jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
It is happening at a pace that doesn't force people to think about it. If something big and bad happens suddenly, then people are forced to notice. But if the same big and bad thing happens slowly, one step at a time, most people don't notice. And those who notice are aren't able to do much as they are in a minority.

Also, many people are more idealistic in their youth - before they have families, careers etc and before putting food on the table becomes a bigger priority. That is why it is easier to protest as a college student, than as a 40 year old with a mortgage and two kids. But that is also getting harder these days - student loans, getting a record etc

And above all else, it is easier to numb ourselves these days than ever before with internet, video games, porn, TV, ebooks ("mental porn") etc. Why go out and do something (like protest) and put ourselves at risk, when we can watch Netflix comfortably at home? We are quickly becoming a species that values convenience over everything else, including privacy and civil rights :(

Edit: There is another thing - most people genuinely believe that bad things won't happen to them, as they haven't done anything wrong. While that is cute, we know it is not true but most of us have trouble accepting it
Surprisingly, they didn't force a password reset on all accounts. Even though the passwords are hashed and salted, targeting a couple users and checking for weak passwords can now be done offline, with no rate-limiting or network calls necessary. In breaches like these, it should still be mandatory to issue service wide password resets. Anything less is unacceptable.
I'm pretty sure he's from the Netherlands, so he definitely probably isn't a native speaker.

That doesn't mean that he shouldn't fix the mistakes. I'm just saying that he needs to proofread ;)
It turns out, I am really a static-typing ...type after all.

Have you tried Scala?
I switched from Cucumber to Steak for several months and loved it. Getting away from english specification was a BIG win.

However, two weeks ago, I removed Steak entirely, and am now using pure RSpec for my integration tests.

If you look at the heart of Steak [1] you'll see it's nothing more than a couple aliases for existing RSpec methods. 'example' becomes 'scenario', and 'before' becomes 'background'. I'm all for accurate language, but I don't think switching a couple method names really changes anything important here.

Switching from Steak to pure RSpec was simply a matter of a global search and replace, and now I've got one less gem to think about.

[1] https://github.com/cavalle/steak/blob/master/lib/rspec-2/ste...
I take it you never heard of a little thing called the Apache Software Foundation?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism

Proponents of third-wave feminism claim that it allows women to define feminism for themselves by incorporating their own identities into the belief system of what feminism is and what it can become through one's own perspective. In their introduction to the idea of third-wave feminism in Manifesta, authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards suggest that feminism can change with every generation and individual:

"The fact that feminism is no longer limited to arenas where we expect to see it-- NOW, Ms., women's studies, and redsuited Congresswomen-- perhaps means that young women today have really reaped what feminism has sown. Raised after Title IX and "William Wants a Doll", young women emerged from college or high school or two years of marriage or their first job and began challenging some of the received wisdom of the past ten or twenty years of feminism. We're not doing feminism the same way that the seventies feminists did it; being liberated doesn't mean copying what came before but finding one's own way-- a way that is genuine to one's own generation."
I hear this OSX thing is popular now too. And Android has a userspace that is half Linux, half BSD, and some of its own decisions thrown in.
One reason is that his reasons might resonate with others and add value. It did with me.
The first Iraq war demonstrated that in conventional military confrontations, obsolete tanks and aircraft have little chance against their more modern counterparts.

Iraq invasion also showed that to be true. However, war is not won until ground troops get a hold of control over conquered area - which is something US troops never were able to do (not counting japan after WWII - which is not the same as modern conflicts).
Ginny is pretty consistent about promoting good science and criticizing the bad. For example, in a blog post on "7 Ways to Encourage and Support New Vegans" (http://www.theveganrd.com/2010/08/7-ways-to-encourage-and-su...), she says:

Be honest about nutrition. It’s pretty unlikely that a vegan diet is the only healthy way to eat and we will always get backed into a corner if we say that it is. Likewise, some nutrients are harder to come by on a vegan diet. If we dismiss nutrition issues, we run the risk that some vegans won’t thrive, which is bad for them and bad for veganism

I don't think she has time to address every blog post by every uninformed person (vegan or anti-vegan) on the web, unfortunately.
> 6. It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site.

I think this is the reason Hacker News exists. The comment threads on destination sites are scattered across the Internet and do not bring any one community together. They are also often filled with some of the least desirable commentary possible. Read any of the comments on a Washington Post article, say, for an example of the rubbish that is exceeded only by Youtube commentary.
I agree with this. Follow up question: I've seen sites where HN comments appear in the source's comments (like trackbacks). Can someone point me how to do this with Posterous?
Well, I get some good teas from local Korean and Vietnamese grocery stores, but Adagio is a bit more accessible for most people here. :)

Roasted barley tea* (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mugi-cha) can be pretty good, too, both hot and iced. Korean markets often have big sacks of roasted barley for cheap. The roasted corn tea is also good.

* Not really a tea, it's...roasted barley. Surprise surprise.

Yerba mate is also good, but deserves a completely separate top-level post.
A 99.99% uptime guarantee would be 4.32 minutes per month. You calculated for a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
Great article. We love the tea here in Northern Ireland, and our impression is that most off-the-shelf bagged tea here is of very high quality in comparison to the US. We're drinking lots of 'Punjana' these days.
Just because there's a name for feeling like a fraud even if you aren't one, doesn't meant you aren't one! I felt like a fraud in graduate school and it turned out I was one.
1 & 2) http://www.printingchoice.com/battle-of-the-business-cards/

3) Ideally, the name should describe what you do (or at least symbolize it), or be incredibly memorable.

It takes a while to come up with a good name. Spend the time necessary to pick the right one.
The hardest part is not the technology, but getting it all legal and accepted by the music companies.
No kidding. This was an awfully bad example. I use a REPL for this kind of math too, but it's because I'm too lazy to learn how to use Excel properly.
Does this mean that the tracker isn't included at all? I think you're right.

How would you visualise verifying integrity? Is that really necessary to visualise?
Yeah, I think they meant "follows it on a regular basis".
Yes, obviously. My comment was directed at "the studios" if that wasn't clear.
Was there an option in, say, 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for people with brand spanking new English degrees that wasn't a braindead job in an office? The entry level job mix changed a bit but the character strikes me as fairly consistent: if you have no commercially valuable skills at graduation (and if you majored in English, you probably don't), you get a low-responsibilities job while becoming acclimated to your industry and learning some soft skills.
Yup, net neutrality is dead. National firewall is in. It all goes downhill from here.
No worries, I've really enjoyed your postings on many topics, mostly around hiring techniques (and have always been a big fan of Hunter & Schmidt).

I think that I am somewhat biased, given that I started a PhD in the placebo effect around then, so I actually (sortof) know all of these people. I would argue that there are a few problems with placebo research as currently practiced.

1) clinical studies without no-treatment arms
2) Relatively small experimental studies with not completely explicit treatment protocols
3) A fascination with colourful brain images at the expense of good experimental design (though that is sadly not limited to placebo research).

Statistics is very, very difficult to get right (and I've often struggled) and the incentives are not lined up in the correct way. For instance, if I find a counter-intuitive results in an experiment, it does not benefit me to engage in rigorous fact-checking, I am more likely to benefit if I just publish it, given the demands of tenure-track. To be honest, its a wonder any science gets done at all.

And hence why I no longer work in science.
"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you representational state transfer" -- Matthew 11:28
I fear though that this is not really that much different from another spin on social networking in the end.

I guess this is unavoidable in just about any web development job these days but at least the context is a little more intrinsically interesting at Ableton. At least to me.
Are these abstractions "real"?

That depends, of course, on how you define "real". Are the rules of chess "real"?

How do we perceive them? I agree it's not with our eyes and ears.

And here we're back to Kant. They are intelligible, not sensible. We perceive them with our mind/intellect. (Interestingly, in Buddhist philosophy, there are six senses-- the mind joining the other five, so they push the intelligible/sensible distinction down a level.)

"That's just the way it is" isn't an explanation of anything, though. How do we know, once we've proven 17 prime, using these rules, that we will never discover a factorization of 17? How do we know that our reasoning about these abstractions is sound?

I'm not saying "That's just the way it is"-- I'm saying "That's the way it has to be because we defined it that way." How do we know that in some particular game of chess, the bishop won't suddenly be allowed to move sideways?

Anyway: if you are really interested in the reduction of arithmetic to pure logic, check out Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica-- or better yet, read the graphic novel "Logicomix" which does a wonderful job of covering the domain for non-specialists.
"While kind of you to share this datapoint, the fact that there are 5 times more lines of C than Haskell is a bit less than compelling"

Legacy Code (almost 10 - not 5 - times as much C than Haskell). Can't transform it instantly, much as I would like to. (I did explicitly state that most of this is being moved to Haskell).

Why should a pre existing code base preclude the use of Haskell in production and be "not compelling"? I don't get it. But hey if it helps there's even a few thousand lines of Fortran in there (accessed through a C interface). Even less compelling now? ;-)

Fwiw, The 20,000 lines of Haskell would be (at least) equivalent to another 100,000 lines of code in C. So at least 1/3 d of my project is in Haskell. And the ratio is increasing everyday. The OP asked for examples of using Haskell in production. I am using Haskell in production. I didn't see any "purity constraints" in the OP's question. But maybe they were implicit who knows. I am just throwing out what I do with Haskell.

If you find it "less than compelling", that's fine. My clients (the users of the system) are delighted. Good enough for me!
Some cool tidbits from the FAQ (http://dominion.isotropic.org/faq/):

- Donald X. Vaccarino, Dominion's designer, provided -- and allowed this implementation to use -- the images from the original prototype versions of all the cards.

- The complete logs of every finished game are available in a daily CSV file.
They should try 'the parked domain girl'.
That's why, apart from pre-flight screening, they have a policy of having plainclothes air marshals on every flight and locking the cabin door.
"Every Israeli adult is ex-IDF"

I wish it were true, but it's not. Many people are exempt from service on racial, religious or just ideological reasons. Mind you, it's not always easy to be exempt, but some sectors of the population have an automatic "pass".
Lack of training and lack of awareness. Here at work (in France), probably less than 3% of programmers ever used Haskell or ML. Less than 10% knows they even exist. And no-one would be willing to train a team so these languages can be used in a new project.

Now, financial software may get away with those because they don't really have a choice: they are a narrow field, with a critical need for correctness.

Conversely, you could say that most projects get away with ignorance. They use sub-optimal languages, for the very short term benefit of not training people.
No one needs Steve Jobs? Just a personal sense of focus and increasing quality, and stepping back from problems to gain some sort of vision once in awhile. You can't hear people talking if you're head is located at the pit face next to the drill!
I think if someone can achieve a GPA that is equal to Pi out to 5+ significant digits then Google should hire them instantly. :)
Heard about FDA this week, really exciting. This all makes sense. I'd like to do something with quite broad appeal (possibly e-books then, but I have doubts about whether I could create a great community, and as mentioned above I don;t necassarily want to run through someone elses affiliate program, would prefer to creat emy own by going direct, though maybe this would be possible with authors..)
https://github.com/minimaxir/aggregate-data-from-likes-of-fr...

The 2 .csvs there display as plain text.

EDIT: Both work now.
While were at it let's throw in a good dose of violence, because that can help us get what we want as well.
Definitely true, but unfortunately it also promotes thoughtless arguments such as "this was such a cold winter, so global warming must be a hoax."

How about "catastrophic climate change?"
Well, a reduction of biodiversity would be a possible effect of climate change that has to be considered. I’m not disagreeing with you.
This post makes the strongest argument I can think of in favor of testing: you're doing it anyway, so why not keep them? I don't know anyone who doesn't write a little main or side program to test out the code they have created. Unit testing can amount to nothing more than just keeping those tests in a file that runs periodically and flags raises a notice when they no longer work. Usually the "problem" is that the code has changed and the test needs to be modified, but sometimes the problem is an error introduced into the code.

TDD is a slightly harder sell, because it isn't how most people normally code. TDD folks strongly believe that once you train your mind to think this way, it's the right way to go. I don't write code this way, though. I do what I described above.

The problem arises when it starts to become very difficult to write tests, and the scenario I described above no longer applies. If you're writing something that can be tested through simple main style program, no problem. But what if you need to test a UI element, or a service, or something immensely database oriented (that would require writing extensive mocks just to do the test). A good framework should make this easily testable, but they don't always. There's a limit to how much I'll bend over backwards to unit test something. In this case, maybe integration tests are the best way to still get some coverage.
Continues past the first set of ads.
Probably much better to offer "Ayn Rand" cruise-ship packages. For libertarians, it would be a "nice place to visit" but NOBODY would ever want to live there.
What about doing a "partial sort" where the point sum of a discussion thread starts to go lower that it is pushed lower than any zero/positive sum thread? This way discussion threads that are low quality tend to be pushed away, but the rest are treated equally -- after some testing to make sure the modification isn't too sensitive.

Disclosure: low karma poster
Automated testing gives you the confidence to make very invasive changes to code at any stage during the development process. This is especially important in environments with short iterations, where you are not necessarily designing for features that haven't even been conceived yet.

Note that I didn't say unit testing. The author gives the example of writing a test to verify that a bug exists, that the fix makes the test pass, and now as you grow the code you have confidence that the bug doesn't reemerge.

The same is true for features. You can write a test that verifies a feature exists, and that the feature continues to exist as you radically refactor the code to make new features fit better, as well as across such dangerous operations as branch merges.
I exaggerated a little with this randomness.

Let me explain:

Given the same input Prolog program and imperative (Pascal?) one will give the same results. Because Prolog is imperative.

Non-imparative languages give estimated results (actually I don't know any of these). Why? Because for example data is too large to do simple things like counting all elements. Thats non-imperative. Result is no longer based on what is in the data space, but based on its characteristics. For example, you may calculate a number of helium atoms in a cubic inch, but you will never do such thing like counting them one by one (imperative way).
The 208 has 3.5 g as well. I have owned both the 515 and the 208. While the 515 is better in terms of hardware (aluminum and gorilla glass throughout) it has some software issues and half the ram of the 208, which seems to me has a better software stack.
I know I've bothered you before about this, but can you explain [1] for the layman? It seems to be saying that non-rigid curves may have secret attacks. Then provides a table where, for some reason, just the NIST curves are listed as "manipulatable".

It seems, from reading [2], that the NIST curves went out of their way to claim "verifiably random" generation....using unexplained seeds. The page says it's conceivable that the NIST curves have weaknesses that "were introduced deliberately by NSA."

I don't understand the math so it's likely I'm totally misunderstanding. But reading those pages, they seem to hint that the NIST curves might have some intentional flaws, and that it's suspicious that they generated curves that are susceptible to known problems.

1: http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/rigid.html
2: http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/bada55.html
My favorite part is "The Standard School Mathematics Curriculum".
Not sure what exactly they've dropped, but I know Amazon Payments haven't been accepting new crowdfunding sites for years. It's got to be a major fraud risk; the only reason they don't get more chargebacks is because most projects fail outside of the chargeback window offered by credit card companies.
Looks great! Just reported an incompatibility with Unicode.

Also, is it possible to tweak the autocompletion so that hitting Enter selects the first offered completion? Right now, you have to hit tab or use the arrow keys to select.

A Homebrew formula would be great.
I always thought it was odd no one made an external heatsink for laptops.

Apparently at one point (1983) someone thought it was possible: http://papers.sae.org/831101/
Not to discount your observations of a couple of your friends, but if you look at actual scientific studies of LSD's effect on creativity,[1] there is a very clear link.

That said, it's not a panacea or a magic pill. You are not guaranteed to become more creative when you take LSD. You most likely will not become Mozart or Picasso by taking it. It is even possible to misuse or abuse LSD, as you can misuse and abuse alcohol, food, water, and sex.

My own observations of people having unproductive experiences from psychedelics is that they take them in ignorance, without much if any education about what they're taking, without proper respect (ie. to just "party" or "have fun" or as attempted distractions or escapes from lives that are miserable in various ways), in an unsupportive or even actively hostile context, without planning, and without a goal.

They often believe in all sorts of urban myths about LSD and other psychedelics (like that taking LSD seven times makes you "clinically insane", or that LSD damages your chromosomes or makes you stare in to the sun until you go blind, etc), they often mix drugs (which can be very dangerous -- especially when one of those drugs is alcohol), and do really stupid things like driving under the influence.

Is it any wonder that such situations and attitudes lead to bad outcomes? Should drugs be blamed for what happens? Or could some responsiblity for what happens be laid on the shoulders of the people who choose to use them in stupid ways, or on the society that keeps them ignorant or tries to lie about the effects of these drugs or actively tries to harm drug users, or at least make constructive, safe use of these substances very difficult and dangerous?

About your friend who was "sectioned" (I presume this refers to involuntary confinement to a mental institution), it sounds like you know very little of what actually happened to him or his psychological state before or after the incident. I would not be surprised if his family (who you admit have had mental problems of their own) or the authorities overreacted, and that his confinement to the mental institution might have been a much worse experience than his LSD trip.

Finally, an LSD trip can be a very emotionally intense experience. Emotionally intense experiences of any kind could trigger psychotic episodes in succeptable individuals. Such people could have a psychotic episode without any being drugs involved. People with family history of mental illness would do well to be extra cautious before engaging in any activity that might result in an emotionally intense experience.

[1] - http://www.amazon.com/LSD-Spirituality-Creative-Process-Grou...
> snow lion

...Snow Leopard?

The problem with your response is that I don't know that anyone has ever actually provided reliable evidence that the number of complaints has gone up. GP's view, which I share, is that people always complain about new releases, forgetting that the previous release had its problems as well. As GP said, bad headlines are easier to make than good ones. Simply reiterating that you think the previous release had fewer problems, and that there are anecdotes out there about problems in the current release, is hardly a refutation of this. This is entirely consistent with GP's view.

I for one have experienced no significant change in reliability on the road from Snow Leopard to Yosemite (for what that's worth).
> I mean, all software has bugs.

That's a cool mantra to repeat but it do not seem to match reality.

For instance, in over 10 years of daily usage, I do not think having ever noticed any bugs in vim, grep and PostgreSQL. Just to take grep, for instance: if it says the string is not in the file, I have 100% confidence it is not in the file. So not only grep do not freeze my PC, it is also deterministic, which means perfectly reliable when one talks its language.

OSes are more complex you will tell me. Yep, but you said "all software has bugs".
Google will often suggest ferry as a means to get somewhere when you try for a walking route. Which as you point out is faster than walking the whole way. I wish it could also take into account more public transport options though as I am sure a direct train would also be fairly fast and require less passport control.
If you must know, the commute involves going out of my way to pick up kids on the way home. If the gig goes Long Term I am definitely moving closer.