skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For what it's worth, Troy's perspective is colored by living in Australia.

My experience is that the Australian tech scene (I don't live there anymore) is in many ways similar to the 1990s in the U.S. Customers and recruiters ask about certificates. Hell, you typically have to go through a professional recruiter in order to get a job; it is often not possible to apply directly to companies.

I am generalizing and also talking about my experience in Australia about 8 years ago. Maybe everything has changed.
Good old pen and paper!

I keep a paper based day planner and a notebook with my ideas, thoughts, etc in it. Recently I have been also trying to keep track using an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil using an app called Nebo. I'm not ready to switch yet. (And for that matter I have never been able to switch in 40 years).

Paper to me is long lasting. I can start something in a notebook, shelve it and then pick it up again. No need to update the OS or the app I used to create it (if it still exists).
Are GCs scaling well to new hardware? Memory sizes are increasing, as are core counts. But if those extra cores are being used to GC the larger memory, are we effectively losing those extra cores?
Surely this isn't a big deal? The entire city of Wellington, NZ generates enough energy from windfarms that frame the city to power every single household - I'm sure plenty of cities in Europe are the same.
> I hear this thing about return of energy, etc. But this is nothing new, right? Check out the oil sands project in Canada. Do you think the market cares about how much energy is used to create something? No.. just the $.

Ok, please stop and listen.

Economics, Government, the Public... they are all wrong. They got used to not care about EROEI because at the begining of the Industrial Revolution it literally didn't matter. I don't know the numbers for coal, but back when the first oil wells were being digged, the EROEI of oil was ~100:1. It did not matter how much it did cost to extract the stuff, just that you had access to it and how fast you could come up with ways to turn that energy surplus into value added (ergo, $$$).

Now, according to the article we are approaching the 10:1 barrier. That's still pretty good, and you can still run an industrial civilization on top of it, but it has become far from irrelevant. The problem is that all the economic models in use today got created back when the stuff as much more abundant and easier to produce.

If is as if there was a perverse Law of Moore that would cut transistor density in half every 18 months. Everybody started with virtualization and scripting languages and garbage collection, then C and C++ just sneaked under everybody's radar. And now, you are here, bashing assembly hackers because everybody knows that what's more important is programmer's time, not code efficiency.
> Can you even name a famous video game character, other than Sonic, who isn't a Nintendo brand?

Master Chief (Halo). Lara Croft (Tomb Raider). Duke Nukem. Cloud Strife (Final Fantasy VII). Solid Snake (Metal Gear).

there are a few. I could go on. a lot of extremely famous/popular game franchises don't stick with a single iconic character though. Assassin's Creed is a good example. The archetype is consistent but it's a different character in each game. A lot of games are like this. Nintendo has pursued a branding strategy based around a handful of "mascot" characters (Mario, Link, Samus, Donkey Kong) but it's not like those are the only famous video game characters around.

Maybe that's what you're pointing out though? Besides Sonic (which was Sega's attempt to make a Nintendo style mascot character) most other game developers don't use mascots. That's true. They generally don't. The games themselves are still incredibly well known and popular though.
Legal pot growers are driving a different kind of boom in California
Imagine all the poor programmers in the alternate universe where the US was similarly stubborn about its calendar system as it is now about its measurement system, with everyone having to convert between Julian & Gregorian on a daily basis.
On a related note, there's no good half-life calculator on the web for people tapering off SSRIs. The issue is that in order to actually have as gentle a taper as possible, you need to halve your dose only every few weeks because of how long the half life of these drugs is. So ideally you'd want something where you would enter your starting dose and how much of the drug you plan on taking each day, and it would show you your projected concentration of the drug each day as well as the percent change.

I made this in Excel for someone a few years ago, but it would make a good weekend project if someone wants to learn react or whatever.
This is 100% the fault of EU and American legislators.

Apple was mostly only doing what's reasonable (aside from, I think a 'special tax deal' - which is unfair).

The EU makes the rules. They created the gaping loophole.

Then they decide they want to 'change the law retroactively 25 years back' [1] - this is gong-show Chavista banana republic type property theft. Apple should sue them aggressively.

What should have happened:

A) The EU should have closed the loophole, long ago, and set some harmonization rules. When the closed the loophole, it should not have been retroactive.

B) American leegislators are at fault as well. Why? Because insane US tax laws prevents US companies from just bringing the money home.

Two problems:

i) Corp tax rates are too high in the US 35%

Because of this, there's a lot of loopholes in the US tax code, instead, they should close them and just reduce the tax rate to be consistent with the international averages

ii) US 'double taxes' foreign profits. A US company that pays 25% corp tax in France, brings the money back - is hit with another 35% tax. US is the only country that does that. Everywhere else, they pay a repatriation fee. The US system is basically designed as though the rest of the world does not exist. US should have a repatriation fee - it can even be commensurate with level of taxes paid in country of origin to be smart about it.

Large US companies are not really 'American' - they often have the majority of their staff, majority of sales, possibly majority shareholders overseas. So we need to grasp this new world order.

The only thing really sneaky that Apple did was pressure the Irish to give them a special deal, but it's still legal, and rational.

The EU is a terrible organization, they're incompetent, ideological, and they work against us as often as they work for us.

If there 'was a problem' with Apple's taxes, it was 100% their own fault - Apple was just following the law.

You can't change laws and have them apply retroactively for 1/4 century, it's totalitarian.

To be clear: I don't think that Apple should have been given a special deal, but it's not their fault for trying, or for having been given it.

It's quite common: Ontario just gave a huge subsidy to Cisco to open an office in Toronto. It could have very well been in the form of tax subsidy. EU massively subsidizes Airbus. Auto manufacturing incentives etc. etc. it's all common. Agree or not with them, but they're not nefarious.

[1] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-2923_en.htm

"Following an in-depth state aid investigation launched in June 2014, the European Commission has concluded that two tax rulings issued by Ireland to Apple have substantially and artificially lowered the tax paid by Apple in Ireland since 1991"
Thanks for clarifying. Do you have some more info about this. Some page where these ranges are listed?

I'm curious to understand how these numbers are derived as they seem slightly off to me.
I think you got my feelings upsidedown. Like, I am of the strict opinion that you can't solve these issues via standardization. It's not reasonable, and does miss the point of automation. I also don't like daylight savings time, but not because it makes timekeeping hard, since timekeeping is always a horrid mess even without it (hardly makes it worse).

But it's hardly technodeterminism to say that it's a bloodydamn hard problem to solve, and may not even be solvable (which is why I contend with the 'weakness of will' part). That's sort of my point: if they can't consistently solve the calendar by hand, I can't imagine getting a computer to do it. It would have to be something wildly complex, like a social networking system that bases your calendar on your own web of trust. Someday that may be reasonable someday, but we're probably only barely hitting the point where we can get Lady of Mazes-style masks of the world metadata [0].

So you have deeply complex richness in language and culture, but computers took decades to be smart enough to capture it in it's plodding bin-packing way. Either these cultures could miss out on years of work integrating in with the enormous advantages and progress computers provide, or they can wait and fall behind. I'd choose to be an optimist and hope that we can now bend to the complex needs of these cultures now instead of first resorting to poor approximations. Just as we can now do better than all-caps ASCII, we can try harder to meet the demands of these complex calendar systems. Woe be unto the programmer who has to code those horrific systems, but ... well, that's the job :)

Re automobiles, I think there's a long, complex history at play there. A town I used to live in would have the residents complain often of the train that would cut through at the most inconvenient times of the day, right across a crowded main street. They often complained of the audacity of the train company's scheduling, forgetting that the train predated the town. And, in fact, the town was there because of the train. But it's a mess, and what can you do. The train was there first, but the town's noisier. Hilariously the train company also doesn't care, I think, and frankly you always give right of way to the bigger vehicle (a lesson I learned from working in plants rather than social justice).

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Lady-Mazes-Karl-Schroeder/dp/07653507...
I'm a huge fan of this book. While I think it's probably not great literature, it has some well articulated ideas about how technology and society interact. A central conceit of the story is the protagonist lives in an area managed by tech locks. These restrict technology to match the society (it is explained somewhat late in the story, and how it came to exist is pretty interesting). You're not restricted from moving between worlds, so to speak, but it puts at the forefront how much even the subtle demands of technology can shape a society (from music-based tribes to singularity-tech ringworlds).
Which seems like harmless, lightheared tribalism, sure, but there are many forms of tribalism that have quantifiable negative impact.

Even for Midwest football: http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/03/21/qje.q...
How to Cut Down Cell Phone Bill with Family Cell Phone Plans
Rather delightfully, the phrase "intuition pump" is itself an intuition pump :)
Hi Thomas, I'm interested to hear what the elite jobs are you speak of and in what respect having a cert would hurt one in them?
NSA watchdog on leave in whistleblower case
That would be Desai, et al. Though I can't access the paper right now, they say that the 2011 regulations have tripled handoffs, increasing handoff risk. It also turned out that the average amount of sleep per week was not increased by much after instituting the regulations.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130325183819.h...

[2] Desai SV, Feldman L, Brown L, et al. Effect of the 2011 vs 2003 Duty Hour Regulation–Compliant Models on Sleep Duration, Trainee Education, and Continuity of Patient Care Among Internal Medicine House Staff: A Randomized Trial. JAMA Internal Medicine, 2013; DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.2973
https://github.com/jlevy/og-equity-compensation
Why is Amazon hiring H1-B workers for Technical Program Management roles? :mindblown:
WASHINGTON—The federal government is increasingly taking money out of recipients’ Social Security checks to recover millions in unpaid student debt, leaving thousands of retired and disabled Americans with below-poverty incomes, according to a report set to be released Tuesday.

This is just pure, unadulterated evil.
I literally can't think of a single person I talk to in security --- and I talk to lots of security people --- who will mount a defense of the CISSP certification. Most of the people I know see it as a plague on the industry.

(I'm 22+ years in the industry, for whatever that's worth.)
TeX has \def which basically allows you to write lambda expressions, so yeah it's Turing complete. The basic math notation isn't though, and I'd be surprised if this extension allows you to use \def (or really any of the more powerful features of TeX).
I haven't used OpenBSD in a long time, so this is worth a go.
in fairness, this is still much better than just needing access to your email to gain access.
Content-wise, CEH is probably one of the worst infosec certifications in existence. And EC-Council is nothing more than a paper mill. This can't be emphasised enough.

Check out a few sample questions: http://www.gocertify.com/quizzes/ceh/ceh1.html

Also review their attrition.org page that exposes how they just copypaste their material from other authors. http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/ec-council/

Especially this part: http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/ec-council/history_and...

Oh yeah, EC-council keeps your passport scans and other PII unencrypted in their gmail inbox. I would know, I hacked them once. https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/EC-ha...

Stay away from CEH and EC-Council, don't support these scumbags. They're just a bunch of charlatans that managed to grow their paper mill by spamming and stealing material from others.

EDIT: Oh! But there's more!
Apparently they like to serve ransomware on their website
http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/03/ethical-hacker-web...

tl;dr: stay the fuck away from CEH and EC-Council.
Oh sorry for not being clearer, I didn't mean to imply you misinformed people. I just thought you should be more transparent about where results are coming from.

For example it would have been nice to see a "results from Bing" message somewhere on the search page, or an item on the about page saying that you use another search engine's results.

It would actually have increased my confidence and impression of your project. I know that you can't have made a fantastic query engine like Bing/Google's without a ton of engineers so you must be using someone else's, and it would have given me a better impression if you said that up front instead of my having to infer that.
I've had this experience over the last few months. The reason, at least in my case, is that I've started applying a lot more filters on the ideas, and have stopped considering any of them as 'weekend ideas' (specially if it's a possible business idea).

Most of my ideas fail on one of these two questions:

1) If the idea is 'revolutionary' (Eg: Go to Mars) --> Why has nobody been able to implement it till date? Can I do it? Am I willing to spend the months and years required for it?

2) If it's already an established market/in-use idea (Eg: Uber for X, Groupon/FB/Amazon clones) --> What will we do differently? If it involves some kind of services, can I guarantee and deliver them on time and am I willing to put myself under that stress?

So, for the last couple of months I've been focusing more on just reading and understanding things, coming up with ideas and rejecting them. Hopefully someday an idea will come that does pass these filters or something that I would be willing to stick with for more than a month...
> Firefox Developer Edition's existence is a contradiction

It isn't a contradiction. The only devtools that are in FDE but not in Stable are experimental ones that are on the path to stabilization. It's a testbed, not an enclave.
It's a lack-of-clue signal.

I'm not saying it should be. If you're hiring exploit developers, your process should begin and end at having candidates build model exploits. But almost nobody hires like this; most organizations have tea-leaf-reading hiring processes, and proudly advertising that you have a CISSP or CEH is one of the tea leaves they read.
I always ask this of full-stack/backend devs who shit on frontend: show us what you've managed to build with that attitude.
Here is from Techempower benchmark C# vs Go[1]. To me C# is not looking very impressive. For memory I do not have a better reference than[2]. Here again C# seems to use 2-10 times more memory than Go.

1. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r13&hw=...

2. http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...
Full circle back to Slashdot's moderation? :)
The site links to the original data source, which has the raw data available as XSLS files:

https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/performancedata.cfm#...
many employees don't understand the basics of stock options, hence they don't value equity as much as employers / investors do

The fact that I know the basics of stock options is precisely the reason I don't value equity as much as employers or investors do. I can count on two fingers the number of companies whose stock options put money in my pocket, and one of them is Microsoft. I would need many hands to count the number of ways a company can screw me out of a payday on options.

Point is, for the vast majority of people knowing or not knowing the first thing about stock options won't make a lick of difference in their bottom line. What people need to know about options: sign the paperwork when it's given to you, and on the outside chance the options end up being worth anything your coworkers will give you some half-assed advice, which is one's trigger to go talk to a financial advisor.

Otherwise, spend your mental energy on how to increase your 401K contribution. That's guaranteed to involve real money that you can benefit from, and you should bone up on maximizing the potential.
Ditto this. In my part of the world CEH isn't much, it just states you have a basic idea of the tools and processes needed to be a CEH. Ask a job candidate with a CEH to describe the steps in setting up MiTM server and they probably couldn't. The folks who break shit, like their parents WiFi, are the ones who can answer that.
Top Python libraries of 2016
I know what my code looks like after 30 hours of coding with no sleep (unfortunately)... it's not pretty and takes days to recover from. Thank goodness no one's health depend on my code.
I totally understand your intention behind it. And it's ok to use strong tone. But as a matter of fact:

a) Say you're not going to use strong / condescending tone.

b) Use strong / condescending tone.

c) Express yourself in an honest manner.

Pick two.
To add to all of this, most people really don't understand the tax implications of options (whether they're ISOs, NSOs, or not options at all but instead are RSUs).

It's hard to explain those without looking at a person's individual situation (the company, the initial value, the current valuation, and the person's tax bracket), which is why there's not a lot of talk about them. But the taxation can very easily be the tipping point between "definitely worth it to exercise" and "definitely not worth it to exercise", so it's really important to understand them.
Ah, wasn't aware of that. Thanks. :)
The financial system does not recognize fairness as a factor. Apple is playing the game to make money for its shareholders. It would be noble of them to behave otherwise, but I certainly don't expect it.
I think that's a fair point. I've seen reddit change over the years into a place where people no longer debate in the comments section, they just find the thread they agree with and comment on that. It's part of why I'm looking for somewhere else.
There are 2 things which people are very financially illiterate about these days. Stock Options, and how income taxes work. You've covered the former, with the later I've seen confusion with how progressive tax brackets work, how deductions work, etc. All you can do is to make sure you understand it, and be careful of the advice you get from others.
I think of thought experiments as consistency audits on a mental framework - they can't tell you anything new about the world directly, but they can reveal problems in the way you've broken the problem down.
New Experiments Show Consciousness Affects Matter
out of interest, which platform still has better firewire support? most windows laptops don't have them either.

btw, as someone who didn't use firewire, i hated that port. waste of space, could have used an extra usb port instead. and it wasn't like there was a lot of gear that used it, unlike e.g. ethernet or vga which sometimes came in handy (i also loath vga).
It's a lot of little things that add up.

There are a ton of quality utilities that add up to a nice experience.

cmd is a lot nicer than ctrl to use as a base for keyboard shortcuts and the keyboard shortcuts are generally well integrated into the os.

How the operating system handles events enables a lot of the tweaking apps to work well.

I like the single menu bar at the top of the screen.

It's unix under the hood and it has a terminal as a first class citizen. Finder is pretty weak but what can you do? There are some alternatives to finder and the architecture of osx allows for them to exist without causing a bunch of the mac equivalent of "blue screens of death".

I am sure there are some equivalent utilities for windows and linux but I have some mouse gestures that are system wide that I would be severely disappointed not to have anymore.

In general there is a nice little gui that polishes up whatever little utility thing you feel like doing but didn't know.

I am sure I could move to linux if I really needed to but there would be things that I missed quite a bit.

Edit, a few more:

Cmd left and right arrow to go to the beginning and end of a line is great. emacs bindings by default in text areas is nice to have(I think you can turn vi mode on too if you want).

Parallels to use windows when I need to for engineering programs that need it and have it seamlessly work as a mac app is great.

the hardware is of great quality too. (the mac pro before the trashcan was a thoughtful and modular machine that was a joy to work on)

plugging in monitors just works which is great.
The article is here:
http://unmhospitalist.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/65758972/desa...
I'm reading the description and reading it, and I still can't make heads or
tails of what does it do and when would I want to use it. Publishing text
files that happen to be code? Running a parametrized script on a request,
RPC-like? Running a script that was supplied in request, so people don't need
to find code injection attacks, but simply submit their code? Something
different?
Well what's even more odd is that sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.
Feelings should not be any part of this nor should the concept of 'fair'ness. Either Apple/Ireland followed the law or they didn't.
More or less. While I usually speed, the speed limits do regulate my speed since I dislike tickets. So, I'm willing to drive a speed that: I feel is safe and is close enough to the posted limit so I don't get a ticket.

But, yes, for the most part I do agree.
I actually hadn't heard about the Lewis book. Having read most of TFAS myself, I now have the same question :) Though I suspect that for me the answer will be "no".
Indian business to tap into a state-owned fingerprint-identification system
But nurses are no different.

We need to start addressing the leading cause of medical accidents - physicians/nurses sleep deprivation.