skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It turns out that AMBER alerts have actually been described in the same way as TSA procedures ("security theater") - they are "crime control theater" [1] because if a child is going to be killed by an abductor, generally it happens within three hours of the abduction, and there is nothing law enforcement can really do to prevent that, they just cannot move quickly enough.

> In fact, AMBER Alert is arguably an example of what could be called crime control theater. It is a socially constructed “solution” to a socially constructed problem, enabling public officials to symbolically address an essentially intractable threat.

[1] http://cjr.sagepub.com/content/33/2/159.abstract "Child Abduction, AMBER Alert, and Crime Control Theater"
(General reply to sister comments)

Sounds to me like there some cross purpose debating going on here.

To me it is simple. If by "Capital" you mean "money" then of course it has no intrinsic value, it is based on faith. Zimbabwe's currency is an obvious example of that.

If we are talking about other stuff that is useful to our lives, then the value is relative to the beholder and their situation. Water is more valuable than gold from a survival point of view, but not from a $ point of view.
These animations always remind me of something you'd see in Monty Python by Terry Gilliam.
Part of the problem with the new move semantics for me, and C++ in general, is figuring out what the compiler is going to do and their interaction with the return value optimization. Sometimes I can't figure out if the RVO or the move constructor is going to be used.

C++ has definitely blown it's complexity budget and the problem is getting worse. I don't really see a way out of it either. I sure hope Rust starts to gel or a better C++ comes along, because I don't think I can keep pace with C++ too much longer.
It reflects on an obvious potential outcome of some alternate methods of punishing the suicide attempt.

How would you handle the situation?
> debugging first in your head is yet another skill that should really be taught to everybody but isn't

Along with smelting iron. I don't know why people advocate skills one doesn't need, saying "but they make you better".

Skills you don't need will atrophy, because you don't need them. Conversely, skills you need with strengthen. Why would I debug first in my inaccurate head when I have a perfectly accurate debugger right here, and I can run my test suite in ten seconds?

Debugging first in your head is a good skill if actual debugging will take hours. If feedback is instant, you're probably faster writing the first thing that comes to you and iterating on it.
Snapchat is now Snap
Very neat. I was hoping to unintrusively tinker with my buzzer in my condo, but I found that the wires coming out of the back of the device used some sort of signaling system, and I couldn't just use my own controller to switch on the door buzzer to let someone in from my phone.
I want to get spammed junkmailjunkymailgmail.com
I'm trying to get as much spam to junkmailjunkymail@gmail.com Can you help me? :) lol
Except if you are down-voted your opinion gets censored. First to those with colour blindness, then eventually to everyone.
The Munger OS: How to Live a Life That Really Works
If you are using Julia, then I will presume you are primarily working in some form of numerical computing. It is a very wide field, so it is difficult to say if object ownership will be tricky or not.

If you are working with (b|m)illions of particles or entities which are capable of changing ownership, you will have a hard time in any language. Whether that's the C++ ownership being unclear or the garbage collector defragmenting your memory (just because you don't see the issue doesn't means it's gone in GC languages).

That said, typically I find most algorithms have a computable upper-bound memory constraint and so you just pre-allocate a slab and then objects reference it. You will usually get better cache coherency and less wasted operations/sec. You're left with only a couple pointers you need to delete when you're done with the structure.

As for `functional programming`, it depends on what you're looking for. C++ has two killer features for this, in my opinion; expression templates can seriously improve performance of functional composition (see Eigen3), and compile-time elision of type-dependent code branches (like a static if).

Since I have learned to use `unique_ptr`, `shared_ptr`, `weak_ptr`, (`deferred_ptr`), and to prefer idiomatic accessors like `.at`, `.find`, `.insert` I cannot recall the last time Valgrind was angry at me. I think I end up writing `new` and `delete` maybe once a month(?).

If I was designing widgets or applications with hard to define user interaction, I imagine I would have more complaints to share.
Six Recipes for Software Managers
or perhaps they'd look at us like wild beasts, ripe for cultivation in their factory farms.
> It starts with a pretty basic need of financing the nets and boats to do the fishing, where the lender then gets slowly repaid with the fish caught.

> At some point a finance person steps in and introduces a credit lending facility

It sounds like there was already a credit lending facility? As far as I can tell, "credit lending" just means giving someone a loan now in exchange for being paid back (more, usually) later.

> At some point trading the loan securities and fishing future contracts starts paying more than humble fishing

Historically, the point at which this occurs is the introduction of loans and futures. There's no transition point.

Assuming an economy consisting solely of fishers and financiers, compensation for financiers is limited by the amount of fish produced, but it's quite possible even then that one financier produces more fish than one fisherman does. And your example presumes other classes of workers when fishing requires nets and boats as capital goods.

> This, of course, collapses at some point, but the problem is that it's hard to point out that one step that's completely irrational and bonkers

You say that like a collapse demonstrates that a mistake occurred at some point. Everything collapses some of the time.
If you are still looking for feedback on the rules, here's what I've got:

1. Allow errors to be source mapped back to the language they were written in originally (bolt/blaze/json). Proper line numbers should be in the error messages, and if that's too much to ask for, then at least don't minify the JSON down to 1 line.

2. Bring back debug mode!

3. Make it possible to see, when changing a schema through the rules, what existing data that was writable will no longer be writable because it needs to be updated to match the new schema. (In dev mode, not so important. In production, this would be my number 1 concern.)

4. Stick to one language for all of the rules. I don't see any reason storage rules couldn't also use Bolt.

5. Allow imports. My rules file was getting long, so I eventually decided to split it logically and concatenate before compiling, but that's far from ideal.

6. Within the firebase console, allow us to see the details of incoming requests (including auth data) as they happen. And whether they're going to get a "Permission denied" error or not. It doesn't need to be a permanent log or anything like that, but maybe something you can enable for a few minutes while debugging. The simulator sort of helps, but it's so limited. There's nothing that compares to real logging when you're trying to figure out what's going wrong.

And as an aside, looking at the "legacy" docs again brings back good memories. I enjoyed firebase way more before the Google transition. In addition to having better support the docs were friendlier, and that made a big difference.
Sure, but my point is that being forced to be more methodical isn't a good thing. Not needing to be methodical is better (because your tools will catch your mistakes for you).
heh... I've written a bit about our favorite abandoned language ;-)
Could you? I thought they didn't make the answers available, and just always showed the grayed out text even if there was no real answer after you paid up? There were several incarnations of the site though, and of course I may well be mis-remembering, it was a long time ago...
This is epically awesome. Enough solar to charge a cell phone and provide some light at night, a door you can lock to prevent being hassled, a composting toilet to keep the area clean and a place to sleep. I can totally see this working for a lot of people.

I am surprised this isn't more common. There is a lot of unincorporated land in Santa Clara county (https://www.sccgov.org/sites/sccphd/en-us/Partners/Data/Page...) that might support this sort of housing.
> At the same time I cannot use toy languages that have no compile time type checking

This guy seems like and sounds like a serious developer, so I'm totally confused by this statement.

Dynamic languages that don't do compile time type checking are not toys.

I used to only write in Java or C++, but I think it's a stage of maturity as a developer to realize that you can develop code that can take arguments with the assumption that the objects sent in are of types that will have the behavior you need to work with them.

If you argue that the code is faster when it is compiled- that's fine, and I agree, and that's good, if it matters.

If you argue that you need types because otherwise you can't be safe, I'm sorry, but that's like being a helicopter-parent. Sometimes maybe you can't trust what is calling your code even when you give it trust, and that's valid; just like as a parent, sometimes the child really needs that level of micromanagement. But, for a lot of if not most of practical web development, you can use dynamic typing, and most children do not need that level of micromanagement.

There's nothing wrong with languages that provide type checking, but it isn't necessarily a deficiency when it's not there.
How do you translate that "principle" into a useful definition of GDP? E.g. When can I include revenues from trading options contracts in GDP?
I can imagine such topics, but nearly none of them occur in a software development workplace. As I said before, it has been my experience that the extra bandwidth of a voice channel is nearly always wasted. IMO the best case for voice calls as a developer is brief daily status/standup meetings, and you've probably seen how many people around here dislike those.

I think what's really going on is that people who grew up analog don't see textual decisionmaking as "real", and need a familiar voice call to make things feel "official".
I think that is 1 step too far.

Why does a site have customers? Not because it has customers. But something else.

And I think that something else is usefulness. Look at any busineas or site that is successful. To someone, it is useful.
Teenagers right now have a different attitude about how their camera interacts with the world, by virtue of having been raised in a perpetually-filmable world. For a teenager, everyone they know has had a camera with them pretty much as long as they can remember. They've already got a camera pointed at them all the time. It only takes a few seconds to start filming something with your phone.

People who are 30 are going to be weirded out by this. People who are 18 are not. They already have the assumption that anything they do in public might be filmed and shared on social media. And they want to be able to quickly film anything they're doing in public and put it on social media.
Yes. I use uBlock Origin with it daily.
damn good article! thank u for the deep insight.
He should have used --link-dest= on his rsync.

PREVIOUS_BACKUP=$(cat ./prev_backup)
NEW_BACKUP=$(date +%F_%T)

rsync --link-dest=$PREVIOUS_BACKUP /path/source /path/dest/$NEW_BACKUP

echo $NEW_BACKUP > ./prev_backup

This will copy /path/source to /path/dest/$NEW_BACKUP (which is a time stamped folder). But it will take into account the previous backup. If a file hasn't changed, it will create a hard link. If it changed, it will then copy the whole file.

And that's it.

Since it's the name is a time stamp. When you need to restore, just read ./prev_backup or just list the directory content, sort it and read the last entry.
I was thinking about the same thing and just posted a comment to the same effect :o

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12578338
Any technical solutions to the global issues we face will be thwarted by sociological factors due to our immaturity as a species. Climate, for example, requires cooperation on a global level and all populous industrialised countries must participate. China, for example, may decide to not participate for any number of economic or political reasons. What then? They would be further destroying the planet. Should we force them to participate since their decision is adversely affecting other nations?
20+ years ago, sodium (?, same as below?) lamps were suggested but supposedly people didn't like how things looked (IIRC) in the light.

http://www.flagstaffdarkskies.org/for-wonks/lamp-spectrum-li... says low pressure sodium lamps significantly improve star viewing compared w/ LED due to the narrower spectrum.

Downvote science, bitches.
Last time I tried using Firefox i didn't liked it.

But last week I completely moved from Chromium to Firefox.

I didn't miss Chromium.
I run the backend/website of my side business on sqlite. It is one of the best technology decisions I have made. It performs reasonably, is super straightforward (at my day job we have a team of postgres people to keep our dbs running smoothly, but for my little side business I don't have those resources); backups are dead simple. I love sqlite.
Sometimes it is, maybe not in the snow or rain, or on the hottest days of summer. I think the value is in short commutes, regardless of mode.
I didn't think the project needed one. After all, I explicitely stated the distribution and version that the binaries are for. If you're looking for a statically-linked Linux binary, that will come in the future: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/issues/41
Curious to hear what exactly the devices do? Article hints at compression and such, and the fact that they've moved devices to the edge of the machine to handle network connectivity makes me think it's a shift for better interaction with SDN more than anything else. I don't get how it has much to do with AI though?
Actually it appears that they read that supervised machine learning has limitations according to the no free lunch theorem and applied it to all of machine learning. See http://www.no-free-lunch.org/
https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/30/smartspot-which-brings-com...
It's not like you can't make desktop development "sexy", though. You could, but we're not there yet.

Qt is a pretty amazing framework (yes, I'm biased). You can write apps in Python, but Python is a clusterfuck for shipping anything cross-platform or any kind of desktop apps.

My vision for LXQt was to very much have a modern desktop (targeting recent tech such as fingerprint readers, wayland etc), while retaining some design patterns from the classic desktop ("classic" taskbar or global menu, icon-based desktop grid, etc) without trying to reinvent "desktop shells".

Working on the desktop doesn't always mean using ancient tech, nor solving ancient problems - FWIW I'm probably younger than the average HN demographic. We tried having/creating solid developer tooling, good documentation, a decent-looking website but there's only so much you can do when you're lacking manpower in every area. Nearly all my time was spent doing developer outreach.
This is a great comment. I hope it reaches many people.

In the spirit of this comment, and I can't find the particular article I'm looking for right now, but Paul Krugman many years back was writing about how financial services should move more towards a public utility model.

The argument is, we would all be better off if we separate off all the risk-taking in finance to for-profit companies that can fail without posing greater risk to the economy.

The more mundane, more-necessary, day-to-day financing that we all need (home loans, etc.), according to Krugman, should move to the public utility model. It's not complicated and if the companies that do these jobs fail they pose enormous risk to the entire economy.

This is the analogy I can think of: If our water company became bigger, more risk-friendly, and more profit-oriented, people would obviously know that is ridiculous. Basic financial services is not any more complicated, to be honest.

The welfare of humanity would benefit enormously from an even more robust version of Glass-Steagall, but the finance industry is so entrenched in US politics I don't see it happening.
>I wake up and find the company I worked for is now insolvent

Google, facebook, twitter et. al aren't insolvent. Yest, I know, bordering no-true-scotsman... I think his point is if the superstar corps move, there may be some motion, not hipster-startup #229777. Yes, and Yahoo! and other examples of big names going under exist.
It means that there isn't a sublime/perfect id/being/spirit at the core of us, just the same flawed person as is on the outside. So a religion or philosophy of trying to worship or obey some inner perfection ultimately just means doing whatever you feel like, which isn't a good idea let alone worth proselytizing.
Foreign absentee landlords are terrible to municipal services in California, since Proposition 13 makes them reliant on sales and franchise taxes instead.

In the case of Vancouver, they have made a hollow city.
I've asked 88 questions, answered 992, rep 28k, reach of over 2 million people.

But, my coworkers, use SO all the time, and don't even have an account.

Most of the issues are with people trying to participate with low quality questions and answers, it can feel like a negative experience, but that's only a tiny fraction of people in the scheme of things. High frequency noise that won't make it to where it becomes useful.... search results. While it isn't a perfect system, it's results are great. If you feel burnt by SO, just don't take it personally, keep participating .... or not, if you really don't like it, go contribute on forums in a more casual non curated manner.
People writing stuff like this should spend a year in a disease prone third world country away from all modern technologies like electricity and internet. Then you'll understand whether you really have a higher quality of life or not.
If Amazon pays a shipper to deliver product to its customers (or move them between warehouses) isn't it the shipper's responsibility to make sure they're shipped via an approved (legal) method? I guess Amazon would be responsible for disclosing the contents but this articles tells us almost nothing.
Yes, it is a lazy way of stopping requests. I also modified Iridium's "trk" scheme code to pick up domains ending in qjz9zk so I can notify the user.
If anything it would just be one of their Von Neumann probes looking to fuel up, probably from Jupiter or Uranus. Maybe it would send some pics of us back to the home world where they might say "oh, those guys look neat, add that one to the inhabited planet catalog"
Thanks! I didn't know about Security Dynamics.

I think there's a lot of neat improvements you can make on 2FA products for different markets. But it's kind of at the point where if I wanted to continue working on a better 2FA token, I would have to get funding and do it full time. Although it's always tempting, I'm not sure I want to "cash out" of school and regular life just yet.

Also if I don't work in government I'd be in a lot of debt to pay back school. So that's an additional hurdle.
It's a two steps forward two steps back kind of situation. For a while we just had HTML+PHP... save it, alt tab, reload. Then we had servers that have to boot and that took a step back. Then we had hot reloading servers and everything is fast again. Then we added asset complication and things took 30 seconds to process again. Now we're working on incremental building of assets to get back that speed again.
Or, as Terry Bison put it in "They're Made of Meat" - http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html :

> ... "They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

> "So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."

> "They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."

> "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat." ...

> "Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"

> "First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."

> "We're supposed to talk to meat." ...

> ... Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."

> "I was hoping you would say that."

> "It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"

> "I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' ...
I think emergence of life is a start of a ticking time bomb. If someone would look at earth from afar and observe the changes on a compressed time scale, one would see the earth 'lighting' up a bit as soon as intelligent life emerges.

Life emerging on a planet is like a bomb's fuse getting lit. The bomb in this case being earth itself with its unique chemical composition. It is only a question of time when this bomb goes off and destroys all life in the process. Maybe the purpose of life is to accelerate and magnify that explosion to achieve the highest possible cosmic reduction of entropy.

Some people argue against this by citing how earth has become relatively peaceful over the last century. I think this is a false belief - earth is in a local minima of violence bought about by the emergence of nation states and nuclear weapons.

The next level of evolution of intelligent life, which will most likely be AI, will bring with it a new wave of violence. First, when AI takes over and fights the humans for dominance, and next if there are multiple AI which emerge and fight over the resources of this solar system.
Yes, I've realized this and made an issue for this: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/issues/38

If you have the computing resources, you can easily take out the patch that does the "wishlist" changes you don't want.
I thought the price tag was the major obstacle to Google Glass.
You can choose to work or live elsewhere.
My CppCon 2016 trip report (thoughts on my favorite talks and my sessions)
Reminds me of this talk from SPJ, "Spreadsheets: Functional Programming for the Masses"
https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/kfrdbs/peyton-jones
People peddling arguments like this are being incredibly obnoxious. There are billions of people alive today who don't have access to modern medicine/electricity/internet. You claim with a straight face that your quality of life is not better than them?
Although the links are interesting, my general sentiments on the subject hold. I more than suspect this particular event (Collateral Murder) was but one of far too many and remains a common theme. I am reminded of :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm6hC2oW5P8 - Blackwater drive-by recreational shooting spree. There are others too.

The military, notably with its cozy relationship with private contractors, has created a substantial rift between itself and civilians. Arguably no longer having much to do with defense, its occupations are highly dubious and without the support of many (the majority?) who involuntarily fund it. The DoD has exclusive exemptions from auditing and maintains a hefty black budget. If it intends to bleed the nation dry without reasonable transparency and accountability, I'm willing to pardon a margin of error among whistleblowers.
The Women in Product
Look for someone who's already encapsulated USB devices. They might be able to reuse an existing mold. That business is all tooling cost; per-unit cost is tiny.

But don't send the job to China, or your device will be copied, cheaper.