skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it is first a recognition problem -- in the US we are now embedded in a pop culture that has progressed far enough to seriously hurt places that hold "developed cultures". This pervasiveness makes it hard to see anything else, and certainly makes it difficult for those who care what others think to put much value on anything but pop culture norms.

The second, is to realize that the biggest problems are imbalance. Developed arts have always needed pop arts for raw "id" and blind pushes of rebellion. This is a good ingredient -- like salt -- but you can't make a cake just from salt.

I got a lot of insight about this from reading McLuhan for very different reasons -- those of media and how they form an environment -- and from delving into Anthropology in the 60s (before it got really politicized). Nowadays, books by "Behavioral Economists" like Kahneman, Thaler, Ariely, etc. can be very helpful, because they are studying what people actually do in their environments.

Another way to look at it is that finding ways to get "authentically educated" will turn local into global, tribal into species, dogma into multiple perspectives, and improvisation into crafting, etc. Each of the starting places stays useful, but they are no longer dominant.
Well, if he's talking about consumer products, he's absolutely right — Telegram is about the only widely popular non-US consumer product offering encrypted communication I know.
The era of Hypercard, RAM Doubler, AppleTalk, Dark Castle etc and wondering when Cyberdog, OpenDoc and Taligent were going to change the future of computing. Good times.
Hey, I'm the Jason Punyon drob's gushing about in the post. I wanted to tell you that this is 100% totally realistic, everyone on the Data team at Stack Overflow besides Dave Robinson is living proof.

In the beginning the Data Science Team at Stack Overflow was just me and Kevin Montrose. We're both ~30, we had some skills that were data-ish, but they were general critical thinking and math skills. By no means were we statisticians or data scientists by trade like Dave Robinson. However, the data at Stack Overflow was very amenable to analysis, and we were able to ship a personalized machine learning product after a year of work.

That year was plagued by (my, mostly) engineering failures (http://jasonpunyon.com/blog/2015/02/12/providence-failure-is...) and a bit of unfortunate lack-of-empiricism, not "data science" problems. And post launch of Providence, the engineering remains the bigger issue. It's just hard to get this shit right. Our record on getting experiments right the first time is spotty, and at Stack Overflow levels of traffic you might be dumping a week or more of time on a single screwup. We've had to rerun many experiments because of various things going wrong with the code (screwed up the A/B testing code, not counting the right things, visual issues with the ads we didn't catch during design, etc etc etc). There's a litany of things you've gotta get right engineering wise before data even comes into the picture.

So if you're gonna take the plunge, know that it's 100% possible but 100% difficult, and maybe not for the reasons you think.
It is interesting to point out that the last few nuclear tests were to test the supercomputer simulations.
I said this and reply to another user, but I'll say it here. I really do think that some or most of the people at the top believe, or at least have convinced themselves, that they are doing the right thing for the American people. I also think that they know more about the world than they will ever let on, and there are things that go on behind closed doors and off the record that we will never learn about, so it's tough to say what they really do and don't understand.
I'm not into quackery.
Yep, there's loads:

https://www.aboutpaypal.org/
http://www.paypalwarning.com/
http://www.screw-paypal.com/horror_stories/horror_stories.ht...

Some of the content is NSFW
International bank transfers (at least to/from outside of Europe) are a massive pain, can take many days to clear and often cost quite a bit more than what PayPal charges.
Of course not. Yes, in fact bank-issued debit cards are the default here.
Mozilla Open Design: branding without walls
It was an entertaining show. Just wish it had been a bit more creative than a simple copy/paste/merge of American Psycho and Fight Club. I guess they added computers in the middle.
On the rebound from epic failure
It's all trade-offs.

If there happens to be a well-tested third party library that does what you want, doesn't increase your attack surface more than necessary, is supported by the community, is easy to get up and running with, and has a compatible license with what you are using it in, then by all means go for it.

For me and my work, I tend to find that something from the above list is lacking enough that it makes more sense to write it in-house. Not always, and not as a rule, but it works out that way quite a bit.

I would also argue that if coworkers couldn't write a library without a prohibitive number of bugs, then they won't be able to write application or glue code either. So maybe your issue wasn't in-house vs third party libraries, but the quality control and/or developer aptitude around you.
How to Tell Someone’s Age When All You Know Is Her Name – FiveThirtyEight
Mark Zuckerberg won’t be able to choose the next Mark Zuckerberg
Apple to GOP and Trump: Get Lost
"it has data persistence reliability on par with Postgres" if we pretend transactions do not exist and postgres is running in some non-default config then maybe, but we don't need to pretend.
The Quality, Popularity, and Negativity of 5.6M Hacker News Comments
8 Career Skills You Learn While Travelling the World
The Alan Kay quote struck me as interesting.

There is no reason why Wikipedia couldn't do that.

I wrote a MediaWiki plugin to do pretty much this for JavaScript. I use it for helping teach kids JavaScript. http://fingswotidun.com/code/index.php/Main_Page

The difficulty arises when you want to extend the abilities of the wiki to do things like this within the revision/revertible mechanism that Wikipedia supports.
I fail to see a meaningful difference between these two approaches, especially if we transform the first one in a list comprehension:

[user.first_name for user in table_users if user.is_active]
For those of you who missed it: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/20/telia_engineer_blame...
Except that once theere's a lot of money in smart contracts, people will hack the contracts without letting people know. Somebody's going to complain about "losing all their money in a contract and they don't know why" but they'll be ignored as technically ignorant and in the meantime, the thief will walk with lots of money.
Hey Jason,

Thanks for sharing your 2 projects! To be honest, I'm surprised that a few simple projects like that could support someone! I'm completely new to this, and was wondering if you could break down some numbers for me? Like: how many users, where they come from, what you think is the total market, how much of that you currently capture, and any growth hacking or marketing you did?

Thanks a lot!
The only solution to this I've found is to disable Windows Update from searching for updates by setting it to "Manual Updates Only".

However, this causes a problem in that every time you want to actually update, Windows Update may rebuild the entire "installed updates" database from scratch which can take hours on a heavily patched machine.
Is this a question!
Really depends on the requirements for encryption. Unbreakable encryption is easy to do with basic math.
https://www.dropbox.com/privacy

Where
Around the world. To provide you with the Services, we may store, process and transmit information in the United States and locations around the world - including those outside your country. Information may also be stored locally on the devices you use to access the Services.

Safe Harbor. Dropbox complies with the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Safe Harbor ("Safe Harbor") frameworks and principles. We have certified our compliance, and you can view our certifications here. You can learn more about Safe Harbor by visiting http://export.gov/safeharbor. JAMS is the independent organization responsible for reviewing and resolving complaints about our Safe Harbor compliance. We ask that you first submit any such complaints directly to us via privacy@dropbox.com. If you aren't satisfied with our response, please contact JAMS at http://www.jamsinternational.com/rules-procedures/safeharbor....

NOTE: When transferring data from the European Union, the European Economic Area, and Switzerland, Dropbox relies upon a variety of legal mechanisms, including contracts with our users. Dropbox doesn’t rely upon Safe Harbor as a legal basis for data transfer but does adhere to the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles while specific guidance for the forthcoming EU-US Privacy Shield program is developed. For information about data transfers from Europe to the United States, please visit this page.
So SteamVR = PC and Oculus = Console?

If so, I need to go and join the glorious SteamVR master race. ;)
I have been in this business for 20 years and hired a lot of good developers over the years and only one bad one. The bad one was a personality defect and not an ability defect.

If you need a whiteboard or tests, to tell they are a professional then you may be doing something wrong. I can talk to a person and within 10 minutes tell you if they are a good developer or not. Perhaps it's a gift, but I suspect not, what I suspect is people focus on the wrong parts of what makes a developer a good developer.

People focus on the mechanics of development. Do they know syntax? Do they know the API?

In my time I have forgotten more syntax and API's than I know, I used to be a top notch Pascal developer and could be again in 2 weeks same with Delphi, but today I would be hard pressed to write a line of it. But people get hung up on this, they think a whiteboard, disconnected from information, somehow simulates reality; meanwhile we all use Google, before that it was the development library at your company, Barns and Noble and a host of other printed material. The reality is memorizing little used portions of a languages API is a waste of time (the platform is going to change). For 80% of applications built you are going to use the same simple patterns in whatever platform is being used.

The key is to focus on what you are realistically going to have them do. If you are hiring a CRUD developer they should have a good handle on Data access, Relational or NoSQL theory and web/mobile technologies. Don't ask them to write an algorithm that factors prime on the whiteboard when no one is ever going to write that and even if they are, they are certainly not going to do it in a disconnected environment.

I look for three things, intuition, an inquisitive nature and motivation. Those are the three things that cannot be taught. It has yet to fail me other than the above mentioned anomaly.
Yes, it is possible. It is partly developing a kind of fluency that is very similar to sight-reading music (this is a nice one to think about because you really have to grok what is there to do it, and you have to do it in real time at "prima vista").

Doing a lot of it is one of the keys! Doing it in a way that various short and long-term memories are involved is another key (rapid reading with comprehension of both text and music is partly a kind of memorization and buffering, etc.)

I don't think I've read 23,000 books in 76 years, but very likely somewhere between 16,000 and 20,000 (I haven't been counting). Bertrand Russell easily read 23,000 books in his lifetime, etc.
I think this is the core flaw in the mindset of Ethereum adherents: the very idea that it is even possible to have "Laws" which are completely objective to the point of mathematical logic and that these could/should be enforced, literally, by a computer running a program.

We are thankfully very very far from a system of Laws which are anything like that. Such a system might be great in certain "sandbox" environments for manipulating resources that have carefully controlled interactions with the outside. But to have arbitrarily complex "smart contracts" running in the affairs of the real world? no thanks!
What motivates you? Do you ever apply the knowledge you've gotten this way (do you even care)?
P.T. Barnum and Soapy Smith, who gained enormous power from confidence tricks and hoaxes, weren't even mentioned.
> The human brain is amazing at coping with vision defects.

Indeed. I am a bit short-sighted (literally, not metaphorically), but I usually spend the day without my glasses. Only in lectures, I will put them on, and immediately wonder how I could cope with the blurry mess that I saw before. But it just doesn't matter when you're focusing on different things.
How to Pin Down the Core Message of Your Startup
What steps would a group of people (civilization?) need to take in order to make progress here? When choices are abundant, the masses have been enabled, and yet knowledge is still at a premium?
>I can go on and dismantle every other premise in this article using data and logic, but I will stop here.

is this r/cringeanarchy?
It's time to share & spread information about PayPal's competitors:

What has your experience or market research yielded (stripe.com and paymill.de probably being the most obvious ones)?
Spark Tutorials in Scala and Python
This is for older children, twelve and above I'd say, but I think the Alice books (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There) are great. Then they (and you) can read The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner, which opened up entirely new levels of the stories to me.

For younger children, I'd say The Wind in the Willows.
I wonder what the quasi Newton methods would look like if adapted to this framework
This is a worthy goal, and I think quite possible. Note that Biology requires a lot of organization in order to do this, so it is likely not to be straightforward from where we are. But we had to make the Internet -- etc. -- self-healing in many respects (we had to go to dynamic stabilities rather than trying to make perfect machines ...)
Tencent Seals Deal to Buy ‘Clash of Clans’ Developer Supercell for $8.6B
What kinds of changes to your thought processes did you make?
> GNU Make’s source code is available from Github repository

It's not GitHub, it's Savannah, as just linked literally 2 lines below :

> http://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=make
So the moral of the story is don't make offers, just fire the chaff?
Well, over here (in Germany) everyone gets a bank-issued debit card while a credit card usually comes with additional fees (I think it's 20-30€/year in my case, not sure right now). While it's not much, and I absolutely need a credit card for international purchases, a lot of fellow germans simply don't see the benefit when they could as well use the free debit card their bank gave them. And online their Paypal account is linked to their banking account which enables instant payments without credit cards.
IanCal - I upvoted you but let me comment for extra emphasis. I remember coming out of PhD level quantitative social science studies in academia back in the late 90s where I was using K-means clustering, Factor analysis, multiple linear regression, ANOVA and more. When I moved into marketing research and dealing with company data it was shocking and disheartening how little of those skills I could actually deploy. Data quality, data management and just the cost of capturing relevant data was so high that we were reduced to much simpler analyses.

Over time I came to appreciate exactly what you were saying. Many companies can be helped by fairly simple analyses.

Fast forward - data is getting much cheaper and now all these years later my more advanced stats skills seem to actually matter. But even in this apparent abundance ... data management and data quality assurance is often lacking or significantly underfunded and simple aggregations and analyses still make the most difference in many organizations.
12 Games Missing from E3 2016
I wish they would get back to what they used to do - make actual computer games. I still can't shake the nagging suspicion that the recent VR hype is just the product of the every-decade-or-so fad cycle (similar to what happened in the 80's with it).
It's worth noting that fasthttp doesn't support HTTP/2.0.

According to the README, there are plans for it in the future.
Sure, using PayPal as a buyer is great as long as you never get into a dispute with a seller. It took about 4 months for me to get PayPal to refund my money when a seller on eBay ripped me off.

PayPal support was so inept they claimed that I had not returned the merchandise despite giving them the DHL tracking number and shipping receipt multiple times and eventually they closed my case in favor of the merchant.

I had to keep calling and harassing them and finally threatening to have the charges reversed by my credit card company when they suddenly reversed their decision.

I will never use PayPal for anything if I can avoid it.
Smalltalk was an early attempt at non-command-messages to objects with the realization that you get a "programming language" if you take some care with the conventions used for composing the messages.
The thing is this benchmark uses a small data set and no concurrent writes. This means that the data set can be trivially cached in memory on every single instance.

In this benchmark there is theoretically no need for different database nodes to even communicate with each other after the initial data sync. It is embarrassingly parallel.

In fact it is somewhat alarming that going from 2 to 5 nodes doesn't at least double the performance, given that there should be absolutely zero need for coordination between servers.
Sending money in an envelope would be easier and more accepted.
Mailosaur – Automate email testing with Selenium
Skippered Yacht Charter
At least in my area, all of the Uber drivers are fully or semi-retired older people. These are people that certainly wouldn't want to work full-time as taxi drivers, and assuredly aren't going to jump through all the hoops and regulation to run their own taxi company. Uber is really taking advantage of under-utilized resources that would otherwise be wasted.
faith in humanity restored
I'd love to see an example of such a restricted contract language. My speculation is that we'll see a few different languages pop up with different approaches to safety, along with coding methodologies and tools for static analysis.

Maybe we'll also discover a handful of primitive contract building blocks, to be implemented with care and stringency, with methods for combining them.
InVision Raises $55M Series D and Serving 2M Users
Always possible that he is dumb and deliberately lying.
Yes, but they could be doing a lot better. There is a whole raft of companies out there that would have been happy customers of Google, MS and Amazon cloud services that is now doing business elsewhere.
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Still gonna need some inertial dampers though.
Besides, keep in mind that the C language has some "weird corners" and in some considtions, you might encounter an "unspecified behaviour" scenario.

For short, there are some cases in which the C language specification does not tell you what to do and how to interprete code and in this cases, the choice is left to the compiler.

This is not trivial as it might look.

For example, what happens when you omit the return statement at the end of a function? GCC will to automatically insert a return statement for you, but Clang will not. Both are perfectly fine behaviours... As long as you are aware of it.

If you always compiled your code with GCC and suddenly switch to clang you might see weird shit, because the processor reached the end of your function, found no return instruction, and just went ahead and executed whatever code was put after your function (and it might not be so obvious what code is there).

(But in a way, this is part of the beauty of the C language: there is very little abstraction, and it is easy to understand what will happen when you run C code.)
Bob Barton got most of his great ideas in sleeping dreams.

Most of my ideas come in "waking dreams" (this is a state that most children indulge in readily, but it can be retained in a more or less useful way -- I don't think you quite get into adulthood by retaining it, so it's a tradeoff).

Main thing about ideas is that, however they come, most of them are mediocre down to bad -- so steps have to be taken to deal with this major problem.
> Solidity is a compiled, typed language.

The same language can be both compiled and interpreted, this doesn't affect the semantics of the language. For example, OCaml ships with both a compiler and an interpreter. There exist AOT compilers for JavaScript too.

Also, JavaSript is a typed language. It is just dynamically typed and does too much type coercion.
also because the issue is that trump himself said the judge is unfit due to his ethnicity.

thirdly,

> La Raza is a group that advocates for a path to citizenship for all illegal immigrants.

this quote implies that the judge is incapable of being an impartial public official, incapable of performing his job.
Fearless Salary Negotiation
Australian 'Satoshi' filing hundreds of Bitcoin patents
> the non-US companies will be bought en-masse by US companies, like Microsoft did with Skype.

I'm glad I'm not the only one having that opinion about MS's acquisition of Skype. There's this article from July 2012, after the MS acquisition and before the Snowden leaks: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/skype-makes-...

> The FBI, whose officials have complained to Congress about the “going dark” problem, issued a statement Wednesday night saying it couldn’t comment on a particular company or service but that surveillance of conversations “requires review and approval by a court. It is used only in national security matters and to combat the most serious crimes.”

and most importantly

> But changes allowing police surveillance of online chats had been made since late last year, a knowledgeable industry official said Wednesday.

As an anecdote, just wanted to add that I live in an Eastern European country which has started to at least try to put up a fight against endemic corruption, with the help of some Western countries (i.e. the American and the UK ambassadors issuing worrying statements from time to time saying "corruption is bad" and meeting the head of the Anti-Corruption body).

Anyway, in a couple of anti-corruption cases investigated by our local anti-corruption prosecutors there were mentions of the authorities having access to the corrupt people's Skype conversations. Now, our NSA-like structure is no way as powerful as the real NSA, computationally speaking, so I don't see them breaking Skype's built-in encoding all by themselves, unless given that information on a silver plate by our friends from across the Atlantic Ocean. In exchange, we might help them with keeping nasty terrorists locked in an improptu prison, because that's how friends help each other out. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/inside-romani...)
Or less -- I think UIs have really gone downhill.

But, it's also worth looking at places where there's been enough change of one kind or another to constitute "qualitative". This has certainly happened in many areas of engineering and in science. How about in computering?
Hashes, even md5, are pretty good about going nuts when even one bit is changed in the input. And video codecs (speaking very broadly) are tolerant of a bit error rate like 1e-9 or they'd be useless over the air or on optical media. So simply have your torrent client randomly flip 1 in a billion bits as it downloads. The md5 will never match and the movie quality will be unimpaired.
This explains the famous line from Star Wars about the Millennium Falcon "making the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs". George Lucas was obviously hip to the implications of special relativity.