you use for you personal note taking activity?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736102

Ask HN: What are your note-taking techniques?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976751

Ask HN: How do you take notes (useful note-taking strategies)?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13064215

Ask HN: How to get better at taking notes?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21419478

Ask HN: How did you build up your personal knowledge base?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332957
nice comment from math guy on structure and difference between math and CS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21338628
useful comment collating related discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21333383
highlights:
Designing a Personal Knowledge base: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8270759
Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17892731
Do you use a personal 'knowledge base'?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21108527
Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21310030

other stuff:
plain text: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21685660

https://www.getdnote.com/blog/how-i-built-personal-knowledge-base-for-myself/
Tiago Forte: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com

hn search: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=notetaking&type=story

Slant comparison commentary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011281

good comparison of options here in comments here (and Trilium itself looks good): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18840990

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_note-taking_software

wikis:
https://www.slant.co/versus/5116/8768/~tiddlywiki_vs_zim
https://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/tiddlywiki+zim
http://tiddlymap.org/
https://www.zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins/BackLinks_Pane.html
https://zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins/Link_Map.html

apps:
Roam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21440289

intriguing but probably not appropriate for my needs: https://www.sophya.ai/

Inkdrop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20103589

Joplin: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15815040
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21555238

https://wreeto.com/

Leo Editor (combines tree outlining w/ literate programming/scripting, I think?): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17769892

Frame: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18760079

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/cb18sy/anyone_use_a_personal_wiki_software_to_catalog/
https://archive.is/xViTY
Notion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18904648

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ap437v/modified_cornell_method_the_optimal_notetaking/
https://archive.is/e9oHu
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/bt8a1r/im_about_to_start_a_one_month_journaling_test/
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9cot3m/question_how_do_you_guys_learn_things/
https://archive.is/HUH8V
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/d7bvcp/how_to_read_a_book_for_understanding/
https://archive.is/VL2mi

Anki:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/as8i4t/use_anki_for_technical_books/
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-anki-saved-my-engineering-career-293a90f70a73/
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ch24q9/anki_is_it_inferior_to_the_3x5_index_card_an/
https://archive.is/OaGc5
maybe not the best source for a review/advice

interesting comment(s) about tree outliners and spreadsheets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21170434

tablet:
https://www.inkandswitch.com/muse-studio-for-ideas.html
https://www.inkandswitch.com/capstone-manuscript.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20255457

I haven't read this but both the article and commentary/discussion look interesting from a glance

hmm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16896390
In small companies where there is no time to "waste" on tests, my view is that 80% of the problems can be caught with 20% of the work by writing integration tests that cover large areas of the application. Writing unit tests would be ideal, but time-consuming. For a web project, that would involve testing all pages for HTTP 200 (< 1 hour bash script that will catch most major bugs), automatically testing most interfaces to see if filling data and clicking "save" works. Of course, for very important/dangerous/complex algorithms in the code, unit tests are useful, but generally, that represents a very low fraction of a web application's code.

Here’s a LessWrong post that describes it (including the insight “I honestly didn’t think Zettelkasten sounded like a good idea before I tried it” which I also felt).

yeah doesn't sound like a good idea to me either. idk

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20909404
Kevin Buzzard (the Lean guy)

- general reflection on proof asssistants/theorem provers
- Kevin Hale's formal abstracts project, etc
- thinks of available theorem provers, Lean is "[the only one currently available that may be capable of formalizing all of mathematics eventually]" (goes into more detail right at the end, eg, quotient types)

thegradient.pub looks interesting

This article addresses the long-standing question of why students and faculty remain resistant to active learning. Comparing passive lectures with active learning using a randomized experimental approach and identical course materials, we find that students in the active classroom learn more, but they feel like they learn less. We show that this negative correlation is caused in part by the increased cognitive effort required during active learning.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21164005

nice resources for learning RL in HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19170294

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8594079
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21100734

The Fantasy of Opting Out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21416673

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20715136
https://jakeseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-professors’-attention-or-how-to-get-the-coaching-and-mentorship-you-need/

also some discussion of RSI in the comments

- John D. Cook

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9758063
Organization is the hardest part for me personally in getting better as a developer. How to build a structure that is easy to change and extend. Any tips where to find good books or online sources?

- Bjarne Stroustrup, Niko Matsakis, Andrei Alexandrescu, Rob Pike
- 2014 so pretty outdated but rare to find a discussion with people like this together
- pretty sure Jonathan Blow asked a couple questions
- Rob Pike compliments Rust at one point. Also kinda softly rags on dynamic typing at one point ("unit testing is what they have instead of static types").

related:
What is Systems Programming, Really?: http://willcrichton.net/notes/systems-programming/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17948265
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21731878

Her deck looked disorderly; metal pipes lying on either side of the cabin, what might have been a bed sheet or sail cover (or one in the same) bunched between oxidized turnbuckles and portlights. A purple hula hoop. A green bucket. Several small, carefully potted plants. At the stern, a weathered tree limb lashed to a metal cradle – the arm of a sculling oar. There was no motor. The transom was partially obscured by a wind vane and Alexandra’s years of exposure to the elements were on full display.

...

Sean is a programmer, a fervent believer in free open source code – software programs available to the public to use and/or modify free of charge. His only computer is the Raspberry Pi he uses to code and control his autopilot, which he calls pypilot. Sean is also a programmer for and regular contributor to OpenCPN Chart Plotter Navigation, free open source software for cruisers. “I mostly write the graphics or the way it draws the chart, but a lot more than that, like how it draws the weather patterns and how it can calculate routes, like you should sail this way.”

from the comments:
Have also read both; they're fascinating in different ways. Paul Lutus has a boat full of technology (diesel engine, laptop, radio, navigation tools, and more) but his book is an intensely - almost uncomfortably - personal voyage through his psyche, while he happens to be sailing around the world. A diary of reflections on life, struggles with people, views on science, observations on the stars and sky and waves, poignant writing on how being at sea affect people, while he happens to be sailing around the world. It's better for that, more relatable as a geek, sadder and more emotional; I consider it a good read, and I reflect on it a lot.
Captain Slocum's voyage of 1896(?) is so different; he took an old clock, and not much else, he lashes the tiller and goes down below for hours at a time to read or sleep without worrying about crashing into other boats, he tells stories of mouldy cheese induced nightmares during rough seas or chasing natives away from robbing him, or finding remote islands with communites of slightly odd people. Much of his writing is about the people he meets - they often know in advance he's making a historic voyage, so when he arrives anywhere, there's a big fuss, he's invited to dine with local dignitaries or captains of large ships, gifted interesting foods and boat parts, there's a lot of interesting things about the world of 1896. (There's also quite a bit of tedious place names and locations and passages where nothing much happens, I'm not that interested in the geography of it).

best part of this is the links to other guides
Commit Often, Perfect Later, Publish Once: https://sethrobertson.github.io/GitBestPractices/

My Favourite Git Commit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289827
I use the following convention to start the subject of commit(posted by someone in a similar HN thread):
...

“‘I don’t speak’, Bijaz said. ‘I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.’”
- Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

I love this quote

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16548684
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6417319
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4158865

https://aras-p.info/blog/2018/12/28/Modern-C-Lamentations/
https://thephd.github.io/perspective-standardization-in-2018
https://sean-parent.stlab.cc/2018/12/30/cpp-ruminations.html
http://ericniebler.com/2018/12/05/standard-ranges/

I have this is in Papers3. Really should read it sometime.

Choose Boring Technology: http://boringtechnology.club/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20323246

The choice of an efficient document preparation system is an important decision for any academic researcher. To assist the research community, we report a software usability study in which 40 researchers across different disciplines prepared scholarly texts with either Microsoft Word or LaTeX. The probe texts included simple continuous text, text with tables and subheadings, and complex text with several mathematical equations. We show that LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors. On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users. LaTeX users, however, more often report enjoying using their respective software. We conclude that even experienced LaTeX users may suffer a loss in productivity when LaTeX is used, relative to other document preparation systems. Individuals, institutions, and journals should carefully consider the ramifications of this finding when choosing document preparation strategies, or requiring them of authors.

...

However, our study suggests that LaTeX should be used as a document preparation system only in cases in which a document is heavily loaded with mathematical equations. For all other types of documents, our results suggest that LaTeX reduces the user’s productivity and results in more orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors, more typos, and less written text than Microsoft Word over the same duration of time. LaTeX users may argue that the overall quality of the text that is created with LaTeX is better than the text that is created with Microsoft Word. Although this argument may be true, the differences between text produced in more recent editions of Microsoft Word and text produced in LaTeX may be less obvious than it was in the past. Moreover, we believe that the appearance of text matters less than the scientific content and impact to the field. In particular, LaTeX is also used frequently for text that does not contain a significant amount of mathematical symbols and formula. We believe that the use of LaTeX under these circumstances is highly problematic and that researchers should reflect on the criteria that drive their preferences to use LaTeX over Microsoft Word for text that does not require significant mathematical representations.

...

A second decision criterion that factors into the choice to use a particular software system is reflection about what drives certain preferences. A striking result of our study is that LaTeX users are highly satisfied with their system despite reduced usability and productivity. From a psychological perspective, this finding may be related to motivational factors, i.e., the driving forces that compel or reinforce individuals to act in a certain way to achieve a desired goal. A vital motivational factor is the tendency to reduce cognitive dissonance. According to the theory of cognitive dissonance, each individual has a motivational drive to seek consonance between their beliefs and their actual actions. If a belief set does not concur with the individual’s actual behavior, then it is usually easier to change the belief rather than the behavior [6]. The results from many psychological studies in which people have been asked to choose between one of two items (e.g., products, objects, gifts, etc.) and then asked to rate the desirability, value, attractiveness, or usefulness of their choice, report that participants often reduce unpleasant feelings of cognitive dissonance by rationalizing the chosen alternative as more desirable than the unchosen alternative [6, 7]. This bias is usually unconscious and becomes stronger as the effort to reject the chosen alternative increases, which is similar in nature to the case of learning and using LaTeX.

...

Given these numbers it remains an open question to determine the amount of taxpayer money that is spent worldwide for researchers to use LaTeX over a more efficient document preparation system, which would free up their time to advance their respective field. Some publishers may save a significant amount of money by requesting or allowing LaTeX submissions because a well-formed LaTeX document complying with a well-designed class file (template) is much easier to bring into their publication workflow. However, this is at the expense of the researchers’ labor time and effort. We therefore suggest that leading scientific journals should consider accepting submissions in LaTeX only if this is justified by the level of mathematics presented in the paper. In all other cases, we think that scholarly journals should request authors to submit their documents in Word or PDF format. We believe that this would be a good policy for two reasons. First, we think that the appearance of the text is secondary to the scientific merit of an article and its impact to the field. And, second, preventing researchers from producing documents in LaTeX would save time and money to maximize the benefit of research and development for both the research team and the public.

[ed.: I sense some salt.

And basically no description of how "# errors" was calculated.]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002
I question the validity of their methodology.
At no point in the paper is exactly what is meant by a "formatting error" or a "typesetting error" defined. From what I gather, the participants in the study were required to reproduce the formatting and layout of the sample text. In theory, a LaTeX file should strictly be a semantic representation of the content of the document; while TeX may have been a raw typesetting language, this is most definitely not the intended use case of LaTeX and is overall a very poor test of its relative advantages and capabilities.
The separation of the semantic definition of the content from the rendering of the document is, in my opinion, the most important feature of LaTeX. Like CSS, this allows the actual formatting to be abstracted away, allowing plain (marked-up) content to be written without worrying about typesetting.
Word has some similar capabilities with styles, and can be used in a similar manner, though few Word users actually use the software properly. This may sound like a relatively insignificant point, but in practice, almost every Word document I have seen has some form of inconsistent formatting. If Word disallowed local formatting changes (including things such as relative spacing of nested bullet points), forcing all formatting changes to be done in document-global styles, it would be a far better typesetting system. Also, the users would be very unhappy.
Yes, LaTeX can undeniably be a pain in the arse, especially when it comes to trying to get figures in the right place; however the combination of a simple, semantic plain-text representation with a flexible and professional typesetting and rendering engine are undeniable and completely unaddressed by this study.
--
It seems that the test was heavily biased in favor of WYSIWYG.
Of course that approach makes it very simple to reproduce something, as has been tested here. Even simpler would be to scan the document and run OCR. The massive problem with both approaches (WYSIWYG and scanning) is that you can't generalize any of it. You're doomed repeating it forever.
(I'll also note the other significant issue with this study: when the ratings provided by participants came out opposite of their test results, they attributed it to irrational bias.)

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01796-1
Over the past few years however, the line between the tools has blurred. In 2017, Microsoft made it possible to use LaTeX’s equation-writing syntax directly in Word, and last year it scrapped Word’s own equation editor. Other text editors also support elements of LaTeX, allowing newcomers to use as much or as little of the language as they like.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20191348

If I had to guess, I'd say I probably work around hundreds of bugs in an average week, and thousands in a bad week. It's not unusual for me to run into a hundred new bugs in a single week. But I often get skepticism when I mention that I run into multiple new (to me) bugs per day, and that this is inevitable if we don't change how we write tests. Well, here's a log of one week of bugs, limited to bugs that were new to me that week. After a brief description of the bugs, I'll talk about what we can do to improve the situation. The obvious answer to spend more effort on testing, but everyone already knows we should do that and no one does it. That doesn't mean it's hopeless, though.

...

Here's where I'm supposed to write an appeal to take testing more seriously and put real effort into it. But we all know that's not going to work. It would take 90k LOC of tests to get Julia to be as well tested as a poorly tested prototype (falsely assuming linear complexity in size). That's two person-years of work, not even including time to debug and fix bugs (which probably brings it closer to four of five years). Who's going to do that? No one. Writing tests is like writing documentation. Everyone already knows you should do it. Telling people they should do it adds zero information1.

Given that people aren't going to put any effort into testing, what's the best way to do it?

Property-based testing. Generative testing. Random testing. Concolic Testing (which was done long before the term was coined). Static analysis. Fuzzing. Statistical bug finding. There are lots of options. Some of them are actually the same thing because the terminology we use is inconsistent and buggy. I'm going to arbitrarily pick one to talk about, but they're all worth looking into.

...

There are a lot of great resources out there, but if you're just getting started, I found this description of types of fuzzers to be one of those most helpful (and simplest) things I've read.

John Regehr has a udacity course on software testing. I haven't worked through it yet (Pablo Torres just pointed to it), but given the quality of Dr. Regehr's writing, I expect the course to be good.

For more on my perspective on testing, there's this.

Everything's broken and nobody's upset: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EverythingsBrokenAndNobodysUpset.aspx
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4531549

https://hypothesis.works/articles/the-purpose-of-hypothesis/
From the perspective of a user, the purpose of Hypothesis is to make it easier for you to write better tests.

From my perspective as the primary author, that is of course also a purpose of Hypothesis. I write a lot of code, it needs testing, and the idea of trying to do that without Hypothesis has become nearly unthinkable.

But, on a large scale, the true purpose of Hypothesis is to drag the world kicking and screaming into a new and terrifying age of high quality software.

Software is everywhere. We have built a civilization on it, and it’s only getting more prevalent as more services move online and embedded and “internet of things” devices become cheaper and more common.

Software is also terrible. It’s buggy, it’s insecure, and it’s rarely well thought out.

This combination is clearly a recipe for disaster.

The state of software testing is even worse. It’s uncontroversial at this point that you should be testing your code, but it’s a rare codebase whose authors could honestly claim that they feel its testing is sufficient.

Much of the problem here is that it’s too hard to write good tests. Tests take up a vast quantity of development time, but they mostly just laboriously encode exactly the same assumptions and fallacies that the authors had when they wrote the code, so they miss exactly the same bugs that you missed when they wrote the code.

Preventing the Collapse of Civilization [video]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452
- Jonathan Blow

NB: DevGAMM is a game industry conference

- loss of technological knowledge (Antikythera mechanism, aqueducts, etc.)
- hardware driving most gains, not software
- software's actually less robust, often poorly designed and overengineered these days
- *list of bugs he's encountered recently*:
https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk?t=1387
- knowledge of trivia becomes more than general, deep knowledge
- does at least acknowledge value of DRY, reusing code, abstraction saving dev time

You should own Ferguson and Schneier’s follow-up, Cryptography Engineering (C.E.). Written partly in penance, the new book deftly handles material the older book stumbles over. C.E. wants to teach you the right way to work with cryptography without wasting time on GOST and El Gamal.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/al533ecu82w29y1/BusinessCycleFallout.pdf
https://twitter.com/MarkKoyama/status/881893997706399744
This is like a reversal of the industrious revolution studied in my JEBO paper: new consumption technologies are money cheap but time pricey
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23552
https://www.1843magazine.com/features/escape-to-another-world
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13723996
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/07/what-are-young-men-doing.html
https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/08/americas-lost-boys

http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/work-becomes-optional/
participation has changed along an understudied margin of labor supply. I find that “in-and-outs”—men who temporarily leave the labor force—represent a growing fraction of prime age men across multiple data sources and are responsible for roughly one third of the decline in the participation rate since 1977. In-and-outs take short, infrequent breaks out of the labor force in between jobs, but they are otherwise continuously attached to the labor force. Leading explanations for the growing share of permanent labor force dropouts, such as disability, do not apply to in-and-outs. Instead, reduced-form evidence and a structural model of household labor supply both indicate that the rise of in-and-outs reflects a shift in labor supply, largely due to the increasing earnings of men’s partners and the growth of men living with their parents.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. My thoughts:

1. When we think of labor force participation declining, we think of, say, John Smith, deciding to never work again. What this paper is saying is that the statistics reflect something different. One month Smith takes a break, then next month he gets a job and Tom Jones takes a break.

2. I think we have always had a large number of workers who are not fully employed year round. That is, there have always been a lot of workers who take breaks between jobs. This is common in construction work, for example.

3. I don’t know if this matters for the phenomenon at hand, but we used to have inventory recessions. In those cases, workers would be out of a job for a while, but they would still be in the labor force, because they were waiting to be recalled by the firm that had laid them off.

4. It seems to me that this is an important paper. Re-read the last sentence in the quoted excerpt.

Job outlook growing worse for young American men: https://www.courier-journal.com/story/opinion/contributors/2018/01/02/job-outlook-growing-worse-young-american-men-opinion/996922001/
As one might imagine, the absence of a job, quality education, or spouse has not bred otherwise productive citizens. Multiple studies have found that young men have replaced what would otherwise be working hours with leisure time at a near 1-1 ratio. Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, found that young men spent a startling 75 percent of this leisure time playing video games, with many spending more than 30 hours a week gaming and over 5 million Americans spending more than 45 hours per week.

Higher suicide rates, violent crime, and drug addiction among young men have followed. Suicide rates in the United States are at a 30-year high, with men more than three and a half times more likely to take their own lives than women. Around the United States, violent crimes, homicide in particular, has increased in two-thirds of American cities, with overwhelming young male perpetrators driving the increase. A 2015 Brookings Institute study estimated that nearly half of working-age American men who are out of the labor force are using painkillers, daily.

These problems have been “invisible” for too long.

As video games get better, young men work less and play more: http://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2017/article/video-games-get-better-young-men-work-less-and-play-more

Why Are Prime-Age Men Vanishing from the Labor Force?: https://www.kansascityfed.org/~/media/files/publicat/econrev/econrevarchive/2018/1q18tuzemen.pdf

Prime-Age Men May Never Return to U.S. Workforce, Fed Paper Says: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-23/prime-age-men-may-never-return-to-u-s-workforce-fed-paper-says

Reading speed and comprehension interest me, but I don’t have as much information as I would like.  I would like to see the distribution of reading speeds ( in the general population, and also in college graduates).  I have looked a bit at discussions of this, and there’s something wrong.  Or maybe a lot wrong.  Researchers apparently say that nobody reads 900 words a minute with full comprehension, but I’ve seen it done.  I would also like to know if anyone has statistically validated methods that  increase reading speed.

On related topics, I wonder how many serious readers  there are, here and also in other countries.  Are they as common in Japan or China, with their very different scripts?   Are reading speeds higher or lower there?

How many people have  their houses really, truly stuffed with books?  Here and elsewhere?  Last time I checked we had about 5000 books around the house: I figure that’s serious, verging on the pathological.

To what extent do people remember what they read?  Judging from the general results of  adult knowledge studies, not very much of what they took in school, but maybe voluntary reading is different.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/reading/#comment-3187
The researchers claim that the range of high-comprehension reading speed doesn’t go up anywhere near 900 wpm. But my daughter routinely reads at that speed. In high school, I took a reading speed test and scored a bit over 1000 wpm, with perfect comprehension.

I have suggested that the key to high reading speed is the experience of trying to finish a entire science fiction paperback in a drugstore before the proprietor tells you to buy the damn thing or get out. Helps if you can hide behind the bookrack.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2019/03/31/early-reading/
There are a few small children, mostly girls, that learn to read very early. You read stories to them and before you know they’re reading by themselves. By very early, I men age 3 or 4.

Does this happen in China ?

hmm:
Beijingers' average daily reading time exceeds an hour: report: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201712/07/WS5a293e1aa310fcb6fafd44c0.html

Free Speed Reading Test by AceReader: http://www.freereadingtest.com/
time+comprehension

http://www.readingsoft.com/
claims: 1000 wpm with 85% comprehension at top 1%, 200 wpm at 60% for average

https://www.wsj.com/articles/speed-reading-returns-1395874723
http://projects.wsj.com/speedread/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=929753
Take a look at "Reading Rate: A Review of Research and Theory" by Ronald P. Carver
http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Rate-Review-Research-Theory/dp...
The conclusion is, basically, that speed reading courses don't work.
You can teach people to skim at a faster rate than they'd read with maximum comprehension and retention. And you can teach people study skills, such as how to summarize salient points, and take notes.
But all these skills are not at all the same as what speed reading usually promises, which is to drastically increase the rate at which you read with full comprehension and retention. According to Carver's book, it can't be done, at least not drastically past about the rate you'd naturally read at the college level.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11226223
Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant?: https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/is-productivity-growth-becoming-irrelevant

A Population-Level Decline in Serum Testosterone Levels in American Men: http://sci-hub.tw/10.1210/jc.2006-1375
Secular trends in sex hormones and fractures in men and women: http://www.eje-online.org/content/166/5/887.full.pdf
https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/984543033285898246
https://archive.is/dcruu
Small n and older sample, but interesting that while testosterone decreases have been large for men they’ve been even larger (in % terms) for women; wonder if this contributes to declining pregnancy and sexual frequency, rising depression.

https://www.labcorp.com/assets/11476
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/sperm-killers-and-rising-male-infertility/
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jul/25/sperm-counts-among-western-men-have-halved-in-last-40-years-study
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/most-men-in-the-us-and-europe-could-be-infertile-by-2060
Strangelove: https://youtu.be/N1KvgtEnABY?t=67

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sperm-count-dropping-in-western-world/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14855796
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857588
People offering human-centric explanations like cell phones: Note also that the sperm quality of dogs has decreased 30% since 1988.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/august-3-2019-science-of-awe-blue-whales-and-sonar-chromosomes-and-sleep-and-more-1.5047142/man-and-man-s-best-friend-have-both-been-experiencing-declines-in-sperm-quality-1.5047150
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20636757

mendelian rand.:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28448539
1 SD genetically instrumented increase in BMI was associated with a 0.25 SD decrease in serum testosterone
https://twitter.com/SilverVVulpes/status/857902555489341441

Ibuprofen linked to male infertility: study: https://nypost.com/2018/01/08/ibuprofen-linked-to-male-infertility-study/
http://www.pnas.org/content/115/4/E715.full

Tucker Carlson: "Men Seem To Be Becoming Less Male": https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/03/08/tucker_carlson_men_seem_to_be_becoming_less_male.html
Carlson interviewed Dr. Jordan Peterson who blamed the "insidious" movement being driven by the "radical left" that teaches there a problem of "toxic masculinity." He said ideological policies focus on "de-emphasizing masculinity may be part of the problem."

...

Those are the numbers. They paint a very clear picture: American men are failing, in body, mind and spirit. This is a crisis. Yet our leaders pretend it’s not happening. They tell us the opposite is true: Women are victims, men are oppressors. To question that assumption is to risk punishment. Even as women far outpace men in higher education, virtually every college campus supports a women’s studies department, whose core goal is to attack male power. Our politicians and business leaders internalize and amplify that message. Men are privileged. Women are oppressed. Hire and promote and reward accordingly.

https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:bd7b0a50d741
But it also hints at an almost opposite take: average testosterone levels have been falling for decades, so at this point these businessmen would be the only “normal” (by 1950s standards) men out there, and everyone else would be unprecedently risk-averse and boring.

Ask HN: How to understand the large codebase of an open-source project?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16299125
nice comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16302360

tiny sample size
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14067732
https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/646807/modafinilinduced_changes_in_functional/

It didn't make it into law, partly due to lobbying by the likes of Intuit, but more interestingly, I thought, because Grover Norquist, the well known promoter of the "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" took the counterintuitive view that just making the process easier equated to a new tax, since taxpayers might end up paying taxes already on the books that they might have previously unintentionally evaded.
That to me is the most bizarre detail about this entire story. It's likely that it would have passed if not for the strange interpretation of one man to this not-a-new-tax of it effectively being a new tax, and his ability to sway the Republicans due to the political power his "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" holds over Republicans.

...

I think that a major component of Norquist's thinking is that the more painful people find taxes (including the process of calculating them) the more they'll support his agenda of "a government so small you could drown it in a bathtub".

critique in first comment