skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you're an engineer and your boss gives you an order that will cause the company to engage in unlawful behavior you should probably (1) refuse the order, (2) find another job as soon as you can and (3) if you feel the situation is serious enough that the cost to your career is outweighed by the benefits to society consider to become a whistle-blower.

Professional engineers should definitely be obligated to uphold the public interest above all else, including the interest of their employers, and this includes the government.

Of course, in real life, it takes great courage to actually stand up to your employer and risk suffering the potential personal and professional consequences, which is why I hold so much respect for Snowden and the actions he took.

In Canada, graduating engineering students need to attend a ritual to receive their Iron Rings, and in it, they must make the engineering equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath that aims to cement this notion in their minds. [1]

In my opinion, something like this should be part of mandatory education. The lack of regard for professional ethics is what causes these decisions to be made higher up in the chain of command in the first place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual_of_the_Calling_of_an_En...
Yes, I did that too in the past for icons but now I just use inline svg - it's tiny and you can style then so... multicolor and animated icons!
The OP mentions font loading starts as soon as a .css directive using the font is encountered, which makes me think the initial html page load could include a tiny snippet of .css with the font defs and a dummy styling instruction that use the font. The idea is to load the rest of the .css in parallel with the .woffs. Would this work?

I guess prefetch does exactly that, but wondering if the "hack" would work.
> So change your User Agent so the website renders the way you like

So if I visit 100 different websites daily, and most of them are the ones I've never seen before - I will have to spend half of my life just writing stylesheets for each of them? No, thanks, It's not a world I want to live in...
You act as if the consequences were clear. Whatever analysis even the most sober and risk-averse 18-year-old student did in 2005 about her student loans could not have predicted the massive economic flustercluck we've been through in the past 10 years. Flawed inflation and wage growth assumptions alone have already likely doubled the long-term cost of those loans, even if you assume the student found the job they were essentially promised when they committed to the deal. The fact is that these kids were misled by a delusional society and egged on by greedy loan providers and desperately underfunded state universities.

You call it a moral hazard to forgive the debt, but the students who took the loans are the least-bad actors in this scenario.
So $1.20 more per month than more powerful VPS from competitors like OVH.
Accidental New Yorkers: Grandparents Relocate
When robots will be able to replace most of the jobs (which is not going to happen soon) the production of goods will increase and we will probably be able to afford a basic income or something like that. That would be a good times.
No. Society forced them into that choice.

What on earth makes you think the choice was not coerced? A student before the age of 18 is presented with an option. Here's one path - be in massive debt. Here's the other path - your hopes and dreams are shit. That's freedom? Hardly.

It's funny how all the moral hazard trolls come out of the woodwork as soon as something benefits poor people. Bank bailouts? No hazard. Corporate tax cuts? No hazard. Corporate subsidy? No hazard. Private prisons? No hazard. Help indentured slaves? HAZARD!
The Reign of Recycling
This doesn't actually appear to be new; at least not that I can tell.

Google Cloud has supported being able to open an SSH session to any of your instances right from the browser for awhile. I've found it to be a killer feature and am really surprised Amazon Web Services does not offer the same thing.
Both of these are by far not as important as sanitation, cheap food and affordable housing.

There is a big achievement in the 20th century, which is that the time-barrier has been slashed for spreading information, and that spreading information has become cheap. IMHO this is the biggest thing since the invention of writing (== communication over large distances) and the invention of printing (== cheap mass reproduction of information, but you still had to physically transport it around the world). The internet goes hand in hand with cheap personal communication devices, I give you that. It's a shame that it is mostly used for shopping and looking at cat images ;)
Frankly, one doesn't need to know anything about the case to find the idea that Google would balk at the request for a single payment of $25M to ensure that Android was free from claims of infringement is clearly nonsense. They spend more than that per year in food for their employees.

Of course, that's not true, and you know it's not true, since you replied earlier this year to someone who explained that the alleged offer was $20M + 10% of Android's revenue (capped at $25M) for a three year license - and this was in 2006, years before Android had even launched. FSM knows what Oracle would have demanded after Android was a proven success and Google had caved earlier.

Of course, one may still think Google should have paid whatever Sun/Oracle asked for, but let's not spread misinformation.
If this is for an installed price this is a huge deal, if it's just for the panel cost it's well meh considering that they are 1-2 years away from production at this point.
Many languages have a few programs for each benchmark. You can try looking at the shortest one.

Most submitters try to optimize for speed, and to use smart tricks you need more LOC, so usually the shortest program is the more straightforward.

Actually, in this site they don't measure the size of a program in LOC, they use the size of the compressed program that is a better metric.

(It may be different in other sites specialized in code golf, because in the those sites the submitters are specializing for size specifically.)
As someone fascinated with web design, typography, UI and the like, it may be worthwhile to point out that design can markedly enhance the rate at which salient information is digested, the real bitrate, if you like.

The website of an individual, a company, or even a framework like django rely on more than the digestion of facts, the factual-bitrate if you like. Perhaps not entirely scientific, but things like 'aura', 'emotion', 'atmosphere' and 'feel' can stimulate in a way in which a generic layout cannot. Design creates memorable impressions and literally colours our intuition and usage, allowing us to emote with others.

Although I acknowledge that the brain is not well understood, it seems plausible that some minds rely more on design (used in a very loose way here) than on a more scientific analytical mindset to interpret content and what is going on.

Note I did not use the word rational to refer to the latter mindset.

That's because humans are not particular rational. Trying to systematise the internet and remove all 'colour' would take away the beauty and the poetry of what the internet allows us to do.
I've been using this on Windows for ages and it's great. Too bad it's only for windows.
Education is never free; it always consumes some resources. The question is who should pay the cost: the student or everyone else?

In cases where basically everyone needs the education to succeed in society and the positive externalities are large (e.g., teaching young children to read), I think that the case for "everyone else" paying is pretty strong. In cases where the education is mostly consumption (i.e., the benefits all go to the student), the case for subsidizing is weak (e.g., a trust-fund kid getting multiple PhDs in impractical fields to have something to do).

So the main issue becomes: where does a Bachelor's degree lie on this spectrum?

1. Fields of study are very heterogeneous. Some majors have a much larger return on investment than others, so subsidizing all "higher education" equally probably doesn't make sense.

2. Even in Western Europe, college attendance rates are only around 1/3. Is it right to have that 1/3 subsidized by the 2/3 who don't go to college, and who on average have lower income?

3. (More speculative) To some extent, the payoff to a college education is not because of what you learn, but in signaling that you're a smart, conscientious, perseverant person. In that case, a degree becomes less valuable the more people that have them, and the case for subsidizing what has become an arms race becomes a lot weaker.

4. If we spend a lot of money and effort propping up the current, very expensive, forms of higher education, we might discourage better ways of educating from emerging. One example is something like Coursera, where the marginal cost of adding one more student is basically zero, and everyone can learn from the very best educators in the field. Another would be separate institutions for education and for testing / accreditation. This would help with grade inflation, bring back the focus in the educational institutions to teaching rather than credentialing, and provide more accountability (% of graduates passing a common exam is a lot easier to compare than future income of graduates, and is less confounded by things like socio-economic status of students).
If Google isn't doing that, wow, they ARE tracking GF users!
As an introduction to signals, The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing is pretty good(http://dspguide.com/)
you should also read this woman's blog http://www.windytan.com/
Show HN: Update Your Ghost Blogging Tags
Your comment reads of "Hey, you think you have it rough? Imagine THIS kind of life! This would be FAR worse! Look how insignificant your troubles are in comparison!"

One-upmanship like this never helps others feel better.
Poll: What cloud services provider do you use?
Having worked only with AWS running several large production and staging workloads for a long time now I'm curious about what others are using. Please leave some feedback on your experiences with others (positive or negative).

I'm mostly talking about services that provide full control over machines (so not Heroku) and also alternative services such as Lambda or some machine learning tools, etc (so not Digital Ocean even though I love them).

Thank you!
Other (please comment)
Well in all honesty if you end up leaning on it heavily in spite of the warning you kind of deserve whatever you get...

>This is a Beta release of Cloud Shell. This feature is not covered by any SLA or deprecation policy and may be subject to backward-incompatible changes.
Yes, it might be a hack [actually I don't think it is], but it should offer some powerful functionalities...
How I setup my VPS on ovh.com
Awesome. Thanks for the info!
Yes, it might be a hack, but it should offer some powerful functionalities... I'll remember this one.
I don't think that a linear relationship between temperature and CO2 level is a safe bet. The climate is pretty chaotic, it seems unlikely that such a simple relationship is true in general. It seems entirely possible that we'll hit some kind of runaway effect at some point that completely breaks the linear relationship.

Anyway, I'm not a climate scientist and there are a number of people who claim that 1000 GtCO2 lead to 2 degree warming, so your 1500 GtCO2 seem only a little optimistic. However, just reducing CO2 production is not enough. We have to completely stop, because CO2 takes basically forever to sequester from the atmosphere, and every degree of warming we cause increases the likelihood that we leave the "safe" linear-relationship territory.

See http://trillionthtonne.org/
12 August 1995: It Works
One way to deal with the student loans crisis is for a nationwide student loan bailout. You don't have to erase the loans, just refinance them at a much lower interest rate. Currently the rate is 7%, which is just insane. For a virtually no-risk loan, which cannot even be discharged in default, that is a terribly high rate.

Refinancing will be a transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor. Good for the economy, shores up consumption, and all that. Has the added side-benefit of freeing indentured slaves.
It is common in history for a royal court to raise the princes and marry the daughters of their enemies. The Persians (Story of Esther), Egyptians (Moshe), Greeks (Helen), Romans (Herold), Mongols, Ottomans did this to name a few. Integration, hostages, aslyum politics are a few reasons.
Stalins daughter is recent example in long tradition.
This is not an exercise in moral justification. I'm asking if there are any browsers that fail to render documents without <html> and <body> tags. Do you have an actual answer?
A year from now for that price is okay considering federal subsidies will end and you'll need that price to attract adoption.
This is a much more realistic outlook, and much better expressed than I ever could. Thank you.
Nice idea. I do a lot of my development SSHing to a resource rich VPS. For things that take a long time to run (Haskel stack builds, a long running machine learning calculation, etc.) it is great to not run that stuff on a laptop.

Cloud Shell is a bit different in the sense you would not want to try anything resource intensive on a micro instance. But for coordinating other services it makes sense.

I think Google needs to add one more thing to their cloud development toolkit: a public version of something close to their cider web based IDE that gives you access to work with any code you have in you private Google-hosted git repos, AppEngine and VPS services. nitrous.io has something like this, and I think that Google would do well to offer something similar for using the public version of their infrastructure.
I wasn't explicit with my earlier comment, you're right about the beta period. I was referring to after when they exit beta and are a good, useful service for a year or two.
Caveat: the slides indicate you can indicate prefetching via an HTTP header but in my local testing (and subsequent Googling) it appears that doesn't work in Chrome (perhaps it's Firefox-specific?).

Edit: found the relevant bug: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=58456
lol... here is another good quote:

> quantum theory implies that consciousness must exist and that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality.

Yeah? Really? Three strong words (implies, must, ultimate) yet the sentence remains weak.
When robocars and flying drones have converged into airdroids proper, they'll probably develop networked fleet intelligence for coordinated tasks and strategic planning. They'll be really useful then, with their aerial range covering all our airspace.

At that point I guess we can call them "Skynet" or something like that?
The hand-wavy way I've always thought about the Monty Hall problem is as follows:

When the contestant picked a box he was making a random choice between three boxes and had a probability of 1/3 of picking the car. The probability that one of the other two boxes was the car is thus 2/3. When Monty Hall opens a box it's still the case that the probability of the car being in the other two is 2/3 but the contestant can now eliminate the open box and knows that the probability that the car is in the other box is 2/3. Thus it's worth switching.
It's baffling for me that designers/coders don't realize that desktop and laptop display panels are probably the first thing a manufacturer will look at when it comes to cutting some corners and lowering the overall price of the product.

Also most 'normal' users will never pay the x4-x10 premium price for some fancy IPS display and calibrate its colors.
React + some sort sort of library to handle app state (Redux is recommended). You gain a modern componentised frontend app and the ability to render it server side. Server rendering of a React app is pretty simple, of order maybe a 100 lines of code or so. And that includes populating the server rendered pages from the same API as the frontend uses. Redux docs may be a decent place to start:

http://rackt.github.io/redux/docs/recipes/ServerRendering.ht...
Vice.com can have "mature" content.
There is a switch in Chromium where one can disable remote fonts entirely. Obviously not for the average user, and more of a power-user thing, but still handy:

--disable-remote-fonts

You can find a tonne of other optimizations you can do to Chromium here: peter.sh/feed/chromium-command-line-switches

Also if you want fonts that load faster than Google Wenfonts, have a look at http://brick.im/

I use Brick on a tonne of different side projects, and there is a marked decrease in loading time. Brick uses Fastly, which is (arguably) a faster CDN than Google Webfonts and other webfont initiatives like Adobe Webfonts.

Also using Brick is another chance to ban Google from your web traffic as many are doing...Google is like a barnacle that is stuck to the web and is hard to remove entirely without them slurping some of your data
Its like the opposite of walking your parents through something over the phone...
Military conquest doesn't work in a long run because enslaved people are very unmotivated. Economical conquest works much better. Natural resources are limited and not very profitable except for oil and gas.
Lending money is risky, and includes risks beyond a straight up cost/benefit analysis. It also makes the lender more vulnerable (not just to the borrower, but to others as well). It should never be entered into lightly.

What I mean is this: a lender who cannot choose who to lend to wisely will be pushed out of a free market. If the people they are lending to cannot pay them back in large numbers, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Agreed. I feel for these students as well, as there are a lot of social pressures to go to college.

But that empathy is short lived. We all have a free will. All these students could do the math prior to the commitment (I did!) and see the mountain of debt they'd be in. To say that it was someone else's fault is just yet another cop-out of a generation where it is socially acceptable to walk away from commitments and refuse to accept responsibility.
There where Soviet Illegals who hid in plain sight in both the USA and UK.

Any history of the cold war will cover them and the is of course the more recent case Ana Chapman and the Illegal ring that got busted not that long ago.
Author here. Thanks for all the kind words. README files are important, and I worked quite a bit on this one. Had some fun writing it.

A quick summary of the language itself: I felt I needed a smaller language than Perl 6 to "think" in as I mapped out exactly what we want from macros. If you're curious about the latest shape of that thinking process, you'll want to read https://gist.github.com/masak/13210c51f034f931af0c .

Implementing 007 has been a fun thing, and largely easier than I thought. Mostly bottlenecked by available tuits. Somewhat surprisingly, I found it much tougher going to implement user-defined operators than to implement macros. (But now that we have both, you can also haz custom operator macros!)

Next up, I plan to use 007 to map out as much of the terrain as possible covered by that gist above. That is, I want 007 to get synthetic Qtrees, really good handling of hygiene and lexical scoping, statement macros, maybe multis if I feel it's worth the trouble, introspection of Qtrees, and visitor macros.
How does the sync between machines work, in your experience?

Not that well. For me it's not a huge issue: I use an iMac as my primary machine and keep that as the primary database / state. If I end up doing a lot of work on a MacBook, I manually copy from it to the iMac.

I do need it to reliably sync 500,000 items across multiple computers though

Probably it's not for you! I think you can get a free trial, though, and test it.
CPPCon 2015 Presentations
So you would prefer living in China without DMCA over a Western country?
I normally am quite reserved about language use, but comparing google to OVH? Seriously? OVH is a dysfunctional company that somehow turns a profit.

We almost lost our company's domain name twice due to their incompetence.
These seem like good techniques.

But I still don't consider reliable FOUT a victory -- it's still annoying as a reader. I'm not sure if the final slide cross this out because his design has a solution to it, or because he decides not to consider it a problem. I _think_ the latter maybe? (Slidedeck without the accompanying narrative can be hard to interpret sometimes!). If so, I disagree, reliable FOUT with otherwise quick loading may be the lesser evil in the present environment, but it's still annoying.
That's nice. Devils Lake ND went with a little blue wave sign attached to the street lights to tell you how high the lake level is. It does make a person very mindful of what happens if the dike breaks.
If your competitors are not making money, you don't actually have to compete with them. Without revenue and growth and/or profit, that money is not an asset, but a time limit, after which they are done. Being well-funded does not make a competitor significant - only their actions and their product can do that.
That seems worth pursuing. I'd want to verify that when the font is loaded this way, it's loaded async, and doesn't stop further asset loading until complete. Or else it might not be a great solution.
Very strange. With some googling:

http://www.readingeagle.com/life/article/the-dentists-chair-...

> Researchers discovered 86 teeth in a floor drain under a shop near the Roman Forum. The teeth, originally discovered in 1987, were recently studied by a bioarchaeologist, and the results indicate the teeth were removed by a highly skilled Roman dentist from the first century A.D. The suggestion that the dentist was highly skilled is based on the fact that the teeth were decayed yet removed intact.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dentistry#History

Perhaps the explanation is not the low sugar diet, but the high fluorine in the water in that city, as cited in passing in the article.

But the low sugar angle is more moralistic and provide better linkbait titles.
I wish they sold their panels outright. I could use a few 100 watt panels at 55 bucks a shot. Even double that price, this would be a steal.
I understand worrying about burn rate and all that, but when the entire service costs the same as a single cup of coffee per month, it might just not matter. How well it works, what features it provides, and how well it interfaces with the rest of the cloud services you're using are much, much more important concerns than saving a buck a month.
"A staple of all performance discussion is the great Computer Language Benchmarks Game." this is so sad, but true
Ok, do you seriously not understand what it means to be the default stylesheet? Have you ever actually changed the font setting in the browser?

I didn't say anything about writing custom stylesheet for a particular website. I said you should change your user agent so it renders html in the style you want. You do this ONCE.
I tried to look into this once, and I _think_ Google's license for the free fonts, allows you to download all the font assets and serve them yourself if you want too. If you want to trade the convenience of google hosting for your own local hosting (or more likely your own CDN), to avoid tracking and have your own control of performance.

But I wasn't even completely sure I was reading Google's licenses right (and I don't have notes to track what docs I was looking at, sorry), and then other hosts like Adobe are another thing entirely.
The Curious Case of Competition Among Androids