skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The baby-boomer generation basically invented ageism when they were young in the 70's

Earlier than that. The original "Never trust anyone over 30" was already a saying by the mid-sixties as a consequence of FSM: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement

The movement itself was just another step in the protests of the civil liberties movement, and to some degree HUAC. I'm sure we could go back farther, but that's just off the top of my head.

Essentially, every new generation denigrates the older generation, and each older generation thinks the newer generation is going to hell-in-a-handbasket.

There is nothing new under the sun.
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Thank you. I think the sociopath meme is getting a bit tired.
IMO one of the reasons for all the angst is that .encode() and .decode() are so ambiguous and unintuitive which makes them incredibly confusing to use. Which direction are you converting? From what to what? The whole unicode thing is hard enough to understand without Python's encoding and decoding functions adding to the mystery. I still have to refer to the documentation to make sure I'm encoding or decoding as expected.

I think there would have been much less of a problem if encode and decode were far more obvious, unambiguous and intuitive to use. Probably without there being two functions.

Still a problem of course today.
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Only in the limited sense that Telegram appears to at least have an intention of really providing private messaging and one might hope that they one day drop the delusions of grandeur and start to take seriously constructive criticism about how to do it right, as you and others have presented in other threads here.

My understanding of the Whatsapp end-to-end-encryption is that the use of the term is completely misleading, as the "ends" they are referring to are the client and the Whatsapp server (https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/general/21864047). Unless you know otherwise, I take that to mean the communications are in the clear at Facebook, and in my estimation that's tantamount to piping them straight into the US surveillance machinery through whatever they call PRISM these days, or some more or less distant relative of it. (This arrangement would still offer protection from bad actors that don't have some form of easy access to Facebook's internal information).

Both seem like dreadful options in absolute terms, but if we're comparing I'd slightly rather have that user base in the hands of someone possibly sincere and incompetent than with someone competent but almost certainly treacherous. At least there is a sliver of hope for improvement and, who knows, maybe once they're off the paved road of Whatsapp they'll wobble their way though other alternatives to something like Signal eventually.

Since we're fortunate enough to have you here anyway, would you mind commenting on how Signal would fare under a similar blockade? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10750898

Would the service be taken down? Do you consider it a priority to try making it difficult to block in the default configuration?
For a modern game, is there any particular reason why 'seed = SHA256(seed + "reseed"); return SHA256(seed + "value")' isn't a good enough, performant enough RNG?
Well, Perl 6 also introduces a distinction between strings (Unicode) und buffers (octets), but it also introduces loads of other changes, to the point where it's its own language.

That said, the Unicode features were a major thing planned for PHP 6, and (afaict) one of the reasons there has never been a PHP 6, but rather they went straight from 5 to 7.

I'm not aware of any graceful transitions.
Are you including interacting with oneself?
Are there any use cases for which a good CSPRNG, with a fixed 256-bit seed at process startup from /dev/urandom or equivalent, is not fast enough?

Last time this came up on HN, I measured individual reads from /dev/urandom, and those are fast enough for many large-scale applications, like one per tweet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10608843

(Obviously there are bad CSPRNGs, but there are also bad non-CS PRNGs. So let's not count those.)
So this is meant as art? Ok. It should be judged as art.

It's junk art. Another madonna. Big deal. The image of mother and child has been done to death in every medium. Doing it again in a new one isn't saying much. The author picked a subject to trigger a boringly predictable emotional response. It is as much art as the latest kittens meet puppies youtube sensation.

Leave the art to actual artists. If you want your medical machine to create art, allocate some time for artists. Treat it like every other mother treats a sonogram. Put in on the mantle, not the internet. Don't waste time/money/helium on hack projects in an attempt to generate news.
If you couldn't make your way through undergraduate CS exams, why do you think that you'll be able to sustain 100% effort on anything?
Indexing HTTPS pages by default
Putting a number on the stellar rise of .io domains
Damn, it seems the only benefit to JQuery over Vanilla JS is "document.querySelector" == "$"

For most of my uses of jquery that is :)

Guess I'm bookmarking that page and dropping jquery
Got no response yet
"Sick" may not be in a medical dictionary, but that doesn't mean it's not a real word.

A sociopath is someone without a conscience. That's the dictionary definition, and it's absolutely applicable in this case.
I've read a bit about him but did not see that. Thanks.

So, my confusion still remains as to how he accumulated that much capital in the first place.

EDIT: Yes, perhaps through greed and malice. But how exactly? To go from nothing to enough money to buy companies is quite a jump and you need several consecutive breaks/perfect opportunities.
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And extreme luck.
For whom is it positive that these tax credits will end? Not to mention, I find it ironic that Republicans were opposed to continued tax credits for anyone ever...
As a kid growing up in India I always thought of cancer as some western disease. I only knew one person who had cancer.

Now I know tons of people who have died from cancer or are battling it. Perhaps it was under diagnosed but I some blame it on "westernization" .
Please please please do not use ./configure aka autohell.

Study the Makefiles in http://git.suckless.org/

Straightforward & fast.
I think the question was if you aren't going to be backwards compatible, why not unshackle yourself completely and design a new language without the GIL and make it as pythonic as possible?

A scripting language that support multi-threading is possible, right? I think TCL does it.
Same, The first program I ever wrote was a counter-strike script to automatically buy weapons. Due to network latency, I added artificial 50ms wait() calls and immediately fell in love with automating things. I thought I was so pro figuring out the wait() hack. Later on I would learn that what I did was called programming, and here I am, a decade later, working at a CDN trying to solve the very same issue.
The line is even thinner when it is some issue that impacts a persons ability to reason. An old person who is mentally all there can make an informed decision if they think the offered treatment is an actual attempt at a cure or some mad scientist's plaything, but someone with dementia is far less able to reason about such.
It's a random-number generator. It's not supposed to have expected behavior.
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All I could find was this, from the article: "It’ll be a while before all browsers support background sync, especially as Safari and Edge don’t yet support service workers."

It talks about using code to check to see if it's supported in the user's browser under "Progressive Enhancement".
This guy seems more and more like a comic book villain every day. The next step, I suppose, is when he's sentenced to spend eleven days in a minimum security prison and he falls into a vat of industrial chemicals while working in the laundry. It turns him even whiter and he takes on a silly name, and disappears into the night, embarking on a spree of ne'er-do-wellery.

Then again, he's already screwed over a lot more people as CEO of a pharmaceutical company than he probably could as a super villain. It takes the efficiency of capitalism to achieve real evil, I guess.
I used to record Jools Holland onto VCR every week, and then make mix tapes of my favourites. I would happily pay 99p a track for my favourites - and feel like a winner.

Simlarly with live lounge sessions. We get a selection of what some pratt at the BBC thinks were the best of the year in a compilation CD. WHY NOT JUST SELL THEM ALL?

I have been bitching about this for years, how has it not been made a thing?
With great power, comes great responsibility.

edit: nvm, didn't see execution time cap
Being able to zoom on mobile would be essential (cannot read the whole table on Samsung S3 with Firefox).
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The Apache Lucy project has an internal tool called "Charmonizer" which doesn't assume Bourne shell.

Charmonizer needs a supported C compiler command line interface (POSIX cc, MSVC, maybe others in the future) which can run "system()" commands in a supported shell (sh, cmd.exe).

The testing logic is all implemented in C code. Instead of shipping a shell script, there's one big amalgamated C file, plus a tiny "configure" wrapper to present a familiar interface.

Charmonizer hast given Lucy Autoconf-style probing on all our target platforms without adding any prerequisites beyond what Lucy already needs itself. This has made installing Lucy much easier for a wide range of users.

Right now Charmonizer remains a private component supporting only Lucy but if there were to be interest it could be broken out as an independent project at Apache.

http://github.com/apache/lucy-charmonizer
I guess they were happy with breaking backwards compatibility a little bit, not not as much as simply removing the GIL and not adding back any implicit synchronisation at all.
One major issue is much of the "fast enough" problem is about benchmarks, and possibly even microbenchmarks. When a popular benchmark (or some rando's microbenchmark) really just exercises the RNG, the headline will still be "$FOO IS SLOW AS MOLASSES AND THAT'S BULLSHIT" not "$foo courageously uses a non-garbage RNG by default despite some performance impact in RNG-heavy scenarios". So the primary incentive for language/stdlib developers is to have a fast rng, not to have a good one. They probably aren't going to sabotage the rng entirely, but given the choice between "fast and same as everybody else" or "excellent but not as fast" chances are the first one will win, even if it's crap.

The same problem exists with hash functions.
They only arrested him because he was about to bail out Bobby Shmurda and the feds don't want Bobby Shmurda out.
Interesting work to see as I've promoted this view myself. Specifically, that the brain is designed to rapidly acquire knowledge with relatively little data in childhood then changes overtime somehow. Not to mention people's reasoning ability that often seems closer to a self-modifying, expert system that NN's don't seem anything like. So, it all uses neurons but different types that smoothly integrate.

Hence, the DNN's modelling a small part of the brain that doesn't even do our thinking isn't going to make thinking machines. The machines will be really stupid and hard to train. Humans are hard enough to train: takes two decades on average. The ability to automate abstraction, understanding, and feedback via example generation all on small amounts of data is critical.

If that's not found, then my next question is, "Will DNN's deliver acceptable models for non-recognition tasks they're aiming at or will they experience The Second AI Winter when truth sets in?"
Does someone have a link to a concise technical explanation of what this is about? I can't handle the vague long-form writing about some guy's startup and 2-year-old on my morning pass through the news. I'm reminded of the current southpark season, feeling like this is an ad being passed off as news.
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> Criminals, for example, simply don't have it.

At least in the US we presume innocence. Defendants are not criminals and their rights must be respected.
Yes, but it's incredibly complicated.
Agreed; the author is wrong. But his insight is that DMU is related to loss aversion when the sums involved are large, and that really is interesting. Hadn't occurred to me. He just overstates the case.
I guess it's kind of beside the point of the article, but I wonder if the author considered using a library like Shapely[1].

[1] http://toblerity.org/shapely/manual.html
Also covers Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder.
It's hard to get an interview with a "big" company without a degree and/or any professional history as a developer?

Maybe you just didn't provide all the information? Have you been employed full time as a developer before?

How long and what was your focus?
how old are you, exactly? 40? 50?
she is 76, and people definitely start treating you as she describes after ~60. your gender won't matter after that.

and this shouldn't be surprising to anyone. yes, there are a few out there that are able to stay strong even in that age bracket, but they are few.
I would recommend against dropping. It sounds like you are more interested in Software Engineering than the more academic CS, so if you could transfer into such a program, I would do that, if you really think you can't deal with CS any more.

From your description above, your ambition is to work at a big company, which pretty much by definition is working on big projects. CS will give you (some of) the tools, the ones you say you've never needed in your small projects, to deal with these big projects, and they are the kind of thing that a big company would find appealing in an applicant. I think you will learn those things much better in a university setting than on your own, and at the end you'd have the credibility to back up such learning.

Another note is that communications skills are important for working with others, as you'd have to do in a big company. I have to mention that in your post title, you should have written "Please advise me" (an 's', not a 'c'), and your conclusion should be "What is your advice, HN?"

Finally, I think that you might find the work world to be at least as hard to deal with as university. Persisting with CS (or an alternative) would be better than dropping out and taking your chances on a purely self-taught skill set.
Rage is so against the machine that they've done over $100 million in revenue for Sony. So, yeah, they make lots of money for a big multinational. Sounds like something a stereotypical Republican would like, no?
My father would not get me a Nintendo and instead gave me something programmable (a BBC). He said I was free to buy a Nintendo though which I obviously could not afford. So I programmed until I was old enough to get a weekend job at 15, and I bought and sold games a lot. Good moves Father! The value of money and a programming career.
I've actually been talking about these Congresspeople and the letters they've been writing for months. It's nice to see confirmation that I'm not the only one who finds it suspect.
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I feel the same way! Or, I ended up attempting to teach myself C# because of it.
> The baby-boomer generation basically invented ageism when they were young in the 70's

I am Not an American. Can you point me to any more info on this.
There's ano old story about someone who got a barrel of apples. At every point, they ate the apples that were starting to go bad first.

They spent months eating slightly rotten apples.
>I mean, have you been to a developer conference lately? That wasn't a Microsoft conference? Did you happen to see any Macs there?

I haven't been to a MS developer conference and saw a mix of platforms at all other conferences I've been to. Have you actually watched apple's product launches? Ever notice the media consumer is whom they are marketing to?

>OS X has shipped with a complete Unix shell since 2001. Pretty much every dangerous command you can think of on Linux will execute the same way in Terminal.

There is so much more to an OS than terminal, so it's not all that matters. I suppose if one only worked 100% out of terminal and nothing else it would be a non-issue.
It also completely ignores that programmers may appear to be mediocre because of environmental factors beyond their control. Casting this to the general case, people do not have absolute control over the conditions in which they need to succeed, and may fail despite taking every optimal action for their situation.
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I remember reading something a few years ago that criticized the use of the term psychopath because it wasn't defined in a rigid way and the definition basically tracked the general populations general fears. And because we as a society are afraid of corporations now, CEO's become the target, and possibly the baseline, for the definition of psychopath.

I'm sure that many CEOs share a certain personality type, but to claim that most CEOs have a serious mental disorder seems ridiculous to me.
"As a result of international collaboration, more than 1,600 people have received a 3D-printed hand at low cost," Dr Ayres said.

The article touches upon the idea of low-cost 3-D prosthetic printing, but it's pretty sparse and does not provide details on how these "1,600" people received the hands.

Providing low cost or zero-cost prosthetic limbs is an amazing results of low cost, more distributed 3-D printing. Here is an example of a company providing such solutions: the non-profit Limbitless Solutions provides 3-D printed limbs at zero-cost to children. http://limbitless-solutions.org/index.php/en/
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This seems like a pretty unfair generalization of Koreans. Assuming all scientists have the same shameful characteristics of a few doesn't seem very scientific, does it?
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Hash functions are supposed to be fast, though. (If you need something slow like a keystretching function, you iterate a hash function, and you pick the number of iterations based on wall clock time on a representative machine.) BLAKE2 is competitive with MD5 and way, way more secure, for instance: https://blake2.net/
From the outside, Python 3 seems like a much better language. I don't have strong views of its object system (I avoid OOP as much as I can) but it seems like the string/bytes handling is much better, and I'm also a fan of map and filter returning generators rather than being hard-coded to a list implementation (stream fusion is a good thing). Also, I fail to see any value in print being a special keyword instead of a regular function (as in 3).

What I don't get is: why has Python 3 adoption been so slow? Is it just backward compatibility, or are there deeper problems with it that I'm not aware of?
Thank you for reaffirming my priors on what kind of people judges are.
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Ok, fine. Can we have the print statement back?
All of the Congresspeople mentioned in this article have received HEAVY contributions from Google. Anna Eshoo receives a huge amount of money from Google every single term. She basically receives above full-time minimum wage every year from them, she should probably be called a Google employee.
Yep... I didn't take my GF to the office Christmas party, cuz I didn't wanna hear the comments. ay!
Taking chemicals which haven't been made for human consumption and haven't been tested thoroughly could render you dead much faster than that.
Cancer requires more than a single mutation.

Also, "They did not look at tissues from two of the commonest forms of cancer – breast and prostate" this is not an accurate description of 'cancer' just the types of cancer they are studying.

Further, this is focused on types of tissue. Environmental factors that increase risks for all forms of cancer are ignored.

PS: Mathematically, if a very small percentage of the population had much lower risks of cancer it would be almost impossible to detect.
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Uh, OK. Sure. Whatever
Interesting how Teichmueller has a bunch of stuff named after him, yet there's very little information about him to be had. There are some references on Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=%22o+teichmueller%22&btn.... He is certainly published in more than a single journal, however.

However there are no references to him on his "discoveries". Note the lack of a history section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teichm%C3%BCller_space and compare that to the section on Hilbert space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space#History

On the other hand, Felix Hausdorff, who also appears to have worked in the same field (though topology is probably a far broader field than I can understand) has plenty of information readily available. This is conjecture, but the mere lack of solid information on Teichmueller could lend credence to some of what you say.

There is a book about mathematics under the Nazis, which would likely cover a lot of ground http://www.jstor.org/stable/20453494?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...

Anyway, bit of a mystery ¯\_(ツ)_/¯