skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who has injured himself for a "hobby" a number of times:

My "hobby" is a means for me to challenge myself, to push myself to my limits, to see what I am capable of and take my measure as a human being. It is a means for me to learn how to overcome fear, pain and doubt. It provides an objective haven when the subjective world is upside down.
For anyone interested in this topic, I'd recommend the Lexicon Valley podcast [0] in general, and two episodes in particular.

What Does It Mean to Sound Black? [1] featured Columbia professor John McWhorter as a guest, and discussed the "black accent" in terms of phonemes as well as AAVE.

Rules Are Made to Be Spoken [2] with John McWhorter now guest-hosting, covers "variationist sociolinguistics", the study of how linguistic cues are interpreted as a signifier of class and socioeconomic status.

0: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley.html

1: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2016/0...

2: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2016/0...
I'm re-reading your comment and feel like I must have mis-read it. Either way: we don't appear to have anything to disagree about. Sorry about that!
Yes external factors will definitely get you off your butt or whatever.
The question of whether one language can be called simpler than another is notoriously thorny, and I doubt it's any easier with dialects. Humans tend to overlook any complexity that we're either habituated to* or are so unfamiliar with that we simply don't notice it. This makes it hard to be objective.

Besides that, as I'm sure you know, such discussion is often skewed by unspoken agendas around why people want to call one thing 'simpler' than another in the first place. I'm not imputing that to your comment here, just pointing out that it's frequently in play, probably the more so as a topic is more politicized.

* (as, offtopically, is rampant in the software business)
Is anyone surprised? Tesla and SpaceX have almost always missed their timeline goals. This is their MO. They do, however, always produce what they say they will.
I'd say the problem is that people get so emotionally invested in the stuff. The flimsy line between dialect and language should just be an interesting example of the ambiguity of human life, but people get enormously upset about it. AAVE should just be an interesting example of a dialect and how dialects develop, but everyone has to rush to judge it, not just examine and understand it.

The US has a long and proud history of rationalizing the perceived inferiority of black people using scientific-sounding arguments. Evolution, physiology, and psychology have all served this role, and linguistics is just another way to do it.
If this results to be true, this could be one of the most expensive bugs in computer history.
What about What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought by Stanovich [1], is it better?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300164629
You're suggestion is to not test a massive chunk of functionality. That may be reasonable choice, but it's a long way from total test coverage.
Mozilla emits nightly builds of heir-to-Firefox browser engine Servo
> the math for perspective was developed long before computers with z-buffers existed

I would say long before computers existed. Perspective projection was the key algorithm of renaissance art!
World’s largest purifier cleans air and turns pollution into jewelry
Link to original paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/06/27/1602413113.full
What's your basis for the idea that learning "correct" English is the reason for their academic success?
oops forgot the reference...

[1] http://www.bearcave.com/misl/misl_tech/msdrm/darknet.htm
Passwords Las Vegas – programme – now part of BSides
Good call on the competetive edge, arcade games (the ones that eat up childrens quarters in the first place) also had it: there was a scoreboard, and there was fame to be had by being there.
In my experience if you keep at it you will be able to stop it from slipping away. It is a naturally unstable state, you're conscious, and you are getting visual input, that you know isn't "real". Your entire life your brain has worked to shut off that situation so that is what it wants to do. Leaving it running is sort of like balancing on a chair, you really want to put your feet down but you have to will yourself to stay up straight by not using your feet.

For me, at first things would just stop (back to black as it were), then they would slowly slide out of my field of view and any head motion would cause them to stop. But eventually, like balancing, once I got to the point where I got it started, I could keep it going for a while. At this point if I can keep it going for several (say 6 or 7) minutes I'll find myself asleep (which I recognize by waking up). Only on a few occasions have remained as lucid as Feynman describes while actually dreaming.
New developer/designer/front-dev community
For me it's one of the following:

1. Good sleep. Note I didn't say "enough" sleep but good sleep. To wake up fresh in the morning you have to sleep well and you do that by going to bed early. Also, eating in the morning will teach your body that the morning is the period with lots of energy available so it will wake up in the morning.

2. Exercise. Periodic, daily exercise helps to clean your brain. Literally. Caveats: biking does not count plus cold air can give you a slight brain inflammation which leads to "don't feel like working". Every time you brain is not in top shape, you will feel like not working. I recommend moderate weight lifting.

3. Eat properly. Plenty of advice on internet. Your brain works with the food you eat, so if you eat garbage your brain will run on garbage.

4. Daily rest. Plan each day a proper rest. For your brain. I.e. when you do physical work, you rest by staying still. When you use your brain to work, you rest by going in the park and not thinking at all if possible :). Caveats: documentaries, games and other things that make you think do not count. Sorry :)

I include here plans to do things that you really would like to do a.k.a "live your life". This change of scenery helps a lot when you go back to work. You will feel very motivated.

Each time I don't feel like working I just think about what I did in the last days or week and see which one I skipped.

Usually people recommend 1-3 but I was doing that and still no results. Once I implemented 4 I was really productive.
So, genuine question, why?
This seems to be unfairly biased against landlocked countries. Kazakh and Lao are languages too!
Duckling: The linguist that parses text into structured data
Considering US v Microsoft in the late 90s was spurred by simply bundling a web browser...
Compute password for any UPCxxxxxxx WiFi hotspot
> [Elizabeth Warren is] suggesting comprehensive regulatory scrutiny for technology giants — calling out Google by name alongside Apple and Amazon.

These firms and their well paid employees generate a lot of income tax and capital gains tax revenue for California.

I suppose California lawmakers ought to stridently resist such regulations. It threatens their money source.
I don't think you get the point.

It may be a braindead idea but it's their idea. If you don't like it, fork it.

If you don't like it, write your own.

But don't complain because someone wrote some software and kindly published it for all to use for free.
I work at Arts&Ideas Sudbury School in Baltimore, 8 years old at this point. I have been with them for two years.

There is no veto. There is simply discussing the issue and revisiting it if necessary. While it is always possible that a disastrous decision will be made, anecdotally, it seems to be exceedingly rare.

Students want the school to succeed. They want to be safe and respected. When you start from those places, bad decisions rarely happen if someone points out why they are bad. Of course, like any group, we may all think a decision is good when, in fact, it is bad. But if someone has a good view or argument, everyone listens.

I have learned that democracy is not about voting. True democracy is listening and being heard. It is a bit like in Buddhism and how simply witnessing and acknowledging emotions will often lead the way to a good outcome.

The absolute core of the school is accepting, without question, that each student is responsible for themselves. Once everyone really gets that, bad intentions melt away.

It is important to have a strong environment for students to experience mutual respect. Starting a Sudbury School is very difficult. But once it starts, as long as a small percentage of new students is added at a time, they will acclimate to the environment and accept the idea of balancing the needs of the many with the needs of the one which is ultimately the balancing act that we all must struggle with.

On many occasions, students have come to School Meeting with a rule that staff did not like. Sometimes during the discussion the staff have their minds changed. Other times, the student might change their mind. Still other times, the rule gets passed and the staff come to see that it is a perfectly good rule.

We also have a jury-style system (Judicial Committee) for rules. It is a body that the staff turn over the responsibility of adjudicating rule breaking and sentence making to. When some students make a mess (no cure for that, I am afraid) and I feel angry, I go and write them up. My anger passes and by the next day, I am okay with whatever our JC comes up with. It is generally fair and equitable.

Students almost always plead guilty if they did it, but if they did not do it, they will certainly say so. And we all get to suggest a sentence, but the members of JC decide on what it will be. They debate thoughtfully and generally rule wisely.

I have seen plaintiffs ask to drop a case while defendants ask to keep it. They want to admit to wrong doing and move past it. There is no shame, just lessons to be learned.

It is the most humane and fun environment I have ever been in. Students learn how to be part of a community, how to accept responsibility for themselves, and how to learn.

They may or may not learn academics; it is their choice. Academics, it turns out, is rather easy to acquire for children coming from a place of empowerment and respect.

To grow up accepted is a powerful foundation to accomplish anything.
Yes, I forgot about Adam Smith's treatise about online review systems.
What result would disprove the article?
A good recent real life example of this is when the POWER architecture moved to Little Endian. The API's stayed the same (think GLib C API), but LE introduced a new ABI where registers (ie r12) which had a specific purpose in BE changed in LE. This all has to do with linking/compiling.

At runtime if you're reading/writing to memory you had to ensure that you read and write using the same "stride" ie reading and writing back in 32bits is fine, but if you read in 32bits do some transforms in a register and write it out in 16bits you'd have to make sure the internal register BE representation and the written out to memory LE representation made sense.

The GCC and other compiler guys can give you lots of war stories about SIMD (VMX/VSX on POWER)

Anyways, just something I thought off the top of my head :)
I wouldn't go that far. Little girls can be very manipulative and yet perfectly normal. Psycopathy requires things beyond playing games with adults. This particular girl just doesn't respond well to artificially-imposed authority figures. Her form of lashing out is simply more aggressive than standard coping mechanisms which, with girls, often internalizes things (shyness, self-destruction etc). Frankly, I give her points for demonstrating the absurdity of the assignment while at the same time operating within the rule. I fault the teachers for not anticipating this.

(In my day, the popular option for such assignments was "starship captain".)
So what, you almost entirely agree with me? How dare you! Go to hell!

At any rate: thanks for clarifying. I think I have a nitpicky disagreement with your characterization of AAVE as sounding simpler because of actual simplifications, as opposed to misapprehensions SE speakers have about what constitutes simplicity. But it's just a nitpick.

Also, Pullum himself suggests, towards the end of the essay, that it's just an accident of history that we're all not speaking something closer to AAVE than SE.
I have sometimes used a method where I start working in the morning and when I find myself losing focus I have a rule to stop and go home. It keeps me constantly underachieving and wasting time. After a while I actually just really want to get stuff done and the runs get longer. Obviously this does not work very well when working in teams or for someone else.
Or you could just use the terminal like any sane person. This is how to encrypt a message using someones public key ready?

gpg -r pubkeyidhere -e filetoencrypthere.txt

Honestly if you can't work a terminal you shouldn't be left around encryption.
If you have a government sponsored monopoly like that, at least do a half-way decent job. I will never understand getting paid $300k for a static website and being so desperate to squeeze another ounce of profit out of an already absurdly profitable contract that you shoot yourself in the foot by not at least delivering something pretty.

I mean, wow.
same here. I had the motivation but not the ability to do it. After a few years I realized that lack of motivation just means "brain (the organ) in bad shape" (see my other comment).
And yet, not only all speakers of one can understand perfectly the other, everyone can speak it effortlessly, and even understand localized accents and subtleties.
Do you know your engineers?
I'm black and I loved PHC. It and Car Talk were the only things that made me seriously consider donating to NPR. It was the only show I would make an effort to catch on Saturdays when I had to make long drives back and forth from NYC.
Well, football ain't bull ridin' for sure. There's just something gladiator-exploitative about the whole mess.

Another anecdote: guy I know has a kid that's like a high school... sophomore and in order for this kid to continue to add value as a basketball player, he apparently can't afford to play HS varsity ball. It's a distraction. His other (older) son is approaching 7 feet tall and is totally over organized sports altogether, and is pointed at engineering.
I caught Whad'ya Know when they came to town many years ago. The musical guest was Reverend Peyton and his Big Damn Band and Jim Packard was (or pretended to be) uncertain whether he could say that on the air, so the first time he introduced them he called them the Big Darn Band.

Was overall a quite entertaining experience, but my local NPR station dropped the show a long time ago so I haven't kept up.
I'm also relatively fluent and I'm the same way as you. You need to be Cervantes-level fluent, like my wife who was not only native born in a Spanish speaking country but educated in private schools and then college educated there as well. I also think some people may naturally be slightly more in tune with linguistics in general.

Spanish speakers are a huge group and many simply don't know their own language. It's like going to Alabama and expecting to find Shakespeare.

I'll grant you that mutual intelligibility is difficult to define but I'm using it in the sense that my wife is conversational with folks from Portugal and Italy when we travel there. That's a decent standard.
I see this more as "the people who just show up" vs "the people who actually work when they're at work".

Dividing them up like this the typical "just shows up" person is purely stimulus driven. Nothing happens if you don't tell them to do exactly something. They won't tell you they're blocked on Bob sending a purchase order for a month. They won't tell you because you didn't ask. You didn't ask so they just... they just do nothing.

Or you have contractors who really don't care[1]. They bill by the hour, and if you don't give them tasks then they can take a second contract and bill more.

Most companies I've seen are full of stimulus-response people.

You don't need to work more than 40 hour weeks to be productive. What you need is managers and coworkers who understand what your job kinda entails. People who when you say during the two week planning meeting that you'll fix a typo and that's it, will call you on it saying "that won't take two weeks, what else?".

I've seen competent people (with children) fall into a comfort zone where they can keep up and "perform well" working just an hour or two a week, because nobody else gets any work done so it's not like they're blocking people. These same people actually perform in better companies.

[1] I'm not saying no contractors care. But they have extra reason not to care if they happened to be paid and aren't "stimulated" (in the simulus-response sense).
Fully and 100% agree. I've said as much before and I always get shouted down (on reddit, mostly, but sometimes here). You got my upboat.
The Death of Expertise (2013)
That comment seems excessive. She may be very normal, creative and competitive girl. Even if she really wanted to be a porn star. In such free schools, gaining respect from students without the use of punishments is something the teacher needs to learn himself.
"Our results suggest that the principal cause of the invalid cluster inferences is spatial autocorrelation functions that do not follow the assumed Gaussian shape."

In other words, researchers cut corners. You should never assume that something is a certain way without rigorously proving it. How did these papers make it past peer review?
French too, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a language more stuffy or proscriptive. How many languages have a 400-year-old state-sponsored committee whose sole purpose is to guide the language?

It's amazing how difficult it is for people to get past the trap of thinking that what's familiar is "correct."
Programming Isn't Easy
On forums, here's how I'd like to have it work:

https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/01/a-dec...

It isn't very technically detailed, but it should be clear enough. Your system sounds like a good match for what I imagine. The TL;DR: The messages are in focus, not the servers. Content-addressing using hashes, threads managed through messages referencing prior messages directly by their hashes. When creating forums, servers are just (optionally) defined to simplify routing / delivery.

One could build discussion servers on top of the matrix home server, and discussion clients to match.
Doesn't that lady have a gift worth cultivating?
I'm not joking, by the way — finding weak points and exploiting them can make you a good novelist, intelligence officer, crisis manager...

I condole with her teachers, at the same very time.
There is probably a good middle ground. If it's a "once off" sort of task, then there is no need to over-engineer it to perfection.

The sweet spot has a nice tradeoff between extra-time spent, and ease of migrating to a full-blown complicated and extensible solution. For me, I generally write my code in that middle ground. Stubbing out parts of my solution and then coming back to fill it in. In that sense, having separate functions with clearly-defined input/outputs or portions of work, aides me in completing my solution.
Title should really read "fMRI" instead of "MRI". The referenced journal article is titled "Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates".
& is bitwise and

| is bitwise or

You are trying to confuse people.
That's too generically racey and not substantive enough (that's really why these groups excel at academics, and those don't?—large claim) to count as a good comment here.
Which is why most people who comment on HN confess using adblockers. Are you suggesting that because there is Ebola in africa, it is fine to introduce in the US? How does websites being infested with trackers justify introducing tracking inside the OS?
Given the sheer volume of writing he had to do week for years, wouldn't surprise me. I certainly couldn't sustain that quantity and quality.
In Sudbury Schools, there are plenty of rules. If a student broke the rules, their would be a jury of their peers and a sentence to follow out. If she wanted to stay at the school, she would accept it all and acclimate. Sometimes it takes a few weeks, sometimes a few months.

Someone who ignores our system of justice would be expelled. It happens.

It all depends on whether she wants to be in this environment or not. Most people want to be, but not all.

If she lasted long enough to understand that she could be heard by being her real self, then she would probably stay. But it can take a long time to get through the toxic layers some students have built up over the years.
1890 in glorious colour: the magic of photochromes – in pictures
I thought once one reaches a retirement age in the US, the only option is medicare?
Poor idealistic Snowden. I suppose he did us a service by exposing what he did, but he was unprepared for the realities of the world he entered when he left the cocoon of the IT department of the NSA.
tech companies...
They were probably peer-reviewed by biologists, not statisticians. Peer review is mostly just a good think and read for about a month, not a perfect analysis.
> This article starts off with addressing how so-called-10x developers are often just building tech debt into their applications. I was with Tiwari on that. Then he moves on to creating a non-judgmental culture... not sure I agree there. And then... linters? Huh?

Thank you. Did anyone read the damn article? It's all over the place -- borderline nonsensical. I suppose it's intended to be a promotion of their company. Color me unconvinced.
It's already been known for several years that almost all MRI brain scan research is wrong, what exactly is new here?
For me, the biggest reason is the community and the people that hang out on HN. I mean how many places can you get Alan Kay to do an AMA of such high quality as this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851

Other reasons are simplicity and speed of HN site that makes it a breeze to only focus on the content. No flashy stuff.
http://techblog.bozho.net/why-all-the-fear-in-electronic-vot...
Powerful abstractions make the promise that you'll only have to learn the abstraction to write powerful software, so "even people with only basic knowledge will be able to do X using abstraction Y".

The promise is almost always false. All abstractions are leaky, and if you do serious development with them inevitably bugs will bubble up from below and you'll have to dive into the messy internals.

For example, ZeroMQ makes distributed messaging relatively painless. Someone with very little knowlegde of the network stack can write simple programs with it easily. But for any serious enterprise application with high reliability requirements you'll eventually run into problems that require deep knowledge of the network stack.

>Talk to me about Docker and Swarm and the like hosting technology platforms and frameworks that make it trivially straightforward to program distributed systems reliably, and really hard to program them wrong, and we might have the utopia you speak of.

Yes, that.
A Tesla Model S is about the furthest possible thing from a "crappy car".
[2001] the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Unix Legacy [pdf]
I hit the front page with "Where is who is hiring hiring?" [0]

I got my current job through it and from time to time I still get "thank you" emails from random people telling me it helped them get a job too - a really good feeling (:

[0] http://whereis-whoishiring-hiring.me
Did you link the correct flight? Because your link says something entirely different.
Doesn't sound like a straight up bug, but rather unsound statistical methods which can happen with or without software. You get the same problem with finite element analysis software: the operator has to be aware of all the assumptions baked in, and has to ensure that the input conforms to them.
Translating back, German for evangelical would be evangelikal, not evangelisch.