skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Back in the 90s I took a linguistics class and wanted my semester paper to be a review of the literature on this topic. I started my research and found nothing. I figured it was my research skills falling short and I didn't know the right terminology and places to look. So I asked my professor. He suggested talking to other faculty. I did. They gave me some terminology suggestions buuuut.... also told me that they didn't think there was much out there on the topic. In fact, one of them told me I almost certainly wouldn't find anything. And he was right (then, having burned half the semester chasing down a dead end and facing the choice between doing original research in two months vs changing topic, I picked human usage of computer language, which got me a C+ because the prof was adamant computer languages aren't human languages).

Anyway, I was astounded that this aspect of acquisition wasn't well-studied, and I'm glad to see it has been since.

Edit: I never meant to contend that computer languages are human languages in the sense that the former can function in every way the later can -- so I wasn't suggesting that anyone should say "C is a language just as Spanish is a language." But I did argue that programming languages come by their name honestly, are meant to communicate between humans, and most importantly find their way into language colloquially, and as such deserve attention from linguists. My prof seemed to have engaged with the paper as if I were making the "C is like Spanish!" argument, whether that's because (a) I wasn't clear enough in my writing (b) he wasn't paying close attention or (c) there's something else that eluded me is left as an exercise for... well, me, and apparently hacker news participants who want to take it up as a matter of discussion. :)
I don't know, even as a kid, I remember the allegories being pretty obvious in The Sneetches and Horton Hears a Who. The stories generally weren't that subtle in their morals, so this story doesn't seem atypical for Seuss.
However Rocket Lab's launch of their new Electron rocket, from New Zealand, has made it to orbit successfully.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2018/01/21/space-star...
not trying to assume any position here, just want to point out that you're looking at the world through the gucci glasses of someone who lives in a 1st world country with functional financial and legal systems.

There are plenty of people in the world who live in countries where the legal system doesn't work, the do not have access to banks, their fiat currency gets manipulated by the corrupt government. And these people now have smartphones and Internet.
That's a good point. There's probably a way to highlight unexpected characters. I wouldn't use "Unicode" as a criterion (that's an encoding, not a character type that excludes ASCII). Perhaps the browser could define a set of "expected" characters based on the user's locale and highlight anything outside that set.
spooks keeping their back door open?
a la Dual_EC_DRBG and RSA etc...
It gets worse. A decade ago, Obama actually got political heat for pronouncing the names of countries, the same way their inhabitants do.

Language has evolved far far beyond its original roots as a medium for communication, and has now become a symbol of political identity. "If you pronounce words differently, well, you must clearly not share our values."

https://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/09/barack_obama
MIT prof: neutron star mergers, not supernovas, make gold and platinum
Growing up in the 80s this was a book I read many times before going to bed. I can't remember if I got the nuclear weapon analogy or not, but it is still a good allegory about the folly of arms races.
You're not allowed to make decisions in the crypto meme sphere. Only hodl.
finally someone made the reference :D
Is there some evidence that it would actually replace any of the existing financial system, rather than just adding yet another venue for speculation and manipulation?
Tracking Russian Influence Operations on Twitter
I've seen this come up a few times and let me explain why this is not a good idea. Excluding MAD theory, if you're the United States, or the UK, or France, or whomever - your nuclear weapons are the great equalizer and keep you safe. Other countries have a lot more people than you and will catch up or surpass you technologically and can invade you. Nuclear weapons immediately stop that.

Let's say China (and I'm not a fan of the idiotic relations between the US and China and the foolishness on both sides) decides that Japan just has to go. What stops them? You could say the United States, sure, but what really stops them? It's not the US Army, or the Marines - the air force and navy certainly play a part in "hey we'll come try and blow your stuff up" but what really stops them is that, no matter how much manpower they have, no matter how many airplanes or tanks they build, or how many rockets or missiles they can construct, a nuclear weapons makes all of that pretty much useless. It allows countries with smaller populations to posses weapons such that big countries can't go stomping around and hurting them. Is North Korea really scared of the United States military coming from all the way across the ocean to help South Korea? Or are they scared that the United States will drop nuclear bombs on the country?

People forget how easily countries can slip into war, even between great powers. If you live in the UK or something - you better hang on to your nuclear weapons for dear life. It sounds fun and all good to have everybody disarm, until some big country decides to come after you and you're hoping other people want to help you out.
>Burning oil is still the only reliable propulsion for space programs.

Not true. The space shuttle for example burned a solid fuel (namely, ammonium perchlorate composite propellant) and liquid hydrogen.
I've found in many fields that are as complex as finance, that when I think something in that field is stupid, unnecessary, or onerous, it is I that am wrong because I simply didn't understand the why of how that thing came about.

Someone else has already brought up Chesterton's Fence, but long before I heard about the fence of Mr. Chesterton, I learned that every warning sticker on your ladder, every regulation you despise, every "Don't Do $ACTION on the $THING" sign you see has a story behind it. Because few people enjoy researching and purchasing signs and stickers so much that they'll do it unprompted.

So, yeah, as you've discovered, when you hear talk about getting rid of Frank-Dodd or other dual-name regulations, ask yourself who benefits from that and why we had to write down some rules in the first place. IOW, Chesterton's Fence. :-)
Powershell 6 halved my start times from 1.5s to 720ms.

However some things will always be slower, aince powershell does more for you than bash does. Compare productivity from not scraping to consider the tradeoffs.
Urban = Core

Suburban, inter-city = Fringe

Your point stands, but your assumptions are a bit off.
Well, since as far as I know there's no real empirical evidence for this. I'll give my own anecdote as a man.

I wasn't encouraged at all, by anyone I knew, to get a career in programming. My parents tried to block certain websites I was frequenting, my friends showed no interest at all in what I was doing. I was lucky to find online communities who did help me and encourage me. But I found those on my own through my own curiosity and desire. I never knew where it would take me and my parents thought I was wasting my time.

It wasn't until I actually got a job that I got some validation by people I actually knew.
Halite AI Challenge Finals
There's always a reward for becoming part of a problem.
No, "fake news" refers to a very specific phenomenon. It's not just any kind of misleading or incorrect reporting. Trump was the one to start saying "not fake news, YOU'RE fake news", but the phenomenon as initially encountered was about shoddy and small fraudulent websites, often trying to deceive their audience to believe that they were a different website, pushing the most anger-inducing news. It wasn't about left vs right (and why are those the only two options, argh).

It's a far cry from the NYT or Fox News reporting incorrect things, whether deliberately or not, to someone called Foxx News or Non York Times reporting that Islam causes prostate cancer.

If you look at the list here, it's all over the political spectrum, some of it is just plain apolitical scams like the Hawking Scam on a CNN knockoff website or celebrity stalking:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fake_news_websites#Lis...
> Get angry at banks?

My response to anyone serious about competing with banks: go work for one.

Banks are often portrayed as these evil faceless entities that act completely in their self interest. In reality, most banks that matter are simply too large to act as one – and not in the sense that they are too big to fail (although, that's probably true as well) but that they are huge organizations with thousands upon thousands of employees and teams of varying autonomy. They may be all under one brand (and likely also under many sub-brands) but they don't act as one, pretty much ever.

Banks are very interesting organizations to work for, for a great many reasons. I think anyone with a serious grudge against banks thinking they can do better should spend at least a few years working for one. If nothing else, they'll learn first hand what to try and avoid, and possibly also why things are so ass-backwards a lot of the time.
Poll found 0% of Icelanders under 25 believe Bible creation story
Every waking moment in a day in the life of an ML engineer at Kensho
The author says they were offered a job in a space they considered to be filled with bad actors and dishonesty, so they turned it down. That just isn't what cynicism means, sorry.

Cynical would be the opposite, working in a space that you believe to be full of bad people but not caring about any of that and focusing on just the money.
> Powershell does the UNIX philosophy better than the equivalent traditional toolset

How so? Remember that the "text" convention was not chosen haphazardly, but rather very consciously.
The Problem with Courting Amazon
I must have mixed up some notes about ASIC-resistant altcoins with some older info about Bitcoin, its quite difficult to keep track.
Once upon a time we escorted an Air Force convoy whose commander referred to the enemy as "butter-side-down people".
Not necessarily. Lack of centralized trust is just one feature. They have other features like public (but anonymous) ledgers, irreversible transactions, smart contracts, the ability to hold them without a bank account. Features like those could definitely come from a private or central bank.
>Isn't that a fancy way of saying they are making their product do things that people enjoy

Humans have a tendency (called "hyperbolic discounting" in the literature) to choose a small immediate reward over a larger delayed reward. In this case, the small immediate reward is reading an interesting post on Facebook, and the delayed reward is... pretty much anything else.

If we're lucky, people will become aware of this bias and start making better decisions, by designing their life to align their available immediate rewards with their choice of distant rewards.

This is basically what things like Fitbits do -- provide small immediate rewards (number of steps going up!) that align with your desired larger distant reward (being in shape).

Or the very notion of "getting off Facebook" -- increasing the personal effort/mental distance required to claim a small reward that does not align with a more distant goal.

The reason this is particularly challenging is that "the Internet" is very useful for doing things that do align with our legitimate, long-term goals, but once the Internet is available, the distance to "Facebook rewards" is low.

It might be interesting if Facebook, as a response to this backlash, finds a way to offer short term rewards that do align with your long-term goals...
To keep creativity flowing, side project marketing is something I'm trying to do more of.

With the free-flowing open bars and late nights, weddings are ripe with legendary tales. Our side project, Hell of a Wedding, is our fun way of engaging the wedding crowd, giving them an outlet to share their wedding "war stories".

You can vote on each story in the list, or submit your own!
I have a gut feeling that all of this madness is driven by legal and management terror. Doing the right thing likely means, to many people, admitting fault. Legal has likely banned anyone from doing anything that looks like an admission of guilt. Management and PR, etc. are all probably about saving face, too. The people who care about doing the right thing from a technology perspective likely don't have any power.
>Can we extend that logic to classes or interfaces?

This was one of the main ideas behind the original definition of OOP. The original notion of "object" was very similar to our current notion of "service":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjJaFG63Hlo

Objects received messages, including messages sent over the network. There was not supposed to be a clear distinction between local and remote services - by design. A lot of inter-computer stuff could be/was handled transparently.
That's a fair objection, and I already had to add a caveat about deserialization libraries that can instantiate arbitrary objects. (Which is a problem that affects other memory-safe dynamically-typed languages too, e.g., Python's pickle and yaml modules have the same problems.)

I think there is a meaningful distinction, still, between something like OGNL where the program / library is providing its own interpreter of the EDSL that is excessively capable (which can be done in any language, including Turing-incomplete languages, capability systems, etc.: a library can always dispatch input to whatever functions are available to it) -- i.e., where the programmer intended the functionality that was implemented, they just didn't think through what they were doing -- and things like buffer overflows and ROP where the course of program execution, on the existing interpreter / runtime / platform, is subverted to something the programmer did not intend. I'm not quite sure how to phrase it. (And I'm not sure on which side of the line arbitrary-object deserialization lands.)
> So I find it fascinating how many people/groups in history have gotten mad at banks/finance, tried to make a "better" product, gotten stung or robbed others, only to eventually re-invent many of the things safe, efficient banking requires.

Hehe, this reminds me of a thing X that I'm implementing because my manager doesn't like thing Y. X will have the same exact same limitations as Y and won't be as battle tested nor will a new hire be familiar with X (although they'd be familiar with Y). But hey, at least it isn't Y.
> solid fuel

...and where does that come from?
Because the Pixelbook is $1,000 and I figure that's the bottom end system you'd get from Google. But as others as have stated it is completely speculation on my part. All I have to go on is the mention of checking all apps were web-enabled as part of the migration. That implies people aren't just building a VPN from their desktop and then ssh'ing around after the migration to a private LAN which was also the point of the article.

So my original assumption was therefore must be using a web interface to some sort of unix desktop and then sshing from there, right? However on second thought the article implies once you're trusted you're trusted and all systems are enforcing their own security so maybe people are sitting on UNIX desktops at Starbucks, authenticating via a certificate and then trusted across the public interfaces of Google's assets. That too would make perfect sense and still fit the spirit of the article.

The question is really do you have trusted access from a portable device or simply via one?

Again this really is speculation on my part and I'll happily own that. I can only dream of the level of access the average Googler has; the regulatory oversight and internal interpretation of same has resulted in far harsher limits in my space.
What about some sort of electrical power hawala transaction?

I provide power in some far place with my car, and in exchange the power supplier gives an equivalent amount of power to my air conditioner for free for as long as I’m providing power.
I wasinformed recently that there's something similar behind most of the speed cameras in the UK - if you see one (other than on a motorway) it means that somebody died there, probably more than one somebody.

There's a debate to be had about whether they are the most effective means of slowing down traffic, but it changed my view a little.
Also You're Only Old Once, perhaps?

And then there's the Seuss WWII political cartoons that I've seen recently due to their criticism of the America First movement of the time... which is interesting to juxtapose against the brazenly racist depictions of Japanese people that Seuss also did during that era.
Do your users really need to know you are implementing blockchain technology?
How Apple Fumbled the Voice First Future
> I don't think so.

care to explain? is it coincidence the global warming narrative began suddenly picking up momentum post-Crimea?
US Olympic Uniforms Are Heated via Conductive Ink
I think the fact that we only dropped two nukes in anger is absolutely shocking; it's an affirmation of human goodness and rationality. It goes against everything else I think I know of humanity, especially against the previous history of the 20th century, against everything I know of human nature.

I mean, I'm not saying it's good we still have nukes pointed at oneanother, but we're still alive, and that's the best historical evidence I've found that humans aren't completely self-destructive.
Google AI Achieves “Alien” Superhuman Mastery of Chess and Go in Mere Hours
As a national issue, deporting people who should by rights be citizens and have known no other country than ours, many of whom are parents of actual American citizens, children, citizens, who might not even know Spanish, that's a minor issue?
> The BTC chain's devs mostly work for Blockstream

This is not true, at all. Only one of the regular Bitcoin Core contributors, Pieter Wuille, works at Blockstream. Other companies, Chaincode in particular (http://chaincode.com/#team) have many more Bitcoin Core developers.
Regarding “prêt.” You are correct when the word is isolated. However, in the locution “prêt à manger,” the word is followed by a vowel sound, so the “t” is indeed pronounced, a phenomenon known as enchaînement. This gives some logic to the common English pronunciation of the fast food chain.
Me too. Trying to help others avoid this mistake.
The guy I'm replying to was saying that crypto coins enables someone who invents a protocol to get paid, my dude. It's not an assumption on my part, I was replying to what he said.
There are upcoming Distributed Ledgers that don't use blockchains or mining - like Hashgraph which uses a form of gossip protocol to handle more than 300k transactions/second. These distributed ledgers may soon handle traffic that currently requires centralized servers (MMORPG games, etc).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgwYU1Zr9Tg
powershell also kind of has an awful UX, and a serious discoverability problem. I know powershell can do literally anything I want, but god help me find out what it's called

Not to mention the way it reports errors to the user is incredibly verbose. However, it seems very par for the course for a strong Microsoft tool. If you are able to get in the correct headspace, it's magical. I'm just sad I have to sell my soul to the cult to use it
I understand the pain. I am in same boat, trying for over 6 months. definitely there is dome thing changed in the industry culture. you are competing with every one in the world and need connections inside company
We've got a number of blockchain developers in our team and rent out their time to interested parties, so we see a number of these options come up.

There are a few different business models possible:

* When ICOs are issued, tokens are sold in exchange for other currency (typically BTC, ETH, or fiat currency like USD). The reason is to have more-established forms of money available to pay developers working on the technology, so this means you can actually pay people conventional cash (in the short term).

* In the long term, most protocol developers monetize via software built on top of the underlying technology or powering the underlying technology. BlockCypher is one example (https://www.blockcypher.com/) You can offer pro versions if folks run them internally for a fee.

* It's also common to offer consulting/human services related to technology you developed. (https://gem.co/ is a good example)

* Decentralized protocols don't mean you can't take a cut of transactions – they mean everyone has a chance to take a cut of transactions! Most blockchains call these "miners" and open it up to everyone, but the initial protocol developer may also set up/offer a pool to take advantage of this process. This happens quite often with industrial/commercial blockchain used by larger industry groups.

* More generally, technology running on open protocols can be centralized/proprietary even if the underlying tech is open – the same rules apply. TCP/IP and HTTP are open and decentralized, but we have plenty of money-making businesses here on the web!
I have tried PowerShell multiple times and hated it every time. They either should have gone with a language like bash or gone straight to C# as scripting language. Powershell is that weird in between that does nothing well.

I know a lot of people love Powershell though.
Citation please. I believe Microsoft is the king of abandoned tech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Microsof...

there's also:

Groove Streaming Music
Microsoft Office Groove
Access Services for SharePoint Online
Microsoft Continuum
Skype for Business
Kinect Adapter
Microsoft Band
Xbox One TV DVR
Kinect Xbox One
Kinect Windows
Wunderlist
Sunset
Games for Windows
Silverlight
Zune
Kin
XNA
PlaysForSure
Flight Sim
Expression Suite
SteadyState
Windows RT
Windows Phone 10
Windows Phone 8.1
Windows Phone 7
Forefront
Front Page
Money

Please add any that Wikipedia and I have missed.
The conspirators purposefully made the flag from nylon, rather than candy wrappers, in order to foil future attempts of sound extraction.
I don't think yellow journalism has the same properties as fake news. For one, yellow journalism doesn't try to deceive its readers as being as the same source as another more reputable source. With print media, this was harder to do.

Fake news has a slightly different approach because it's much easier to reach an audience online and elude trademarks.
Huh? It's a trustless timestamping service. That's a thing that some protocols benefit from. Digital notaries, for instance.

That surely justifies a valuation around a few cents per bitcoin.
Get Storage for Your Severless Functions with Minio and Docker
Oil isn't going to disappear because of oil. Oil disappears because of batteries and the improvements that have been made over decades.

To say oil will win over batteries (where applicable) is to say that either 1) battery improvements will not continue; or 2) that oil is somehow immune to economics.

Any discussion of the end of oil without mentioning batteries is incomplete. They are the driver of the change.
The Navy's ‘fast, agile’ warship has been stuck in ice since Christmas Eve
Open Source Largesse Oblige: Follow the Money, Note Where It Stops
As someone who has dealt with chronic nerve disorders for the better part of a decade, I can tell you that numbness is preferable to raw chronic neuropathic pain.
Blockchain Coin Banana
Chemical weapons were used during the Syrian civil war. Just because something is banned doesn't mean someone won't use it.