skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to agree with the more 'mournful' passages from a general perspective. I agree, it's promising to see the hard work of researchers finally enter the market, but the comments the author is making addresses a deeper issue.

Funding for basic research has dropped considerably over the decades across North America, yet the long-term value has shown itself to be unimaginably vast. It's incredibly short-sighted for a government to primarily invest in research that has direct industrial applications. The returns on basic research on both a financial and intellectual level, as a whole, are massive. We need to keep investing heavily in researchers that are addressing fundamental topics that some might otherwise see purely as 'academic'.
SQL injection interactive tutorial using SQL.js
It seems like a good idea. If every software engineer had a blog we'd all learn so much!
I picked up https://www.youtube.com/user/thephilosophytube

Seems cool.

Here's one of mine. It's about statistics (psychographics mostly) models implemented in R. Some undergrad level psychology lectures included, but the stats are pretty advanced.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMdihazndR0f9XBoSXWqnYg
"The groups observed that the disparity of spaceflight data available for men and women who have flown in space – 477 men vs. 57 women as of June 2013 – makes it difficult to derive concrete conclusions based on sex and gender alone."

Statistics can't work like that, can it? It's surely not harder to derive concrete conclusions from a large, imbalanced 477-57 group than from a smaller but balanced 57-57 group... right?

At the extreme, you could always take a random subsample of 57 men.

Note: I agree that imbalance is bad, I just disagree that it's bad for taking the conclusions listed in the article and other similar conclusions.
Yeah, this is where I stopped reading. It's such a juvenile way to argue.
Yes, the editorialist here seems to be bemoaning the 'professionalization' of the research topic, as if the companies and researchers owe some sort of loyalty to a university which profits off the cheap labour. It is roughly equivalent to chastizing NFL and NBA teams for taking all of the NCAA's best players, and paying them more.
A raspberry pi could probably do this quite well.
Microsoft seems a bit more opaque about it than Apple - I've got pcs, a macbook and an iPhone and with Apple it's always a straight forward so and so is available, do you want to download it? Windows not quite so much.
Was the egg raw, or cooked? That makes a great deal of difference in how I think about how awful your experience was.

Not a keyboard, but: Many years ago, I worked for a company that was using microwaves on living tissue. They used salt water (saline solution) to simulate blood - it has a similar thermal reaction to microwaves. We had this VMEbus rack with various circuit boards in it. The top card in the rack was the graphics cards. And we had this VMEbus rack without the top on in the lab, so we could get oscilloscope probes onto the circuit boards...

I happened to be looking at the monitor when the tub of salt water got dumped onto the graphics card. I suspect it looked something like an acid trip (don't have any actual experience to go by).

They turned off the power, rinsed the graphics card with distilled water, then dried it in an oven at about 150 F to dry it out thoroughly. It worked after that.
I think it is better to change the interface so that the choice is labelled <13.3 rather than <13.
The bigger fallout from doping and WADA is the "drugs are bad" story it pushes. This leads to things like "anti doping" in e-games. Or calling students using mind-enhancing drugs cheaters. We should wholeheartedly embrace people using medical technology to improve themselves, rather than being slaves to genetics and limited by the money they have for exotic training methods.
String processing in computers is difficult. You have to be careful to avoid every corner case and potential error.
I agree. We all take advantage of online communities like StackOverflow but so few give back
> in the 80s, 90s and 00s everything about our society became more and more regulated and safety conscious (hotels, taxis, health care, education) meaning costs skyrocketed, and the cost of entry to compete in those markets became astronomical.

Speaking generally, I think it's safe to say that this is the opposite of what happened. The hallmarks of Reagan's [1] and Thatcher's economic policies in the 1980s was massive deregulation (and privatisation). By the end of the decade it became the global norm for economic policy, a consensus generally accepted by even their left-wing successors, Clinton and Blair, by many others around the world, and became a key part of the "Washington Consensus",[2] which was a set of economic policies forced on poor countries who needed aid by Western governments and agencies (and accused often of coldly sacrificing the welfare of hundreds of millions of very poor people). As a more recent example, excessive deregulation of the financial industry, such as the repeal of Glass-Steagall act [3], is widely blamed as a signicant cause of the financial crisis of 2008.

I'll add an interesting point: The period of perhaps greatest economic growth in the West, the 1950s and 60s, was the period of greatest government regulation and direct involvement in economies. Deregulation began in the 1980s and while economies have grown since then, wages for most Americans have been flat for 30 years. That proves nothing, but it suggests the evidence for the libertarian theory isn't so clear cut. (Personally I think regulation is not an ideology but a tool, good for some things and not for others.)

[1] It actually began under Jimmy Carter, a little known fact.

[2] http://www.cid.harvard.edu/cidtrade/issues/washington.html

[3] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/wallstreet/wei...
> I went from a 12 minute mile to a sub-7 minute mile in 3 years

A 5 minute difference. Which is amazing. But only to other runners.

Going from a 50kg (110lbs) squat to a 130kg squat (286lbs) in 3 years is almost trivially doable (I've once gone from 50kg to 100kg in 3 months) and is impressive to everyone.

As much as we'd like our motivations to be pure, we really really really like impressing our friends.
How to Hide^H^H^Handle Security Problems in Your Products (2008)
I was thinking of The Graduate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4YUbYU6LmQ&t=4m05s
More, in this case, meaning "at all."
Defending free speech doesn't always mean defending MLK or Snowden. Sometimes it means defending creeps. Actually, usually it means defending creeps.
I prefer this more concise background explanation of the poem.

However, we are misreading the article as being about the poem, when actually it is about literary misinterpretation...
Journalism is actually a great example of the utility of literature classes - because even if you don't enjoy literature, the act of reading critically is an important skill to making sense of the world.

I'll take a leap and suggest that you and I can agree that much of what is called "news" these days does not merely transfer facts from the news organization to your brain. When you read a news article, you interpret it with context. You ask, what is the reputation of the agency reporting this news? Do they have a history of factual reporting? Do they bring a particular political bent or agenda to bear on their reporting? What words are they using to tell the story? What does it mean when someone refers to the "War on Terror" - how do you understand that metaphor? What memories, emotions, experiences does it evoke? How is that phrase intended to be interpreted?

There is so much more to write about this, but bottom line for me is: language drives human interaction. Understanding how others interpret language (through metaphor, shared understanding, history, etc.) is important for navigating that interaction. It helps us call bullshit on politicians who use words to conceal ignorance, or maybe on teachers who don't actually understand the literature they are presenting ;)

I imagine you were never rewarded for "filling up pages" with actual bull shit, so you picked up metaphors at some point along the way.
Should we issue a moratorium on scholarships?

State funded 'generic' scholarships simply rise the cost of tuition. Good state schools are a much better use of funds as they drive down for profit education costs to be cost competitive. Schools can easily offer scholarships at minimal costs as a form of price discrimination, but public scholarships tend to simply result in administrative bloat.

Should we discontinue subsidies for solar energy companies?

Yes, instead we should tax CO2 production instead of subsidizing two industry's. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

How about the billions in R&D tax subsidies that we give to pharmaceutical/industrial/healthcare companies each year to develop new drugs, treatments, and machinery?

These should also be stopped, it's fine to fund public R&D but private R&D has terrible ROI. Drug companies spend more on advertising than R&D and really don't need help. For a solid example, the US could have a 10 year strategic food reserve for 1/10th the cost of current agro subsidies that directly result in massive health issues.

PS I agree that markets are often inefficient, but subsidies then to be horrible ways to correct them. Taxes tend to be much more efficient.
I never suggested that unqualified personnel should enter an unsafe environment or people add anything to essential safety equipment. The Leeo just listens for alarms and lets you decide what to do with the information. It does not affect the operation of the safety equipment whatsoever.

In the case of CO2, is it better to have qualified personnel attempt to arrive at 6pm after you get home from work and hear the alarm, or sometime closer to when the leak occurred and you were alerted on your smart phone? (I don't think emergency responders are twiddling their thumbs in the evening or there's light traffic)

In the case of fire, is it better to call the personnel before the retired lady down the street notices the flames and smoke while your at work??
Yes, it is possible to make fire-breaks where the fire can be handled.

They have to be very large (and therefore expensive. Both in terms of land and in terms of maintenance) to protect your house against a mega fire though.

Of course, they could be created in preventative fashion to limit the fires so that the size of the forest fires is limited.
Anyone know if the simple programmer course is any good?
So it's really a poem about the economic theory of opportunity costs...
They're replacing the existing system because the interaction of programmers and users made an unusable system that didn't account for the business needs. Unfortunately, the people in control of the pursestrings don't have the same day-to-day perspective of the people actually using the system. I've seen documented processes be completely divorced from reality. The real challenge in these systems is uncovering the true business, and the true business isn't understood except as a collective.

It is challenging to tell a director that they don't understand their own business, however.

I've worked in a lot of internal IT shops throughout my career, and it is only recently that I've worked on B2C applications. That's why I explicitly say that replacing an existing system requires more iteration, not less.

How many times have you seen a user exploit a bug to get their work done and be angry when it's "fixed?" The real bug is that the business didn't understand their own process.

My job, when I was in internal applications, was to cut through the bullshit and really understand how the business was run. And anyone who thinks they can analyze the problem up front and give a precise estimate for how long it will take is delusional.
Very nice. I really like how it pretty prints python objects. I wish it was a bit more "repl"-y, but the quick auto-evaluation helps make up for that.

I currently use https://repl.it/ for an in browser interpreter/repl.
While I agree with the general idea in theory, I haven't seen it happen that often in practice.

More often than not tests will constrain the architecture of the actual system and result in code that is much more complex than what is required to solve the problem at hand. People then start having blind faith in their tests while being completely oblivious to what they don't test. At that point the codebase is such a mess that you do need tests to maintain it.

People who focus on understanding their code work very, very hard to keep their codebase simple enough to quickly wrap their heads around it. I know I modify my codebase way too much for it to have tests - I'd spend more time refactoring the tests than progressing and I wouldn't be able to simplify the architecture as much because my attention is now on how testable the code is rather than how simple it is.

I see projects shipped with unittests that still required maintenance and debugging 6 months down the road, and others without tests that worked flawlessly out the door.

Of course, there's a difference between understanding and thinking you understand, but that's another matter entirely as we're walking into Dunning-Kruger territory!

I'm not saying tests are bad! Far from it, I do write tests for functions where the logic isn't obvious, but my point is that there's too much focus on testing and not enough on actual quality and simplicity.
I went thought it and found it very helpful in improving the quality of my blog.
So at least they are Baysianly useful.
The built-in password generation tool looks awesome. I'm curious though for people that do: why do you use tools like this for credit cards and other non-password information? Seems to me that all that information already lives in places where they are used: paper documents waiting for paper forms or in-person verification, credit cards saved in the sites they are used for...

or maybe I just answered my own question, why leave credit cards on sites anymore and risk it when you can always carry the info securely with you?...hmm.
Oh man,i've been using safeincloud till now, i'm going to try this for the simple fact that they also support linux :) I've been wanting ubuntu support for a while now!
That's why I avoided taking such classes.
>Is the US population psychotic?

The US is by far the most violent Western nation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

>Hopefully body cameras solve this ridiculous problem.

Body cameras will likely vindicate police more than opponents would like, although it may be hard to compare before and after because knowing you are being recorded will have an affect.
Is Microsoft/Apple/Google/etc. prepared to pay me for software that I've previously purchased but is incompatible with their newer OS? Plus any costs associated with finding new software, training on the new software, migrating to the new software, etc.?
For example, a queue in a post office. With FIFO every member has to wait for x units, where the unit is the time to handle one member and x is the size of the queue. With LIFO, most members have to wait for 1 units, but a few members have to wait on the order of x^2.

Someone correct me if my interpretation is incorrect.

I think LIFO queue would make an interesting experiment in a real world scenario, in contrast to FIFO used almost everywhere. Just make sure there is a maximum time limit set for those who are stuck in the back of the queue. This way most members get out quickly, and a few have to wait for whatever is the maximum time limit or close to that.
Intellectual property is still property!
(I'm going to make some flat statements that are not meant to be inflammatory about Uber, but are there to be a bedrock to the next step in the logic chain I think is important - so read the next few lines with that in mind please :-)

Uber's core operating model is to forcibly standardise taxi regulations in a huge number of regulatory regimes by appealing over the heads of regulators to the market in the hope that if they move fast enough all the regulators won't gang up on them all at the same time. It's probably going to work in much of the Western world (apart from France :-)

Now this is a regulatory play - something that needs a very different core skill set to autonomous cars. Ubers recent purchase of Nokia (?) maps is a clear "related" area because right now today, having better maps than the opposition will yield benefits whether humans or robots drive. There is not much of a chasm to leap

However autonomous cars are a leap. The technology is only "slightly" there. The legal, regulatory and business models over autonomous cars are nowhere like settled. Who owns the cars, what power source they will have, who will build them, who will even let Uber use them. These are all undecided questions - no way of monetising them on the scale to justify a billion dollar investment

This is not to say I don't see a market here - it's going to be staggeringly huge, as plain as the belly found my middle. But it's not yet a related business - it's not a business yet.

So what I mean is that all these unicorns are taking huge amounts of suddenly available private capital, and making R&D bets on vast new industries that have yet to become businesses. It's like building petrol garage forecourts because you see potential in the Model T. It's coming yes, but it's not your traditional way to invest billions.

The traditional way is to find a repeatable process like "buy a shop on a corner and sell coffee at five bucks a pop"

So, there is a new source of huge capital, feeding a new species of R&D company that have structures and (potential) business models that have not been seen before, thus not taxed, regulated or understood before.

So, long winded, but the distance between Uber today and a potential autonomous car taxi company is enourmous, and that distance implies a lot more fundamental change to our society than just an investment decision implies.
This is how I've felt for a long time, but I think how a lot of PED apologists argue is that they believe they have a right to interpret the rules as they see fit, to find corner cases that the established rules do not cover and exploit them to their advantage. They are letter-of-lawyers versus spirit-of-lawyers.

Is "Moneyball" cheating? Is playing for overall points rather than wins cheating (for series competitions, like racing)?

So when it comes to the drug issue, if the rules say "no testosterone levels over a certain degree" rather than "no drugs", then the apologist would say using drugs is within the rules, if it doesn't raise testosterone levels above that predetermined degree.

I don't agree, but it's difficult to say where one draws the line between poorly written rules and cheating.
> I am nitpicking

You certainly are.

> can you perform the elementary exercise using only special forms?

I don't even need any special forms. All I need to do is use the default argument to GET.
My favorite Hemingway quote:

"There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is the old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are sharks, no better, no worse."
How far have you gotten on your project? The idea of a mirror I could wave at to change the information display on is pretty tempting.
Don't forget the first pivot: Inprise.

Borland decided that the new shiny thing was "enterprise client/server middleware" — whatever that was. The new Inprise products were oriented towards building distributed client/server database apps using DCOM and the all-too-obviously-dead-on-arrival CORBA.

This was right around the time the web took off, but before the inane "enterprise Java application server" market exploded. Borland had a hard time competing with Java, and they started to neglect the stuff that had made Delphi such a powerful proposition in the first place.
It's not strlcpy he had an issue with.

His issue was converting a whole lot of code over to strlcpy() while introducing bugs that didn't previously exist.

For another example of this kind of irrational thinking, look at NeoVim's massive churning changes to the Vim codebase for the purposes of "modernization".
> It is roughly equivalent to chastizing NFL and NBA teams for taking all of the NCAA's best players, and paying them more.

That's characterizing industry as the more advanced form of academia (NFL/NBA are more advanced than NCAA). But that's not really true. Even at the companies with the most well-funded research teams, the actual kinds of research being done in industry are often different from the sorts of research those same individuals would be doing in academia.

And while it doesn't make the headlines as often (for obvious reasons), it's hardly unusual for people in industry to return to research in academic institutions.

We don't need to think of academia and industry as zero-sum, no, but we also don't need to think of academia as merely a stepping stone to industry, even if that's how it is used by some people.
I love the Chasing Product podcast. Great interviews from the dev/freelancer perspective for anyone looking to branch out into making their own thing.
Security and npm packages: An Infographic
This is interesting and worthwhile, but I do wonder about some of the questions.

For example, the core-mantle-crust structure of the Earth is fundamental. Everyone ought to know about that. But whether the core is the hottest part? This strikes me as highly non-obvious, even to a relatively knowledgeable person. The article says people were shown a labeled picture; I bet most people just guessed, based on the colors used for the various regions.

And then there is the question about uranium & nuclear energy/weapons. What about plutonium? Sure we can make plutonium from uranium, but then we're getting into subtleties of what "needed" means.

Lastly, it is nice to know the role of Jonas Salk in the development of polio vaccines. But that is more history than science (and a lot of people receive the Sabin vaccine ...). Better questions might address what a vaccine is made from, or roughly how it works.
I tried to find the original reasoning for banning doping and couldn't do so. According to Wikipedia the IOC banned doping in the 1960s after some sports federations began to do so. It was widespread at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Olympic_Games#Re...

Could it be simply part of a conservative response to drug-taking in the 1960's? Reefer madness? I don't know.

Please comment if you can find a source. If we know the original reasoning, then it would be good to critique it 50 years later.
Is anything a true meritocracy?
Earth on Wires - how Arctic melting is changing the way we cable the earth
This is probably a better source: http://www.fastcompany.com/3050210/tech-forecast/qualcomms-s...
Yes, but that's not what made git popular. What revision control did Linux use before git? It sure wasn't popular with the public even though Linux used it.

What made git popular was thousands of slightly clueless novice Ruby users forced on to git by GitHub. They then began writing thousands of blog posts about how git is confusing, but—they, in their infinite cleverness—discovered the secrets and will now share them with you.
Maybe add a motion sensor to it?
Because we don't have a lot of rules for musicians. Of the rules we do have, they are a social contract rather than a binding rules committee. And of those rules, none of them govern drugs. Plagiarism, yes, but drugs, no.
The workers were bullshitted by CBM and didn't get it:

"When I asked WeWork for more money, they told me to talk to CBM, he said. When I asked CBM for more money, CBM said WeWork had to approve the raise. It was frustrating."

The underlying problem, that both companies in question are under pressure of financial forces, didn't get mentioned.
Google, Twitter Work on Open Source ‘Instant Articles’ for Mobile