skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Zed Shaw's position is that Python 3 is not suitable for the intended audience of Learn Python the Hard Way. His rationales (along with his response to criticism) was laid out a recent essay: https://zedshaw.com/2016/11/24/the-end-of-coder-influence/

Anyway, Zed Shaw is, in my opinion, worth paying attention to. This essay seems particularly relevant to the current kertuffle: https://web.archive.org/web/20120821234313/http://learncodet...
And vice versa outside of government!
How much are you willing to pay for it?

There's the Talos Secure Workstation, which has no such ME firmware (but costs ~$4.5k) [1].

A RISC-V desktop is pretty far out. There is an Arduino style microcontroller being made in silicon, though [2].

[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-systems/talos-s...
[2] https://www.crowdsupply.com/onchip/open-v
Ah! Nice catch. Will fix.
What if I like using the integrated NIC?
From the article:

> Apple is still shipping security updates, albeit on iOS 9, for the iPhone 4s which was released in 2011 (5 years ago). The iPhone 5 is still being kept up to date with iOS 10.

Apple has a very good track record here. Based on past experience, it's likely that the iPhone SE will continue to receive security updates well past 2020.
Send free hand written letters to Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton
You're really bringing Thalidomide, of all examples?

To quite the Wikipedia article you linked:

For correctly denying the application despite the
pressure from Richardson-Merrell, Kelsey eventually
received the President's Award for Distinguished
Federal Civilian Service at a 1962 ceremony with
President John F. Kennedy. In September 2010, the
FDA honored Kelsey with the first Kelsey award.

The award, given annually to an FDA staff member,
came 50 years after Kelsey, then a new medical
officer at the agency, first reviewed the application
from the William S. Merrell Company of Cincinnati.[109]

Cardiologist Helen B. Taussig learned of the damaging
effects of the drug thalidomide on newborns and in 1967,
testified before Congress on this matter after a trip to

Germany where she worked with infants with
phocomelia (severe limb deformities).

As a result of her efforts, thalidomide was banned
in the United States and Europe.

I mean, it did take a while, but they didn't just give her an award – they _named_ the thing after her when they finally got around to recognize her.

Meanwhile, in places where the market was regulating itself:

Throughout the world, about 10,000 cases were
reported of infants with phocomelia due to
thalidomide; only 50% of the 10,000 survived.
The NIC permits remote access to the Intel rootkit, you probably don't want to use the NIC.
Your condescending remarks ("...someone paid attention in his middle-school statistics club") detract from what is otherwise a very useful comment.
You mean like the World Trade Center?
I have you beat with 1.5h from midtown Atlanta to east Atlanta via MARTA (subway + 1 or 2 busses, this was about 5-6 years ago.
This is just one of the hashes, though. If you consider a function of "color of shirt someone is wearing" to "are they here". Then "color of shirt" is now part of the filter. Same for "is wearing a hat", "is exceptionally tall", etc.

So, if you know that Peter is wearing a green shirt today, then you can rule out his being there if the guard says nobody wearing a green shirt has arrived.

Is this a rigorous model? No. It is just an easy mental model for me to conceptualize this.
According to Google Trends, "cyber" overall slowly going out of use, but "cyber security" has a reverse trend. At the same time, Cyber Monday is winning it all.

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=cyber%20sec...

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=cyber%20sec...

EDIT: I've managed to get rid of this pesky Cyber Monday out of the graph!

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=cyber%20-mo...
VCT has been around for a while, it's been integrated into UE4 at some point (Siggraph 2012 here [1]).

In the end, the global illumination solutions they've had :

* VCT [1], seemed real-time

* Indirect Lighting Cache (similar to Tatarchuk's irradiance volumes), precomputed with their Lightmass tech same as UE3 I think

* LPV (Light Propagation Volumes, contributed by Lionhead Studios) [2]

* Distance Field GI [3]

Global illumination in real-time is a hard problem, there's a lot of interesting research on it at the moment.

[1] https://de45xmedrsdbp.cloudfront.net/Resources/files/The_Tec...

[2] https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Li...

[3] http://timhobsonue4.snappages.com/distance-field-global-illu...
One time, when leaving a company, I helped interview candidates for my old job, since I could best tell what skills are needed and to what extent.

I reckoned at the time, from most interactions on the Internet, that I am (globally) a mediocre, if not below-average, developer - in each discussion I participated online, there were always people above my level, from the ones having a slightly better understanding of the subject to the people whose depth of knowledge appeared somewhat otherworldly.

This belief was particularly strengthened by the fact that I didn't have much contact with real-world developers in real life, as my friends tended to come from different backgrounds.

When the interviews came, I was astonished how many of them couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. The ones who did, wrote code with messed up indentation, inconsistent style, ugly and hackish approaches, and the like. I couldn't imagine how someone could leave their code like that and say "there, this is my finished product." But here they were, and it seemed like they didn't really see anything particularly wrong, or just not important enough to justify the added effort of cleaning the mess up. It was a very strange moment for me.

I believe this to be an example of the classical selection bias: people inclined to participate in online discussions, answer questions on StackOverflow, write blogs and type out detailed technical comments on HN are on average a lot more skilled than the average just-earning-my-living developer fresh out of some half-assed "be a software engineer and make tons of money!" three-month course.
> sometimes explodes

thought you were talking about java bloatware for a second. Oh your OS doesn't have 1.2gb for HelloWorld.class? Enjoy your OutOfMemoryException!
That's the Ballmer Doctrine and he's toast. His scorched Earth policies lead to things like the Zune, products like Bing getting almost zero traction, and the endless, futile struggle for Windows Phone to register at all on world-wide usage metrics.

Nadella has a different approach. He built Azure, a platform that could have been Windows exclusive but wasn't. I think he understands what open-source can do for Microsoft, and what Microsoft can do for open-source.

Gates wasn't an extinguisher, he was a hard charger that would try to make best-of-breed products. Where others slowed down or got distracted, Microsoft would stay focused. That's how Visual Studio beat out Borland C++, how Word prevailed over WordPerfect, how Excel trounced Lotus 1-2-3.

Once Microsoft had taken a commanding lead in those markets the influence of Ballmer started to be more severe. He was blood-thirsty, he wanted to crush anyone left. This became clear in the anti-trust trials where it was Ballmer that wanted to crush, kill, and destroy anyone in the way of Windows achieving 100% market share.

Remember, Gates was a programmer who happened to be CEO. He was driven to make products that people wanted, to win by simply being technically better: More features, more modest system requirements, more backwards compatibility.

Then Ballmer took over and that all went out the window.
Came in here to say this. What is up with this? Some type of black hat marketing trick?
Can anyone give pros/cons of RN vs Native in a nutshell?

I'm already familiar with native coding, but not sure how much better RN is than say PhoneGap.
OK but where does it end? Every time you strike a match you could start a fatal fire, but it would obviously be absurd to require people to take a safety class every time they strike a match. We settle for putting a generic warning on boxes of matches instead. Likewise you can buy gasoline and propane at the gas station without having to go through any bureaucracy, because it's assumed that responsible individuals know fire is dangerous and that refined fuels are highly-combustible, so as long as there are some warning signs up to remind people of the fact then the public interest is considered to have been served. And sure enough, millions of people buy and consume gasoline every day without injury despite the high risk potential.

Please stop offering false dichotomies like 'status quo (even when it's failing) or no regulation at all.'
That doesn't really follow. If freight rail is getting in the way of passenger rail then the cause is insufficient capacity, not the existence of freight. And the solution is to build more track (or allocate more of the existing capacity to passenger services) but that costs money, and there's no political will behind it.

If anything it sounds like the freight rail is the only reason you have any passenger rail at all.
This is really well done. I'm fairly familiar with React & was able to pick this up around Section 3 "Core Components" [0] & feel like I could be decently productive with React Native.

Thanks for sharing your work!

[0] http://www.reactnativeexpress.com/core_components
There's also the part of "authorial intent" where particularly at that time many of the games were designed and developed sometimes on much bigger hardware (corporate mainframes, for instance) targeting the consoles and then later QAed on development consoles (that might not even be the same hardware as production consoles). There certainly are questions for some games if the authors intended something much better that they could get their development hardware to perform. It's not that many console hardware generations back where even development consoles still varied in hardware from production consoles (at least as recently as the early history of the PS3/Xbox 360).

All told, it's all a part of game's version of the "the artwork is never quite finished/realized, it's just eventually published".
I am happy for you, but please stop spreading FUD about Google/Android. I would like you to point out a single practical example of tracking in Android that you can't opt out of.
It's more than just "some blob" though. ME is a system within your system, that is completely out of your control. [0]

[0] https://libreboot.org/faq/#intelme
That may not be true. Fi works with (and was marketed with) the Nexus 6 which is EOL as of this month (Oct 2016). That means the OS version will be halted at Android 7, as I understand it. They may still receive security updates, but I don't believe Google has said how long they'll be doing that for.
In this example, you have dropped it down to a single function in lookup. Namely, "is the person in this picture in the building?"

Now, if you are saying the guard internalizes this with "has someone with that hair color entered? What about of that height? With that facial hair? etc. Then, yes, this is the same.

Analogies can almost always help, for the class of people that are helped by analogies. :)
Interesting toy to get introduced to Arduino programming: https://www.amazon.com/Thames-Kosmos-Workshop-Android-Compat... using a video game to teach programming. A bit pricey, though at $135.

On the STEM size I would suggest the following:

* A microscope never gets old, I bought this one (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NOU54O) and was surprised by its quality at a very low price. Never buy these from ToysRUs or similar store, those are junk. To jumpstart the fun, I suggest you also buy a set of prepared slides, e.g. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0055DZ3EK

* An adequate spectroscope (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B84DGDA) can be bought for under $10! I bought this for my 9 year old and he had a lots of fun with it.

* My son also loved the Zome kit (https://www.amazon.com/Zometool-Creator-1-Construction-Kit/d...). We had funs discussing how to build a 4-D cube!

* Walkie Talkies: I would have killed for these when I was a kid. I bought this pair (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GH7TKVK) but in this age of iPads and the like didn't really entice my son much. He likes to take them with him when we hike, though.

* Make your own soma set: Using this supercheap set of cubes (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007F0UQR0) and a glue gun.
Hod @ Couchbase. Looks like an excellent tutorial. I understand you have limited time, and this is providing a great resource to the community. I'd ask, if you have the chance, to take a look at Couchbase Mobile. I'm of course biased, but I think I can legitimately claim that Couchbase is on par with Realm (as evidenced by business critical apps using it in large scale deployments). Happy to chat about it (hod@couchbase).
I was trying to figure out how this is so much faster than FNV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fowler%E2%80%93Noll%E2%80%93Vo... Is it only because of the parallelism? Or are the operations really that much cheaper somehow?
>real life

That's the big drafty room with the blue ceiling, amirite???
Just reboot after neutralization.

"With ME neutralized, the MEI interface disappears from the PCI bus, and the integrated NIC ceases to work, but will resume to work after a reboot."
I am not following - what is raw assembly? I can write a complete userland program using only Assembly and it will run just fine. When do I need to deal with the MMU exactly?
I think that you have the formulation backwards. You claim that people can just write better, and should attain perfection.

> I don't think anyone can demonstrate that it is virtually impossible to write 100% safe C code.

I think most people come at the other way. Most people are aware that they are fallible and wants tools to help with that. Most people strive for perfection and none will ever actually attain it.

> I don't think anyone can demonstrate that it is virtually impossible to discover errors safely in C code.

There is a huge difference simply moving from C to C++ with exceptions. The type system in C++ can detect several classes of errors at compile time and prevent then grom going into the results.

Then for runtime problems if an underlying functions throws, it cannot simply be ignored. Any programmer can miss a single statement, or worse refactor a function with a void return to one that returns and error code (which then results in every caller ignoring the return value). However, it takes a special kind of malice to use something like carelessly catch(...) in C++ to disregard exceptions so that runtime errors are avoided. C++ with exceptions has more sane defaults because it fails fast and the failing itself doesn't need tests until it starts doing something meaningful.

Now imagine the advances in error detection moving to languages that catch additional classes of errors.
Rob Helmer on twitter reminded me to make the separate point that Netscape was a hindrance over time, not a help.

At first, it endowed hundreds employees with CVS commit access, while volunteers -- some of whom were much better hackers -- had to submit patches and beg for reviews to get access.

As time passed and we rewrote the old codebase to do XUL-based apps (a multiyear mission, by definition), Netscape management suffered via a series of misadventures culminating in Netscape 6 in Y2K, a terrible release decision, made against mozilla.org and grass-roots engineer advice. After that, AOL replaced the VP in charge and repeated the process in 2001, with another VP decapitation that fall.

However, we at mozilla.org who were inside Netscape/AOL by then had the evidence from Netscape 6 to show new management that Mozilla was the better way to develop and test code, and (as important) to recruit talent. We leveled the CVS access playing field after Netscape 6, forcing Netscape to put new-hires on the same footing as volunteers and people who came fresh from Red Hat or other companies to hack the code.

I've given some of the history here in other podcasts, as well as in this one. Bottom line is Netscape, while it paid lots of the contributors (all, on day one), was in short order a problem. Money does not equate to success; it has downsides. Too much money, with a crappy agenda and bad hiring legacy (and the code those people wrote, and the design costs they sunk), can and does hurt.

Money from Netscape and then AOL indeed helped pay the top engineers with whom I worked to rebuild the code starting in October 1998, and I'm grateful for that.

Money from Netscape/AOL did not help Mozilla gain market share or build product -- we did that in spite of Netscape, it was a total hindrance on us doing products intended for end users. We created and distributed our own binaries at first for QA builds to testers who did not or could not compile, as I said in this 'cast. Netscape was offended by our success, and this (in part) drove Dave Hyatt to quit and go work for Apple in 2001. I could go on but I'll save it for "the book".
I was in a long-distance relationship and would definitely have bought this at that price. The landing page is clear and the photo on it speaks to me.

I wouldn't have actually used the heartbeat feature, but the mutual schedule one is valuable. I might even use that with my wife now occasionally. I would have when I was interviewing to move to the U.K.
It's a much better notation because NOT(MAYBE) = MAYBE.

That's hard to explain when you work with binary booleans.
I didn't realize they had added that to their policy. While that's awesome, I still see a ton of them on there.

From some quick googling - https://www.amazon.com/Sentey-LS-4232-Headphones-Microphone-...
I could not hit Spotify quickly enough. I am starting with "L’Amour de Loin". First "song" in and it is fairly comtemporary classical.

I am just an amateur musician and I am amazed at those with those that could hear such minute details. I have attended various rehearsal session for classical music, and it is astonishing to hear the conductor (or the choral maestro) pick out a certain note in a certain measure from a certain instrument. I can recognize a bad ensemble from a good one, but such detail at that level is simply amazing
Namecheap are doing dollar domains for cyber monday. I usually buy about five or six at this time of the year with frivolous keywords like issomethingcool.com whattimeisit.com etc

I never renew these BTW
The changes necessary to make efficient use of these instructions go well beyond just inner loops (e.g. struct of arrays vs. array of structs) that the compiler can't transparently perform for you.
Yeah. Especially when I've done nothing on your page.
> I've ever bought has a big warning on it saying 'DANGER - do not swallow' with an explanation of why

I've seen the "do not swallow warnings" but I don't recall ever getting much of an explanation.

I think explanations of warnings are severely under rated. It's the difference between a warning someone might actually heed and one someone might easily dismiss as nannying.
At least on the surface that's an extremely fascinating idea. I guess I would want to understand why we created institutional protections for individuals in the first place before forming any opinion about whether removing such protections is a good idea.
The published version of "The lifecycle of software objects" has some lovely line drawings, which I am sorry not to see in the linked version.
An example is bypassing a LOCK prefix when there is only 1 thread or only 1 CPU.
Yes, its still going to be government.

I'd rather resources be managed privately but I just don't river traffic being managed privately in this country. Even if a private company managed it by contract, there would be the inevitable kickbacks to the pols making the decision.

Which is why I also advocate reducing the concentration of power our system has created. Specifically, I'd like to see proportional representation replace winner-take-all elections, even in the executive branch.
How-to terror manuals still being sold by Apple, Amazon, Waterstones
> It's just not better, at least not for most people.

Certainly if you define "better" as "do everything I currently need it to do", Linux/BSD aren't any better. But with just a little effort, you can apply nearly any skills you learn in Linux in far more domains than you can for Windows skills. For instance, robotics and embedded systems.

"Enabling a path to future growth" certainly qualifies as "better" in my mind.
Serverless Framework 1.0
Not exactly that expensive these days. Anovas broke that barrier years ago and they retail for $99 - $125 during this time of the year.
CPU Performance Counters on Windows Using ETW
Note that it looks like they may not make their goal. It ends on Dec 15th, and they only have about 10% raised ($344,310 raised of $3,700,000 goal)
Actually the second group you describe is the huge majority: Many parents have heard about STEM and programming and want their children to be exposed. However, being non-techies they don't know where to start.

Also, a large number of Christmas toys are bought by grandparents,where the above problem is even more prevalent.
I did read that, and I don't believe it provides any clarity related to what I wrote.
Daemon tools most certainly does not do what im talking about. It does blind restarts of single processes, not coordinated restarts and killing of collections of services.
Agreed on the 'ceremony' and 'boilerplate'.

Java - although I love it - tends to be verbose and prone to this kind of stuff.
I agree! I started a chip8 emulator in Rust. Once I get video and input finished, I'm considering writing a Gameboy emulator.

https://github.com/TrevorS/rustychip8
Here is how it was made: http://m.imgur.com/t0rxWqH
CNN Buys Video App Beme for $25M
Great honeypot as well. If a malware analyst dumps one of their intelligence agency canary strings from one of their spyware packages, they can use it to track the discoverer.

If I were a spook, I would totally be releasing reversing tools that alerted on my encoded code words.
So, require them to be sold with warning labels. Problem solved.
Agree completely with the stops issue. Personally, I think that focusing any amount on intercity trains is wasted effort without first having intracity transport worked out. What's the point of having a fast train between Orlando and Miami if I can't do anything without a car on the other end?

No Florida city has a good public transit story. Hell, in the Tampa Bay area, you can't even get from the Tampa International airport to Pinellas county without two hours of buses, because the cross-bay express buses only run for commuters. (Only on weekdays, only during rush-hour times.) So what's the point of a train that goes from Tampa to Miami if it takes me another two hours to get to Clearwater or St Petersburg? That's half of the four hours already to drive direct!
That doesn't really make sense. If we got rid of the freight trains the rails would just start to rust, it's not like there's a ton of money/interest/profit in passenger rail thats stymied by all the jam packed tracks.
For sure! There was definitely demand to know more about Couchbase Mobile at my class, so I know it's relevant for people using RN.
It isn't clear to me either. The rules make it sound like it's judged based on being "open", "collaborative", "dependable", and "inventive".

Projects get 0-5 points for each of the 4 criteria. I guess you could be a top project without being completely open source..

Edit: It also seems as if EtherScope is an old project with a commercial product. I think.. I can't even tell.
Yes, but the other part of the sentence is all wrong, the gradual shift from this pricing model to more like $20 a tape happened from the mid 80s to early 90s.
Take a hint