skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Runaway Grade Inflation in U.S. Colleges
I do not have any degree, relevant or not.

Obviously they were happy with my competency since I was offered a job, they just took the path where they used my lack of degree as a negotiating tactic.

Turns out there are plenty of other places that don't care about degrees and offer more money, so I accepted a job somewhere else. It was an easy decision at the time.
They're allowed to browse the Internet and go to the Gym? Sounds better than most hotels I've been.
Really great work. Thumbs up.

As an experienced programmer who only recently got into compilers, I have a few, open ended, somewhat advanced, questions about the transformer phase (for anyone to comment, thanks in advance).

It appears to me that the transformer is like the guts of the compiler, everything else is more like support system. And more often than not, the purpose of transformation ends up being 'optimization', but of course you could do transformation for other purposes. However this phase ends up being very hairy logic if the programmer is not careful.

Anyway, my questions are:

- is there any consensus on creating a DSL for providing transformation rules instead of hand coding them in the programming language?

- There is the nanopass compiler framework in scheme [0]. Is that one of the superior ways of doing things? or are there any serious criticisms about that technique?

- Is there a relationship between compiler transformations and 'term-rewriting systems'?

- OMeta/OMeta2 pattern matching on context-free-languages?

Whether it's nanopass-framework, OMeta2, term-rewriting system, or some other DSL, I guess what I'm trying to get at is how can that phase be made more 'formal', so I guess at this point we get into the area of 'formal systems' and 'formal semantics' etc, etc.

I would appreciate if there is recommended reading (books, survey papers, etc) on this topic.

[0] https://github.com/akeep/nanopass-framework
I don't really see that. I think whiteboard coding is one of many ways a team could function and that how a candidate performs on it is not generalizable. For instance, I have never written code, pseudo or otherwise, on a whiteboard outside of an interview in over eight years of writing code full-time. Hell, I used a whiteboard more in my four years as an EE and two years as a SysE than I have as a SysE/SwE.
it is an interesting question - would we go to war to prevent carbon release?

for me to have a position on the question would depend on the particulars.

A related thought - there aren't a ton of countries that have both large fossil fuel reserves and a large enough domestic market to burn them at a high rate. US and China are the only two that come to mind. Maybe Iran? Which implies that sanctions (either on the import of energy or the export of finished goods) might be effective if you can keep the US and China on board.
Stupid shit no one needs and terrible ideas hackathon recap
I think it's much more likely that Google has data to back up this decision as opposed to doing it because MIT looks neat on a resume.
Did you tell brian?
Not at all. There's a whole slew of companies with different arrangements of pcb/fab/express in their names. They've all done 5 boards for ~$50 for a very long time. Granted, they're simple two-layer boards. If you need anything more, then, yes, I agree.
Exactly, the problem has got worse.

Banks are larger and more centralised, the offenders unpunished know they can act with impunity, legislation is unchanged.

Banking/ finance types now know that if they are losing money they must simply lose big enough to trigger more bailouts and the taxpayer pays.

This is despotic anti-capitalism: they keep the winnings and losses are generational debt on which they again profit.

The only ways that have ever worked to inject capital is to pay the poor and middle class by national infrastructure projects or GWBush style $1000 cheques - everyone benefits as money circulates.

Keynsian economics got this right.

Banks and the rich largely hoard capital where it is useless, pretending risk aversion when it was outright fraud that caused the econopocalypse, not risky but legitimate loans to business.

This will happen again unless investment and savings banks are again separated, but no nation wants to do it unilaterally fearing an exodus of non-dom capital they use to cook the government figures.

Finance is rotten to its core.

Quantative easing is bailouts by the backdoor.

Austerity stagnates an economy.
The Sumo-Sized Guide to Building the PERFECT Landing Page – SumoMe
Are you saying that life in a prison should be worse than living in a budget hotel? Why?
Now please continue with the rest. Deutsche Bank anyone?
No, the idea is that the ads.js runs on the real DOM. The shadow DOM is a copy of that DOM minus the ads. This is the DOM shown to the user.
That's not EEE, that's Microsoft trying to convince an important customer to keep buying their office suite. What a crime!
I think part of the "Extreme" was also to "turn the practices up to 11" - eg. Code Reviews are good? Then we'll have continuous code reviews thru Pair Programming. Short Development Cycles are good? Then we'll have cycles that go on the order of minutes or even seconds (Red/Green/Refactor). Customer Involvement is good? Then we'll have them actually sit with the dev team. etc.
This Guy Allegedly Sold Fake CIA and FBI Badges Online–Now Interpol Is After Him
Axolotl renamed to Signal protocol
It is, in the same way its possible that a waterfall might produce intelligent thought.
Sen. Wyden: Plans to Weaken Strong Encryption Are a Double Loser
At least for now, I think ad-blocking should be optional, as it is in the new Opera beta, but I think tracking-protection (against third-party cross-site trackers) should be the default in browsers.

In fact, browser vendors should not just use "tracking blacklists" (as Firefox does now), but they should be working on new standards that break websites that use cross-site tracking, and they should set a deadline of 1-2 years before it goes into effect. Call it a "sandboxing/isolation" feature (which is what it should be).

I think tracking on the site that shows developers what pages a user visits and whatnot, is fine, but I oppose tracking across websites. That's really just another name for mass surveillance. That kind of trackers also introduce all sorts of security issues.

Being tracked across domains is really more of a new phenomena on the Web, and Google was one of the first companies to introduce it. And because they just enabled it for everyone by default, we didn't get much time to fight back against it. But I think we can and should fight back against it.

Optional ad-blocking in browsers will eventually teach the advertising industry as well as publishers that they better do something about those heavy ads and quickly before everyone starts learning about that setting in their browser, while a default ban on cross-site tracking should hopefully stop the practice altogether.

I hope that everyone who wants to implement ad-blocking in their browsers should also allow users to test how the browser performs with ads vs without ads. That feature in Opera is seriously addictive and just another way to encourage publishers to get rid of bad ads.
This is awesome! One comment, it might be a good idea to make the docstrings in JS appear above the functions rather than inside them? Chrome refuses to optimize functions if they are above a certain size in bytes, which includes comments, so it seems most 'docstrings' are placed above the definition rather than inside. Also does str(x) convert to x.toString(x)?

I'm going to use this in a project I have in mind :)
Hmm, sounds interesting, but wouldn't it need a lot of more resources for computing all that stuff? You also need to actually download and do the work with all those ads.js (that loads another 10 trackers).
The article is compelling that you can't have an organism like a human but why should it look that way? A loosely coupled system with lots of local computation could just as well "think", just not like us. Ants and termites are extreme examples of this though we don't typically think of them as a single organism (except in The Sword in the Stone) but they have collective behavior. Bacterial biofilms too.

And in fact all parts of our brain do not communicate with all others; there are specialized subprocessing in the early visual system (cf Letvin) much less the various specialized cortices.

So one could construct a computational agent on the scale of a galaxy -- this ignores the question of evolution.

I've long presumed that we're unlikely to even recognize an intelligent alien (and that an alien encountering human interstellar travelers might not recognize the humans as intelligent). It's a fundamental hermeneutic question.
Yes, it's because idiomac Python don't make use of those concept as much. E.G: asyncio uses await instead of callbacks.
Which is for the most part the entirety of a degree's usefulness beyond the first year or two of employment. It's a signal, and it allows a company to easily take a stack of 250 resumes for a single position and cut it down to 80 without a significant hit to the skill distribution. Some of the best are likely eliminated, but most of the worst are as well.

My sub-3.0 GPA for a humanities degree a decade ago has no bearing on my skill as a programmer, but it almost certainly means I won't be working for Google or Facebook.
"They spend their days doing laundry, working out in the gym and browsing the Internet."

Hard time. Or as my wife calls it, time.

Badum tisch.
>Well no bankers anyway.

Please point to the convictions. We don't throw people in jail because we don't like their business practices.

The idea that the government wasn't absolutely salivating at the opportunity to throw some bankers in jail is one of the funniest things I read on the internet. People don't seem to understand that the government and banking industry are often at odds on many things. Of course, often these are the same people who interpret things like TARP as a "gift" to the banks.
Lame, April Fools isn't till tomorrow.

Wait, for real?
I like the idea of building a general platform and adding paid features, pensions are mentioned on the |product| page. Because pensions don't really exist much anymore for private business in the US most of the time, it got me thinking.

Since one of the important roles of HR staff is compliance with employment laws, it would probably be good for the guiding legal framework to be explicit in the description of the product.
HN, Checkout My Parallax JavaScript Library on GitHub and NPM
> A strict language with optional lazynes could use ordinary type-tags.

And then you'll have a total order, that makes your code hard to parallelize.

But more important, it mixes state updating (that can be actually done in several orders, can be rewinded, and has several other interesting properties) with IO, with list mapping, with exception handling, and everything else.
The American City Was Built for Cars. What Will Happen When They All Leave?
Python and modern JavaScript seem like fairly similar languages (dynamically typed, object oriented/functional hybrid, rich ecosystem of packages), the biggest difference being Python's "batteries included" standard library, which presumably isn't (all?) available in the browser.

So is the main reason to use this just familiarity with Python, minimal context switching if your backend is in Python, and the potential for a bit of code reuse between front/backend?
> Take the recent cases of malware-spreading adverts on legitimate sites. These sites get their ad spaces filled through agencies that then broker further deals, often selling ad space on-demand through live auctions to others, and so on

Yeah, and I think this is the crux of the problem. Like The Cube, we (as a collective, not you and I) have built his massive incomprehensible machine with an infinite number of moving parts that no one person actually groks the function of. The pictures about a third of the way down this talk[1] are instructive. So not unlike the banks with the GFC, there isn't really some moustache-twirling evil-doer pushing one weird trick ads and malware your way who you can regex out of your life, so you just have to nuke the whole thing from orbit. Which is essentially what we're doing with ad blockers.

[1] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
New example of rare Etruscan writing found
Workshop on Linux and .NET Core and ASP.NET Core and Docker
+1 for OSHpark, I can get boards in my hands in 4 days using their expedited service.
I don't have a problem with law-enforcement getting a warrant for an individual's device and then using whatever means available to get information off of that device. It's the warrantless or use of general warrants to justify mass surveillance that I have an issue with.
Well, I was being slightly sarcastic.

NB I remember crossing George Street here in Edinburgh in early 2009, a familiar looking chap waited in his convertible Ferrari for me to cross. A few minutes afterwards I realised why he looked familiar.... quite brave being out in Edinburgh at that time in a convertible - for a lot of reasons not just the weather.
The only system that's generally better is Score Voting aka Range Voting. But you want to _avoid_ ranked voting methods.

http://ScoreVoting.net/NESD.html
Poor Man's Actors
yeah I know, this was just the first example that came to mind.
Using an electric hotplate for reflow also works very well for prototypes. You just watch the board and judge the reflow point by eye.

https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/59

Cheap PET stencils are available from OSH Stencils and SMT Stencil. For small boards, it's not difficult to dispense solder paste by hand with a syringe. The application doesn't need to be precise if you're using a board with a solder mask - surface tension does the hard work for you.

https://www.oshstencils.com/pricing.php
http://www.smtstencil.co.uk/
Was going to say the same thing, but also add that Rubio didn't even play in Minnesota right away, so that argument doesn't make sense.
Hey guys, super excited to finally post this as we just launched. We provide a BI suite for mobile analytics that is really easy to use, would love any feedback on the product or anything else.
There are a lot of assumptions in there. For instance, those methylation marks may in fact lead to changes in the DNA. Epigenetic silencing is possibly associated with gene duplication: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00239-002-2446-6
My uncle is one of the jailed, mentioned in the article. One of Iceland’s most respected lawyers and teacher at the University of Iceland has gone on paper, and on radio, and on TV, saying that the Al Thani trials did not make any sense, for more than one reason. The most obvious mistake was that by the time the case went from local courtrooms to the federal level the prosecution had completely switched the focus of the case, going so far as to turn prosecuted into witnesses. (The courts also gave out 99% green light on all wire taps requested from the prosecutors to prepare the case, and let them put my uncle and others in multi-day isolation years after the events themselves... didn’t really get the reason for that)

The court ruling is very interesting. The foundation of the conviction is market manipulation, which, at least in Iceland, is highly interpretive by judges. It seems obvious when you read the ruling and the criticism that judges were ruling in favour of public opinion. That’s my opinion and reading of it, the public opinion is still very much against bankers, so ymmv when asking other people in Iceland.

The article also fails to mention how Kaupthing went bankrupt. Understandably as the article doesn’t go into any detail on anything at all really. But it involves credit lines shutting down completely following a raid by the British on UK offices of Kaupthing using terrorist law to seize files and shut down the bank’s UK presence.

You could maybe google translate this for better info: http://www.pressan.is/pressupennar/Lesa_Brynjar/al-thanimali...
> We do not like meetings, documentation or other waste in this process

I should add:

"We like to try a fancy languages no one else is familiar with, and when we leave the company we make sure we leave a nice piece of shitty, completely undocumented code running in the infra, which has some bugs that never had time to address and which has been packaged manually and links to a very special library that was downloaded in a zip file attached to some blog post."

Bonus points if it involves and old Gentoo box.
To quote an old book: "That which has been is that which will be,
And that which has been done is that which will be done.

So there is nothing new under the sun."

More than likely, there is no app that hasn't been done. There are only ones we don't know about.

An idea on the front page of ideaswatch.com looks pretty easy and useful -- bill splitting for roommates.

It has of course, already been done. It's too obvious to have slipped through the cracks. But if you want to build something small that'll help lots of people who need help -- that would be a good one to tackle.

There are plenty of other good ideas at http://www.ideaswatch.com
What I'm saying is that with so much public service to be done, why put them on a 'pleasant' place? They certainly have there roads with snow to be unblocked, pastures and streets to be clean, poor people to be fed...
You would be surprised. My Mum owns a Lenovo Yoga and she uses the touchscreen all the time - in laptop mode. She uses it often enough that when I show her an article on my (non touch) laptop, she tries to scroll using the screen.
I'm optimistic that ad wars will lead to cleaner Internet. Until recently, Internet was like wild west for ads, it's time for more mature, orderly and safer (for end-users) solutions. The problem is not ads themselves, but the unregulated and un-trustworthy ads distribution networks. I wouldn't mind old-fashioned paper like ads (pics + text) that do not try to follow me and include arbitrary, possible malicious code. Currently I see two realistic scenarios: 1) companies that provide checked ads and ensure that they meet certain quality standards (I'm ready to bet that Google will take this path in near future) 2) native ads, where big players host ads on their own domain and sell ad space directly (to costumers or agencies).
Unlocking a safe unlocks that safe.

The proposed FBI exploit would unlock any and all iPhones.
>There was a guy who reported his own wife because she spoke pejoratively about Erdogan.

What are divorce laws like in Turkey? I'm betting this guy just wanted to get rid of his wife, and found this to be a convenient way to do so.
I like to call it literate programming because it’s very close to what Knuth was thinking about; there’s no other way to do it in JS.
> For instance, he talks about working strategies, and puts Google as an example.

First, I also listed LinkedIn and Facebook. Second, many small companies use the same strategies, but most people probably haven't heard of them, so they don't serve as particularly useful examples.

> Given that the author is consulting for tiny startups, chances are he hasn't stared at those problems in the face

If you're going to make an ad hominem argument, you should at least do a more thorough job of looking up my background :)

I've worked at and with small, medium, and large companies. Every single tool and technique involves trade-offs, and no one approach will fit everyone, which is exactly the point I discuss at the end of the post.
>the offenders unpunished

Unpunished...for what? What are the crimes?

I mean, people were certainly punished financially when their banks equity was wiped out or bought for pennies on the dollar.

>Quantative easing is bailouts by the backdoor.

Please elaborate.

>Keynsian economics got this right.

Do you know the academic origins of QE?
It's neither good or bad, but a reflection of how complex real security is, that being perfectly secure is likely impossible, etc.
I agree that it does demonstrate defensive programming.

But can I also just add that the error message remains unhelpful and outright "bad." You should absolutely have checks for "impossible" situations, but when those checks fail you need some way of determining which check failed (and cannot always assume you'll have stack backtrace, in particular if an end-user is telling you the error message).

For example you could do this: "Impossible Error in GetName(): {Exception}"
This line about sums it up:

"...because it's not my fault. I'm really, really trying, and it's just not working."

Nothing is EVER anyone's fault anymore. Snowflakes are too precious to actually be responsible for their OWN TIME! Makes you wonder if they;ve tried going to bed earlier for a change - maybe even longer than a night or two... god forbid they miss something unimportant at night... Jimmy Kimmel maybe.
There's just no reason to do this. There seems to be very high risk and very little reward.

Also, assuming that your product isn't directly related to video games, people are going to ask how you came up with the name. Are you ready to explain that your company is named after a teleporting cat that can be found in the woods and has super powers?
Well that would be me, I have been looking at these for years but the cost always put me off.

Also, how is it different from this one?
http://www.amazon.com/Philips-goLITE-BLU-Therapy-Device/dp/B...
A new housing crisis, and not just in Seattle
The main argument in favor of Linuxbrew is that it doesn’t require you to use `sudo`.
Encoding, Encryption, Hashing, and Obfuscation
Ok thank you for your answer. So many things are claimed that it is hard to track what is real and what is just hype.

I agree that it's something big. Training Alpha Go on itself means something bigger than "just" optimizing a statistical model on human data. I think recognition of logic elements to strategy planning are parts of what will make ML really close to IA. (With memory, and cleverness to learn) And are the next big steps.
anyone have links or info. on how they actually got past the security measures?
You're mistaking order of evaluating separate functions, from function composition. So if I have two pure functions, f and g, that take and return immutable values (thus having no side effects) I can go:

a = f(x)

b = g(y)

or:

b = g(y)

a = f(x)

And the order does not matter. Because each function cannot effect the other. This is what these quotes are talking about. That independence. There's no outside state mutated in one evaluation affecting the other evaluation.

What you're talking about is function composition. That it f(g(x)) vs g(f(x)). And as many others have said on these threads, the order of the functions when composing two functions together like this is only unimportant if the functions themselves are commutative.
We're talking electricity here, not all energy, and 96% of electricity in Norway is from renewable (nearly all hydro).
Yeah, honestly, as a one incidence sort of thing, this sounds awesome haha. You could search the code for it, find the relevant piece immediately, and the user was prompted to call you guys quickly to get it resolved!
That's great if you live in an area with a bunch of companies you want to work at. If, like me, you don't you end up having to use vacation days and make up excuses for short-notice one and two day absences.
Of course I did. He didn't remember putting in that error condition, but he loved the story!
The simulation uses random utility generators, which sometimes create situations where two candidates are highly similar and thus "partially" clones. The point is to model reality.

Compliance with "independence of clones" is in this property chart.
http://scorevoting.net/CompChart.html
Well at least the biggest thing they can break now is the gym equipment.
>Corruption is growing all over the world and these types of leaders are consequences of that.

Don't worry, we'll join those other countries later this year when we elect our own queen of corruption, Hillary.