skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have heard the NSA mission in this regard characterized as both defensive, and offensive. Defensive in that they protect our infrastructure (a counter-intel role), and offensive in that they attempt to exploit the infrastructure of our adversaries (and others) for sigint. They trick is finding the right balance, and I don't think there's much hope for agreement on that at the moment. I also find the debate a difficult one to engage in because there are large information asymmetries and much of what we're trying to discuss is obscured by secret courts, classified documents, etc. My impression is that even the people who are tasked with oversight don't get the full picture, so what do we hope to know about it. I've had experiences in industry that I can't talk about that maybe you (in the general sense) haven't had that also inform my views.

Personally, my view is that we should be putting the focus on the defensive side. Protect infrastructure, IP, etc. I believe the reputation of technology in general is harmed by the offensive mission, and US companies disproportionately so. There is now even greater incentives for our adversaries (and friends) to foster development of technologies that compete directly with US products in their own jurisdictions (where they can get a look under the hood).
Replacing a general purpose programming language with a language that really should have only one application (front-end web development) is a huge mistake. And there are many other, much better alternatives. Python would be fine, java isn't perfect but not all bad either, clojure could be interesting.

Python would have the added advantage that you can go in many different directions from data structures and basics to machine learning, web development or analysis and it probably would come in very handy when collaborating with other students.

Universities that pick javascript for an introduction to programming are making a choice of convenience rather than one that is best for their students.

Well, at least they'll have plenty of bad habits to unlearn later on.
The Stanford curriculum goes from Java to C++ to C in the first core year of classes.

Our final project is a memory Allocator (Malloc, Realloc, Free). By the end, students really do grasp computer organization and architecture.
That's a super interesting episode. Thanks for posting it.

It's definitely important to hear as many perspectives on this as possible, and not to look at LSD or any other drug through rose-colored glasses.

With traditional doses, everyone agrees that set (mindset, or where you are mentally) and setting (where you are physically, and how the space around you is) play huge roles in what kind of experience you have. I wonder if the same is the case for LSD microdosing. Some people just might be unprepared for such an experience, and even at sub-threshold doses LSD might be exposing things they're not ready to handle on their own.

At one point, they say:

"I feel like I at least had a point where I was like, PJ, just do it, it’ll be fun. And I think that that’s an irresponsible approach to a really strong drug."

I would agree with that. These substances should be treated with the utmost respect, and maybe the way most microdosers casually use LSD is not respectful enough of its power and life-changing potential.
It sounds like they're training a parametric speech synthesis platform on samples in order to learn the parameters. I wonder if there are are approaches at generating n-phones for concatenative models, or using a hybrid approach.

I built a toy concatenative Donald Trump speech system [1], but I don't have an ML background. I've been taking Andrew Ng's online course in addition to Udacity's deep learning program in an attempt to learn the basics. I'm hoping I can use my dataset to build something backed by ML that sounds better.

Is anyone in the Atlanta area interested in ML? I'd love to chat over coffee or join local ML interest groups.

[1] http://jungle.horse
Mathematica has been using that terminology since 1988, and was written by mathematicians and physicists.
I belong to the Java generation but thought it was very clean and nice, promoting good OOP practices. That was in 1998 though and Java was helmed by Sun, and we used something like Java 1.0-1.3. I can understand someone jumping into Java of today could feel far more overwhelmed. So maybe this hasn't always been a truth, but a truth that has been growing?
Windows Power Throttling – 11%+ CPU Power Savings
So because you can think of relatively few cases where key figures were duped, it therefore must not be a problem? That hypothesis fails to account for the rest of humanity.

I have a friend who believes in aliens. They showed me a video that someone had put together of "footage". They were seriously showing it to me as evidence, to convince me that they are real, based on this video. I was shocked they were so serious - and having a hard time containing my laughter.

I later found a number of other videos debunking the videos and clips that video was based off of - but my friend still believes in aliens, based on those videos. And this is someone I regularly have "intelligent" conversations with.

This change, the ability to put words in someones mouth, is the next photoshop. And it WILL have consequences to it, good and bad. And we are not prepared for that, as a society - we haven't gotten over photoshop yet.
Eh to be fare, because the kernel linked list implementation is slightly different from what most people think of a linked list, I believe it's easy to get a bit confused with it from time to time... I agree with you that it's not hard per se, but some of the bugs one can introduce with this type of linked list are a bit hard to track down, at least in my own experience.
The move to JS is a great one (although I'm sure many will disagree). When I was first learning programming, half the fun was seeing stuff happen on the screen. Doing programming in HyperCard[1] is one of the fondest memories I have of learning how to write code. And HyperTalk (like JS) wasn't really a "good" programming language, but it was a fun one.

JavaScript has easy access to the DOM, Canvas, and even OpenGL, which should make it a great introductory language. People are able to easily build more interesting stuff than yet another mortgage calculator.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard
Let's say you have 3 people: one who makes 50K, another 125K, and a third who makes 250K. Let's also assume SS tax of 7% on first $125K.

The first pays $3500 per year in SS tax, the second pays $8750, and the third $8750. But each one gets the same SS benefit (assuming same number of working quarters and lifespan).

You are right about tax rates, but those rates don't affect the benefit.

The article makes the point that lifespans are not equal, which tilts the SS program in the regressive direction. But (unless I misread the numbers), SS is still a progressive system overall.
This disparity in receipt of SS benefits has been known about by the people who run/regulate these things since its inception. I'd be shocked if they didn't know this would happen even before its inception. Can you name a single mainstream politician who has made a serious effort to correct this problem? Maybe a couple exist, but I've personally never heard it uttered by a candidate.
It's not about whether it is "high". When you multiply the probability of the suspect shooting you by the cost of getting shot, the cost of acting nice all the time is high.

Therefore, according to the statement you yourself agreed with, that cost is "relatively much higher" in the USA.
Manzotti conflates the scientifically observable with the subjective. Because it sounds intellectual, it gets voted on Hacker News? Manzotti will shit himself when he puts on VR goggles or takes LSD. What will he do then?
Learnt with Python, Uni intro went Haskell (which I know is done at a few others) + Java later in the year as an OO fundamentals language.

JS is a very poor alternative, but it's better than the French High School system that introduced it's own completely demented "Algorithm Language" AlgoBox. So many of my classmates swore to never touch programming because "It's difficult and pointless".

That first contact is incredibly crucial, and I don't think JS is the answer.
I've taught introductory programming to undergraduates in both C and Python at different times. In my experience students struggle to grasp computer architecture and memory management at the same time as learning to think like a computer and formulate ideas in code. They have coped much better with Python and enjoyed how time/effort is spent solving useful problems rather than boilerplate.

Ideally they would all learn about computer architecture and memory management at some point. But at least with this course motivation and interest is a big problem, and producing confident Python programmers seems a better result than terrified students who can't produce competent C.
Global Extinction Rates: Why Do Estimates Vary So Wildly? (2015)
I was thinking of creating a large corpus of my voice, as well as a few of my friend's voices, and licensing it under creative commons or the public domain. Perhaps we can get an early start on making this technology familiar and acceptable before lawyers start to shut us down.
>>>I wasn't trying to take sides

hmmm

>> I'm supporting the cops doing their jobs over the person doing something without full knowledge of the situation

Sure sounds like you are taking side....

I see this often when people excuse police abuse and over reach. They often claim they "dont want to take sides" or "dont want to defend their actions" but then proceed to defend the actions and/or take the side of the cops.
Agreed. Java was my intro language, and probably my favorite (those are probably related); conversely, I still haven't gotten the hang of Python, and it's one of my least favorite languages, but I still recognize that Python is a massively better first language than Javascript of all things.
Even if you don't feel fulfillment from it, it's awesome that you don't mind contributing in that way. Many more kids need it than is evident, usually.
This is exactly what I miss from tech/sci-fi - so much of it becomes increasingly philosophical and abstract instead of delivering (what I think) is a good solid intriguing plot.
Free Video Tutorial: The 2017 React Development Starter Guide
You really should keep your browser updated.
How can Hacker News record your votes if you are offline?
NBOMe's are! They also have psychadelic effects but are a lot riskier and tend to last longer.

It's a good thing they have a bitter taste, and if your LSD has a bitter/metallic taste: spit! It shouldn't taste like anything and you don't want HPPD.
> I phoned a Harvard official, with whom I was on friendly terms. First I asked whether the gift played any role in Jared’s admission. “You know we don’t comment on individual applicants,” he said. When I pressed further, he hung up. We haven’t spoken since.

Were they actually on "friendly-terms"? How did he "press further"?

I have to doubt the premise of this article:

> I also quoted administrators at Jared’s high school, who described him as a less than stellar student and expressed dismay at Harvard’s decision.

Why would an an administrator comment on an individual student? What reason do we have to trust such an individual?
I'm good with it. The more people they crank out learning the wrong languages, the more value I have working with the right ones. :P
Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution
Mumbai University curriculum goes from C to Java (actually its more of Object Oriented Methodology) and then we have a separate subject for Computer Organisation and Architecture. This is in 3 contiguous semesters. By the end, we know from low-level to high-level.
With python you just need a browser too: www.repl.it/python
Why Quora Should Be Valued at 1.8B
I think that it's a big mistake that universities teaches programming in CS using most popular languages. They should use more didatical languages. Not being a popular language it's in fact a huge bonus, because it will force que students to learn other languages before leaving the university. Learning new languages shouldn't be a big problem for a good computer scientist.
I think it's the (less interesting) average benefit minus tax per year, not in aggregate. The latter is presumably much harder to measure. I'd be shocked if high earners with average life expectancies could expect to recoup (inflation-adjusted) their lifetime contributions, given the "bend points" of the benefits formula.
I'm showing my age here, but in my first year of CS we used Pascal and COBOL.

My second year was the first year they taught Java, and back then it seemed incredibly easy and powerful by comparison!
While that's true, you learn a lot from going through those troubles. I disagree that we need to make it "easy" for students to get into programming by glossing over very important details like environment configuration. Someday they'll have to do it at their job - why not prepare them for it?
Sounds great, I was trying something like this in Keras but didn't get very far: https://github.com/sehugg/kerasspeechcodec
I strongly disagree. The kind of bugs you can create with javascript are enough to make pl experts scratch their heads, scope is a mess and while there is no shortage of web frameworks and resources that have to do with web development outside of that the library field is surprisingly barren.

The only thing it really has going for it is distribution, if you have a browser then you can learn how to program in js.
are they going to blow the dust off an old good SICP one day?
Care to clarify/confirm that I understood correctly that you mean to say the asians/whites are racists for living longer?

How did you reach this conclusion?

Edit: and it looks like hispanics are actually living the longest https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6335a8.htm
What's non-personal data? My emails are personal data!
It's not that the advice is necessarily 'crappy', it's more that it's no longer current. You might be looking at an article which is only a couple of months old but is already out of date because some lib (like react-router) has changed, or it's considered 'the wrong way' now (when it was 'the correct way' a couple of months ago).
Uber cloaked its spying and all it got from Apple was a slap on the wrist
You don't give up the right to sue them; you just lose the patent license if you do. If you use preact, you don't have the patent license at all, so you are in the same situation as if you used React and sued them over patents.
Java -> JavaScript :: C -> FORTRAN
I've been greeted by obvious bugs in their UI too many times to count. Its the only "major" website I've ever come across with amateur mistakes. I can't recall any specifically, but +1 on not spending more than 10 seconds on it. And to be fair, the new UI seems to be cleaner so far.
https://www.reddit.com/r/zerocarb/comments/4qlmch/thyroid_an...

https://www.reddit.com/r/keto/comments/4929yx/can_keto_induc...
In 2000, I taught an unaccredited programming course at my local community college. It was once a week for four hours on Saturdays. The language, Perl, was an elective. The choice of language and scheduling guaranteed a rather diverse group of students.

One fellow in his late 40s was a security guard at the college, and so classes were inexpensive for him. He was particularly drawn to my class because there were a number of Perl related jobs in the area at the time.

During my office hour after the class, we sometime chatted and I discovered that he had been working at a local manufacturing facility for almost 20 years. That facility had shut down some years earlier and all of the jobs moved overseas. (1)

He was a pretty bright guy, and though he had almost no technical background before he started taking classes a year earlier, he was passing my class.

I asked him about his hundred of ex-coworkers that had also been laid off. Few if any were making as much progress as he was toward building a new career from scratch in the second half of their lives.

Some people can learn radically different, technical skills later in life. I'm now in the second half of my life and I'm learning new things every week, though I've been deep in technology since I was 10 years old.

A better question is this: of the hundreds of people laid off from that factory, and the thousands laid off in that particular region, how many would be able to find tech jobs if even half managed to get the proper training?

1) The building lay idle for a couple of years, and then was bought by a large multinational company based in the area, and turned into its primary Information Systems location. https://www.google.com/maps/place/David+Glass+Technology+Cen...

That's where 90% of the tech jobs in the area were, so over the next 9 years I would occasionally look up his name to see if he'd hired on. Once he finished his training I was going to surprise him at his desk! Alas, his name never came up. Not surprising in retrospect, since most of our positions wanted some experience.
Summaries of the Top 101 Business Books Ever Written
Even as a JS developer, I'm not sure JS would be my goto. I actually really like introducing people through pure Ruby (so, not rails) since the syntax is pleasing, it has OO concepts but can also be used functionally, and really cuts down on the "scaryness" of the language.

Python isn't a bad choice but virtualenv, v2/v3 issues, etc do make it a bit scarier. Also there are a lot of bad tutorials out there that teach poor habits (not that JS is any better..)

ANSI C isn't a bad one either but I think it's more difficult to grasp and is slower to get results which might dissuade some new developers.
It's 2017. We have other options available in a browser:

https://trinket.io/python
Not sure how that follows. You can try to teach good habits, but you're still throwing intro students into a language that doesn't care if you follow them or not.
Maybe because you need all the parts, so there's no benefit in differentiating them.
I think that if a company has enough of a monopoly on information that they become a de-facto governing agency, that they should be forced to uphold the principles of the 1st amendment.

Facebook should be classified as something like a common carrier.
I agree with you, usually you shouldn't optimize to the point when code quality starts suffer. It's all about trade offs. If you have one or two hundred servers and millions of RPS then it could be reasonable. Or coming back to the code quality, perhaps it's worth to re-visit the efficiency part and find another algorithm/ approach (someone suggested FSM in comments in this case)
Japanese change was just a codification of simplified forms already widely used in handwriting, and is rather limited in number (cca 370 characters).

Chinese switch was motivated by the desire to improve literacy in the country, which was to be achieved by making the writing system more accessible/simple. The changes were far wider than in Japanese, and total count of characters that were simplified is cca 3500.
I may be in the minority here on hacker news, but I think Java is a great language. It was intuitive for me to learn, and it is highly extensible/customizable.

Telling college kids to learn javascript first is a terrible idea. Teach them a static language first. Anybody who knows what they're doing in a static language will have no trouble picking up non-static languages like javascript.
Came here to say this. Also Tecmo Bowl
Behind Carder Kingpin Roman Seleznev’s Record 27 Year Sentence
Actually, Java was my first language too. And I still don't regret learning programming using Java. How much ever I love JS, I wouldn't have traded it for Java.
It's probably the best show the SyFy channel has ever aired: http://www.syfy.com/theexpanse
I think it works. I mean there's a reason we use this approach for courts and elections, the cases where getting the truth is the most important for society.
It think the edges might be cutoff by a few pixels.
So, Western involvement in Syria is due to wanting to protect one of the oil pipelines that supplies it's oil?

And Russian involvement is to stop that I assume?

What are you implying here?
The early-Modern "they" means "one or more people"—as in, it can be singular or plural, as you wish.

Shakespeare still would use "he" or "she" as appropriate when trying to make it explicit that there was exactly one person being referred to.

But now, we are told to use "they" or "he/she" even in that situation, because singular-generic "he" is offensive to some people, and because human-referential "it" is offensive to rather more people.
I've gone through a couple online courses and some percentage of people obviously really struggled to get setup. It's probably significantly less of an issue at schools where "Intro to Programming" mostly assumes that you already have at least the basics of hacking around with a computer down. But it's probably hard for most people here to appreciate how daunting "never seen a command line before" is for many beginners.
Mine wasn't quite as 'aged', but not sure it was the best choice.

First programming language my school taught was C++.
JS is a powerful language for a narrow domain. That makes it totally unsuitable as an introductory language because if the domain you wish to move to is not web development you now have to restart all over again with another language. Python would be better, java wasn't all that bad as a universal language it is applicable to many domains. But the ECT cycle of java could be seen as a drawback, python would remedy that to get the instant gratification factor.
Gianluca Guarini is the maintainer of Riot.js. It's hard to believe he just naively tried React and this is what he came up with. Riots main page has more of these questionable comparisons.
I think it's a lot easier to understand OO, for instance, when you know what structs and functions are ("oh, a class is basically a struct with functions [methods] in it with an implicit argument pointing to itself, and some sugar on top? Cool, that was easy.") versus trying to jump straight in, which is what makes Java so painful to n00bs.

I don't see moving to JS helping with that problem much, though. If anything prototypal OO is more confusing without that foundation, and loosey-goosey nothing's-really-defined-for-real-until-runtime languages might be fast to get started in but will quickly lead students into a big ol' swamp of WTF.

I'd think a semester of C as an intro, despite its warts, would make everything that followed much clearer. But maybe it'd turn off too many students because everything they'd do in that semester'd be kinda boring.
A lot of the naming of stuff goes back to Redux's Flux heritage. The Flux architecture labeled those objects as "actions", so Redux (since it was intended as a "Flux implementation") kept that naming.

You are right that the majority of usage is really at the user level, than the library level. I'm actually working on a blog post that will try to clarify and discuss what actual technical limitations Redux requires of you, vs how you are _encouraged_ to use Redux, vs how it's _possible_ to use Redux. Been busy with other stuff, but hoping to make progress on that post this week. If you're interested, keep an eye on my blog at http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com .

If you have concerns with the docs, I'd appreciate any specific suggestions or ideas you might have for improving them. Docs issues and PRs are absolutely welcome, from you or anyone else who wants to help improve them.

Finally, I recently opened up an issue to discuss possible future improvements and "ease-of-use" layers that could be built on top of the Redux core: https://github.com/reactjs/redux/issues/2295 . Would be happy for any feedback you could offer.

(edit: just noted I replied to you a couple different times in this thread, and repeated myself a bit. Offer of discussion absolutely still stands :) )