skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find your stance well considered and it intrigues me because I don't think I agree with it. However I might agree in principle and differ on what exactly it means for someone to know first principles.

I've been through a CS education track, including algorithms and complexity, my day job has been software development for over 5 years since I've graduated college. In practice I have been able to understand complexity tradeoffs when selecting approaches and building implementations and have been able to recognize shortcomings in the same done by others and been able to improve upon what was built. The difficulty I have encountered has never been in the implementation of an algorithm. I have even taught the first principles of complexity to others sufficiently well that I have seen them make informed design decisions.

I will openly admit that not once, during all of that time, have I ever been able to whiteboard an optimally efficient (or nearly so) algorithm implementation _and be confident it was such_. Mind you, I'd love to be able to, and I'm definitely not arguing that understanding complexity isn't useful knowledge. However I would contend that being able to bang out a optimal b-tree implementation from memory on-demand isn't first principles knowledge, but is merely _trivia_ ability.

I would further argue it's not even first principles knowledge that is most important, but rather a combination of critical-thinking, enough self-awareness to notice when you've exceeded your current knowledge/experience, and sufficient humility to fix that lack rather than plod along with blinders on.

Granted, I might be less competent than I believe, but then, in practice, it would seem that incompetence can lead to genuine success. Perhaps the scope of my 5 years real-world experience is so narrow that I've simply not had the chance to encounter a situation where others would say "if you're not able to whiteboard a b-tree, you're not the right person to solve this problem". But then, I'm a full-stack developer that regularly uses Java, Javascript, and Python and have occasionally had reason to use R and C#, so it seems unlikely that my experience is that exceedingly narrow.

Sorry that this became a bit rambling, it's just a topic that's always intrigued me in how divisive it can be.
The same effect occurs when getting into a hot car. You gasp for air.
Services like Android Pay quite reasonably elect to not work if the device appears like it may have been compromised. It's not easy to tell if a device is rooted because the user wanted root access or because a virus got in.

But suppose you established that the user intentionally rooted the phone (somehow). It'd still not be clear whether the rootkit that the user used was trustworthy. Even if you established that it was trustworthy (stretching the bounds of reasonableness; who is auditing these?), you couldn't assume that the user hadn't run other malicious programs. That last point is true for non-rooted phones, of course, but since this user had root access those hypothesized malicious programs become much more dangerous.

(Also, I doubt you own or have root access to your credit card. But what would you do with it if you did? All I can come up with is to consolidate a few of them onto one piece of plastic.)
Always fun with people that run with exotic ideas =)

I might be missing some aspects but would it not be much easier to locate the datacenter on land but close to the ocean (or other large body of water), with similar principles as used for cooling nuclear reactors? Then you would get the benefits but would not have the same strict requirements on reliability of the components.

If you locate it on land you would also have the benefit of using the excess heat for house heating (if located in cold climate and the temperature difference to outside is big enough). This is done in a number of cases in Sweden with excess heat from large industrial plants [1].

[1] Report in Swedish; http://www.svenskfjarrvarme.se/Global/Rapporter%20och%20doku...
Well, they'd promise to make the country great again for starters.

They'd crush the unions to undermine their political opponents.

They'd align themselves with big business.

They'd tell "big lies" and believe that if they repeat them enough then people would believe them.

They'd think a minority religion was plotting their downfall and start making plans to deport them all.

They'd build up the army, while not spending enough on problems at home.

Against all economic advice they'd stop trading with others, viewing it as weakness, and try to become entirely self-sufficient.

So watch out for that kind of thing.
Nuclear power plant water exchangers in both California and Sweden have attracted blooms of jellyfish[1], who then clogged the heat exchangers and caused the power plants to cut power output to mitigate the efficiency loss.

[1] http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/jellyfish-shut-down...
Map a-z to the first 26 primes, multiply and then quicksort your dictionary.
I agree with this. OS X is a flavor of BSD. I've learned that it's often more helpful to search for "<thing I want to do> bash BSD" than it is to search for "<thing I want to do> bash OS X".

Making "Winbuntu" a fully compatible Ubuntu sounds like a really lofty goal, especially when it comes to things that expect a Linux file system.

I guess for me, it's easier to reason about Linux in a VM (or maybe a container), with all the limitations of that approach, than it is to wonder what surprise might occur as a result of trying to run something on Winbuntu. At some point maybe that will shift. It's not like VMs are exactly like bare metal.

Keeping trying hard Microsoft! I like Winbuntu enough that I bought a Windows 10 laptop just to play with it! Emphasis on play, not seriously use.
Yeah!!!

The way in which we detect them is so incredible: either by noticing the periodic slight decrease in light as the exoplanet orbits its star, or by noticing the periodic slight wobble of the star around it and its expolanet's joint center of mass. When you think of what a tiny difference we're measuring, of something so dim and so far away, and the fact that we're able to actually resolve those things––it's just staggering.
Its been my experience that a non-degree developer can crank out CRUD apps quickly whereas a developer with a CS or engineering degree will struggle with the idea of a CRUD app since its never taught in school from a modern perspective. That being said, the theory learned in school can help a developer see the bigger picture and provide them with tools for creating solid code with few performance issues while those that are self-taught or went through the boot camp will probably have to Youtube and Google their way out of trivial or ambiguous problems, such as null-pointer exceptions and data type mismatches.
I really enjoy when people dig into things like this and report their findings. Having said that, I question the wisdom of "bothering" with this sort of thing. Everything you do that's non-standard or works against a system's default behavior incurs a cost. It's yet another thing you have to replicate when you migrate to a new version, change provisioning systems, etc.

And for what benefit? A few hundred syscalls per second? Linux syscalls are fast enough that something of that magnitude shouldn't matter much. Given that /etc/localtime will certainly be in cache with that frequency of access, a stat() should do little work in the kernel to return, so that won't be slow either.

It's good that they did some benchmarking to look at the differences, but this feels like a premature optimization to me. I can't imagine that this did anything but make their application a tiny fraction of a percent faster. Was it worth the time to dig into that for this increase? Was it worth the maintenance cost I mention in my first paragraph? I wouldn't think so.

I'm really trying not to take a crap on what they did; as I said, it's really cool to dig into these sorts of abstractions and find out where they're inefficient or leak (or just great as a learning exercise; we all depend on a mountain of code that most people don't understand at all). But, when looked at from a holistic systems approach, a grab bag of little "tweaks" like this can become harmful in the long run.
Most popular/AAA titles aren't released for Linux, unless you mean Facebook/other web games.
The 2017 Design Salary Survey Is Officially Live
He makes a good point that the "scoring function" for what we think of as a good anagram is actually the more important.

In general just generating the solution space is actually much easier than coming up with a satisfying scoring function.
> TZ=:/etc/localhost

Hope this is just a typo in your comment, not the actual test ;)
unrelated but reminded me of another non-rhyme-based form of poetry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ci_(poetry)
Rob Pike is the 2nd biggest contributor to this project: https://github.com/upspin/upspin/graphs/contributors
This guy is building a startup from scratch and giving it away to his readers
I noted the disclaimer: "Upspin is not an official Google product". Yet it is announced on the Google Blog? Is it a separate "skunk works" team effort?

Also, I note that they can set access levels based on email addresses, but I am unsure how that would work? Would those emails have to be linked to a Google account so that Upspin could check the currently logged in Google account to allow/disallow access to the files?
MacBook and Iphone!
True then, as I believe best anagrams transcend mere good manipulation of dictionary entry,

a letter rearrangement goes beyond the plain, ordinary substitutions of vain academic men.
Does anyone have more context to compare this to Camlistore, which is made by another member of the Go team?
I believe expolanets with oxygen have already been discovered:

https://phys.org/news/2016-08-venus-like-exoplanet-oxygen-at...
There really is no substitute to knowing people, whether at meetups, conferences, training, contributions to open source. Certainly if you want more exposure pick something with a small following and join the Slack channel and ask if anyone has anything they want help with. You will quickly become someone who is trusted if you can deliver.
Knowing the typical time and space complexity for an algorithm (without even understanding one bit about the implementation details) in a given category might be considered too trivial to be even basic, but I submit it's about the most "advanced" piece of knowledge for what a typical engineer really must know to write good, high quality and performant enough code.

I think we're both saying that it's generally a good level of 1st Principles knowledge for programmers to have.
I'm not the author of the original comment, but I recall reading a similar argument in the book:

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/...
Penetrations are not necessary. It is possible to use electromagnetic radiation to transfer both data and power.
Failing Your Goals with Beeminder
You're definitely missing a lot. Please take a look at the overview doc, it should be mostly explained here: https://upspin.io/doc/overview.md

One of the key elements of Upspin is that all content is signed and encrypted by the client. Sharing is totally in control of the content owners, and the servers need not be trusted at all.
Learn How to Create and Manage Big Data Teams
Interesting question. Perhaps you should look at the cost of spacecraft engineering for an example. You can't replace the hard drive on a probe billions of miles from earth!
In the same vein, I wrote a Twitter bot that finds and retweets pairs of tweets that form anagrams:

https://twitter.com/anagrammatweest

It's a clone of anagramatron, the original anagram Twitter bot that went inactive almost a year ago.

I use a combination of Damerau–Levenshtein distance, longest common sequence, length, number of English words, and number of different words to score and rank anagrams to figure out which ones to retweet.
So what Linux did not have was a proper pitch to the OEMs, so that you could buy a pre-configured, pre-installed Linux computer from Walmart that would be compatible with existing standards.

This was pretty much impossible because of many things, but mainly because of the proprietary standards in both hardware and software.

Even if you'd manage it technically, you'd then have to face with the legal trouble.
I think you'd be surprised at how non-white males are treated in the Deep Red, is again my point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Fore...
There is a reason people use Dropbox not Apache to share files. Unless you can explain why that is, I'm not sure what criticizing their open source work achieves.
This was a thoroughly fascinating read. Highly recommend reading the previous part in the series as well.
Do Immigrants Import Economic Destiny? How Migration Shapes Prosperity
Their number is gradually rising. Higher availability of games needs breaking the catch 22, it's not an instant process (i.e. bigger market means more games). Linux gaming grew in the last 5-6 years tremendously already. And it in turn increased Linux desktop usage. So catch 22 is eroding and things are progressing in the right direction.

Recent bigger focus on improving graphics situation (Vulkan and etc.) is helping that as well.
The tricky parts of embedded development? Take all the tricky parts of making all the functional elements of a computer, kill the supportive community, demolish a couple bells and whistles, burn all pertinent documentation, and, most importantly, give it to a single developer to handle all by their lonesome.
Well, that's because companies can't afford to be as picky right now. Once everyone "learns to code." and there is a glut, you'd better believe degrees become more valuable.
Association between polygenic risk scores for ADHD and cognitive outcomes
Legislation to stop US border agents from demanding passwords is on the way
As another reply to your post says, paraphrased, allowing applications to escalate privileges is absolutely less secure than not allowing applications to escalate privileges.

This really has nothing to do with services not working because root is enabled, instead it has everything to do with companies (Netflix in this case, or Google for Android Pay in your example) preventing widespread theft of employee/customer data.

Even the most cautious users can accidentally click "allow" by mistake. Here's a example of how that might happen:

Build an app that some user wants - maybe a game. Make the user click a "Start" button to play. Time how long between presenting the button and receiving the click, after a few rounds of this, wait a fraction of a second less than the average time and trigger the sudo call which in turn usually triggers an allow/deny popup.

Did it register with you in time, or did you click allow? Did you even notice it if the game starts anyway? Probably not! Netflix just gave an attacker an entry point, and Google just lost the confidence of their banking partners, who are likely looking for any excuse to avoid working with Google (and Apple etc) anyway.

A good IT department has to protect the company from risks like this, and nothing the company requires you to do will require root (There are obviously exceptions, but the number of employees worldwide who fit this bill, outside of phone OS development, is likely less than a 5 or 6 figure number).

If you need root for personal tasks, and the company isn't happy with root, then they are entirely within their right to deny that device access to company systems.
This reminds me of a very similar behavior in Solaris over 20 years ago. Our C application was having odd performance problems on some client systems, and eventually we saw via truss that there were hundreds of fopen() calls every second to get the timezone. Setting the right environment variable solved the problem.
One of the "Hello, World" applications would be learning to classify MNIST digits. They have a tutorial on their site.
Sounds a little like IPFS: a global file system based on end-to-end cryptographically verified files distributed through untrusted nodes. Anyone want to compare the two?
Just to share my experience:

Like you, I also didn't have a CS degree (I did take foundational CS coursework in undergrad, and also had an MS in something akin to HCI). I was hired for my first software engineering job in SF by a couple not-very-technical founders--both of whom were rather taken with a game I had designed/developed--after completing a week-long contract job for them. No CS fundamentals interview process.

After that first job, it was very easy to get interviews, although I had to prep a bit for those CS questions. I'm now interviewing for my third job, and feel like I've taken on too many interviews, many at big name startups and big corps. Among 18ish cold applications, I've only been turned down without so much as a recruiter call twice, likely because I was missing some keyword on my resume or something.
What about chromebooks? They did alright.
We need FOSS handheld devices.
Pretty happy with the Kitty fork of putty, which is a lot less spartan with features.

https://www.fosshub.com/KiTTY.html
The article mentions that one of the benefits is that they don't have to deal with building codes being different in different places. It's truly an "off the shelf" data center that doesn't have to be customized for the laws, zoning, and codes in that area.

But who is in charge of the seabed around the United States? I imagine that I can't just drop a big metal container on the ocean floor without informing someone or asking permission, otherwise there would be a lot of things just dumped out there.

I also wonder about jurisdiction. If the data center is outside of the Territorial Zone (12 nautical miles from shore) but is inside of the 200nm exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which country would jurisdiction fall under? The country that owns the EEZ? Would the data center fly a flag of its owning country? Perhaps the country where the cabling comes ashore?

Some interesting legal questions. Perhaps the datacenter would be treated like a submarine in terms of jurisdiction. It could allow Microsoft to have their Irish branch open data centers 13 nautical miles offshore of the West Coast to provide storage that's harder for the US to legally get into.
Microsoft Faces European Privacy Probes Over Windows 10
I've seen other people take a bunch of open source components - not knowing in depth how they worked - and put them together to create surprisingly credible solutions very cheaply, the kinds of solutions that win 7-figure SaaS deals. You don't get there with your knowledge of binary trees or compiler principles.

But having some basic algorithms knowledge might make the difference between delivering such a solution that runs reliably and quickly enough and not.
Man Loses More Than 50 Pounds Playing a VR Game
I did it my way, but I wouldn't wish that path on anyone. Stay in school kids!
docs: https://upspin.io/doc/index.md

More on https://godoc.org/github.com/upspin/upspin/upspin
Important topic but not much details or examples in the linked material. Any tips on other sources of content on the topic of building mindshare? Working in the Saas B2B space but any examples are interesting.
> With everything that's available in documentation, on YouTube, in forums, and in boot camps and other trainings, doesn't it seem like there are much more efficient ways to get the foundational knowledge that don't require four years of expensive college courses?

Sure, but the risk of getting led onto an inefficient, time wasting path that doesn't give you a good grounding in the foundational knowledge is also high.

The skill to evaluate approaches to learning the information and the set of information you need to learn is not something you are likely to have without having studied the information, and there are lots of people with pet theories or financial interest in your actions trying to promote different approaches.
Features are faults redux
> It would have been nice to have a control group, true, but howya gonna do dat? We have to look at the evidence we have, and there is a fair bit of it, so we might as well take a look.

I totally get that, but that's no excuse for saying you have causation when you have only correlation. It's also no excuse for claiming to have proved a negative.

> I don't think the author is cherry-picking

Calling it cherry picking is generous: this is anecdotal evidence. You need more than a half dozen examples to prove a trend, and I'd prefer examples more precise than the events that occurred across an entire country over the course of decades.

To be clear, I don't question that catastrophe can reduce inequality, but I don't think it is the only thing.
Boulder City, Nevada, was built as a semi-permanent town in 1931 to house 5,000 working on the Hoover Dam.

The Wikipedia entry says the city "was exceptionally rare as an example of a town fully planned under government supervision. This is unlike 19th century privately funded company town examples found in the United Kingdom, such as Port Sunlight, or in the United States, such as Pullman, Chicago."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder_City,_Nevada

The thing that fascinates me about company and government towns is the rules the residents ended up having to follow. In Boulder City, no drinking, prostitution or gambling. In Saltaire, UK, no hanging washing on a line, or "Gatherings or loitering of more than eight persons in the streets".

http://www.saltairevillageexperience.co.uk/rules-for-living-...
Framed faces. The real world status board
There's countries in the world that are completely unable to feed their people, provide any modicum of security, and where that's been the case for decades.

You are worried about problems in America?
nuget does not work
> Focusing inward on problems and negativity is a great way to increase the feelings of negativity and hopelessness.

Repeating an earlier comment: the entire point of modern evidence based therapies is to help people avoid focusing inward on problems and negativity.
Except that for many people it is simply the only option. Disabled Veterans are employed by government at something like 10x the rate of other employers. Minorities are employed at much higher rates as well. Alot of this is because of the way the civil service hiring works, which is perverse in some ways and highly merit based on others.

There are alot of metrics where private enterprise is just plain terrible, and government is the lesser of two evils.
Cooking and music are two professions that come to mind.
An earthly tangent to this is remote sensing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_sensing). It's not quite as incredible as inferring whole ecosystems on distant planets but it is amazing what scientists are able to achieve using these techniques.

I think a lot of people are aware that the field exists but don't realize how much "hard" science is/was involved especially when it was a relatively new technology with more limited IT resources.

Edit. It also reminds me of the recent debate about automation taking jobs. I work in GIS and every office has someone near retirement age who remembers the days of mapping terrain with actual photos and a stereoscope - it's all automated these days and uses technologies such as LIDAR. The result has been a boom in geospatial jobs.
You're right, and they've discovered the replenishment mechanism, "the planet is flooded with ultraviolet or UV light. UV light breaks apart water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen" - so no evidence of life.

edit

Not exactly replenishment, water gets broken up into H and O, some of the H streams off into space, leaving stray Os floating around. In that case everything is just slowly boiling away into space.
Judith Curry has a long past of incorrectly claiming that global warming has ended.
Ironically, It reminds me of those cult leaders that claim the world is ending on a specific date and then keep moving it back when it doesn't happen, lol.