skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A necessary skill, but honestly, a college-level skill that most students/people will opt out of because it doesn't sound sexy and it certainly has no direct-skill applications in the work world. If you put critical thinking as an item on your resume, only a very small crowd would view it as information rather than noise.

I guess the other wrinkle is explaining to people that "critical thinking" encompasses a lot more than destroying opposing arguments and building secure arguments of your own; critical thinking is a necessary but not sufficient skill to engage in formal debate, but that's not what most people use it for anyway. Critical thinking is a modality for interacting with the world, and its dictum is active engagement of ideas rather than passive reception and acceptance. Actively engaging with the world involves abstractly de-greasing the gears of their mental machinery so that they seize up and require hands-on attention more often. Rather than allowing an advertisement to blare its claims unchallenged as is default, critical thinking will consider the motives of the advertisers, their most effective methods, the target audience, the angles of human nature it is attempting to leverage, and the explicit or insinuated claims of the advertisement. The author notes broadly that being a sucker is both the cause and result of passively accepting outside claims/advertisements and physically acting based on the assumption that those claims are true. We can not say, however, that learning critical thinking will undo suckerdom (this was discussed in depth in The Republic), but it may innoculate people against falling for some future timeshare sale.

I have long thought about assembling course materials to teach critical thinking, and dreamt about creating an institute for the teaching of critical thinking. Once again, the trouble is convincing people that critical thinking is essential, even though to some of us it may seem obvious. The problem with getting people to take critical thinking seriously is that critical thinking looks a lot like what you'd learn in a philosophy or English class, which people identify with being useless because they don't translate into jobs as a skill directly. Unfortunately people seem to forget that critical thinking is practiced at a high level as part of science, instead preferring to lump scientific cognition into its own category which is framed as inscrutable to the commoners. If I had to teach people to think critically, I'd probably use a blend of media/propaganda study, formal logic, scientific method, rhetoric, and literary deconstruction-- I imagine that's enough to scare away all but the most determined.
I'll just leave this here...

"Quietly, some geeks are decentralizing the net. Again. Who are they? Why are they doing it? What new technologies are they using? How will this change the world?

We interview them to find out, and we're a community to help out."

http://redecentralize.org/
@sloverlord Hacker News is a steaming cesspool and I don't have time or desire to deal with their bandwidth demands, so I just block them.

https://twitter.com/jwz/status/665658171415859200
Because others might not be up with the terminology: in a Go struct an "embedded field" or "anonymous field" is a member of a struct that you didn't give a name to.

type MyType struct {
sync.Mutex // embedded/anonymous
mu sync.Mutex // not embedded
}

So AYBABTME's advice is to give the mutex a name.
Spanish speaking people tell me they find the Cuban accent difficult. Of course, it's all inter-comprehensible, but you're not refuting the OP's point.
The author's point, though, is to remove yourself from the institutions and support networks that have shaped you as a person your entire life. The military is the exact opposite of that. The military is the one institution in society that can bring the most pressure to bear in shaping your values and personality. I think it's kind of missing the authors subtler points to suggest that.
The only country where English is the native language is the UK.
Its kind of depressing to read this working on current projects knowing they will be meaningless in 15 years. So much for my life's work!
Pandora Protocol, Confusing Modern Forensics
As a former enlisted marine that later earned two STEM degrees and has been a practicing technologist for over 25 years, will have to disagree, but will concede that a four-year enlistment in some branches of the American military will have an effect on your behavior and perception for remainder of your life, regardless of your speacilty. And the military experience is not, in fact, "really alien and uncomfortable" to the 'intellectual' (whatever that genre may be defined as...), but the military culture can be 'uncomfortable' to the general society that the military is serving. The USMC has an extensive book-reading and continuing education requirments for both enlisted and officer. The MOS schoolhouse, wether combat arms or technical, is not a narrow, delimited curricula, and does not discuss only tactical considerations, but requires strategic thinking and emphasizes an ethical philospy not seen in anything outside of seminary school. While the previous 14 years have seen some very bad behavior by the military in SW Asia and Africa, the daily performance of the marine rifleman on combat patrol has been the best of any generation of marines that preceeded them, including WWII.

The downside to a tour in the military is that of distrust and isolationism. Your most trusted life-long friends will probably be those that were developed during a short four-year stint. You will have difficulty relating to those that did not share this experience.

Finally, few people are suited emotionally, intellectually, or physically for some military branches;and those branches having a less onerous lifestyle seem to have increased entrance requirments. And of those that do enlist but fail to complete initial training (43 graduated boot camp out of my 78 member platoon, and this was before today's more difficult training requirements), many are broken mentally and/or physically. A suggestion to start in the military is profoundly serious and should not be issued with any element of whimsy.
There is nothing preventing you from working on skills while being in the military.
yes. Go solar and wind. England can trade something for clean energy.
Personally I started to watch English and French movies without any kind of subtitles since about 2005. It certainly helped with my level of English.
I hear you. I moved onto Linux Mint for this very reason earlier this year. For 6 months, literally the only bug i encountered was that the USB mouse would freeze around once a week. All I had to do is unplug and re-plug. Everything was solid. Stability bliss. Unfortunately I couldn't live life without a large app ecosystem despite trying WINE and what have you, so finally jumped onto the OS X Bandwagon (couldn't bear going back to windows) and encountered a bug within an hour of use. I've had a new machine for 5 days only and encounter one new, annoying -- albeit trivial or minor -- bug everyday.
Patagonia’s Anti-Growth Strategy
> English, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, and German

Just curious, in what order did you learn them? That's a pretty diverse set.
Believe me, I know. I am expressing disdain for mediocrity.
You'd rather use a language full of undefined behavior as opposed to one in which (practically) every behavior of a program is specified by ECMA-262? To "avoid surprises at runtime"?
Epson WORKFORCE WF-2530 Driver
a response to this

> I really don't want to sound elitist, but my choice to go full Macbook and keep my custom built PC at home has never looked better.

not really name calling imho but ok, I know. It is not my normal behaviour.
While the overall issue is not about redistribution in the traditional sense, the battle lines often are.

On the one hand you have capitalist-optimists like Thiel who basically focus on increasing energy output from non-carbon sources (which tends to mean: nuclear). The effect is to maintain the status quo (everyone can keep on using energy without worrying about depleting a public good).

On the other hand you have the left focusing mainly on limiting / reducing carbon emissions. That is - in my opinion - an inherently redistributive project: when you allocate carbon emission allowances, you're effectively allocating production allowances.

Edit: specifically, it's redistributive on a country level: poorer countries would quite like to have a big carbon budget to burn while their economies grow.
French is supremely broken. It makes no fucking sense as it's influences are too varied. Which makes it great for poetry perhaps but not much else.
My comment was a plea for folks to stop posting — and writing — inflammatory material!
There are caching plugins for Wordpress, and you can configure Nginx to serve pages from the cache if no relevant cookies are set. So this feels a little like it's showing lack of knowledge about what's been done before.
I'm from Eastern Europe and I've heard from native speakers that we use perfect tenses more often than a native speak would.

It is interesting to see how much easier it is to communicate with other non-natives in English than with natives. I always struggled with UK accent and considered the US version simpler. However it seems British have developed more tolerance for varying accents over time, while Americans have often trouble understanding anything I said. For them, there was only one version of any given word and I was not using it.
Right. It's definitely interesting. I'm just tired of the "scientists are perplexed/baffled!" headlines.
Not sure it's down to the size of the country. More likely, it's the size of the community speaking the language, and the closeness of the language to English, together with some other factors.

During my time in Belgium, I found that few Liégeois spoke English, and one simply couldn't get by in Liège without being able to speak French. However, during visits to Antwerp, I could speak in English and people there were happy to reply in English.

So why the difference?

Dutch is a lot closer to English than French. Both are Germanic languages. I know English and French share a large common vocabulary, but grammar and basic vocabulary are quite different.

Dutch isn't spoken much outside of the Netherlands and Flanders, so there's more incentive for the Dutch and Flemish to learn a second language, and the obvious one is English.

Many people in Liège actively dislike speaking languages other than French.

Not many tourists go to Liège.

Brussels, though mostly French speaking, is more international, and gets more tourists, so English is spoken there, though French is preferred.
Yeah, its in the intro:

"In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad, known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories."

Vicious is another word I want to pronounce wrong if I see it in writing.

I think often English speakers have a similar but opposite problem - they are used to speaking words but when you come across them in writing you cant recognize them. The "typical" examples of this are gazebo and hyperbole.

I also think only very educated and well read people would know what half those words mean or how to pronounce them.
California lawmaker proposes using the Third Amendment to fight surveillance
Malcom – Malware Communications Analyzer
Interesting use of Electron.

Did you recreate the Gmail interface and leverage its API[1], or is this just running gmail.com in a webview?

[1] https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/?hl=en
did you read the link? the correct answer is probably "both"
There's a clojure/clojurescript library for interactive drawing (layered over Processing and ProcessingJS)[1] and at least one commercial product[2] that I'm aware of. Picking unique names across languages/platforms/sectors is hard and likely unreasonable.

[1] - https://github.com/quil/quil

[2] - https://www.narrativescience.com/quill
I must apologize, I think that surely people lives must not be so doom as in that series, but I find it difficult to watch a film in which people are really happy enjoying life. I can adventure an hypothesis: That many people has so high a goal that they never can reach that high mountain, hence is no wonder films are about killing criminals, war films, or enjoy life in prison.
It's easier to learn english than french.
> it is by no means clear that critical thinking is a coherent skill that is readily taught.

I agree with this...in so much as its not teachable in a traditional classroom setting. I think public pressure on universities is why there are so many programs that require a crappy 1 Saturday = 1 Credit Hour critical thinking course -- most of which amount to "think carefully about things".

I think teaching/learning critical thinking requires constant slow exposure to it and a commitment from the "teacher" to ferret out bad thinking over long periods of time. It requires exposure to hundreds, if not thousands, of real world scenarios so that the application of this kind of rational thought can be learned.

The hardest part is not falling back into the kind of irrational thinking that came before learning critical thought...it's a discipline and it needs to be cultivated and practiced over long periods of time.
I grew up on Macs from the System 7 to Mac OS 9 era, so this was a bit of nostalgia for me. I do think the OS was outdated even for its time. Memory protection could be found in Windows NT, OS/2 and every Unix-like OS to my knowledge. Meanwhile, Mac OS 9 could be segfaulted by a single failure to free memory in a third-party application. Nostalgia is not enough to make you look back on that fondly.

As an aside, those grey rectangles may be ugly to some but at least you had themes [1]. 15 years later, people went crazy at the addition of "Dark Mode" in OS X Yosemite.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_Manager
I haven't, but I might give it a watch.
I think the trivium is what needs to be learned by most people. Many people, especially Americans, have never even heard of it, unless they went to a classical education school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium
Examples are important in a story. It's hard to get upset about a long critique discussing systemic legal policy. It's easy to get upset about a human face for evil in a position of great power and trust -- which is what this judge is.

The issues are far worse than this one judge of course, they are widespread as the article states but it's very nice to have an example of the thought process and behavior of some of these people for those of who haven't encountered the criminal justice system before or aren't trained in law.
Long Strapless Chiffon Formal Gown
Is VIA what is left of the Cyrix/NatSemi MediaGX cores?
Ahh. Seems a little odd to me, but I can understand why it'd be inconvenient to be inadvertently DDOSd now and then
Show HN: SwiftyBeaver – a colored, fast, lightweight logger for Swift 2
Wrong: the only country where English is the native language is England. Wales, Scotland and Ireland were taught the language at the point of a sword.

Worse: English is a somewhat arbitrary set of different local dialects with heavy Icelandic and Scandinavian influences, and formalized by French and German ruling classes. Many things it might be, but hardly "native" of any given region.
Heimdal: a free implementation of the Kerberos V network authentication protocol
This is just a little intro cheat sheet, it's not supposed to be scary - quite the opposite, in fact. Easy things should be easy.

The magic is in the more advanced parts of the language. The, "hard things should be possible" parts.
The Danger of Urban Oil Drilling
Another hypothesis I can adventure is that my karma will be soon below zero, at this moment I have six (6) points, not a big deal to me.
In French, if you see the written word you can deduce with a few simple rules how it is pronouced. However, information is lost on the way, it's hard to reconstruct how the word is written based on the sound (and there are many homophones where this is just impossible).

In English there is not such deterministic way of simply deducing how a word is pronounced based on how it's written. In fact there are many heteronyms.

You have a tear in your trousers but a tear in your eye.

http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/english-pronunciation.html
Asus Chromebit CS10: Chrome OS on a Stick
I'm the sole developer and maintainer of raspberrypi.org - we're a small team at the Foundation and I do this alongside outreach, educational resources, teacher training, software development and other projects. We pay Mythic Beasts for a basic hosting service and they kindly provide us with a full support service in running the server and keeping the site and other services on the machine alive. That one machine runs various Raspberry Pi sub-sites, the Raspbian and NOOBS downloads server, the Raspbian apt mirror, MPEG licence key generation and more.

1. Why PHP?

We all know PHP sucks (we advocate Python in education), but WordPress is ideal for authors and contributors and that's what we had to begin with.

2. Why WordPress?

When I joined the Foundation in 2013 they had a WordPress site Eben set up in 2011 and I wanted to keep the great user experience WordPress provides to authors and contributors so I built a bespoke theme expanding the content beyond the simple blog, keeping all former URLs working despite changes to the URL structure. Some of the newer content, like documentation and learning resources, is outside of WordPress and is pulled in from github and rendered into templates.

3. But why not build your own bespoke framework?

Firstly, if I did that, you'd tell me perfectly good web frameworks already exist. Secondly, WordPress is very mature and it's easy to add functionality quickly. I'm not talking about BS plugins - I hardly use any. I mean it's easy to add stuff into the templates, stuff you're likely to want to do. Finally, I'd rather spend my time and the Foundation's money doing educational projects.

4. WordPress caching plugins exist. Why don't you just use them?

We use WP Super Cache. It does most of what we want, but has some pretty fatal flaws: it doesn't go to cache for "logged in users" (including anyone who's ever made a comment), it recreates the cache after every comment, it does some work to figure out of it can give the user a cached page or not (this slows it down a lot), it doesn't cache the 404 page (more important than you'd think) and it doesn't cache requests with any GET methods params. Mythic created their own static page generating script for the pages with the most hits which updates every minute, and that's what kept us alive this time.

5. Why not use NGINX?

See a full article on this here: http://blog.mythic-beasts.com/2014/11/14/hiphop-and-wordpres...

6. What about hiphop vm?

We tried it. Fast but unreliable. We saw a huge rise in performance but most of that came from the upgrade from Wheezy's PHP 5.3. Compared to Jessie's PHP 5.6 was less impressive.
Someone fluent in English should rewrite antirez's post and submit it as a diff to the author. I for one, would really enjoy learning from it.
Personal knowledge of a wrong would depend on the wrong. Seeing the wrong on TV/video could give one personal knowledge but could equally mislead. Example, if you saw video of a cop shot someone without any provocation, you might think that is a wrong, but what if seconds before the video began recording the cop was stabbed with a knife. Again the concept I'm getting at is generally having all the facts.

And it would appear Judge Gordon:

1. Is shooting first asking questions later (not appointing counsel before indictments),

2. Seemly made disgusting comments about the nature of the criminal system.

Not supporting the judge and what he did/said, but:

1. The law of the jurisdiction may not require the appointment of a lawyer prior to indictment (in other words, the judge was sworn to uphold the constitution and did not violate it, even though some/maybe a majority want greater safeguards).

2. Looking at the Judges comments they appear disgusting, but more of a description or a matter of fact telling of the way the system works, but not necessarily the Judge supporting the way it works (many of us may do our job as required even though we think it's not the best way)

3. The individual was not appointed counsel and this individual sat in jail for a year without bond (n=1). This is a judge who has been on the bench ~30 years, so in this instance personal knowledge would be the facts of this case (either the defendant was shown to be a danger to the community or a flight risk) and to a greater degree more insightful statistics (how many people with lawyers vs those without lawyers did not recieve bond). May be statistics would show defendants with lawyers are denied bond at a hire rate in front of Judge Gordon than those would could not afford one and were not appointed one.
> I should point out that it is by no means clear that critical thinking is a coherent skill that is readily taught.[1]

Possibly not, but the Form 3 and 4 Social Studies modules I did on analysis of the language of politics and advertising were very useful. I was shocked to discover as an adult that while Social Studies was a mandatory high school class in New Zealand, those modules weren't.
The history of Android
we don't do joke threads well here on purpose
Fusion will change everything if we can actually make it work for our general power generation needs. Unfortunately, it's one of those technologies that is always going to arrive "soon".

I fully support investment in fusion research (and pure-research in general), but the reality is we can't wait for technologies that are still technically vaporware. Solar and wind are in the same situation. I expect we will be able to make much more efficient solar generation technologies and find a way to store power at the TWh scale. When we have reached those goals, we can re-evaluate, but right now waiting means choosing to use more coal/oil/gas.

> ... solar ... reducing demand for coal/oil/gas ...

Unfortunately, that's not always the case when solar ends up using a "natural gas backup" to solve the reliability problem.
> Singling out one particular judge who happened to make stupid comments in an interview won't change those policies.

Too bad, but starting with the destruction of the careers of people who should have exercised discretion may be what has to happen when the system is unresponsive. Too bad about whether it should be a matter for the people of that state. They don't get to run a legal swamp in isolation.
> Then the cloud, smart phones, and the HTML5 "living standard"

And the GNOME 3 rewrite.
In Romania, my country, we are also not dubbing movies, although there is a trend for that when it comes to cartoons for little kids. In Bulgaria on the other hand, our neighbors, they've been dubbing movies at least since I was little. Not sure what the deal is there, but Romania has almost 3 times the population of Bulgaria, so I don't buy that it's about size.

Anyway, in Romania we are speaking far better English than any of our neighbors, which includes Hungary and Ukraine. I used to think that happens because Romanian is a romance language, but that doesn't fully explain it. Oh, and people here learn Italian and Spanish as well, almost effortlessly, just by watching soap opera :-) And many of us have learned French in school, though I was not lucky to have good teachers.

BTW, English has some nice features for learners. For example it doesn't assign gender to objects, like all romance languages are doing. Those of us that speak in such languages forgot how hard it was to learn those genders when we were kids.