skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Swift 4.0 Released
I haven't collected the hard numbers for what is presented on page vi of https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/68925.pdf, but soft costs appear to have swollen to take up most of the cost savings from reduced module prices.

In other words, yep.
Everything I wish someone told me when I started making music
Likewise homework. Anecdote: My kids have vastly more homework than I ever had.
Thanks, your link worked to bypass the paywall.
CDC Releases Faulty Research About Opioids
If Apple, Google, or Facebook pays you $150k/yr in stock, you can just sell it on the public market.
>> Today, I see plenty of kids having iPods, Mac Book pros, flashy clothes and driving cars all provided by their parents. Why work hard? Why take chances? Life isn't that bad after all.

I see the same thing happenning, but IMHO nothing has actually changed -- I have just been lucky, educated, and hard-working enough to have gone up several socio-economic tiers. What i'm seeing was likely the case even back when I was young, except on the other side of the tracks. Now i'm living on that other side.
You can always find a worse place. There are places worse than 4chan too, but I don't see how that's relevant to the_donald being hate filled / fuelled.

There's islamophobia, there's cherry picking of news about rape claims, infowars crap about illegal immigrants which is just hate mongering, posts like "let's trigger illegals and show some love for our ICE agents".

I'm not going to link to that dump specifically because they don't deserve the publicity. If you don't see this as hate mongering, we disagree on a very fundamental level.
Shrug, given how hostile the internet is I fail to see how this increases the risk at all.
Comcast, AT&T Are Paying Minority Groups to Support Killing Net Neutrality
ParkAR is an ARKit app that helps you find your parking spot
> If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem.

I am not convinced - I suspect that there isn't anything to the experience of being like a worm; that the very question presupposes self-awareness of some sort. I suspect the hard problem of consciousness might lie in the self-referentiality of self-aware consciousness (though alternatively or in addition, it might be on account of its workings being inaccessible to introspection.)

But our consciousness goes beyond simple self-awareness: having a theory of mind is a step beyond (and is realizing that others have a theory of mind a step beyond that?) Our own experience of our own consciousness is several steps removed from what a worm might experience.

> We need new words - or wider usage of existing ones.

Yes; I think the words we use are definitely an issue, perhaps because we don't remember what it was like to be an aware, but not self-aware, infant. To some people, anything that responds to external stimuli is conscious, while to others on the other extreme, consciousness entails being able to verbalize it. This might be the only case where the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is actually correct - that our ability to think about the issue is constrained by our language.

In short, I think the author of the article made heavy weather of the issue by conflating consciousness with simple awareness, and not recognizing that meta-consciousness, and perhaps even an awareness of meta-consciousness, is an essential part of what distinguishes what is commonly meant by consciousness from mere awareness.

In case I haven't made myself clear, I don't think the hard problem of consciousness has been solved by invoking meta-consciousness; on the contrary, I think that is where the difficulty is most apparent.
Genuine question: what does a Production Software Developer do?
If they consistently used VPN's I would but it seems to be intermittent since the GFWoC is a fickle thing.
Better article than I expected, thanks.

> If a candidate cannot come up with an algorithm that your team needed to implement, they do not have the algorithmic ability to excel at the company.

This part seemed a bit ambiguous. Believe you meant recognize an algorithm, but could also mean derive? Derivation of something complex might be too much to ask in an interview, when nervous. Creativity and calm go hand in hand.
Optimizing Our CI Pipeline
Can someone explain the mechanics of things like how caffeine naps work? I never understand how people are supposed to implement these things, it always seems like they just assume you will fall asleep instantly.

For example, they say you should drink a coffee and then immediately take a 20 min nap. Seriously? It takes me 5-15min to fall asleep at night, let alone during the day. At a minimum this seems like a 45 min ordeal.
I'm obviously very old compared to the target audience. I was accepted to Columbia and Texas A&M and chose Texas A&M because I had various scholarships that paid for my tuition and room/board. I had some scholarships to go to Columbia but was facing debt of ~20k/year so I choose to go to A&M instead. My life is fine but I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who take out huge loans. (I had to work after my freshman year and I didn't go out a lot etc.) Not seeking sympathy for me, just saying I don't have any desire to "forgive" the loans for anyone.

I don't know the solution but having the govt secure all loans and think about forgiving them is not going to help the next generation. Where is the incentive for univ to bring their costs down? Also, where is the incentive for people to either shop for a college they can afford, or even forgo college in favor of some other training or on the job experience?
Yeah this would overall be good, but not short-term.

Once consumers are directly exposed to the shit show that is insurance and pre-existing conditions and zero price transparency, and they have no collective negotiation power as they do when a company purchases, they will revolt and it will force a change.

There are a few people who cannot get insurance individually thanks to pre-existing conditions. They can only get insurance via employers group plans. Short-term a few of these people go bankrupt or die, but whats a few deaths in service of a good ideology?
That would be pretty cool!
Ironic isn’t it?
Nobody talks about the elephant in the room. It is the fact that 2/3rds of Americans are obese or overweight that makes health insurance so expensive.
Federal taxes on cigarettes went up 250% to pay for health care/SCHIP in the past 30 years or so. There is a pretty good correlation with smoking rates and cost of cigarettes.
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.82.1.9...
I run into examples almost daily where I need a mac. The latest being the cognita/angular example from awslabs https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cognito-angular2-quickstart. States right in the instructions you need to run the createresources.sh on either linux or mac. Even running babun or cygwin on windows doesn't work. I tried and wasted quite a lot of time. I ran it on my mac pro and it just works. It's not that mac is inherently better, its that the vast majority of developers work on macs and don't bother to get their workflows to work on windows.
I think not using code completion might have more to do with you having an excellent memory and it might not be fantastic advice for everyone but I would be interested if there were stats on usage of features like code completion in emacs.
Yeah, that could be very good. Especially for people who are no longer students per se...sometimes having access to an expert is the best way to avoid going down the wrong autodidactic path :)

My professor is very helpful, but office hours and schedules can only mesh so much. I'm mainly looking for things I can supplement with to fill in any holes.
Please don't use that whataboutism here.

But, since you asked, businesses that offer services to the public can refuse service to anyone UNLESS they're refusing a member of a protected class, for being a member of a protected class.

White restaurant owner kicking out a black lady because she's belligerent/drunk/whatever -- fine.

White restaurant owner kicking out a black lady because she's black -- not fine.

Religious bakery owner refusing service because it's Monday -- fine.

Religious bakery owner refusing service because the customer is gay -- not fine.

But again, please no more whataboutism.
ICOs and Cryptocurrency Resources
Uber Faces Widespread Asia Bribery Allegations Amid U.S. Criminal Probe
I know several people who use these sorts of techniques to exfiltrate data from a network where you don't have outbound TCP but you can leak information through DNS. As you mentioned, Iodine lets you do this (though by default it tries to use VOID DNS responses that are blocked by a lot of networks).

It's pretty cool being able to do an rsync-over-DNS.
I don't get this.. even if they get a tax benefit, in net doesn't it cost money rather than save money for the company?
I'd be curious to hear how this trend compares across countries. Are teens in, say, England drinking less and having less sex than their American counterparts, or this an entirely American phenomenon?
You get to call your insurance company and test your anger management skills every time they deny you coverage.

OK that's not really "value".

They do add jobs though. There's "coders", they deal with medical codes.
Jeff Atwood of coding horror is also an asp.net advocate. Stack Overflow, written in asp.net, was designed by Jeff. https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...
Point taken. One reading of the article is that meta-consciousness is the new consciousness (whatever that was).

I think of consciousness as being 'what you are paying attention to and what it is like'. One problem with this is that when you're attending sufficiently strongly to something you can't actually notice what it is like; there isn't enough bandwidth free. Yet some of the associated ideas ('qualia') may linger in working memory for a more relaxed examination afterwards. Which proves that you were paying attention and that mental work was going on. (Perhaps it also shows that trying too hard is counter-productive due to lack of integration with the rest of the mind.)
Depends on your corporate structure;my accountant told me that the costs may make enough of a difference to justify changing the structure. Not an accountant, and not your accountant.
Every other major country does single payer. We need single payer, too.
It has happened in the past (chosen example: 2014). Not sure if any current vulnerability is public.

https://blog.torproject.org/tor-security-advisory-relay-earl...

https://blog.torproject.org/did-fbi-pay-university-attack-to...
This is great and should be something everyone should know how to do. Please write a more formal write-up
You do not need interfaces for dependency injection and it can also be done without global mutable state.

This Clojure library is doing so beautifully with immutability: https://github.com/stuartsierra/component
Slightly off topic, but are there more-or-less boilerplate RISC-V verilog/VHDL designs available that can deploy to ~$100ish FPGA boards? I'd be super interested in messing with that if so. I took digital design and HDL related courses in university but haven't really had an opportunity to do anything productive with that yet.
Attempt to log in it would seem...
Except it's well known that
lead exposure during childhood can cause irreversible brain damage.
EM radiation and power draw patterns from your device can leak information about what the device is doing. The NSA takes this stuff seriously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)

There are situations where an attacker doesn't have full physical access to a device but can still observe EM radiation. For example, someone sitting next to you with an EM receiver, observing emissions from your 2FA token.
Shadowsocks, the tool China’s coders use to blast through the Great Firewall
Tech Is Tech Until Proven a Business
"Even if I owe money... why should I pay you? Prove you bought the loans, tomorrow someone else can ask me to pay for it again."

That's an excellent point. The fact that you paid off a fraudster doesn't in any way change the fact that you still owe money to the legitimate owner of the loan. So you need to demand proof that whoever is asking you for payment is the owner of the loan and not a fraudster.
I expect some of the first people to arrive on Mars will be military or police or both. When was the last time you even saw scifi where the civilians got there first and had the opportunity to build something new? No, the governments on Earth will absolutely see Mars as a new colony they own, and their laws apply there. It takes too much infrastructure to get there to figure they'll let people do it and face the almost inevitable threat of them declaring 'independence' once they're out of the range of ballistic weaponry. So send the weaponry with them, along with authority-projectors. The idea of a fresh start to human society, of being able to jettison some of the things that only stick around because everyone has forgotten why they were started in the first place, is one of those things that's just too good to be true. Possible, certainly, but too potentially dangerous for those trying to hold onto the status quo back on the homeworld.
They negotiate discounts with the providers.
IMO, an AR implementation of visualization would be more interactive than a VR. Overall, great job.
> There are a few people who cannot get insurance individually thanks to pre-existing conditions.

Denying insurance due to pre-existing conditions is currently prohibited unless the Affordable Care Act is repealed.

https://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/about-the-aca/pre-existing-co...

I agree with your other points though ("directly exposed to the shit show that is insurance"): removing employer provided health insurance would speed up the current system's collapse and push us to single payer at ludicrous speed. There would be no other option palatable.
I overheard someone giving advice to their daughter the other day that was basically "if you don't go out and meet new people, then you will be unhappy in your life." Which is absolute bullshit, but c'est la vie.
Free lunches at least make economic sense for highly compensated employees. A leisurely 1.5 hour off-site lunch turns into a 30 minute on-site one.
Can someone explain to me, honestly, why I would want an 'entertainmaint' system built into my car? I do long commutes, I drive a lot, I am an occasional truck driver, I have crossed Australia east to west more than once - and I still don't get it. My car is the one place in the world where I stand a decent chance of escaping the all-pervading goddamn film and music industry.
That's developers boycotting the language, not users boycotting developers of the language.
Basically you want to push global state and mutability to the boundaries of your program, where it connects to its environment.
Don't you enjoy yourself in your company? You should be able to offer full coverage if that's what you want. You just have to offer that to all of your employees, but that's probably just you.
Actually, that's something fundamental, and maybe more thought-trough than appears at first, that they are doing here.

> but my understanding is you start at the foundational idea then move on to the its ramifications and symptoms.

That's certainly how you do in electronics and physics. Explain transistors and logic gates before studying a CPU. We know exactly how transistor behave in some specific conditions. We know they will continue to believe that way when surrounded by millions of others, we know its failures mode, etc...

In economics, you can present the things that way, many textbooks do, but the problem is that it is a lie. You can start with micro-economics, game theory, opportunity costs, marginal costs, supply and demand. The problem is, we do not know how to get from there to macro-economics. It is deeply unsatisfying and an active field of research but it should not be presented to students as a solved problem.

The thing is, if your interest lies in inequalities, you are in the field of macro-economics, you want to take a more observational science approach like, say, astronomy. In astronomy you are looking at stars. Well, you think they are stars, they surely look like stars. You don't know exactly what is inside or how they work, but you start by classifying them into observational categories. You start to have rough models of how they may form. Your models assume a homogeneous non-rotating, perfectly spheric mass, you know these assumptions are wrong so you expect deviations and errors as you refine your model.

That's how macro-economists do: they observe correlations, try to model how they can be linked causally, propose theories, observe if these theories are vindicated (because it is hard to make a controlled experiment in macroeconomics).

So if you are interested in inequalities, start by observing it! Understand the shape it has, how it evolves, and start studying things that seem correlated to it, that it may cause or be caused by.

But that book breaks the lie that we know how to go from micro- top macro- economics. I think it is a very important step. Bring back a bit of humility and clarity to the field.
From a certain perspective, he is a "state-level" threat. Not an imminent, physical threat, certainly - this is a threat of a different type. He loudly and vigorously argues and advocates against various government policies and actions (as well as those of the largest corporations most deeply entangled with the state apparatus) and gives advice on how best to resist them.
How would AR make this more interactive? I haven't seen one AR device with an interaction model as good as VR. I also don't know why you'd want to set the real world while visualizing data. Maybe so you could interact with it with other people IRL that are also wearing AR headsets?
QE2: The 50-year journey of a British style icon
>"The "Wild Web" was reigned in long ago by commercial interests."

Perhaps, but the "reigning in" referenced in the title is now being done by commercial interests at the request of governments in exchange for staying in those government's good graces.
It pains me to see how normal it has become to search using unrelated words, I.e. "what" and "is".

I still can't get over the fact that google removed advanced search syntax.
> There is probably a massive rave event happening every weekend in the states.

How much of that is the teens described in this article? The subjects of the article seem to be mostly post-millennial (current high schoolers) who enjoy hanging at home with their parents. The average age of a massive rave goer probably skews a bit more towards the college and early 20s age bracket.
When I was in high school in the 1990s, the web was in its infancy and I did not use it to look up pictures of STDs, but I knew what they were. I got a basic overview in school describing the cause, symptoms, prognosis, treatment and prevention of the most common ones.

My takeaway from that wasn't that sex was too scary to do, but that condoms were a really good idea.
Knock on wood
Based on the Australian experience, the next wave of price declines for residential solar will indeed come from balance-of-system cost declines, increased installation efficiency and lower profits.

Current costs in Australia are about A$ 1.70 /pk-W (~US$1.35), pre-subsidies, split roughly into 35% modules, 10% inverter, 10% mounting system, 10% other hardware (cabling, switchboard etc), 10% installation and 25% "vendor's margin", including marketing, sales and profits.

The household has also to pay for a bi-directional meter to allow for energy sales. IIRC that was around A$350.

It's a mystery why the US costs are so high - maybe not enough competition?
In the event of liquidation, shareholders are on the list of those owed a portion of the proceeds. In fact they are last on the list, after creditors (those who have loaned the company money directly), bondholders (bonds are a form of debt), and holders of preferred stock.

That right is the ultimate determinant of the value of a no-dividend no-vote stock: fractional ownership of the right to proceeds in the event of liquidation, after those above have had theirs.

As a higher-risk asset, it produces greater returns, since otherwise there is an arbitrage: buy bonds issued by the same company instead. This arbitrage lasts until the bond becomes "expensive", and therefore produces worse returns (since its payout is independent of its price).
Converting two existing projects was pretty painless. Though the larger and older of the two had a significant amount of automatically generated changes. Most of them were (Void) in blocks changed to () though. Another nice extra is mixing 3.2 with 4.0 libraries.
Do you pay self-employment tax? If so you can likely deduct the cost of your medical insurance for yourself and your family. I deducted $6,157 for myself and my wife last year through my single member LLC. Line 29 on IRS form 1040 [0].

[0] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf
I was just kidding. The joke still works after your clarification, I think.
this is amazing. good for you!
Health insurance companies are running out of time and they know it, this is their last ditch effort to get as much money as possible. There is no point to lower prices, why gain market share if there is no "later" when you can extract more profit? Why enter the health insurance market if you are not sure how long it will last?
How do things like blogs and rss feeds not fill this gap? Is it simply ease of setup/use?
Claims will have to be coded regardless of who pays the bill.
> Free speech is a human right. FB should not be helping governments violate human rights.

I think it is usually framed in as a human right against government intervention. That is the government can't shut you up if you want to criticize it. However FB is not the government. FB can stop and censor people because it is a private entity. Nobody has a right to use FB's resources (server time, bandwidth) for free to say whatever they want. They can be kicked out without any legal repercussion.

Now wonder what happens if the government gives incentives FB to act on its behalf. Maybe a carrot and stick approach, it can tax it higher, raid its offices or pay it off with contracts in response to FB silencing or blocking certain users. This is where it gets interesting.

What about if a 3rd party wants to silence some opinions and it has nothing to do with the government. Does free speech still apply. Let's say multi-billionaire wants to shape public opinion so it pays billions of dollars to FB or Google to silence and suppress competing opinions. No government in sight here. But it does feel like free speech is being violated. Or is it? Kinda interesting to think about.

And this is not just hypothetical after the election Facebook, Google and Twitter all jumped on the "we will work hard to fight Fake News" bandwagon. It was a nice impulse on the surface, but I think what they really meant was that they are offering those who have money to spend the ability to manipulate and control opinions and discussions since they are essentially monopolies of online social interaction and news dissemination.
In my last teams it was a lot of infrastructure. Deployment, disaster recovery, failover, provisioning, build processes, maybe even building the testing pipeline, etc.

Can't speak for other companies
Another addition: A-Painter (https://blog.mozvr.com/a-painter/)
No. Moore's law talks about miniaturization that leads to better performance and about the fact that when it was first pronounced, no significant roadblocks seemed to exist for 20 years.

The improvements in solar panel tech do not depend on such a straightforward route. There is no process that you can simply iterate through to reproduce the last performance gain.
"Swift 4 includes a faster, easier to use String implementation that retains Unicode correctness and adds support for creating, using and managing substrings."

This alone is grounds for opening and drinking very expensive champagne and/or wine.