skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've wondered about this for a while. There's no shortage of dicks[1] on the Internet. It's too easy to spout off and attack someone online in a way you'd never do "in person" and there's plenty of people who make a sport of it. For the former, there's not much that can be done, for the latter, I think there are a few solutions (variations of which I've seen tried).

Personally, I think it starts first with community standards and moderation. Hacker News, Stack Overflow and such do a pretty good job already. You get a share of jerks here and there but by and large the community self-filters the tone[2] as much as the quality of the comments.

When the inevitable trolls appears, one of the best approaches I've seen is to silence them without their knowing it. I wonder how often this practice is figured out and remediated by creating a new account. It'd be possible to extend this further by categorizing troll posts and selectively providing them to each other (as well as providing all replies) so that they think "it's working" and don't bother switching accounts, all the while hiding all of the trash from everyone else. Perhaps that's a lot of wasted energy but I'd be interested in hearing if something like that has been tried anywhere.

[1] That word always seems to describe the behavior best, to me. I'll use "jerk" from now on. :)

[2] I've always believed that you can say "someone/something is wrong on the internet!" without having to be a jerk about it and have seen many examples of such on Hacker News and the StackExchange family of sites. Those who cannot lack creativity and are, unfortunately, less likely to have their (possibly) valid arguments heard.
In many cases companies are not advertising "gluten free" as it may require additional tests and certifications which cost extra money and extra effort, especially smaller companies avoid these unless it's really important for their brand.
Alaskans have been receiving a guaranteed income of ~$1,000 per anum for the past 34 years.
I am not an expert, but the general difference, in my understanding, is that the BSD coreutils is significantly "lighter", both in features and in code size.
It's important to have approximate knowledge of many things, including how to look up and figure out the shit you don't know.

That said, I think you balance assumptions vs knowledge in order to be effective. Like you assume that it's in the man pages, and the man pages describe the code that is being used on your system, but it's entirely possible that your version of vim or whatever is different then the one described in the system wide man page.
PubPub – Open Publishing
> Flatly, re-writing a several decade's old, matured codebase in today's flavor-of-the-week language is not a good idea.

It's odd that so many in the computing industry are unwilling to move on from a language from 1978. We think of ourselves as one of the most fast-moving industries, but we have this odd reverence for early C and Unix that makes us stubborn and resistant to change. The fact is: we didn't know how to do some things properly in 1978. We know more about programming language design now. (Even Rob Pike would presumably agree—that's why he created Go!)

To be sure, we shouldn't just rewrite things in new languages for no reason. I think many segments of our industry are too fad driven. But to me the right thing is simple: Let's evaluate new technologies on their merits. Rust may well be worse than C! But if it is, let's figure out why, and say so explicitly.
I'm reading between the lines, but I don't think he's advocating for social media becoming the government. I think he thinks he's merely observing what's already happening.

He writes a lot about Trump, but he explicitly says that he could deal with any of the current candidates becoming President. I have wondered if his logic is basically "Social Media is becoming the President no matter what so what 'meat robot' slots to the seat behind the desk in the Oval Office in matters little by comparison".

If you mean that it could in fact be worse than what we have now, you could model what we have now as still being essentially "media" driven, but with no way for anybody to break in the way social media does let some people now. Whether that's really a serious change once corporations do their second-order adjustments... dunno. I expect to still be chewing on these ideas for another few weeks.
I can tell age stories too. But lets get real: people change as they get old. They have different experiences and different referents. They have seen both more and less of the industry, since its been changing a long time but changes faster these days.

Indeed, you get a different employee when you hire an older person. Sometimes that's helpful; sometimes not. We can't wave a wand and make that go away.
But why would that theory specifically apply to a smaller device, and not the 6S as well?
It classified this Labrador-"I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I AM DOING"-meme: http://i.imgur.com/ZQaM2D7.jpg as vip: 45%, moustache: 45%, person: 26%

http://i.imgur.com/FYkxCNS.png
This conversation has been re-hashed ad nauseum over the past 6 months. My take on it remains the same -- their revenue is fine. They need to reduce costs.
My impression is that many people, given more money, would use most of it to pay down debt, rather than to spend on new stuff. (That may reduce the probability of bad debt, which may increase the safety of the financial system. On the other hand, it may not increase consumption to the degree expected, and therefore may not work as well as expected to "get the economy moving again".)
"I was just posting the video[1] on iPhone SE thread about the flourishing iPhone NAND Flash memory upgrade market in China yesterday. "

I read those posts and was interested ... and I am sorry to digress now in this thread, but:

If you upgrade your iphone with an amount of memory that no iphone has ... what does iOS do ? Does it care ? Does it object ?

If I upgraded a 16GB to a 32GB, I would expect iOS not to notice or care. However, I would be worried about upgrading a 32GB to, say, a 128GB, which is a flash memory size that no iphone SE ships with.

What does iOS do ?
> UBI doubled the amount of money in circulation? Bread, milk, eggs, and rent cost 2x as much.

This assumes that production of these things won't rise - almost certainly false.

For milk in particular, we've recently had price supports.

And for rent, a basic income inherently increases the supply of "real estate near enough to sufficient income".
You've just reinforced my point.

You understand that you are unaware of the younger generation's pop culture (pop music is as much part of pop culture as TV is), but you don't understand how people of my generation can be unaware of your generation's pop culture.
Mobile 360° videos may be the holy grail
OK, split it down the middle. If you're already a @bob follower when you start following @alice or when @alice un-@s @bob, whichever happens later, then @alice's action has no effect on you. Even if @bob has been hidden from you by @alice's action, it only affects internal-to-twitter links like retweets. If you have a link directly to @bob or his tweet from Google or from an email, you can follow it successfully, and that action removes the hiding effect for you. These extra complications would probably be good for @alice, since it would make it much less obvious to bullies that she had taken this action in the first place. (Yes, if @bob has observant friends, they'll notice eventually, but that's probably OK.)

I agree with you, the main point is that @alice doesn't have to smell @bob's shit anymore.

The point isn't to nail it down exactly right here and now. The point is that this is a discussion that should have taken place many times at Twitter, and we should see some concrete results by now, rather than fluffy PR-focused fake-internal memos to the effect of, "ok guys now we gotta try hard!"
> Your "solution" means many people have to not use the internet.

Where was that said? I don't see this comment at all. "turning your devices off now and then" is akin to stepping out of a discussion when you start to take things personally. That doesn't mean you are banned from all conversations. It's healthy to take a break.
That was kind of a fad a few years back, but many companies have backed off from it.[1][2]

[1] https://consumerist.com/2012/12/06/charter-ends-twitter-and-...
[2] http://time.com/3916355/social-media-customer-service/
Knowing other languages is great, but there is very real overhead in learning them. Python is mature enough that you have mature libraries available for pretty much everything.
Here is my language-choosing thought process...

Perl/Python/PHP/Ruby: Generally 10x or more slower than V8 Node.js, plus global interpreter lock = automatic no.

C/C++/etc? Fast, but too complex to work with build system / platform compat / 3rd party modules = generally no.

Java? Way too slow startup time; JVM install for users painful = automatic no

Scala/Clojure/etc: Fine languages but same practical problems as JVM languages = automatic no.

Go? Probably nice, but I just don't know it = maybe

Node.js: Fairly fast, easy to debug, fast startup time, easy to use 3rd party code = yes

Rust: safe, C perf, and easy to build and use 3rd party modules via Cargo = yes
No, on Solaris Go uses libc. I know because I am one of the people that worked on the port.

Windows is similar in that regard to a degree as well.
How to Upgrade Xcode: The Glacial Delivery of Hand-Curated Artisanal Data
Low 40s here.

So far the only kind of "age-related" "discrimination" (note the quotation marks) that I faced that I know of have been the "you're too expensive for us, we'll hire a junior engineer and train him" type deal.

I do prefer/tend to work for small companies and startups so even though I have a reasonably decent "enterprise development" and "CS" type backgrounds I'm more or less up to speed on (or at least aware of) the latest developments in the industry so if a potential employer wants to see me hack some homework CRUD assignment using whatever hot-shot stack they are looking to use it won't take me long to set it up.
Capital investment and production are effectively dead sectors in our economy. Central bank manipulation that theoretically used to create both, recently has only created financialization bubbles and corruption. That operation model is dead, but still shuffling like a zombie... for awhile. If the factories ARE never coming back, there is no point in being concerned about financing them or goosing the economy to try to encourage them. Its kinda like the transition from agricultural economy to industrial economy, economic terms and theories and S.O.P. and problem areas that used to work are simply obsolete.

If an economic system exclusively rewards the lucky and the corrupt, like ours, then it deserves its destruction. Wealth has no virtue if its source is exclusively non virtuous. Or rephrased, where did the virtue come from that wealth supposedly has? Certainly not from honest labor and skill, not in this economic system, not in the future we're headed toward.
Yep, sounds like a clue to me.

"windows and samba" is a bigger clue. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11337626 and/or the badlock website itself, first sentence...)

As I see it, there are a couple options here...

One: the bug is in the SMB protocol itself.

Two: the bug is in some library code that is common to both Windows and Samba.

(One and two could be the same thing, but they need not be.)

Either way, coupled with the 'badlock' hint, I will be watching for some bright/lucky soul to find it before 20160412.
In the OP, the manager is frustrated with the "extraordinarily change-averse" employees over 50.

One of the reasons I love being in tech (I am 44) is that you become so familiar with change your start seeing it as an inevitable force of continuous opportunity, instead of something to fear. That mindset keeps you young at heart.

I suspect that age discrimination lawsuits are more likely from slow moving industries, like the academia example in the OP.

The only place where I felt concerned about age discrimination is at YC. "How old are you?" is the third question on the application even before the question "What will your company do".

Having been invited to YC HQ twice now (thank you), I don't think age discrimination is an issue and I can't fault them for asking. But being asked that question upfront still messes with my psychology.
There really isn't any beyond having a large pipe connected to a network device capable of filtering a high volume of pps.

That has always been the problem with competently executed DDoS attacks. You need a very large pipe as Step #1 which is simply not cost effective for most businesses. :/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
From the README: "These are based on BSD coreutils rather than GNU coreutils as these tools should be as minimal as possible."

If all of these utilities are running in userspace, per Redox's microkernel architecture, then what is the advantage of intentionally not making them feature-rich?
I don't think I worded my original comment in the best way. However, I find that the people who make statements like "C makes it far more difficult to write safe and correct code" haven't touched the language in years if ever. Hence, no wonder it will be difficult for them because they have not practiced or been exposed to good C idioms. Correct code in C is actually easy since the language is very simple. Due to this simplicity, unit-testing is very easy yet lots of legacy codebases don't use these testing strategies to their potential. If they did lots of issues would be corrected.

Although I cannot refute there are additional memory-related issues to be aware of in C, it is precisely such awareness that make someone a better programmer because its how the underlying hardware works. For instance, parallelizing algorithms must take into account cache-alignment boundaries and so on.

Abstractions are good. However, too much abstraction is bad. Just as too much of anything is a bad thing. When people rely solely on such abstractions, it is in fact ruinous to ability.

That being said, higher-level languages certainly have their place. But I firmly believe that C is a high-enough abstraction for systems programming and with proper idioms and testing strategies, it can be just as safe as the plethora of garbage-collected languages out there in the wild.
You're discounting the possibility that there's a difference. There's varying levels of harassment, and it should be up to the victim's discretion as to how severely it should be treated. If person A calls person B a jerk on Twitter, that's easily enough ignored (unless there's a pre-existing personal or parasocial relationship between persons A and B that would make "jerk" sting more than it otherwise would), but if person A organizes a campaign involving all of their followers whose sole intent is to make person B feel threatened then that's an entirely different matter.

The hardest part of dealing with online harassment and "trolls" seems to be drawing that line, or even acknowledging that it exists.
not just parrots, crows also have extraordinary ability to use tools or solve problems:

https://youtu.be/AVaITA7eBZE
> Please get yourself ready to patch all systems on this day. We are pretty sure that there will be exploits soon after we publish all relevant information [on April 12].

I predict there will be exploits within a week from now, now that they've told people where to look and given a clue with the name "Badlock".
There is no such thing as a troll.

There is such a thing as people being presented with content that's irrelevant to their interests.

I better way to semantically express what we need, as well as a recommendation system that goes with it, is what we lack today.
My parents are doctors. They are in their 60s. And guess what: they still spend evenings and weekends reading medical journals, attending conferences (around the globe) and doing whatever else is necessary to keep up with new developments in their specialties. That's just what it takes to remain relevant in fast-moving fields.

I think what software developers need is some perspective. We aren't the only ones who have to spend time outside of work on keeping our skills sharp and learning new stuff.
Well, there is a huge problem - copyleft does not only require you to share changes to the source you used and modified, but also to unrelated source of your own. Which kills it for most corporations. Some of their code might contain trade secrets or just isn't freely relicenseable by them as it might involve third party rights. Which is why LGPL mostly works for corporations but GPL not.
Life isn't fair. So either it isn't fair because a poor person can't claw their way out of poverty while a lazy dullard skates through life doing easy work for Father's friends, or it isn't fair because an enterprizing capitalist who scraped his way up from the bottom is taxed heavily to pay for another's laziness or stupidity. (to fairly characterize both side's straw men.)

Appeals to fairness as an argument for or against various wealth redistribution schemes always strike me as odd for this reason. Neither side gets an exclusive claim to fairness. Both situations can end up equally unfair for equally reasonable definitions of fairness. No society-level policy -- especially doing nothing -- can possibly hope to be remotely fair in at least an infinitely of possible senses of the word.
> it bugged me that "x = y" wasn't the same as "y = x"

it is in Prolog
$200K seems pretty extreme for a broken arm, even if it required surgery. I'd guess $1K max for non-surgical, $10/20K for surgery.
I'd love to think that the MicroBit would inspire kids to take an interest in computing.

Unfortunately, I think that it's capabilities are too far removed from kids understanding of computing.

In my era, the games we played were obviously on the same machine as we played on... we knew that given enough time and knowledge we could create Manic Miner, etc.
A child given a MicroBit would not see the relationship between it and their XBox... they're just too far removed.

What we really need is a something more akin to a Python interpreter on an XBox. That would be much more directly related to kids experiences these days.
You are describing why it is the way it is. Yes, pretty much so. There is a lot of convenience involved. The downside is that it creates mostly invisible dependencies which will break at the worst of times.
Most of my clients are, as you mention, skeptical of employees with incredibly long tenures marked by limited accomplishments and static skills. I also can't speak as to the percentage of potential 'age bias incidents' that stem from this type of situation, but attitudes towards employment and loyalty are certainly a factor.

Career fluidity has only been a somewhat accepted industry trait for the past 10 or so years. I had clients circa 2005 that wouldn't look at a resume for any candidate that hadn't been at their current job for 7+ years, which eliminated everyone who had taken a chance on a startup during the first dotcom wave.

The generation of technologists that started work in the 80s and early 90s likely had pensions and other retirement benefits that made staying at their job an easier decision, and they were likely raised with different feelings towards employer/employee relationships. Flash forward to 15-20 years into their career, and the job market, the definition of marketability, and job search itself changed dramatically. It's easy to point to ageism, but that's not really it, because the ones that joined startups or moved around a bit aren't seeing that same level of stigmatization.

If someone is maintaining that PHP4 app at BigCo for 10+ years, I'd think that person would probably need to demonstrate that they've been paying attention to dev trends or they won't get looked at. If you're not getting challenging work at the job, you need to find it somewhere else.

I started offering resume and career consulting services to job seekers over a year ago, and a large percentage of my clients are people in this boat who need to reinvent and market themselves to appeal to today's employers. It can be scary to look for jobs today if you haven't looked in 10 years.
The article stated that the party that won Canada's most recent election has proposed BI. That's "powerful political forces", at least within Canada.
Yeah, i definitely agree with the premise, but as soon as that alert pops up, people would rate the torrent/whatever and say its a bad copy, and then future pirates would download an alternate seed.

Maybe they could "leak" a few different torrents in future and do some testing! :)
Your probably correct, none of these solutions in this thread could actually beat the advertising model even if that isn't profitable for them and trying them isn't worth the risk. It just seems weird to me that twitter basically owns the fanclub for every celebrity in the world and can't monetize access.
Thanks for your work!

Is there a page with instructions on getting the "preview" Micropython running on the ESP chips? Is it possible to use the web terminal, or is that still in the future?

I'm teaching some 9-10 year olds about electronics. My next lesson will be about microcontrollers. I have bunch of nodeMCUs that I would like to use.

(I backed the Kickstarter, I just have not tracked down how to use the in development stuff)
The common definition of the term "bro" is (quoting wikipedia) 'a type of "fratty masculinity", predominantly "if not exclusively" white'.

Now, you can not like that definition of bro, but that is for many people to common definition. The first thing that comes to mind when I hear 'bro' is the phrase 'bros before hoes', which is hard to interpret as not offensive to women.

Does this really connect to a compression format? Of course not, but if that is the first thing that comes to people's minds, why not switch to something with less baggage?

If you can't see how any of this could be offensive, then I'm afraid we just have different points of view.
How a Personal Brand Can Help You Survive a Career Downfall
This "toughen up" sentiment sounds nice in theory but it's absurd in practice. Listen to writer Mindy West's story on This American Life about confronting one of her worst trolls [1]. Her troll made a fake Twitter account in the name of her dead father just to mock her. That's grotesque.

Not being online or in a community not full of jackasses (what you derisively call a "hugbox") isn't an option for West. She's a writer who has to be on the internet and engaged with social media to do her job.

Before you say "Well if you can't handle that, get another job," think about that statement. You're normalizing people being jackasses and blaming their victims for trying to be regular people doing their jobs. You are literally saying, "It's your fault for being on the internet, what did you expect?"

West is a good example of how ridiculous this mentality is. We should all be able to participate in online communities without the fear of being stalked or harassed. Frankly, if the mostly white, mostly male tech community was less so, they might actually understand that.

This kind of victim-blaming is absurd. I understand a lot of people in tech are fond of free speech principles (and rightly so, they're important) and edgy South Park libertarianism, but this is not the right hill to die on.

[1]: http://www.themarysue.com/this-american-life-trolls/
> It's quick, but detrimental (to programmers ability) in long term.

Do you know how the lifetime/borrow check system works?

I've heard plenty of criticisms of it, but I've never heard "the lifetime system doesn't make you understand manual memory management".