skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really see a rant, so no worries there.

> Programming is a "incredibly high leverage and highly lucrative field" ? Compared to what ?

High leverage compared to:

1. Any job where labor is roughly proportional to output. Want twice as many cars in the same period? You're going to employ roughly twice as many people. Want twice as many Starbucks? Roughly twice as many baristas. Want to sell twice as much software or have twice as many subscribers to your SaaS company's offerings? You might need 0-10% more programmers to support 100% growth.

Highly lucrative field compared to (all figures 2014):

1. Median household wages in the US of $53,567.

2. Median household wages in CA of $60487, in MA of $63,151, in NY of $54,310.

I don't know any full-time industry programmers who are working for less than the median household income; that's before any income from other sources or other household members. We're paying fresh college grads around the 70-75th percentile of US household income (again, as individuals).

Those signs don't point me towards the idea that programmers are an oppressed class desperately in need of unionization.

> I do believe unionizing will significantly raise wages, historically they have.

Are there examples of such highly paid professions unionizing? Did wages rise afterwards? (It's a genuine question; I can't think of any highly paid professions that are overwhelmingly [or even typically] union.)
> Given that all 535 members won an election to get there, that is pretty surprising.

I agree with your premise that politicians are generally disliked, but the obvious explanation of this is that voters disapprove of many of the representives they didn't vote for, especially those who belong to a different party or no party.
Some lisps have similar comprehensions. Common Lisp has `iterate` (listcomp) and arguably `loop` (listcomp). Clojure has `for` (genexp) and `(doall (for ...))` (listcomp). A very common clojure library (Plumbing) implements dictcomps via for-map, although you could do python 2.6-style dictcomps yourself via

(defmacro dict-comp
[bindings & body]
`(into {} (for ~bindings (do ~@body))))
I love Scheme as much as anybody else, but I’m not convinced that it should be the first introduction to computer science that people have. I think that the goals for an intro class is to get people to enjoy programming, not expose them to the raw beauty of Scheme/FP. I sure as shit didn’t appreciate what Scheme offered the first time I learned it.
To answer your question: sure, 2000 years from now it's hard to predict total acreage, and it may well be higher (or lower). But there's little uncertainty that on the timescale of centuries, corals will be devastated, and that means really bad things for us and our children, to say nothing of the health of marine ecosystems.
We always found getting blind drunk worked best. Get plastered then go to sleep at about midnight, wake up at 10am local time with a stinking hangover but body clock in sync.
"Who built the freeway system, ran the Manhattan project, created CERN, put people on the moon, and sponsored the research that led to computing and the Internet?"

There's also all of the taxpayer-funded and govt-run basic medical research that the pharmaceutical and medical industries get a free ride on.
We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people: sometimes they follow it!

- Dijkstra, 1972
'Data Selfie' App Shows You Exactly Who Facebook Thinks You Are
Weirdly enough I was talking a couple of days ago about requiring things like CSP (which would go very far in defeating XSS) for stuff like webcrypto and other sensitive bits of HTML5.

Someone working for one of the major browsers mentioned they'd considered it but decided against it - not sure on the reasons why but if they're reading this they might like to elucidate...
Australian here (that was very hard for me to confess)

There was a bit on the news about the massive bleaching event up north, a few mentions on tv. Once in the paper.

My current minister for the environment Greg Hunt, or as he is know amongst his admirers: " Fucking Festering Cunt Hunt", and his jolly band of Liberals (don't be confused, in Australia "Liberal" means far-right fucking nutjob) could care less about the environment and have, on national TV, dismissed climate change as "absolute crap".

We elected this government, and there is a significant chance that we will vote for them again before the end of the year. Fuck me dead if I know why.

I apologize for the cussing, but I believe its appropriate.

(edit: added more fucks)
Nvidia – A $2B Chip to Accelerate Artificial Intelligence
Earth Is Tipping Because of Climate Change
Great, now all my devices can share the bandwidth and reliability characteristics of a stoned boy scout trying to send smoke signals with a flammable blanket!

EDIT: and the less said about pairing difficulties the better.

EDIT2: From the downvotes it seems that many people have had a radically different experience from mine, which is good, because mine has been awful.

HTCOne-Dell: 1MB file will transfer ~50% of the time, pairing took several tries.
HTCOne-MBP: complete no-go, doesn't even pair.
Nexus6-MBP: paired first try, works reliably at a blazing 100kb/s.
Nexus6-Dell: doesn't even pair.
Nexus6-Fitbit: takes minutes to download a day's activity over bluetooth classic, stalls out completely 50% of the time. BLE doesn't seem to work at all.
MBP-Fitbit: requires dongle, synced once, has had 100% failure rate ever since.
Dell-Fitbit: requires dongle, 100% failure rate.

Compare to USB which delivers tens of MB/s in bandwidth with 100% reliability and no pairing process (RIP plug and play). I love the promise of bluetooth, but in my experience it has consistently fallen spectacularly short of that promise in every regard.
Because society needs children. Or at least, it always has in the past. And given that people are still prone to tribalistic thinking, it's a hard belief to wash away.

You may not notice it if you live in a relatively homogenous culture. But when your 'enemy tribes' plan to extinguish you by outnumbering you, it's a real concern.
Nvidia: The Man Selling Shovels in the Machine-Learning Gold Rush
Hey, why don't we get in touch through email and brainstorm about how to get the word out for both of us? My email is in my profile. :)
Yeah or millions of migrants heading to Europe fleeing ISIS, a situation in which climate change has played a massive role.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-and...
Servo is a rendering engine, the DOM and JS are currently provided by Gecko,
Yes, the Dreamliners have this. It's certainly a comfortable plane but I'm not sure how much difference the lights make on jet lag.
In my experience, the more complicated processing ends up being composed up of smaller units (that are testable), and then map/filter remain the most clear way of representing the iteration. Using lambdas for non-trivial process is just as bad as throwing that same complicated processing into a list comp.
It doesn't matter how hard you make tax evasion - if it's possible, then those with resources to spare will be able to game it, and those without will suffer.
> Even the kerning and height issues they point can be explained for that. Perfect kerning and proportions would ruin the illusion of it being handwritten and childlike.

Added to this, it is often the only font on a computer that has an 'open 4' which is why a grade 2 teacher I know uses and prefers it for worksheets, since it's much easier for kids to replicate and distinguish an open 4 from a hand-printed 9.
This story about mapping in areas with no addresses came to mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11299646
If you'd like to know what you can do about this personally, here's some solid ideas from Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
Haha I haven't watched all of them. I learn to occasionally watch so that they don't run out like Dr Who. I like the Traveler ^^. Seems like a good idea that you can travel across dimensions (more freedom) and I like it that he told Weasley to "have faith in people's ability to resolve their own problem". Sometimes if the path is too divergent, we have to let go of people.
Pretending like USB devices aren't already a target, safe, etc. - won't make the net safe.

Being able to interface USB with the net is a natural step in the internet of things.
The Big Shift in Business Models
Missing Piece of Startup Wisdom
I'm also Latin American. Let's talk more about how you could get something going! Please email me. :)
No, we can't detect Hawking radiation, yet. It's too faint. http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/48032/how-would-y...

> Emitted Radiation
When material falls into a black hole from a companion star, it gets heated to millions of degrees Kelvin and accelerated. The superheated materials emit X-rays, which can be detected by X-ray telescopes such as the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory.

> In addition to X-rays, black holes can also eject materials at high speeds to form jets. Many galaxies have been observed with such jets. Currently, it is thought that these galaxies have supermassive black holes (billions of solar masses) at their centers that produce the jets as well as strong radio emissions.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/astronomy-terms/...
I am confused how some can proclaim to love Seattle so much but only visit it three times in six years.

The rest of the article is even more confusing. There is not much substance.
Wow. Should one got an exploding offer, the correct behavior IMO is to tell the recruiter to eat sh!t, or possibly, tell the recruiter that his attitude sucks, and because of it, you'll be waiting until the day after the deadline to make your decision. Alternatively, there is nothing about the GP or GGGP's comments that make the described behavior wrong. That's incredibly naive. You use the word _cheating_? "Cheating at the game we're all playing" is what you said. What the hell are you talking about? The game is negotiation, and if you can't do that, maybe you need to leave. If negotiating employment is shitty to you, you're doing it wrong. Learn how to do it right, and maybe that will adjust your attitude in the right direction.

edit: ok, you don't need to be as rude as I am, but I'm a known asshole, so ymmv.
So I see a lot of negative comments about the security implications of this. Presuming that the browser gates access to USB devices in the same way it gates access to geolocation, what's the risk here? How is it different than installing 3rd party software on your OS?

I've read about the "inner platform" effect, and I don't know. I'm just not convinced it's a bad thing here. For all its warts, the web is far and away the best cross platform application delivery system. Use this in conjunction with things like IPFS and browser based persistent storage, and can run signed versions of trusted, auditable code that can do lots of awesome stuff. Without users having to futz with installers.

What am I missing?
This is too true. Best is when the opinions on these are formed with no previous experience with it. I have to use Perl at work and whenever someone finds out they say "I'm sorry that you have to use that terrible language!" Sure, I would prefer to use Python, but Perl has some useful features that other languages don't do as well which is why I use it. Conveniently, nobody who comments to me about Perl has ever actually used it. Same with when I have used Java in the past.
I have a very similar story. Have you tried any medicines against anxiety? It could be something as simple as magnesium and water. Or Atarax or Buspirone. I've discovered these reduce the chance of a headache breaking out by quite a bit.

But if there's a real tension/migraine headache, ibuprofen is the only medicine that I've tried that helps.

But these days I'm very careful about taking ibuprofen, it hurts my stomach and I've already suffered vitamin B9/12 deficiency once. Not fun at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHsQ6UsA7Js
Eh, the bold is alright but I think the regular version loses one of Comic Sans' most important qualities: it doesn't develop weird/anemic proportions when used at large sizes or in all caps.

and personally I think the 'e' is too aggressive.
So, comments are code smell?
> Or is it simply plain old-fashioned jealousy?

Please don't make the mistake of thinking this is jealousy. There are plenty of wealthy Americans who generally oppose the wealth inequality we have today, and I can't imagine they are jealous of themselves for believing that. I think that if one is empathetic to those who grow up in different environments (whether it be of a different race, religion, or income bracket) then the realization is that they should have equal opportunities to succeed. That, in my opinion, doesn't seem very likely if so much money remains at the hands of those in the top wealth echelons.

Could the nation succeed by putting business interests first? Perhaps, but at what cost to the vast majority of its people? To some, that cost is not acceptable.
Quantum Manifesto [pdf]
Thanks!

We might look into short stories also. News articles might be interesting also, but sourcing multilingual new articles might be a problem. In any case, we have a lot of work in front of us :)
It looks like you need to press very hard. I expect that people's fingers will get tired and stiff.

Why not just take a picture of your paper? Ideally, they could just put some special markers on the corners of the page, and then a phone app could home in on those to properly focus and align the page. Problem solved.

The other thing is, why make the pen communicate with the device (e.g. tablet) in real time? This seems like a waste of power, and not practically useful [1]. You could simplify it by just having a button on your pen that, when you click, sends over the aggregated line data.

[1] I suppose one use case is to share in real-time with some kind of audience, but this is already a solved problem with a stylus on a laptop or tablet... why add the extra cost of special paper?
There are several effects.

Accelerating black holes, or actually any accelerated matter, emits gravitational waves. This are disturbances of space-time itself and unlike electromagnetic waves mediated by photons moving through space-time. At least in a classical picture of gravity, not sure how that would work out within quantum gravity when gravitational waves are mediated by gravitons. But I guess you can just think of the gravitational waves being emitted at the event horizon.

Then there is electromagnetic radiation emitted from matter falling towards the black hole but still outside of the event horizon. The gravitational forces of the black hole heat up this matter to the point that it emits electromagnetic radiation in a wide spectrum.

Finally there is Hawking radiation which is a suspected electromagnetic radiation due to quantum effects near the event horizon. The associated black-body temperature is tiny, two billionth of a Kelvin for a 30 solar mass black hole and decreasing with increasing mass. The temperature of the cosmic microwave background with 2.7 Kelvin is in comparison gigantic and therefore black holes absorb much more cosmic microwave background radiation than they emit Hawking radiation. The universe has to become a lot cooler before Hawking radiation can start to evaporate black holes.
Be careful Amazon is selling products infected with malware
Unicorn Bubble or Boom: With Dropbox, Airbnb, Altman, Livingston [video]
This spec is one of the most interesting features to come to the web. I can think of at least three ways I can use something like this to deliver interesting experiences to users, which would not otherwise be possible.

Yes, it increases the attack surface. This is a real danger, and should not be taken lightly. But no one is taking it lightly.

Another danger, which I haven't seen mentioned yet, is that it increases your fingerprint. If a website can list the Web USB devices currently connected, that's a way to deanonymize you.

But if you set aside those negative qualities, WebUSB, I think, is one of the more important features on the horizon.

For example, I could build and ship a light sensor. The idea is that you'd connect it to your laptop, and websites would be able to react to your environment's lighting + your current screen brightness. Think dynamic color schemes that always look good no matter what kind of monitor you're using, or whether it's night or day. This is only possible with hardware; no amount of software will make this feature available. And I can't think of any convenient way to do it other than WebUSB.
Looks quite functional to me. Except that it uses "for comprehension" instead of map/filter (a matter of preference).
It wouldn't surprise me if someone were to use this to effectively share a licensing dongle.

Although I'd imagine latency might be an issue.
In addition to being broken earlier, it's been trivial for even a casual user to pick up the exploits and use them to run arbitrary software on the device. There's a long-running website out there you can load in the 3DS web browser to exploit your device with a single click.
Implementations are always perfect?

When - not if - someone finds an implementation bug in either the browser or the USB hardware, we will see exploits far worse than keylogging passwords. The bug could be in any USB device, not just the subset you're thinking about. Do you really want to trust your host-controller, every USB device, and the browser interface to be bug free? Are you sure there are no subtle non-bug interactions between devices? Have you even seen how USB devices are designed?

Limitations like "no HID devices" are how it's supposed to work, which is different from how it will actually work.

edit:

Also, did everyone forget about BadUSB?
Taxing capital gains less than ordinary income is a crude method to ensure that you're not being taxed on your losses (in terms of real purchasing power). Unless that's fixed first, there is no way you should be paying for losses.

Based on today's taxation laws, if you bought a stock for $100 10 years ago, and sold it for $110 today, you'll be taxed for the $10 "gain" even though in real terms you lost a fair amount of money. Calculating the real loss (not the nominal gain) is complicated because you need to consider inflation each year into the calculation and the IRS doesn't allow for that.

Not disagreeing that capital and labor need to be taxed at the same rate, but the situation is trickier than just saying "lets tax all gains and wages at the same rate".
Thanks, so what is the deal with the four-velocity always equaling c^2? Ie (maybe it is totally wrong):

c^2 = (v_t)^2 - (v_x)^2 - (v_y)^2 - (v_z)^2

where v_i indicates speed along that dimension. I thought this was why all the weird time dilation effects occur, velocity along time v_t ->0 as velocity through space increases. You seem to be saying that from the traveler's perspective they are not accelerating faster and faster towards the black hole.

As I said, maybe my understanding is just totally incorrect here.

Edit: Actually, I was really confused (this is all based on looking it up the other day). According to the above, v_t would need to increase as eg v_x increases. This is just wrong, but I'll leave it here in case someone wants to explain it correctly.
The way I see it: the language rules are simple, anyone can understand all in one sitting; yet the language gives you all the materials you need to build different concepts in SC from scratch. The latter point is important to both teaching and learning.
Yeah blambot saved me from comic sans a lot back when I need to make club-fliers on a regular basis.
The Great Barrier Reef formed over the last 14,000 years since the last Ice Age rather than million years as you suggest. And while the vast colonies may die, and their calcareous skeletons may dissolve as the ocean acidifies, the polyps themselves will probably survive fine in different forms in other ecological niches. This will be no help for the diverse array of creatures that rely on the reefs, or associated fisheries and tourism industries however.
Love it! That's a really clever use of the Set collection type to pair down non-solutions.
There's a lot of pressure to teach languages that are widely used in industry, which is why so many students come out of university knowing mostly Java. There's also a lot of bias against "old" languages, and for newer, trendy languages.

Teaching SICP in Python is just a further development of that trend.

Software engineering is a very trend-following, path of least resistance, bandwagon-jumping profession. If "everyone" is using language X, that's where most engineers (and managers) want to be. Universities are just satisfying that need.

It's a wonder that Scheme lasted in universities as long as it did. It'll be interesting to see how long Python lasts.
ELI5? are you saying lockheed took this from someone else?
Game development - looking across the aisle from the Linux world - is such an insanely backwards place. Everyone reinvents everything, most developer shops refuse to even use the standard library implementation of whatever compiler they are using, and the entire process is a grindhouse for millions of lines of code, thousands of 3D models, textures, shaders, music, and dialog and all of it often never even sees the light of day once, or at best is used in one game before discarding and redoing it all over again.

The industry has gotten better on that front in recent years at least. Unreal 4 is public source, you can make modifications or contribute back (you are just bound by the royalty fee and fact you cannot redistribute source yourself) and the asset stores of Unity / Unreal / etc, while 99% garbage, at least are starting the industry on a path towards recycling rather than NIH waste at an alarming rate.

You want to talk about culture, think of what kinds of creative experiences we would have today if every game developer open sourced their engines and assets 5 years after publishing. They can keep the maps for their game, which would still give it unique retail value, but id alone created a huge gamut of free software games through the publication of their engine sources in the late 90s and early 2000s. Think of the possibilities if those resources were not inevitably lost in some discarded outdated mainframe a decade after the games release like most are, but instead were made useful long after they made their money off them for hobbyists or indies to appreciate the hours of work designers or programmers poured into these products.