RKoutnik

If you like interactive posts with lots of play, check out Bret Victor's work (if you haven't already). Good start here: http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

What's Tesla's real endgame?

Batteries. If no one buys Tesla cars but all the car makers buy Tesla batteries, Tesla still wins. Gigafactory 1 at full production will be making about as many batteries as the entire planet produced in 2016. They're already working on Gigafactory 2. This is why they released all their patents - Tesla wins if electric cars win in general. Doesn't need to be Tesla cars.

(Disclaimer: I own a moderate amount of TSLA, specifically because I think investors missed this point)

Snyk, the site hosting this article, provide such a service: https://snyk.io/

While it isn't technically a game about programming, I'd add an honorable mention for Factorio - a game that, at its core, is about software engineering. In it, you build an ever-growing and ever-more-complex factory. You can choose to throw something together quickly because you need steel NOW (and pay for the technical debt later) or take your time to orchestrate the perfect layout only to discover that's not what you wanted in the first place.

https://www.factorio.com/

Great game, highly recommended for anyone in software.

It's worth noting that 3 million more people voted for Hillary. I wouldn't chalk this one up to a design issue, rather implementation (in this case, weighting votes by geographic region).

We've submitted a patch and are waiting for enough reviewers to approve: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/

And I suspect many Bolt owners want an economical car, not a luxury one, and the Bolt's got that in spades.

See my other reply in this subthread - Bolt/Model 3 will be equivalent in terms of price, so I don't see how the Bolt is more "economical".

The Model 3 starts at $35k, the Bolt at $37.5k. If you're in the market for the Bolt post-Model 3 launch, then there's not much difference in price - why not go for the classier car?

This article (like many) misses why people buy Teslas. Teslas are amazing cars that just happen to be electric - not the other way around. The large car companies think that "electric" is enough to sell a car, whereas Tesla knows they need luxury options, autopilot & the supercharger network.

I've got a Model 3 reservation myself and wouldn't even think of switching to the Bolt. I want a nice car, not just an electric one, and Tesla's got that in spades.

That certification sounds a lot like the job interviews HN constantly complains about - lots of minor Googleable trivia, no hard problem solving. I don't see how it'd be useful beyond possibly skipping the phone screen.

Could it be gamed? Of course. But then so can a University course. As can an interview. As can a coding school.

It's a lot harder to game those things than it is a certification test.

That's literally a bootcamp (at least, the good ones). I taught at a bootcamp myself a while back and the entire curriculum was project-based. We wanted the students to imagine something and build it. Most of the bootcamp was about teaching new tools/techniques and providing support to our students as they built things.

None taken, the IC3 in particular exists so that people can say they're "certified". The qualifications are things like "Make some text bold in MS Word". Ridiculous.

Hey there. I'm certified to the hilt: IC3, CompTia A+/Net+/Security+ & Microsoft Certified Professional. All before I left high school.

These certifications were absolutely useless when it came to getting me a job whenever I interviewed somewhere where they knew what they were doing. All they proved was that I was particularly good at studying and taking tests. This may be a useful skill in another career but in IT (the area of the certs) and even more in software (where I work now) memorizing rote knowledge is nigh-useless in the era of StackOverflow and Google.

Any sort of programming certification test would be gameable. A test that can be gamed isn't useful for hiring - once again, you're not proving they're a competent programmer, just that they're good at taking tests. No company you want to get hired at will use such a metric.

If it was possible to prove the quality of a coder via a certification test, we'd be out of a job. One of the key signs of a good programmer is their ability to expertly handle problems & situations they've never encountered before, which is (by definition) impossible via some sort of standardized test.

A certification might prove that I've memorized the parameters that get passed into the function in Array.prototype.map but it'll never tell me if someone can build software solutions to real-life problems.

Interesting idea, though explaining the complications of licensing may cause problems when it comes to marketing.

I've had a related idea for a while, setting up SaaS for FOSS maintainers to charge for a SLA (license/source is still open, corps essentially have some security that the project won't be abandoned). Is there anything out there like that?

Same tweet id, just the username changed:

https://twitter.com/cryptoz/status/786254141182074880

Still goes to the same tweet.

The Pebble 2 Kickstarter was early in the summer and didn't start shipping until October. Since the graph mentions shipped units, I'm not surprised they're down. Anyone who was interested in getting a Pebble either pledged to the Kickstarter or waited for the 2 to come out in stores.

Annoyingly, the folks who waited for the store version will be getting theirs before the Kickstarter backers do. The community took a big hit when they prioritized WalMart over the folks who helped them get off the ground. Pebble's community has always been a strong point for the company - not sure if that'll keep being true, so their blip might turn into a bigger slide.

Disclaimer: Backer of Pebble 2 who won't be getting his watch until at least mid-November.

Given that the goal for the plugins API is "I’ll probably never implement this 100%, only the api bits I need for the plugins I use." [0] I don't see this getting traction. Piggypacking off an existing ecosystem is a great way to bootstrap a project but so long as it's wack-a-mole to discover if all your plugins work, this remains a pet project in my mind.

[0] https://github.com/limetext/lime/wiki/Goals

Meta: Looks like WSJ is smart enough now to detect the `web` links. I went directly to the site, hit paywall, backed out. Then went via the `web` link, same paywall. Went to `web` link in incognito, was able to read the (fairly anemic) article.

Usually that's because you're creating and disposing of a lot of objects in your game loop. Look into initializing a lot of objects at the start and reusing 'em (usually called object pooling).

I'd love to take a look deeper - contact info is in my profile if you're interested.

Posting this to trigger HNReplies - See my first comment response to you for the full story.

Interesting, running just the number generation under node v6.5.0 gives:

     { '0': 340364, '1': 330093, '-1': 329543 }

AHA, repro'd in Chrome latest: http://jsbin.com/cefuqi/edit?js,console

Also repros in node. Fascinating. There goes my afternoon...

Ah, I think I've figured it out (nothing to do with JS's RNG, sadly). It's simpler when you ignore Jeremy (sorry). For this case, we can assume `Math.random()` will output uniformly random numbers. `Array.prototype.sort` works as so:

If the function returns > 0, the first param should be sorted to a higher index than the second.

If the function returns < 0, the first param should be sorted to a lower index than the second.

If the function returns exactly zero, the parameters are left as they are.

So what we've got is a 1/3 of Erin 'winning', 1/3 of Thomas 'winning' and a 1/3 chance of a tie which leaves Erin ahead. So she's got a 2/3 chance of being first.

Additionally (but not in any consequential fashion), generating a random number between 1 and 100 (inclusive) gives you 100 possibilities (duh). With three outcomes:

    100 / 3 = 33.333333333333336

Here's a Python solution showing it's not just JS:

link: http://paste.ubuntu.com/23222240/

results:

    {
      'Erin Ptacek': 6523,
      'Thomas Ptacek': 1951,
      'Jeremy Rauch': 1526
    }

One other project comes to mind that also updates every six months: Ubuntu. Last I checked, their ecosystem was doing fairly well. I wouldn't consider Ubuntu "unfinished" unless we're talking about the state of all software everywhere.

Oh, good to hear. That's the one that SpaceX named their barges after?

The series has been on my to-read list, I'll bump it up in priority.

I hadn't heard the full quote - that is beautiful. Thanks for sourcing it!

Do you have any recommendations on modern scifi that fits the futurism bill? There's lots of great stuff (Expanse is my current favorite) that seems to be summed up as "And then things got worse"

I'm writing this comment from a tech conference, which seems oddly fitting.

I find exactly the same problem with modern tech tooling (especially on the frontend). We, the tech community, celebrate tool builders and so we all try to build tools. We end up with a fantastic ecosystem of many diverse ideas pinging off of each other. In this situation we all win - sorta.

I write a bunch of Angular 1. React and Angular 2 are both superb libraries that allow me to build a great frontend UI. There are four React talks and a full-day workshop all communicating the _How_ of React [0]. We're building tools for the sake of tools - continually answering the 'how' with the latest framework without consideration for the end purpose, our 'why'.

If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.

The current state of tech as I see it is that we're pumping out endless tutorials on logging [1] but never teaching devs to yearn for the endless sea.

[0] I'm picking on React here but this is just one example out of many.

[1] Pun intended

It sounds like these issues are pretty big for you and not so much for your team. If I were in your shoes, I'd be worried that staying would impact my moral compass and I'd start thinking such things were ok. If you've joined pretty recently, no one will look down on you for moving on after discovering that they're misleading customers. I was in a similar situation myself and decided to stick it out, which was a big mistake.

I'd be happy to have a chat and see if there's a space for you somewhere in my network. Life's too short to do morally-dubious work. Contact info's in my profile.

You're absolutely right - Niantic's history with Google does not preclude them having crummy security practices that we aren't aware of.

However, "Popular thing possibly has crummy security practices (we just don't know)" isn't HN-worthy, it's just FUD. I think both of us would prefer a HN full of well-researched articles over one full of clickbait FUD.

Right, so not only did they spend a significant amount of time steeping in Google itself, the big G then invested a significant amount of cash into the now-spun-out company. I'd say that qualifies as 'owned'.

It's worth noting that Niantic Labs (the folks who licensed Pokemon from Nintendo and made Pokemon Go) are actually owned by Google [0]. This is Google giving itself permission to do Google things. Dollars to doughnuts they tried to use some internal-only API because things kept falling over at pokemon.com. Is this a massive UX failure? Certainly. Is giving Google permission to access Google stuff a "Huge security risk"? No more than putting your stuff in Google's hands in the first place.

Niantic are also the folks behind Ingress, if you've heard of that.

[0] Specifically, Alphabet owns a significant portion of Niantic, along with Nintendo: https://nianticlabs.com/blog/niantic-tpc-nintendo/ (they were previously wholly-owned by Google).