skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even without inspecting every single leak of Snowden, I believe that some of what he leaked shouldn't have been, as it is unlikely that he is perfect. However, if we want to demand perfection from our whistleblowers, then we are going to have to wait a long time.

Snowden did not have the option of leaking one or two things, then poring over data and leaking a few more. He had one shot to grab as much evidence as possible and flee the country. Given those constraints, I think his behavior was appropriate.

What is really to blame here is a system that made Snowden's method of revealing this data the best choice if you want to minimize your own chances of being tortured. Everyone who worked to ensure that complaints and dissatisfaction with mass surveillance were treated as traitors even before the Snowden leaks.
>Which functions have they excluded? You mentioned counting characters, but you haven't actually specified which definition of characters you want it to use.

The typical human definition of characters. Humans usually don't think about bits or bytes and they shouldn't have to. A character is a single independent glyph, a separate unit that would be taught to a human whilst learning to write, regardless of the internal representation in the computer.

If I need something else, I should ask for something else.

Hypothetical API calls that may address this:

"String".length()

"String".lengthInBytes()

"String".lengthInCodePoints()

This would provide standard implementations for these common functions (circumventing the issue of copying a random chunk of code from SO and all its attendant problems), make it obvious that there is a difference to anyone browsing the docs and/or using autocomplete, and make it easy to select and use the one you actually want in a particular situation. This type of discoverability is an important component in a usable API.
The moral of the story is to use random serial numbers.
(disclaimer: I work on the Flutter team)

Yes, strong mode is something the Flutter team uses to help check their code.

Dart is pretty cool this way: you can scale up or down how much "typiness" you want. As your program matures, you can dial up the static type checking. Hence: strong mode.
You'd basically be estimating the size of the first batch at that point. Which is fine, until they capture a tank somewhere else that has a number of 230.
In Europe we do localize our applications, no such luck with 99% English.
It prevents the government from saying "You can't sell your software in our country unless we can see the code."

And that's about it.
Build Real-Time Search on Google AppEngine with Algolia
So from I'm understanding here, the volatile keyword makes sure that the code always has the latest value when it is read by a thread. Otherwise, you might get a cached value.

A lock, on the other hand, does the same thing, but goes further in preventing other threads from changing the value while the lock is in place.

So the volatile keyword seems to be great for read-only operations on data shared between threads, but won't prevent a race condition if the same code that is reading the data is also updating the value. A lock would be necessary for that.

Interesting. I knew about volatile in C++, but I wasn't aware that C# had a volatile as well.
IoT Ambient Light Using VIPER and Python
Similar in terms of rebutting the idea that a "lifestyle business" is something to be dismissed out of hand as not really a serious business.
3.5M people are coming together to meditate and celebrate peace
I am so sorry about that! I misread and thought it was US-specific.
Internal Clojure Libraries
What I'd like to know is what's the best way to gauge a candidate's coding ability when they say they don't have any code samples to share? (They all have excuses.) I dislike giving homework assignments, and while a lot of people advocate the contract side project (like this guy), I dislike those as well because they take a lot of time and effort. If I wanted to be a contractor, I'd be a contractor, and if I wanted to hire a contractor, I'd hire a contractor. The paperwork and commitment involved is pretty great, and if we assume that Hansson accepts 150 applications, rejects 80% of candidates out of hand, and the remaining 20% send in code samples (or are required to write code samples), then that's still 30 candidates that I have to spend time talking to and reviewing code and potentially doing contract paperwork, only to reject 29 of them in the end. That's a minimum of 60 hours on the phone (tech screens) and a minimum of another 15-30 hours reviewing code samples before I even bring them on site.

Is that really the best use of my time and money?

I think that's really the big problem to solve. How do you prove they can code before they even walk through the door? How do you make sure that you're not wasting your money on people who can't even write "great" code?
This article was trash. If the author thinks that Twitter's main function is finding out what your friends ate for dinner then he's an idiot and doesn't use Twitter. Twitter's problem is exactly this. The general Internet population thinks it's like Facebook but less useful and with a character limit. They have a branding problem
Ok. Great:).
I'll note that's the entire point of Monty's (great) article, which has this near the top:

Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space.

This has all been known to anyone with actual signal processing and/or audio engineering knowledge for a long time now. As in, common knowledge to the kinds of folks attending the AES conference at least back to ~2001 or so. The high sample rate/bit depth stuff is useful for production process, but irrelevant for final distribution.
This is a good idea, though we shouldn't act like it's completely novel. I received most of my math education in the US (I was a math major in college as well), and my high school calculus textbook (this was in the US) was very open about how some of the problems were there to be tackled rather than solved. There were almost always a few problems at the end of the chapter that weren't easily solvable without the principles and techniques that would be introduced in the next chapter. You might be able to estimate it, brute force it, various other things… who knows, maybe you'd discover the next chapter for yourself.

Personally, I think it's an excellent approach. It does sound like Singapore is doing this much earlier in math education than I encountered it in the US.

In spite of all this, I don't see the technique as being especially promising in the US. Not because I think it's a bad approach - I think it is an excellent one. But because people in the US seem to think that they need to copy a process from Singapore or Finland or whatever. Oh, see, what we need to do is teach productive failure. Let's get it into the textbooks!

What we need to do is to start drawing our math teachers from the top tier of math graduates who are inclined to teach and show talent. A lot of these processes that we try to copy from other countries come naturally to people who really understand math and are good at teaching it. I'm not saying there should be no agreed on curriculum, but these success stories, I think, are more the outcome of talented teachers than a curriculum created and imposed from above.
I didn't write this so I am not in a good place to argue in favor or against any pattern, but the obvious answer here would be the needs of the application justify a Singleton. The app doesn't support more than one Calculator, adding additional object management for a feature that isn't necessary is strictly wasted effort.

I don't think it's a "key event" in the sense you're imagining. The store is a black box around a calculator device with emulated physical buttons, so "back key pressed" is one of the store's fundamental actions. I might be wrong about this.
Wow, I have never seen that before. Thank you!!!!
I May have :-)
End of an era! While a lot of ex-founder partner/VC people seem to think mostly about nation-building, vision, and the marketing buzzwords you'd find on an analytics dashboard, Garry's advice is always extremely concrete and close the the metal. When success came, he never rolled down his sleeves and stopped building and that's something most of us around here can really respect.

Enjoy your time away Garry, excited to see what you build next!
"These are rules for States. It has no bearing whatsoever on the GPL."

TPP is designed to give commercial entities equivalent rights to nation states. That's what the 'Investor-State Dispute Settlement' provisions refer to. Under these provisions a commercial entity could 'steal' Open Source code, without the requirement to release the source code. In effect rendering licenses such as the GPL unenforceable. At the very least it may cause a dilution and hinder the growth of the Open Source sector. Now I wonder whose interests that that would advance and who helped to write such provisions.
I propose a corollary to the "bugs are shallow" quote: "Given enough code output, all programmers are stupid"
Well, to be fair, most Americans are unlikely to care about foreign surveillance (although I can hear Team America World Police playing in the background right about now...).

The issues that upset Americans is going to be the domestic surveillance programs.
Where did I say publication is a claim of conclusive proof?

I said they published papers in which they claimed they conclusively proved something, and it turned out they didn't conclusively prove anything. Specifically, because their results couldn't be reproduced.

In case you're not familiar with how experiments are carried out in natural sciences, "results couldn't be reproduced" means that

1. They claimed they got <these results> with p < <this threshold>

2. Some other guys repeated the same experiment ("repeated" as in they administered the same substances, to a sample of equal size under similar conditions and measured the same parameters under similar conditions) and it turned out that on their results, p was through the roof.

In some cases, that was simply because the authors didn't publish enough information for their experiments to be repeated (I was close to making that mistake, too. Thank God for review committees). But in most cases, that simply happened because authors cherry-picked data or "optimistically" interpreted results.

(Edit: Responsible review committees can sometimes spot the latter, but it's very hard to deal with the former. The correct thing to do is to have all researchers publish all their experimental data, even the one which wasn't included in the papers. A lot of researchers agree, but you'll find that a lot of companies that employ researchers actively invent reasons why their researchers shouldn't do that.)

> If you set your p-value threshold at .05, then one in twenty experiments will produce a false positive.

> The reason is simple: given a p-threshold of .05, one in five experiments will yield a false positive.

Make up your mind already.
Why do high quality DACs clearly sound better then? And they sound better with better files. Maybe it really is all in my head but I mean listening to a £20000 hifi the other day (vinyl) really just shocked me.

I was listening to Marvin Gaye on my friends system and I could hear that there were several different backing singers all moving and at different distances from the microphone.

Are there any double blind trials anywhere of Vinyl/CD/24-192khz with super high end hifi systems? Mostly I see people suggesting that these tests are performed from the phono output of a mac with a pair of average ear buds...
I was curious instantly whether or not the acoustics carried as well in open spaces. Here's a video of the instrument being played on the beach. Seems that it does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_LW-eUYt7Y
Can you explain why you think they experienced "legal exploitation of vulnerable population'? Ie it's not something that's intuitive to me and I'd like to know more.
True, but that's generally one thing you can truly control about your work. "Hard enough" could be replace by "smart enough" or a handful of other terms.
Thanks for the comment. We'll change our FAQ. Issue filed here: https://github.com/flutter/flutter.github.io/issues/55
There's a reasonable argument that fits within DSP theory that frequencies sampled above audible range could have harmonics down in the audible range.
I also take those other positions.

Government is not strictly necessary. Government can operate without the same currency as is used in the non-government markets. Government can fund most of its core functions by creation of fiat currency. Government can be run on sources of revenue other than taxation.

(Some of these implicitly assume a certain definition of "government". Some people might say that an organization that does not tax is not a government. Others may define the "governmentness" of an organization by different criteria. My definition allows for governments that cannot or do not tax.)

That doesn't necessarily mean that any system that demonstrates such possibilities would be subjectively better than anything already seen in practice. So far, I am aware of no controlled experiment that has tested any those hypotheses. It might not even be possible to run one. Sometimes the answer to a yes-no question is "I don't know [yet]."

I have no knowledge of the truth of the hypotheses. I don't know whether a taxing government is objectively necessary or not. The anecdotal historical evidence suggests that it is not, but also that any society that lacks a government tax is eventually undermined and overwhelmed by a society that has a tax. The tax funds warfare, either as military, economic, or both. If you don't contribute to professional soldiers or financiers voluntarily, your people get conquered, assimilated, indebted, or enslaved, and have to do it anyway.

Aside from that, in most cases, it is reasonable to reason from a point where you assume one or more untested or untestable statements to be true, but you should be aware that you are not covering the entire problem space.

Assuming that taxation is necessary, it should be possible to say that there exists a system of taxation that is most fair among all systems of taxation. But you cannot then say that is the fairest possible system, because you have not even investigated any system that does not employ taxation.

So if you cannot imagine any such system for the purposes of comparison, your lack of imagination may indirectly be making the world less fair than it could be.
You might have to sacrifice a cat to find out, but you won't find that out until you open the box.
I'm of the opinion that the more the better. It's not about choosing a dominant or #1 framework, it's about what works best for what you are doing.
My life experience has been that Christian vs. non-Christian is not a valuable lens through which to view the world and will lead you to some pretty crazy places, and it looks like you have landed in one of those crazy places.
I think the Swift String API has a lot going for it conceptually.

But I have a big problem with knowing so little about the performance and memory usage characteristics of the functions I'm calling and the strings I'm keeping in data structures.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the API is extremely incomplete. A ton of things can only be done by resorting to NSString functions and that, I think, requires the String being copied into a UTF-16 representation underneath. Or does it? I don't know. That's exactly the problem.

The idea of putting grapheme clusters at the center of the string universe is great when it comes to text that users see and manipulate. It's excellent for writing word processors.

But it is not convenient for analysing large amounts of text data or for parsing semi structured text formats where we have a lot of fixed length stuff that could be conveniently accessed using numeric slice indexes.

I think Swift's String class would work very well as a view on top of a UTF-8 buffer.
MinGW-w64 also lacks ASLR and DEP. As a result most FOSS Windows packages lack them as well:

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19011
Snowden was their source for this information, how is he not responsible for revealing this to the public? He wasn't telling the reporter this information in confidence. What he did do, is simply turn over non-redacted documents and let the media outlets redact at-will to find the newsworthy story. Regardless of the story that comes out, Snowden is the reason it is out there now, that makes him responsible for it.
This is the tech Holy Grail. Get rid of that expensive development team and let marketing "do something up".

Just ... not ... gonna ... happen (for any reasonable definition of "app").
Dart might not be for you, but it's definitely for me. If everyone uses the same platform, things would never be fun.
Anything you use will be obsolete by 2020 unless you are updating your app to stay current. If you're preserving your environment it will still function regardless of your stack or how old/obsolete the code and frameworks are.
Aaron Swartz Day – Hackathon, Privacy-Enabling Conference and Reception
I'm more amused by how that statement makes it sound like the runway is the goal.
Guts of Phoenix websocket channels
The ironic part is that the people who rail against Snowden in grabbing "everything" instead of only the "bad, important stuff" is exactly what Snowden is demonstrating that the government is doing! If they hate what Snowden did, why don't they hate what the government is doing in SECRET, to EVERYONE?
To audit the firmware of the emission control systems in their cars, for example.
Never got a chance to meet Garry but always enjoyed following his blog and the insights/advice he shared. He always seemed incredibly genuine and vested in the success of others. Best of luck in this next chapter, Garry!
When it was first announced there was huge hype here on HN. I myself signed up. We were all really hoping that somebody had finally solved the cross-platform development pain. I was excited to see what the platform was going to do because at my company we really do feel the pain of developing for multiple platforms. So the investment isn't a surprise to me considering a CEO with a previous exit success and all the hype.

When they launched, though, it was just lackluster and had some major rendering bugs. It felt like the air got let out of the tires and everybody just moved on. So looking at it now, it's definitely difficult to see what all the hype was about.
I will never understand how startups like this get money with such incompetent leadership.

Look at how this Famo.us office tour showcases the waste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imc1p_laIt4
#GeekListener v.1 – weekly digest of geeks tweets with comic comments
A Bayesian Model to Calculate Whether My Wife Is Pregnant or Not
Michael Bloomberg Targets Attorneys General with Ads on Carbon Emissions
«Beyond that everything else is either "shove html in a web view" or the xamarin approach which, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is closer to the approach of QT in that it renders all its own controls.»

Xamarin uses native components, in a similar manner to react-native. (Or more accurately, the other way round, Xamarin pre-dating react-native.)

I also wish react-native or NativeScript would actually provide/finish Windows Mobile/UWP support, but I'm not currently holding my breath. (That said, at least Windows supports JS as a native build stack so maybe you don't really need react-native/NativeScript to support Windows, you just need some glue scripts...)
>Why do high quality DACs clearly sound better then? And they sound better with better files. Maybe it really is all on my head but I mean listening to a £20000 hifi the other day...

You were listening to £20,000 worth of amps and speakers, and you were most likely in an acoustically treated room.

Also, novelty is almost always euphonic when it isn't overtly bad. This fact is often neglected. You hear something you didn't hear before and your brain immediately tells you that it sounds better, even if it doesn't actually represent higher fidelity. Actually making an objective judgement requires a careersworth of experience, or a test lab and the skills to use it.

For example: you were listening to vinyl, which is covered in delicious noise and warm harmonic distortion, and is mastered differently. Highly euphonic, very novel if youve only ever heard the CD version before, but definitely not higher fidelity.

BTW higher end DACs do sound better, but the rest of your signal chain needs to be really good for you to notice it. It's often to do with better phase accuracy between the left and right channels, which affects the soundstage, or stereo image. If your speakers/amp have loose timing however, you'll never be able to tell.
Anecdotal, but I'm a mobile developer who also dabbles with some web apps and I hate Javascript.
Read the research - they are accounted for.

CONSAD, Pew, and the U.S. Dept. of Labor have provided strong statistical evidence from research that the 4.5-7 percent gender wage gap exists. Your fixation on accounted-for factors and unwillingness to accept the facts is textbook confirmation bias.
"React Native is taking off"

"Crap. Anybody got anything?"

"Jimmy has a brainfuck to Objective-C transpiler"

"Anybody else?"

"How about non-native controls with a language no one cares about?"

"Ship it"
We've always had anonymous money: Cash and money laundering

Regions like Scandanavia are trying to eliminate anonymous money.

If you eliminate anonymous money, it is unclear how freedom of speech, religion, inquiry etc can be preserved.

Anonymous money is always going to be less convenient that paying in the clear. But it should exist.

Good Luck Electric Coiners
I'd say it's a primary purpose, rather than the primary purpose. I do agree that the downsides to anonymous currency can outweigh the upsides.
From my experience, what matters more than sample rate is 24 bit vs. 16 bit sampling in the recording/production process. Using heavy compression and EQ can mean that very quiet sounds can become louder, in this case 24 bit recording is ideal. Sample rate wise, anything above 40khz is fine for most ears (I've probably lost a few khz in the upper range anyways) Another note is that most converters operate at a multiple of 48K, so it makes sense to use 48/96khz if you are recording. It all comes down to how much disk space you have, and want to use up.
I've also thought about those dual-flush handles while sojourning in various airports. To me, up-for-2 makes more sense: most people are going to pee in the thing, and most people are going to flush down, because that's what comes most naturally. Down should be the flush that conserves best, since that's the intended function of the thing. If a down flush is not sufficient, you can just flush again. Actually, why do we need an up flush at all?
Flutter is in line with Google's business objectives. The more people transition to mobile apps, the more mobile searches people will make (as opposed to in-app searches.)

They don't care if you are on Android or on mobile web, so cannibalization here isn't an issue; both lead to Google searches.
The nigger is a sad stubborn stupid fuck.

The CIA has no engineers, just psychologists.
In this case, yes, they should. Assume they spent 15.5 million on their javascript framework and 15.5 million on the famous.org domain.

The domain has a value of ~$25,000 (-99.8% return on investment).

The javascript framework has a value of $0 (-100% return on investment).
Heh, that reminds me of a few years back, when I was at Lockheed I printed several demotivatioal posters and quietly placed them up around the office.

I got reprimanded by HR after they found this poster I put up in one of the interview rooms: http://i.imgur.com/dzk0YcA.jpg

HR was interviewing someone who was seeking H1-B and noticed this poster hanging on the wall during the interview...