skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is only barely related, but I read something a few weeks ago that I think those interested in this topic would also find interesting:

A few years ago, researchers discovered that schoolchildren in Baltimore had invented a new gender-neutral singular pronoun: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx
The Talent Shortage Myth and Why HR Should Get Out of the Hiring Business
I conducted a technical telephone interview with someone who had a strong stammer. I can't say it was easy, but he was the best person I interviewed, and so he got the job.

You will find the right person to employ you, and ditch the current employer because like others have said, you are not being paid enough.
>> just one is from the past ten years

It takes time for innovations to affect society. I bet that in 10/15 years we'll see that quantum computing and deep learning would be very important.
Typos FTW :)
But...in order to properly execute an XSS attack, you have to get your code onto someone else's computer. You can edit your own cookies all day long and accomplish nothing of value. What piece am I missing here?

That said, as far as the server trusting cookie values to do database lookups or whatever, sure, there's a hole there. Most folks will use something like HMAC-signed cookies in those cases, so that an attacker would have to be in possession of a secret key in order to successfully have altered cookie data accepted by the user. But in any case, the data should be treated like any other user-supplied data - untrusted and to be sanitized.
Thanks for the reply. You guys certainly aren't the only site that does this, and I know I'm in an increasingly shrinking demographic (thankfully).

Unfortunately, in many large organizations with strict information access policies, it's very difficult to get progress done on the technical side. I need someone to break cnn.com or another heavily trafficked site, and then maybe the big wigs will throw a fit.
On my iPad all the letter 'D's have disappeared. It's quite disconcerting.
Query^n for MongoDB
>I can understand the argument for supporting AAVE in schools

I can't. Schools are supposed to teach you the official language and all the skills you need to succeed in society. AAVE won't help you (or be useful) at work, or in academia, unless you are studying AAVE as your job.

I agree that it will be divisive in the long run, I think you are right that encouraging AAVE to continue and legitimizing it and calling it a language is the wrong way to go.

Was the cockney English slang of 1800's England a language? I think most would say no, it was simply the bad English of the uneducated. I think AAVE is simply modern America's cockney slang.
Not really, I guess I should have added that I speak AAVE when I meet some African-Americans for the first time.
Oh I don't think it was unclear. It's nicely written. I am just not convinced that it tells us a whole lot, if you know what I mean. The over-representation of Quora in your sample's applicant behavior being the exception.
Creatorverse: iOS app by Linden Research, Inc.
I don't really disagree, but I'm not sure you could call English "official" in the US. De facto standard at most.
You have to define what you mean by "Ebonics". The term is awful... :-)

According to the article's definition it doesn't sound like a crock at all. When a young person writes Spanish words and grammar in an English essay, sane people don't assume a degraded intelligence. We realize that this person is a native Spanish speaker. They are probably reasonably intelligent, but ignorant of certain normative rules of English and when and where a particular language/vocabulary is appropriate.

That all Ebonics is -- not unlimited acceptance of non-normative english in the wrong contexts, or teaching people to write with black slang (unless that's part of the point of essay). The whole point is to teach kids who speak a different dialect to code switch when writing, for example. These students are wrong to use certain verbal constructions in (formal) written english, but it's the language in a particular context that is wrong -- not the language itself.
"The report said Rubin told a room full of Google executives that Google-owned phone-maker Motorola was a hedge against Samsung growing too powerful."

Andy Rubin was perfect for the job of breaking into carriers and OEMs. At Danger, he learned exactly how unfair that process is, and he was ready to wield Google's market power like Thor's hammer.

"Rubin’s comments indicated a view of Android as something to preserve and protect."

That would be the right mind-set - if Rubin were still at Danger. But the struggle with OEMs and carriers is largely over and won more thoroughly than Rubin himself likely dared wish for.

Now Android, or Chrome, or both, are ready to carve up the carcass of the Windows PC business. That requires a completely different approach.
Strategy Pattern (using Interfaces and Delegates in C#) - Tech.Pro
> I think ebonics if a load of crock, but as an aficionado of linguistics...

I was under the impression that modern linguists generally agreed that good linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. Could you elaborate here?
Why MySQL Performance at Low Concurrency is Important
Isn't XSS only a client side danger? For URLs, this is relevant since you can post a malicious link and people can click on it. It's much harder to get someone else's browser to accept a cookie you made for a specific website.

Of course, cookies are still client-side data and should not be trusted. But XSS is not a problem here. Correct me if I'm wrong.
After playing with this demo for the past ten minutes, I now grok dogs tearing up curtains.
Tesla website is down, big announcement expected at 2pm PST
Probably a drop in the bucket compared to Stephen Colbert goading his watchers to edit silly things into wikipedia.
Updates on the need to use error-correcting memory
I find

var totals = orders.map(function(o){return o.total;});

far easier to understand than

var totals = splat(get('total'))(orders);

And, I would had written

var totals = orders.map(function(o){
return o.total
})

(note the lack of semicolons and indentation)

cheers!
I'm working on an app that has one page that's quite complicated (but in my opinion really easy to use once you've learned how it works). Basically you're outlining the structure of a document, so you have to create a table of contents for the document in a left hand pane (33% width) and then mark corresponding regions on the right hand pane using your mouse, and there are buttons on the left pane to store/load a region corresponding to an entry in your table of contents. As two separate pages the workflow is a little awkward because logically the two steps are related, but when we put the two pages together we found that there was no place to put instructions. I ended up putting in one of those guided tour scripts where you click around to go through it. The thing is once you've used it once it's really obvious what to do and the UI is pretty efficient but you need some way of explaining the interface the first time, and I think something like this is better than wasting a lot of space on instructions.

(I'd link to the app to make it clearer, but it's still a work in progress and at the moment I need to control the number of people using it so we can figure out how it scales before launching it to the world - plus it's really an educational application for instructors so most people wouldn't be interested).
The submission is great, but "Professor tells 1700 students to fill Wikipedia with plagiarism" is a bad title. The professor didn't tell those students to plagiarize. A better title would be something like "Professor tells 1700 students to edit Wikipedia, 85% plagiarism rate".
Yes, the double-negative construct exists in other languages. It doesn't exist in English. You may as well be asking why people insist other people use English words instead of German words when talking to them.
Phonorecords: A Matter Where Matter Still Matters | Murfie Blog
If you're sick of having the argument, then why did you troll it? :)

I mean, I'm perfectly willing to be your imperative curmudgeon strawman if you really want. But honestly, if you're going to blog about the spectrum of "explicit" programming, you're sort of morally bound to accept arguments on sides of the spectrum you'd rather not talk about.
I find your opinion and association with gender to be odd.
That was exactly my experience, and I nearly wrote the same thing. Frustrating day saved by 2 simple commands.
As a programmer, double negatives make me reel with horror. I cannot parse an English sentence with a double negative as being a single negative; it's utterly illogical. At best, they're an unnecessary hindrance.
This is what I love about C#, it really provides all the necessary components to do this style of "wishful development". I've started doing this everywhere and the results are great. Like you said, the code itself literally reads like a specification. It's allowed me to turn what is otherwise would have been an extremely tedious web application into something I enjoy working on.

As an example, I turned what otherwise would have been an extremely tedious exercise in writing tons of obscure SQL (creating reports from a very non-standard database layout) into an API for creating reports that is literally like reading the specification for the report. And all of it was done in about 250 lines of C#. And to top it off we still have complete static type checking! I really cannot sing the praises of C# enough.
As the famous saying goes "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy".
Two unrelated (to this) but interesting linguistic things I've discovered recently:

Boontling: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Boonville-s-quirky-dia...

(Cockney) Rhyming Slang: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang

Not necessarily on topic from a political standpoint, but both good illustrations of how language forms and changes to suit the needs of those who use it.
>The web isn't regressing, it's evolving.

If you understood evolution fully, you would know that "the web is regressing" and "the web is evolving", in addition to not being mutually exclusive statements, regression necessarily implies evolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_evolution
Isn't it a widely adopted practice to encrypt the content of the cookie before setting it? Of course it could still be tampered with, but not as trivially.
While we're discussing him, it's worth checking out another project of his, Goldmund. It's piano centric music that really embraces the minimalist aspects of some of the newer neo-classical artists (think Ólafur Arnalds, Max Richter, Nils Frahm or Dustin O'Halloran).

A lot of the music is on Spotify, and here's a link to a set of it on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/keithkenniff/sets/goldmund
The article is very true. But this happens everywhere, when a short term commercial interest is more important than user experience and solution of users problems. Take this hardware example. My moms favourite iron is a heavy chunk of metal with no self adjustments, regulations and it does not switch itself off. It is 55 yrs old. It just works. My wife changes modern irons every 2-3 years. It pushes economy forward.
This article touches on it but I do find that there are different kinds of programmers. Generally, I find that an individual either likes to solve problems, i.e. write code that as obviously as possible gets the result they need OR they like to solve puzzles, i.e. write code that is the "best" way to do something and may not be obvious at all.

They generally have two different definitions of readability as well. The former thinks code is readable if it is obvious how it works and how to change it, that latter thinks it is readable if it happens to match how you would talk about it in english with no regard as to whether or not it is editable. Often the inability to edit (or even debug) stems from implicit magic vs explicit code.
http://www.creatorverse.com/tutorials/
Not if your server environment is running Node.js! If you start reading cookies and potentially evaluating their content, this could have a major impact on a Node process. That said, I doubt that you could hack a running Node process with this without the system using eval() on the cookie contents. I've been wrong before....
The public schools are these kids' last and only hope to learn the communications skills (aka standard English) they will need to make it to the middle class. Don't ruin it for them.
Pardon my naivete (and disregard for proper accent usage), but I wonder how much Google would accept for their reader service.
How 'explicit' something is has more to do with the social structures around a new technology. Does rails make it easy to understand how its conventions are applied? Does it assume that all rails programmers understand implementation details? It does not, and so it is fair to criticize it for magic. In principle you could solve the 'magic' problem without changing a line of code, purely by changing how the mechanisms provided are packaged to new programmers.

I spent some time last year trying to distinguish between abstractions and services. According to me, abstractions are things that you are expected to understand the workings of, and services are things you are not. By my definitions, rails is a service, but the lisp programming model is an abstraction, because it is impossible to gain a few months of experience with lisp without understanding in great detail how macros are expanded and so on. Many programming libraries are services because in practice nobody bothers to learn how they work, and we as a field, as a species, tolerate this cargo culting.

Unfortunately I had trouble articulating this distinction. Perhaps I still do. Here, take a look: http://akkartik.name/blog/libraries.
By sparse vector support, do you mean the Sparse Fast Fourier Transform reported by MIT last year? http://www2.technologyreview.com/article/427676/a-faster-fou...
That's like saying that using "malloc" and "free" will allow you to fix your memory management bugs faster than using "new" in Java.
Yeah, it's not a great use-case because it requires other flaws where the cookie value is used. This is just a specific example of the general problem that any variable in the browser can be changed by the user before being sent to the server.
I think that it isn't well regarded as a language because at root it is simply an adaption of another language (English). There's differing vernaculars anywhere you go, depending on the culture and the demographic. There's no use in regarding them each individually as "languages", they are termed correctly as just being vernaculars. When I started working at a factory when I was 18, I was suddenly bombarded with blue collar vernacular. By the time I was 21, double negatives, particular "ain't got no.." were fairly ingrained in my speech and I still talk like that in informal situations. I certainly wouldn't advocate that becoming a nationally recognized language. AAVE is perpetuated culturally but almost any AA you meet can speak formal English just fine, being necessary for success outside of their cultural enclave. Making it a separate language per se doesn't serve any real function and will really only cause another level of division on a national level.
Code switching is actually when you wander between two or more languages in the scope of a single conversation (which is downright weird to listen to if you speak only one; girl I knew would wander between Russian and English conversing with her mother and I would try like the devil to follow when she started in Russian and eventually realize that it wasn't some weird English words). Based on my own (small) experience with it in English and French it's sometimes easier to find the word you're looking for in the other language; this only happens to me when I'm trying to speak English in public after I've been speaking French for a while tho. The grammar gets ... complicated.
Barkie's Ass
> determination of dialect/language difference is mostly political

I heard that expressed as "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an...

I found it quite true when you look at cases like Dutch vs. Afrikaans or Swedish vs Norwegian vs Danish. Declaring your dialect a "language" can be a tool of nationalism.
Risk in IT Systems
Yes, I think what the original article is saying is that the cookie could have been altered by a rogue browser extension/virus on a user's computer, which could be then potentially used to import a script from a different origin into the user's page.
High Standards
I don't think you read the article.

"Schools should recognize the legitimacy of AAVE as a language for their students, and teach those students to recognize when and how to switch between AAVE and American English as appropriate. But most schools don’t do that. They simply teach students that the way they speak is wrong. Don’t talk this way; talk our way.

Wheeler says we’re still not doing right by children who grow up with AAVE. “The consequences are that students are being terribly misassessed in our schools. Teachers think that black kids are making mistakes, when really they’re re-creating what they hear and learn at home,” Wheeler says. “They’re counting as mistakes things that are patterns and rule-based, so [the students are] being placed in lower reading groups.”"

The point of recognizing AAVE is not to teach it as a replacement language. It's to treat it similarly to Spanish for example. By recognizing where kids are coming from, the system will better be able to direct them to where they need to be.
> I disagree with "Because we want to get rich". And I definitely disagree with "of course". Real hackers do this because we just have to.

Ignoring the awful "real hackers" commentary, one has nothing to do with what the article was referencing at the time: starting a company.

At the core, if you start a company, you want to make money. Unless you are going the non-profit route, you are in it to make money, and that means getting rich.
Yes, I think XSS from a user-generated cookie is pointless except in very specific attacks. And as far as cookies as an entry-point for SQL injection and other attacks this is a well-known field (albeit less than GET and POST data) that only lazy, 'absent' or uneducated (security-wise) programmers will miss.
Why would they name their application Helios? It collides with Eclipse.
If we're talking about getting a kids to learn how to use these wonderful tools, that's a feature, not a bug. I for one know that I learned to program precisely because I couldn't just swap cassettes with the other kids. I had a crappy computer that no one else had, so the only games I had were the ones I typed in myself. That act of typing (and hence reading) the source code was how I learned to program.
Ever tried downloading a USB stick?
I think that English has a challenge because there is no defined "correct" English, there is no clear distinction between dialect, accent, and formal speech.

In some languages there is a clear and understood role for dialect, in those countries it is understood that most people speak both a dialect and the formal language. You choose the most appropriate mode for the context. More importantly, there isn't a necessary judgement on hearing someone speaking dialect that they "must be ignorant".
The more I look into this, the better it looks. In particular, I appreciate that you used good existing solutions on the backend (EJML, Apache commons math, etc) where appropriate.
Absolutely there is space for debate and disagreement - the problem is generally in getting acknowledgement that there are other view points with which to engage.

A considered opinion deserves respect if not agreement. One formed on assumption, in a vacuum is more difficult to accept.
Yeah I know what you mean. I'd love to talk off the record, but since I have to balance between the companies and user's privacy that is the most I could disclose.

One thing I can disclose, the shotgun style of applying to all the company works. Out of all the cohorts, by percentage, more interns were hired than full-timers because they were open to applying to "lesser known" companies. This is also advantageous because the interns could pick which companies they wanted to work with. The intern cohort might have also had better success because there is no barrier to entry with H1Bs.
Baidu Reportedly Working on Google Glass-Like "Baidu Eye".
The Cost of Running a Startup can get out of control
Great news! Are you planning to do any integration with Erik's spire (https://github.com/non/spire)? I believe, some libraries already started collaborating with it (https://github.com/twitter/algebird/issues/99 and https://github.com/typelevel/scalaz-contrib/tree/master/spir...).
An interesting article, thank you.

"Yo" seems to feel more natural than the usual Spivak options.

I was mildly amused at the "pause/unpause" word pair mentioned in the article, I had always assumed that the pair was "pause/resume"...
RVM Autolibs: Automatic Dependency Handling and Ruby 2.0
NYC - Senior Engineer

Centzy is a price-based local search engine. We are a small team of five, tackling interesting problems in search, data, and commerce. We are looking for another smart and driven engineer to join us. We are well funded but early stage enough that we can offer significant product and equity ownership.

We're looking for someone who has done this before - built products from scratch and scaled them. You've probably worked at a startup if not started one. You're passionate about creating great products and tackling big data and technology challenges. We currently use a lot of Ruby and Coffeescript but we're experimenting with Scala.

We have a fun office in sunny WeWork Labs (West Soho). We offer strong equity and salary, cover 100% of your health benefits, and provide lunches and dinners while you're working. Plus, you can choose your own equipment.

We're funded by some great investors: ffVC, Lightbank, Cowboy Ventures, Founder Collective and angels from companies like Facebook and Cloudera.

Email me at hn [at] centzy
That's not what he's suggesting. Rather, he's suggesting that the schools separate teaching how to communicate amongst themselves v. how to communicate in a middle-class manner, and not label the former "wrong" and the latter "right," but rather the former "personal" and the latter "formal." That's not different from students of yore having to learn Latin to get along in college: it wasn't that they were speaking English (or French, or German, or whatever) poorly, but rather that Latin was required to get ahead in the world. Same thing here.
This is pretty true in India, which is divided into states mostly by linguistic lines. I've heard "dialects" which sound distinct enough to be separate languages (Marwari versus Hindi) and "languages" that sound similar enough to be dialects (Urdu and Hindi).
The three qualities of any great programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

(From The Camel Book (Programming Perl) in about 1990 or '91, from memory)

http://www.hhhh.org/wiml/virtues.html
I believe a lot of freelancers are busy right now. I know I get a ton of freelance email and I always respond, but that doesn't mean everyone does.

Shoot me a few of the emails you've been sending and I'll give you some feedback (email is in profile).
Not to mention that they wield large marketing budgets.
Yeah I had a great input about skipping that number and focusing on, say, 30% of the total book. 30 pages in a 1000 pages book is nothing. I also find that process of skimming the following pages to get a feel of it quite effective. That's how I "went through" Tim Ferriss's "4-hour workweek", which quite frankly is not a book for me. Not sure if there are fans here, no harm intended.
If I have my malware on your computer, I'm just going to use it to steal your cookie (any other sensitive information) directly rather than perform some convoluted roundabout XSS. :P