skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I do agree that being able to program a computer is an important knowledge to have, just like it is important to be able to write, but that doesn't imply that using others software/apps is any inferior.

In fact, to program a modern computer, using software/apps by others is a practical necessity; basic computer literacy is a prerequisite to programming, not an opposed alternative to it.
Even for an executable, the installation environment may be different from the execution environment (which may be sandboxed, mounted read-only, etc.). Moreover, a tarball gives you a reliable manifest so that you know what will happen before installing. A shell script just does whatever it wants, making it potentially surprising/destructive and difficult to clean up.
Can you describe them? I'm definitely in favor of just using tar, so I'd like to see what I'm missing.
Yes, that is fair. But I suppose I took it as an unstated assumption that there's really only one type of ad that we will never be able to programmatically block: ads that are woven seamlessly into editorial content. If the ad blockers of the world win, what will be left is ads that don't really announce themselves as ads.
RAII requires you to use exceptions or equally-ugly hacks to detect constructor failure. Some people (myself included) have a problem with that.
How bold.

Maybe the author could provide some use cases describing how the digital literati of the future will be reading and writing software for themselves, in analogy to the written word?

I'd love to hear about how those with basic "literacy" will be reading/writing anything more complicated than FizzBuzz, much less reading/improving/writing high-quality software in the public domain.
I don't think motorcycles are actually so unsafe that they need to be that loud. But rather than argue about that, I'd rather point out that massive noise pollution isn't a fundamental right, so "we must be that loud to ride" is just saying "we shouldn't ride."
What software solutions are there that could be used to simulate mechanics and physics (including gravity, friction, ...) in order to prototype, say, a human powered heli_thing? :) No, I'm serious.
Not only that, but it's a false premise that if you dabble in programming, you will be an expert in security and privacy issues, and be immune to problems like phishing, malware and so on.

But that's the primary rationale behind this "everyone must program": that those who don't know code will be at the mercy of some bogey man bad guys who do know how to code, from the perspective of security and privacy.
How we reduced isolation in our remote team
Because people should be exposed to a variety of disciplines, and they should be given the chance to demonstrate a talent for whichever they find suits them. In that sense, we should absolutely expose kids to programming.

But it isn't the same as reading. Reading is a primary form of communication and it's fundamentally critical to joining society.
I'm firm believer in the "Peter Principle" whereby "managers rise to the level of their incompetence."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
I really want the "nonexistent" option (collapse)
> What would 'banning bitcoin' even mean? All that is required is the computation of a number and its transmission to the blockchain. It's impossible to block such a message without blocking all other communications.

Government prohibition of an act rarely involves blocking all instances of the act (in fact, if the government could effectively make an act impossible, it wouldn't need to prohibit it.)

So the question here just seems to miss the entire idea of legal prohibitions.
The point of compulsory education is to provide a common memetic foundation for society's interaction and communication.

Without that shared foundation, we see endlessly polarized political talking heads debating nonissues for attention instead of reasoned debate and informed participation in society.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

;)

Edit: I sort of meant this tongue in cheek, but I do look forward to the day when cheap energy and life extension give bright people the opportunity to do all of the things in the parent post. Until then, yes, it's probably better to do one thing masterfully than many things poorly. I wish I had more time for learning for learning's sake, but I've only been playing this game for a few decades and I don't want to nerf my character.
> with it for the rest of their lives like they would reading and writing.

I'd say most do not stick with writing.

> I'm reminded of a TED talk I went to that proclaimed all code is art and everyone should code.

I'd agree the side effects are art, but the code? Maybe in that loose artsy sense of the word art. Is every email also literature because it is writing?
Write Like Chocolate: Overcoming Reader Resistance
If you haven't seen the Gary Bernhardt "Wat" talk [1], I think you'll very much appreciate the sentiment.

https://archive.org/details/wat_destroyallsoftware
You're naive if you believe that the same public schools which barely get Algebra I right will turn around to start properly teaching discrete mathematics.

Except they won't even do that, because the proposed "computer science" courses will be little more than rote exercises in learning an ALGOL-like notation. It most certainly will not impart any fundamental level of understanding, but quite to the contrary a very specific and wrong one. Learning a notation without knowing what problems to solve is useless, and will not leave anyone informed.

We're already struggling with the fact that even a lot of professional programmers don't really have the fundamentals down, but are stuck accepting various abstractions as absolutes. Making "computer science" (code monkeying) a compulsory school subject will worsen this.
If you're willing to allow that, then just wear a single shoe (to be the 'vehicle') and do a BASE jump.
If women are such good leaders, how come there aren't companies that have exclusively female leadership?

I mean, if the owner thought that this would give him the highest returns, why would he care about the gender of his employees?
Show HN: Adblock Pro for iOS Website Download Comparison Video
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki: Without Real Parental Leave, I'd Quit
You cannot subtract a string

Maybe in Javascript you can't, but you sure could design a language where you could subtract strings, if you wanted to. You could treat the strings as two arrays of characters and subtract them. The result would be the characters that are in the first string but not in the second string. "Hello" - "o" would be "Hell".

I'm sure you could do this in Ruby by monkeypatching the string class to overload the minus method.
Even spending two hours in the airport at each end doesn't even equal half the trip if I'm taking a 10-hour flight. And it's only 80% of the trip if I'm taking a 5-hour flight.
Vuvuzela: Scalable Private Messaging Resistant to Traffic Analysis [pdf]
It's unreasonable for the programmer to give integers as strings.

It's unreasonable for the computer to take integers given as strings and subtract them as integers anyway.

The former doesn't preclude the latter.
What the iOS GUI makes accessible to everyone is something other than computing.
>But wouldn't life be easier if we didn't rely on such purpose-driven mental states? Is it not possible to simply enjoy doing everyday things -- taking shower, eating, working, walking -- without contingent goals?

Well yes, but then everyone calls you a loser. http://www.theonion.com/article/unambitious-loser-with-happy...
People aren't taking offense to the comparison to clergy, they're amazed at the hubris.
I wonder if Jobs wrote the copy on the Ad. It's brilliant.
Politiwoops uploads its 1.1M-tweet collection to the Internet Archive
Yes, Easter (usually in April).

The four other times were Pentecost (in May), Assumption (in August), All Saints (in October) and Christmas (in December).

So not much happened between Christmas and Easter....
> Specialization is for insects.

As in, spending years to learn how to code instead of moving on to butchering that sonnet and comforting that hog.
What possibly value is there in coercing strings to integers for _some_ operations but not _all_? I can see rationales for always doing it or never doing it, but this seems like the worst of both worlds.
“Run Project Button” for GitHub, for Every Project
that compiles to C++ and has 2 decades of libraries and tools written for it?
What's interesting about this post is that the regular heap access is fast.

But the sub-class implementation is hit rather badly, which is rather more about the state of the JIT than anything else.

HeapMemorySegment (standalone) : 1,441 msecs

OffHeapMemorySegment (standalone) : 1,628 msecs

HeapMemorySegment (subclass) : 3,841 msecs

OffHeapMemorySegment (subclass) : 3,847 msecs
I'll freely admit I'm not a fan of dynamic languages (mostly due to hacking the Erlang HiPE compiler) and in a previous life I was a Haskell guy. So I'm a fan of strict typing.

> The unreasonable behavior is giving integers as strings.

That I can agree with. But in that case this notion of reusing '+' as string concatenation but '-' is coercing strings to integers is utterly bizarre.

I'm afraid to ask what '*' does (string replication?) and '/' "space magic"?
I have this issue occasionally, switching between sf::Vector2, b2Vec2, gVec2, etc. Something like drawLine({v.x,v.y},{w.x,w.y}) usually works in a lot of these cases, but I don't mind explicitly converting between representations in order to fulfil an interface.
The Apple-II cassette interface is simple,
fast, and I think most reliable. The data
transfer rate averages over 180 bytes per
second, and the recording scheme is compatible
with the interface used with the
Apple- I.

Note that this is almost as fast as the floppy disk drive on the Commodore 64. This is why people remember Woz but not the anonymous engineer(s) behind the 1541 disk drive.
AVG releases transparent privacy policy: Yes, we will sell your data
> On what basis could a company be banned from accepting it?

If by basis you mean authority, the Commerce Clause is most likely, though I suppose the Coinage Clause might be invoked as well.

If by basis you mean policy motivation, there's an infinite number of possibilities.

> No physical items are exchanged.

Government regulates acts that don't involve an exchange of "physical items", but just electronic data, all the time (pretty much all instance of wire fraud, CFAA violations, among many examples.)
I'm not sure if the elites of HN have spent much time among today's average youth, but they certainly aren't learning a common memetic foundation. They barely graduate from high school. And in fact, the average youth are what drag down today's achievers. The achievers are made to feel there's something wrong with them, and that it's a sin against the collective to try to be better than average.

Yet averages are precisely the problem. You throw your achievers together with the average, giving them nowhere to go and no outlets to explore. Programming is one of the few outlets, as it isn't compulsory, yet here we're talking about ripping that one away too.

I figured out what the original comment reminded me of:

https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....

"We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world."
I fly coast-to-coast regularly, it's about 12 hours door-to-door when I get a good connection and not even 7 of those hours are in the air.
A mostly not well written piece that is likely to do poorly on HN, but this one bit is good food for thought:

So it struck me as a little odd that so much of the recent debate over getting women to “lean in” has focused on getting them to adopt more of these dysfunctional leadership traits. Yes, these are the people we often choose as our leaders — but should they be?

A lot of advice given to women with ambition boils down to "behave more like men." From what I have seen, that tends to not work well for women.
Better question: why do so many incompetent people become leaders. I've had the mispleasure of working under some fabulously incompetent men and women in my time (and I've worked under some brilliant people of both genders as well).
The fiery crash landing in China was the pre-PRC era, where China was so weak that it was being carved up by the Europeans, Americans and Japanese.

The Cultural Revolution kicked off an era of double digit GDP growth in China, which persists to today.

I think the Cultural Revolution created one of the most politically educated generations in history. The PRC seems to have survived its graduate schools closing for a few years. Didn't the US and Europe see a dropoff in college and grad school during the early 1940s? They managed to survive that.

Personally I think that empowering young people to smash and burn Buddhist sculptures and paintings, and to eradicate the feudal vestiges of China are what helped it onto its current path of prosperity.

Also, the pathology of focusing on bodies instead of GDP per capita can be found in the US in the Social Security debate. Instead of dividing the GDP by the number of people collecting social security, they count bodies working and retired, as if GDP per capita were not rising. This approach only works where there is no GDP growth. GDP per capita in China doubled in the past eight years, and quadrupled in the past thirteen years.

The feudal thinking was that something like 4-2-1 is a problem. The standing committee of the Politburo of the communist party of China knows that the problem was too little economic growth, and too many children for each peasant family. If they thought your way, they really would be worse off.
The record for this category specifies a flat path.
True. "Run foo.run thing as root, so it can put stuff in /usr/bin, then switch to your regular account to use it". Oops!

The thing is, that ship has largely sailed, with the proliferation of package management that prompts you for a password to go sudo.

sudo apt-get install whatever # trust your distro
sudo ./foo.run # trust foo.run's publisher, a bit worse

> * A shell script just does whatever it wants, making it potentially surprising/destructive and difficult to clean up.*

Just like Windows installers---which is why we need utilities like Revo Uninstaller. This lets us run the application's uninstaller first, then scan the entire filesystem and registry for what looks like bits and pieces that might belong to that program, and let the user select which of them to blow off. I use it quite a bit.
This is completely wrong. Self-driving cars don't break Uber - self-driving cars will help Uber reach its full potential. The assertion that Uber is a service that matches riders with drivers is completely wrong. What Uber does is match passengers with potential rides. As far as Uber is concerned, today it is an unfortunate reality of technology that the only way that ride is fulfilled is with a driver.

Drivers represent a huge cost in Uber's operation, and just a cursory glance at Uber news reveals that drivers have also been the greatest threat to their legal legitimacy. Uber is as highly valued as it is because it is one transportation business whose model is completely safe in the autonomous vehicle world. Uber will operate in exactly the same way it does today -- we just won't have anyone up front.
>Now, I do think that had we not followed Aristotle and his basic logic principles we wouldn't have had science, nor reached the Moon, nor built smart-phones, but deep down we kind of all know that both Heraclitus and Hume are correct in their suggestion. I like to think that Einstein's laugh (apocriphical or not) was caused by this realization.

Actually, I think if we had started off with something more like empiricism than Aristotelian rationalism, we'd have gotten to modern sciences a lot sooner.
CSS is becoming more powerful and we should learn to use that power. I think calc() has huge potential, but you have to practice using it to really understand what it can do for your layouts, and that means putting bootstrap or whatever framework aside for a moment.
PublicTrades - Sell|Negotiate|Buy Product & Services in real-time
PublicTrades® is an online marketplace that allows users to buy, sell or negotiate product prices in real-time. PublicTrades provides a secure transaction platform that allows users to seamlessly trade goods and services in a social environment. With the combination of user friendly communication tools and secure transaction processing, PublicTrades is positioned to reinvent the universal tradition of negotiation. PublicTrades® also makes it possible for users to find, select nonprofit organizations and donate proceeds from product/services sales to various causes they support.
The process happens in 1-2-3 steps:
1. Users select an organization to donate new/used product items or services.
2. They upload details of the product items they'd like to donate on our system.
3. Potential buyers negotiate pricing with sellers live, and If item(s) gets sold ALL proceeds goes to that organization they select. Try free at www.publictrades.com
> Shaving an hour or two off the flying time

Concorde crossed the atlantic (JFK to Heathrow) in ~3h15 (flying time, excluding ACT delay and the like), a standard subsonic flight takes ~7h.
Wow, beautiful integration! Great content, too :-)
I think you're wrong, if only because compulsory education exists and politics is dominated by polarized political talking heads. I think your explanation is very optimistic. My explanation might sound cynical, but compulsory education in some part is clearly intended to mold children into parts that fit well into the economic machine, and another part is inculcating them into the civil religion of the nation.
One other good reason why e-voting may be a bad idea is that it opens the door to the powerful pressuring others to vote in a particular way. The secret ballot is important; if voting in public is possible, and it's possible to have some verifiable way of saying that a particular person voted a particular way, that can lead to abuses where, for example, employers force their employees to vote at work where their screens are being watched.
It would still help against compromise of the CDN, but not against compromise of the original source.

Of course it's a trade off. For stuff like Google Fonts, the Facebook like button etc I'd expect that hashes won't become common, because the effort of publishing changed hashes and embedding them into sites is to big.
Well, you probably wouldn't be able to construct a UIKit::Point from a CoreGraphics::Point in the first place (these aren't C++ libraries but let's just go along for the analogy) if they didn't know about each other. You'd have to strip out the X and Y yourself, and this is the moment where you should be wondering if that's legal to do.

And if the libraries do know about each other then it's even better, because you can just say

CoreGraphics::Point cgp = CoreGraphics::Point(0, 0);
UIKit::Point p = UIKit::Point(cgp);

and p could already be in the right coordinate frame.

Anyways, this isn't some constant thing. Java developers typically like abstraction, ruby guys like passing raw hashes and strings/symbols everywhere. My preferences change based on language, codebase size, and how many people I'm going to be working with.
Is the noise truly a probably or was that just lobbying by Boeing to make sure it didn't succeed?
This "biggest problem" also occurs with traditional intersections.

In both cases, traditional or roundabout, drivers are supposed to leave gaps in the traffic to at least let some cars through the intersection.

In both cases, if drivers don't follow that rule gridlock will ensue. In fact, 2-3 cars stuck in the middle of a traditional intersection is often all you need to completely block entry and exit traffic by preventing anyone from going straight or making left turns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlock
I worked at a place that outsourced writing, in part. It's a financial news site and some portion of the articles are written by a computer. So, outsourcing those things is less outrageous than it may first seem.
> Specialization is for insects.

The single most successful clade in the history of this earth.
OK, then, what is instant access to all of wikipedia, and to Google's entire search index, inside your pocket at all times? It is what computers have wrought. If you don't think "computing" means "using a computer," then fine. But at a higher level, my point is this: if I were master of the universe, I'd pick millions of people with iPhones over millions of people writing their own programs. For those who love programming, coding is an ends to itself. But in the real world it's not -- people don't care about the code, they just want to see pictures of their grandkids. The pictures of their grandkids are really making their life better in a way that shouldn't be dismissed as frivolous and "not real computing." If we don't make software for people to use in the real world, why do it at all?
Worse yet, the plane on display would not even "fly" as a cheap tourist trap. The Concorde may be a fascination symbol of stagnation, the absolute peak of the lighting fast development during the first half-dozen decades of aviation, a snapshot from just before progress suddenly stopped to be anything else than "same thing, just maybe a little cheaper". This is all very exciting for aviation geeks and people who like to think a lot about the younger history of technology, but those won't fill a restaurant. People who have never used the Concorde just don't have the level of nostalgia for it as some of those few that have.
Oh? Do tell.
It may depend on the kind of depression/situation, but I tend to agree. Meds can help you feel better initially, but the important thing to think and plan about is how to break the vicious circle. Explore some place you weren't, talk to strangers, lose stereotype, lose yourself.
So glad to finally have some data for the age-old debate over whether a JS framework is hot or past it's peak! I'll be curious to see how the team extends this, as it seems like there's so many new directions you can take this data over time.
I absolutely prefer strict typing myself. The issue becomes whether or not one thinks type coercion should be a thing.

I'm personally against type coercion - but I also understand how it functions (and why it functions). I disagree with the "why" but as long as I understand the "how" I can avoid gotchas like string coercion. :)

Multiplication ( * ) and division ( / ) coerce to integers. Only + is used for strings, particularly concatenation. Personally I'm a fan of & being used for string concatenation and can't think offhand why not to use it, other than slight possibility of confusion over &&. However I'm not aware of a language that uses it.

>>"5" * 5
25
>>"5" * "5"
25
>>"5" / 5
1
>>"5" / "5"
1
I worked with some Iraqi expats setting up an internet exchange in 2003/2004; it got too dangerous and too chaotic, so pivoted to satellite ISP. I ended up moving into a base, and then set up my own satellite ISP, and did backhaul for cellular, did various radio stuff, etc. Left in 2007. 2008-2010 I worked for a company doing medical imaging (radiology PACS) in hospitals across CENTCOM; worked with the satellite stuff but mainly linux servers in hospitals, which was my first exposure to the medical industry.
The rationale is that + is defined for strings, but - is not.
Ah good that you've thought of this too. Seems like you guys already have some good workarounds