skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The big fears of the (non-activist) population are that someone will physically take them or their children to a dark hole, and that someone they know will inform on them so that happens.

I think you vastly underestimate the rule of law in china. This doesn't happen. Nor are general people afraid of it happening. Where are you getting this impression from?

> It seems to me that the chinese state is in a bind similar to that faced by Deng xiaoping - this thing the West does (Capitalism or Internet) is enabling them to charge so economically ahead it is an existential threat not to follow. But if we do follow the party risks losing control.

That was not the bind Deng Xiaoping faced. He took over china right after the cultural revolution which occurred right after the "Great leap forward". He had a floundering nation that he needed to jump start. State controlled capitalism is the answer to that problem, and fits well with the Socialism narrative (i.e building capital, is the first stage before sharing it).

> Deng did take the risk and the loss of control seemed to be offset - however this time the rifts in the party are deeper, the gulf between rich and poor wider.

This again misrepresents the facts. The gap between the Rich and poor, is wider, yes, but the poor are much richer now. The rifts in the party seem MUCH smaller now. China is no where near a "Cultural Revolution" now... that's how bad the rifts were then.

East Germany is NOTHING like modern China, it might have been similar around the cultural revolution, but the Stasi style informing/kidnapping/interrogating was uniquely east germany.
She probably already knows so is somewhat disrespectful that she has not update the entry saying that Google already fixed her public profile.
IMHO this is one of the few thoughtful, productive pieces I've read on the PyCon debacle. I appreciated his last line:

> Of course I'm just Tim Taylor, talking over the fence to Wilson. Women, do I have this right?

I too would love to hear reactions from both male and female members of the community on his thoughts.
The term PC was originally invented by Reaganite republicans as a piece of propaganda to lampoon the left. The weird thing is that it then ironically caught on, presumably amongst complete dimwits.
I'm curious why you are conflating individual freedom with economic growth? China (and in the inverse, india) are the best examples of why you are wrong.

i.e Why is China's growth so far outstripping India's given India has more freedom?
Having been the beneficiary of a similar event (Cheney, in this case), the hotel/secret service generally clears the entire floor for the official for security purposes. I don't know if it's policy to clear the one above and below, but I was relocated to another hotel.
Another thought is most weekends are empty of schedules/notes/plans, so shove them to either margin and keep the most business-active days (mon-fri) in the middle of the calendar.
>Here's a quick quiz for you: name a woman/asian/black person that is active and does interesting things in the Python community?

Jessica McKellar, Hilary Mason, Wesley Chun... Cancelling a conference b/c all speakers are white male is disturbing, but it's equally disturbing the idea of "token minority" is IMO.
Hence 'not ready yet.'
The persecution of Barrett Brown - and how to fight it
> Assuming I Am Only The Last Thing I Was

I can't tell you how much this annoys me. I've been programming professionally for over a decade now, and I've done a lot of things: C#, PHP, PERL, Ruby, Python, Javascript, etc, etc, etc. Taking a look at my resume, you would assume a rational and logical person would say: "oh, this guy's been in it a while, he could probably pick up anything" -- but this rarely happens.

I get it, you need deep technical expertise in X framework working with Y platform. Actually, no, I don't get it because a decent developer will pick up and run with anything you hand them, regardless of what they've worked on professionally in the past.

> Care

Passion != Success.

Look, I know you're oozing passion for building Twitter for Barnyard Animals, but don't expect me to show enthusiasm for your niche. Honestly, I've probably never heard of it before now. Maybe in time I'd come to really understand it and be interested in it, but right now I'm more interested in the scaling issues and optimizing my productivity through my tools.
omg! That was hilarious! Thanks for sharing that! :)
Im entering evil mode here.......

I cant help think that business would rather keep the, er, difficult to employ out of the employment market.

Do employers really want to employ people with various disabilities and ailments? Do they really want the added grief, work, red tape, costs, etc?

Then we have the long term unemployed, the , er, useless manky scum who cant wash, dress or string a sentence together. Drunk, illiterate and on drugs? Do employers really want these people over and above nice educated suited "normal" people? Who wants Frank Gallagher on reception, as a sales rep, or stinking out out nice Google offices?

If the answer is yes, then hit the streets and employ a few. Go down where the "scum" are and offer them jobs and hope. Cheap, easy to find and plentiful.

If the answer is no, then lets stop begrudging the meagre social security they get. Lets happily pay our taxes to keep such people alive, comfortable and out of "our" way, so that we can get on with our businesses and work, and improve our lives.

Hows that for evil?
The only stack-specific special optimization that's done is fusing the decrement/increment of esp/rsp with the store µop. And that's done mainly since push/pop are one byte opcodes, unlike general load/store.

Everything else is general memory optimizations that apply for everything like the aforementioned store forwarding. It's still expensive if the CPU can't use them (mismatched load/store size, incorrect speculation, etc.)
My best interview advice is this: Don't ask questions to judge, ask to learn.

A lot of interviewers have an interview process that is mainly designed to eliminate candidates. Therefore, the process contains interviewers asking "fake questions" that are designed to trip up candidates and eliminate them. An example is a question like "How would you design a database engine". If I really had to build a database engine, the context and details of that situation would dictate how this database system should be approached.

Instead you should ask questions to learn. If you ask me what a cache is, you better be asking me because you don't know what a cache is. If thats the case, I'd love to explain it to you, because I like teaching people things. Its very awkward to explain something to somebody that obviously knows that concept very well.

When you ask questions like that, you end up subconsciously comparing candidates by their explanation of cache matching up with how you would describe cache. In other words, this process favors people who think the same. A team full of people who all think the same is a company that has many weaknesses. A strong company has people who approach problems differently. You need people who approach life differently. Diversity is extremely important, and asking fake questions during interviews leads to less diversity.
[Wondering aloud] Would a better approach be to activate the sharing icons on mouseover? Sure, users would do this accidentally, but those concerned about privacy could learn to avoid those areas of blogs. Those who don't care (or pay attention) would get a one-click experience.

Touch users woud presumably still have to tap twice.
Further reading: Charles Murray's _Coming Apart_.
There's a non-techincal problem of making sure that no one does something stupid
Yes, we must not pay the scientists, we must pay the visionaries! How can we have science without the visionaries to see the science and tell us about it?
You're right in saying that the anti-abortion movement in Ireland correlates with catholicism, but I think the more staunchly catholic groups are fairly right-wing (not in an extreme, goose-stepping fascist sort of way, necessarily, but more in a Fine Gael sort of way). With that in mind, I think the data in Ireland supports the grandparent's claim that anti-abortion is a right wing movement in Europe.

I think perhaps the confusion here is due to the fact that the Irish don't see themselves as being divided according to the French tradition of left and right, but according to which side of the civil war they think was right.

It's perhaps instructive to note that the people and organisations that oppose abortion in Ireland today are often the same ones that supported Franco's rebellion during the Spanish civil war and that both things were supported for the same reason: catholicism. The Irish right wing has more in common with the right wing in the rest of Europe than it gets credit for.
It's not a test of your ability to recollect something. It's a conversation. If you're just regurgitating the greatest code solution ever but can't explain why it's so damned good then you're not very impressive.

There ARE contrived problems that you can just regurgitate an answer for. (Why are manholes covers round? Because manholes are round duh!) And if anyone asks you one from the lists that are on the interwebs, they're probably just asking because that's What Google Does
Nokia discloses their patents on VP8/WebM
For a post accusing another of FUD, it would help if you got more of your own details right: C# doesn't have an AOT or JIT compiler - all compilers that I'm aware of always compile it to IL. You're right that the .NET JIT has historically focused on startup speed rather than pure speed, but there are many factors that affect performance (e.g. C#'s defaulting methods to non-virtul may mitigate the lack of hotspot-like optimization; value types and the resulting lack of boxing/unboxing may likewise have a positive impact; ditto for reified generics). What in particular strikes you as "horrible" about Microsoft's implementation?
But that job will not be worth talking to so many people. ;)
Strange. I was just envisioning a service like this last week. Cool to see someone actually building it. Best of luck!
Have you ever watched a rocket launch on NASA TV? For me, it doesn't get much more thrilling than that. And I've seen some in person.
I think of the Dart VM as a dev tool. The goal is to use dart2js for production output. The Dart VM will eventually be very useful in Chrome Packaged Apps once Chrome has it built in. Google has a ton of experience with Google Web Toolkit to write JavaScript apps such as Gmail in Java. Dart is branch of that evolution. I am not even sure if they care all that much if the rest of use it. It seems to me an internal tool that they've open sourced. I see no plans to force it on the market.
Why Fred Wilson is wrong about "DIY data science"
This is an excellent post, if you are going to continue with consulting work, you might do well to find a business partner with a different skill set than yourself. Having a detail oriented person that can push through to the end of projects could benefit both of you. You have skills that others need if you tell them honestly some of your challenges, you might be surprised the ideas they can come up with to help you help them.
Keep in mind Imperial College London is something like the 3rd best (academically ranked) university in the UK and in the top 30 in the world.

Could anything like this ever happen at, e.g. MIT or Stanford?
Rule 34... Can someone post some shots of their facilities. I'm just interested. Ya know.
Visionaries want to put a man on the moon for kicks and to fuck with the Soviets. Scientists want to figure out the soil composition of some random valley on mars. I posit that the former is more useful than the latter.
well... I mean do you think that a language evolved that is this easy to parse accidental? I mean our brains are computers using mimicry and heuristics... why isn't that accounted for more in the creation of this language?
Okay, so you are talking about exposing integer vs. double distinction (because CPUs are better at int math) and the SIMD support in the Dart VM.

All of those are using explicit typing to do better at mapping from what the developer does to what the native hardware supports than is possible without explicit types in JS, sure. I don't see why this is a bad thing -- its not sacrificing performance in Dart-to-JS implementations that would be attainable, its just taking advantage of not being stuck with JavaScript's lack of types to further optimize the performance of Dart-on-its-own-VM.
World’s First Perpetual Motion Machine? | ASTOUNDE.com
Thanks for catching that. Snapshots are still being worked on. Here's Feb 2013 info. http://www.dartlang.org/articles/snapshots/
And I am trying for someone to tell me where my logic is wrong. Otherwise I worry that I may have reviewed the evidence but drawn a completely wrong conclusion.

But it seems that most of the people involved in the discussions I read want to have an emotional argument, unsupported by any explainable moral or legal framework.

And that annoys me to no end because our current legal framework seems to be a pretty good one for most parts of the discussion. Can someone be fired for telling a sexual joke at a conference? Yes. Most employment is at-will, telling sexual jokes is not a protected action, and there's nothing which implies that it's a pretext for some other protected action. Can someone take a picture of others at a Python conference, without their permission? Yes, excepting certain narrow legal limits.

Can someone 'name and shame'? Yes, truthful accounts are protected under the First Amendment. Is "name and shame" ethical? The law just says that it's legal, since there's no slander involved. But I don't want to get into the name-and-shame topic because a quick scan shows that there's no effective way to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable publish shaming and still have free speech rights. At least, I can't come up with one and no one has described one that looks the first bit achievable.

Is it okay to fire someone who files a report about sexual discrimination? Only if it's a false or spurious report, and the benefit of the doubt is given to the person who makes the report. Otherwise it's a protected action. Can someone be fired for not being "unprofessional"? Yes, unless it's a pretext for retaliation against a protected action, in which case the answer is no.

See, with the law in mind this discussion seems a whole lot easier. And with it in mind the questions are things like "what moral principles should guide changes to the law?", "how would changes to the law affect previous decisions?", and "what can we do to improve things without changing the law?"

But saying, eg, that it's acceptable to fire Richards for taking pictures of people at a conference without their permission is to ignore the law and society expectations entirely and to live in a fantasy world.

What do I do? I'm a self-employed person who writes software for the computational chemistry industry. I'm also a member of the PSF, which is the organization that sponsors PyCon. Over the last few years, we've been struggling with having a code of conduct for meetings like this. As such, I have a personal interest in understanding what went on, so that I might be involved in affecting change. Before last week, I had very little interest in this topic.

And as for argumentum verbosium, were it so easy. Then I would just ask to highlight the flaws in my fallacious logic and be done with it. But, no, I have a chronic case of logorrhoea. My Match.com profile was "intimidating" for its length, and I've been told I write very long and detailed emails.
You don't think we kinda need both?
I did the opposite and I have no regrets. RequireJS is wonderful because you only need to refresh your browser to see your latest changes. Browserify has probably come a long way (I switched from Browserify to RequireJS about a year ago) but every time I try to give it another chance, I experience some serious downsides that turn me off.

>Always bundling. No running into build problems later on.

That's not something I would list in the "pro" column. RequireJS can build into a single file for production - it's dead simple to set up.
"I’m somewhat of an Adobe fanboy"

So, there is no such thing as "fan" anymore? As in, if you like something, do you have to be a "fanboy" or "fangirl"?

Also, nobody understands the difference between "fan" and "fanboy"?
I don't think it's a taboo to discuss it, it's not being discussed because it shows very clearly what a big problem we have (just like America) with waning job numbers and really awful support for the poorest. We're not in as deep is as America is (from my basic understanding of our benefits vs. American welfare) but if the government were to talk about the problems with Incapacity Benefit they would also have to address the problem of another 2 million unemployed people with no recent job history and no jobs for them even if they could work.

Things are just about ticking over now, imagine the shit storm that would occur if every unemployed person was told they're now competing with another 2 million people, keeping this a "secret" is as much in the governments interest as it is every person that votes. No good would come of this issue being out in the open now, it needs to come out when there are jobs available or proper support for the unemployed, neither of which is true at the moment. I could be missing an important factor (due to aforementioned shallow understanding of benefits) so please correct me if I'm wrong and there is an advantage or proper way this can be addressed.
Proyecto UTUTO | "Ututo: Generando conocimiento"
That's just the number that were lost. A much greater number died.
Only partially? I thought that the culture of fear created by sensationalist news was precisely the reason the US has a violent crime rate that's two orders of magnitude above any other functioning democracy.
>Would you hire someone who has to google for an answer to fizzbuzz?

No, but there's very little utility in someone solving fizz buzz with or without google. Give them a real test and let them use google.
You may well be right. Finding decent business partners is fairly hard, or perhaps I'm looking in the wrong places. I've wondered if a startup style setup would suit me (and any other entp types) as there is a much greater demand to be dynamic and pragmatic. So long as there is a change of problem often enough to keep the brain taxed. Boredom seems to be the curse of the ENTP.
We did quite a lot of benchmarks about various programs (like Python interpreter written in RPython compiled to C#) and the performance was pretty bad. There were various issues, some avoidable some unavoidable, like Exceptions being very very slow (and being essentially for free on Java). I don't think it's possible to summarize it without writing a small novel and I don't care enough, but the JIT is as far as I know a direct IL-to-ASM compiler with very little optimizations or not at all. This puts a serious ceiling on what can be fast and what cannot be fast. In particular the escape analysis is either non-existant or very weak.

The AOT part is exactly C# -> IL and then it's later compiled to assembler.
>But that job will not be worth talking to so many people. ;)

No, but it will give you just enough capital to move somewhere better. And you'll be working on your social skills, which is a big win for anyone.
Sure it could, although I don't think it has yet, which is why this particular story was newsworthy. At the extreme, it's actually easier to gain admittance to, say, Harvard College or Yale Law School with unusual credentials than it might be at a school ranked 25-50, because the latter are trying to prove themselves while the former know they already have it made.

Harvard Business School and others have all sorts of programs for specialized constituencies, not necessarily well-educated ones (e.g. athletes).

Harvard Extension educates lots of people who'd never get into an elite institution in the normal course of business.

And now of course we also have the MOOC distance learning efforts.

-----------------------------

Edit: Phillip Brooks House at Harvard has, in large part, a similar orientation, with lots of mentoring and tutoring of those who need it, from poor kids to prisoners.

http://pbha.org/
I'm gonna guess many "false statement" charges come from these.
I've gone to meetups, gotten business cards, but my emails just ended up going into a black hole.
Silicon Valley Frat-Boy Culture Shown as Sex Jokes Spark Firings
Ordered _Hannibal and Me_. Thanks for the recommendation.
That's... not really subtle. That's like pipelining 101. Which is nearly 30 years old now...

The only weird thing there is the compiler lucks out in generating a version that allows OoOE to save the programmer from themself.
As someone who just spent a lot of time learning Django, with it being the first web framework I've ever used, thank you! The current system resulted in some serious headaches while learning, and these changes will definitely remove a huge barrier to entry for people like me.
...compete with PHP, seriously?

Many of the points above apply to any language. Ruby might have maintainability issue but PHP is far far from perfect.
If you don't think building a usable linux distro is an enormous amount of work you've never actually tried to do it. Canonical (and the Ubuntu project) is an awful lot more than a few Canonical-originated upstreams.
Drupal Feature Freeze updates & Where's the Money - TheWeeklyDrop Issue 78
I love it. It is far more important to me than Facebook/Jabber/&c., all of which are problematic for a variety of reasons. Perhaps it's my age, but I've been emailing for ~25 years now, and it's unlikely that new channels will displace email for me.
I'll see if I can get enough people interested to run one here, otherwise I might fly across. Cheers!
Vipassana meditators here will recognize: Anichchha ...
Cyprus may raise bank confiscation to 25% on uninsured deposits (&gt€100,000)
I guess you're saying that the dice is cast. :)
There is too a solution to this problem: be professional at work and save the blue humor for the social hour. People are trying to get paid here.
I think it was at the 1984 AAAI (an AI conference) where I heard a talk about how Sanskrit was an unambiguous language, good for AI, etc.

Having just read the linked paper, the author of the linked paper was almost certainly the same guy I heard giving the talk at AAAI.

A walk down memory lane :-)
--minify is still being improved and is not complete yet. As well, you need to say what libs you included. If you import "HTML" it is basically like including jquery.
4 Essential Tips for Hiring the Best Engineers
IPad Hacker Appeals With Cyber Law Expert as New Lawyer
The great irony is that the party that was spending freely a decade ago is now talking about fiscal responsibility.

And the other party was constantly complaining that too much was being spent? No, just the opposite: They were clamoring for more, whether it was "state and local aid", a more generous Medicare Part D and CHIP, extended unemployment benefits, special education costs... The list goes on.

And, by the way, the budget deficit in 2007 was, with two wars in full swing and all the Bush tax cuts in effect, a mere $158B.

I'll take a party that at least sometimes talks and walks fiscal restraint over one that still thinks we're not "investing" enough with $1T annual deficits any day.
(Who do you report bugs to on HN? In titles, the character ">" is silently erased: you need to manually enter the HTML entity "&gt". This can't be intended behavior! (Apologies for being off-topic, I really don't know.))
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long