skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wrote a quick script to convert text into the most common 1000 words as best possible, here's your comment. Needs a bit of work, and a better synonym list, but whatever.

as some comments are coming below -- lossy press does not work that way!

interpreting one set of data as another is a able action for puzzles (thematic, for example, to: http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/2013/coinheist.com/oceans_11/t.... -- but that's only a direction, the action is still army of fun!) but is kind of wrong in act.

press is about giveing a similar 'account' while removing the air that just doesn't cut well. in act such as pictures and clear, this is often seen/heard in high light army.

to the christian, the simplest lossy press of an image is to resize it by a half in each area and then answer the data. (not different retina-display artifacts you may have seen). big you do it right (with an averaging filter) -- you've just alone the c half of the representable frequencies, it just so happens that most of what the eye care about isn't in those ranges -- and so the image still air christian. a little blocky if you answer it, but still beautiful good. jpeg is just a more technically developed account of similar actions.

a better approach of lossy press on back is actually xkcd's up goer five (http://xkcd.com/1133/) -- using only the "ten hundred" most common words, you can still give concepts (albeit simplistically) and stay under ten cut a word, or a little less than two ascii act per. if you were to art the cant into "up-goer five" speak, you could cut shakespeare beautiful well. it would clear a lot in the change -- but so does a heavily-cuted image. if you all i to the first 64k words, you have a much larger cant, still alled, and still change within two bytes per word. again you may have to use more words, a word like "ground" still counts for four words account of cuted space, when replaced by "why". tradeoffs!

that'd be a concerned common -- sort the words in man and juliet by word light. record the least common words in terms of the other words. cut.
I know what parsing and walking a tree is. And parsing is walking a tree. It requires going over the entire source, which is my point: they're trying to avoid processing unnecessary code.

You do not need to do code genration to establish what the unused packages are. But you must parse and perform semantic analysis of the entire package to determine what the unused packages are. There is more to "compiling" than code genration and optimization.

Parsing is what they want to avoid, not just code generation. Parsing is cheap for small projects. But nothing is cheap at scale. From the talk I have already linked to:

The construction of a single C++ binary at Google can open and read hundreds of individual header files tens of thousands of times. In 2007, build engineers at Google instrumented the compilation of a major Google binary. The file contained about two thousand files that, if simply concatenated together, totaled 4.2 megabytes. By the time the #includes had been expanded, over 8 gigabytes were being delivered to the input of the compiler, a blow-up of 2000 bytes for every C++ source byte.

As another data point, in 2003 Google's build system was moved from a single Makefile to a per-directory design with better-managed, more explicit dependencies. A typical binary shrank about 40% in file size, just from having more accurate dependencies recorded. Even so, the properties of C++ (or C for that matter) make it impractical to verify those dependencies automatically, and today we still do not have an accurate understanding of the dependency requirements of large Google C++ binaries.

If Go allowed including unused packages, you would end up with the exact same problem.
Exactly, I know some people in real-life, immediate family members, people I can't easily ignore even if I want to, who just loves to feed on drama.

I usually try to stay away from drama queens like my sanity depends on it, but when family members do it, not easy or (always right) to ignore them. I tried to explain, rationalize, reason with them and their drama ways; but it didn't help much.

I think drama loving people are kind of addicted to how it makes them feel.
This could be nitpicking an abbreviated binary choice. The usual advice is to ask if you are free to leave. If the answer is no, then you know you're being detained and can act accordingly.
To be sure, there's such a thing called 'custodial interrogation' which is, essentially, a situation where a person's freedoms are restrained, but not fully under arrest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custodial_interrogation

I've previously heard the suggested language of 'Am I being detained or am I free to go?', which seems good enough to make the situation a lot less ambiguous.
I have a few thoughts on this in no particular order:

- It would be interesting if the top list gaming mentioned in the article was eliminated by replacing download or install count with something more meaningful like "frequency of app open" or "average time spent in the app per day". These can still be gamed but it's harder than just gaming a metric that relies only on download or install count.

- There should still be some sort of collaborative filtering. I favor improving the top list's ranking algorithm over getting rid of the top list.

- Giving new apps more chance to succeed or exposure could be implemented similar to how HN includes job postings. Namely the listing is put in the top spot of "the list" for a bit and slowly falls down. In the app store the new app should probably fall rapidly unless user-engagement is high. How to measure that? Download count is too easy to game so other metrics would need to be used.

- I think developers should be mindful that they're selling to (in general) everyone and not just other developers. When Marco mentions "high-quality" apps he's speaking from a developer's perspective. And developers often care a lot about details that the general public doesn't notice or doesn't care about if they do notice.

- The app store should be faster. The iTunes load time feels too long these days.
Tamil Web Design and Development Tutorials
I'd like to read more about this, if you're allowed to tell.
Not the most sophisticated approach to constitutional law, but they are 77 and 64 respectively. Please consult your local actuarial table.
So we are now in a situation where if I am not under arrest, the things I don't say may be used against me, unless I explicitly assert that I am not waiving my rights as soon as possible.
Check out boxcryptor, works in the OS's that you probably care about.
1: Am I under arrest?

2. No.

1. Okay, I'm going to walk away now.

2. You can't do that. I'm asking you questions and you are not free to leave.

1. But you just said I am not under arrest. Are you arresting me?

2. No.

1. Okay, I'm going to walk away now.

... [a few iterations later] ...

1 starts to walk away.

2 informs 1 that s/he is not free to go.

1, on the basis that 2 has said s/he is not under arrest, and tired of the back and forth, begins to walk away.

2 performs a physically or verbally threatening action to prevent 1 from leaving--e.g., blocking exit path, ordering to remain in place, etc.

1, on the basis that 2 has said s/he is not under arrest, and tired of the back and forth, continues to walk away or otherwise informs 2 s/he is going to continue to walk away (or ask 2 to leave).

... [several rapidly escalating iterations later ...]

1 attempts to walk away.

2 physically apprehends 1 in some fashion and orders 1 to stop.

1 continues to try to leave.

2 decides to arrest 1 and charge 1 with obstructing, opposing, and endeavoring to prevent (with or without force) an officer in the lawful discharge of his duty.
1 is at increased risk of physical harm from 2 in the course of being arrested as this is the kind of situation that appears many times in cases where an officer uses excessive force to apprehend a 'difficult' individual (whether s/he actually was being difficult or merely attempting to assert his/her rights and avoid being bothered by the officer).
I always loved this scene from that episode discussing if the 4th amendment includes an implied right to personal privacy:

SAM
In 1787, there was a sizable block of delegates who were initially opposed to the Bill of Rights. One member of the Georgia delegation had to stay by way of opposition:
'If we list the set of rights, some fools in the future are going to claim that people are entitled only to those rights enumerated and no longer. The framers knew...'

HARRISON
Were you just calling me a fool, Mr. Seaborn?

SAM
I wasn't calling you a fool, sir, the brand new state of Georgia was.
> Further, their store is plagued with malware and shady apps that never get removed. I know because I've reported them and continue to see the same apps by the same developers on the Play Store.

I often read the Reddit Android and Android developer subrredits. Sometimes someone points out some sketchy malware in a post that they reported. Maybe other people report it as well. If the app (and often the developer) are still there two hours later, that's a long time. Usually Google kills it within minutes. Usually these are fake things (say "Call of Duty for Android" by "Acme Inc.") which needs a dozen permissions and are obviously probably BS.

As I said, probably multiple people are flagging the malware which people on Reddit are discussing, so maybe that is why Google responds to them but is not as responsive to your messages.
Puppet's Big Bad Problem
Because he wants to do it, too. In a just world this guy would be out of a job.
This article is far too naive. The NSA is more than willing to operate on an extra-legal basis, as they have been for decades. A ruling on body scanners will not - under any circumstances - squelch NSA domestic spying.

It would require a change top to bottom in the government's entire approach to privacy, from the President to the lowest ranking agents. We have a government that has set itself up from an intelligence position of violating privacy without any regard to the consequences. They're not going to suddenly do a 180 and stop, no matter what one ruling says. It's also a massive cost in time and dollars to change out of their approach now, they will not do it willingly.
Agreed, and we're actually going off of the Codecademy/Khan Academy course tracks for what we're teaching.

But I don't think the moguls are creating more jobs here. They're importing people from elsewhere -- I'd say literally 75% of better of the Vegas Tech crowd hasn't been in town for more than six months. And they've shown zero interest in improving local education, either within the school system or independently. Unless you count Ruby meetup groups as education, which I don't. ;-)
I was pro-airbnb-all-the-time till I booked a room that looked good in the photos but was in a shitty building in a shitty part of town ... (I was in a hurry and couldn't really do as much research as I normally would have). I was there for a nice relaxing vacation so it was quite a surprise and I wound up losing $500 because I immediately ended my reservation and used hotel tonight to get a better room for about the same price.

With hotels, at least you generally get what you pay for, and you can rely on branding (brand names and star ratings) to get you most of the way there as well. So while I hope to use airbnb again, I'm quite chastened by the experience and am definitely more aware of the things I used to take for granted with booking hotels.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0745704/
1999. Amazing.
This is a very interesting discussion between two practitioners that I have tremendous respect for.

To me the discussion highlights one interesting point: the provability of programs. In particular, Colin says I recommend a more modern approach to cryptography — which means studying the theory and designing systems which you can prove are secure.

Now, I remember back in the days of structured programming, and we were all reading Dijkstra and thinking about proving programs. We concluded that it was a pretty expensive to do so. In all my decades of programming, I haven't made a serious attempt to do so. The best I have done is to (sometimes) write programs that are hopefully provable.

The possibility of writing provable programs to me is confounded by the work done by John Regehr, who seems to be the current champion of fuzzing compilers. His techniques find legions of bugs in compilers, including 17 errors in one research compiler that is _proved correct_.

Nonetheless, my question for Colin is how many programmers do you feel are capable of proving programs correct, be they compilers or cryptography libraries? For those of you who haven't given it a shot, take a look at some of the links on the side of Colin's blog post, the "Software Development Final Exam". Not very many of us did very well with that. (My feeble excuse is that there weren't any computer science departments when I went to Engineering School.)

I guess that Colin would agree that anyone who does not do well on those exams might not do well in writing and proving programs correct.

And on the other hand, Thomas explodes stuff that is written by a range of programmers covering the whole spectrum of talent. He sees on a day-by-day basis of the result of confident, talented programmers when subjected to excruciating punishment.

I do enjoy the discussion between these two.
Applying math to rebuild history
> ... unless I explicitly assert that I am not waiving my rights as soon as possible.

... and it is determined that I am in a situation in which I am deemed lawfully allowed to have asserted said rights.
How about we just start at whether it's legal and Constitutional? Everything else follows from that.
I have some family experience with Lyme and meningitis. I'm confused.

A blood test is not useful for a recent tick bite. It takes 4-6 weeks for the antibodies to be present in detectable quantities. For Lyme, you observe the possible site of infection for a few days, if it is swelling or reddening (with or without the characteristic "bulls-eye" pattern), then you get antibiotics. Doxycycline is popular, but it's a long (21-day) course, so a good doc will not prescribe it casually.

Meningitis is either bacterial or viral. The true test is analysis of spinal fluid (this one goes to 11!), but it's a very fast-moving and dangerous infection. Regardless, a blood test is unlikely to be conclusive.

You can save the tick and send it off to a local lab for analysis. That'll tell you with a high degree of certainty if the tick had the spirochette. In some parts of the country, most do. It won't tell you if it has been transmitted to you, of course.

Disease transmission typically happens after the tick has been attached for 36-72 hrs.

Those of you who haven't lived in deer tick country might not realize how tiny the things are this time of year. Pinhead sized or smaller. Easy to miss even if you're diligent. No solution for it except to be more diligent, however.

Good luck with the doxycycline. I don't understand why your PCP ordered a blood test, but the meds make sense.
Indeed, asking if you are free to leave is the better question. Not so much an abbreviated binary choice, but more a response to the suggestion as given.
Hello Brother! Yes, we've used those... sadly they don't work "at scale." My department has 600 members and a lot of them have good ideas. They have to go through the chain-of-command to get those ideas heard. This method not only suffers from the telephone problem Ie. the idea is lost in translation. It also suffers from a Chief or Capitan not liking the idea(s) and never doing anything with it. Manuals and SOPs in a democratic environment where anyone could clone, make changes and submit pull-requests would be a manna from heaven.
Salinas isn't about silence. It's about selective silence. Salinas started talking to the cops, voluntarily. Then they started asking questions about the crime of which he was later convicted, and he clammed up.

If he'd not opened his yap in the first place, this wouldn't even be a thing.
I was lucky enough to be able to do a tiny bit of FPGA programming last year in Verilog. Its deceiving how similar to C it seems initially, then when you start getting into it how vastly different it is to normal programming. I remember thinking that everything is literally running in parallel.
I don't think it would be satire, exactly. He'd have to be making fun of something specific that someone else said. Hyperbole, maybe?

At any rate, that would be encouraging if it were true. I must admit, I do not have a threshold of cynicism beyond which I assume a sentiment is a joke. There seem to be arbitrarily depressing people out there.
Repairing  Bad  Memories
Yes, I did show some people through this too. However, it's not usable as an everyday operating system, for, say researchers such as academics, or journalists.
What could he have said that would have convinced you of something and what is that something?
This is basically the same conversation that circulates around any neighborhood improvement project; it doesn't really have much to do with Tony Hsieh or tech except in the particulars.

Where is the line between improvement and gentrification? How can you maintain the unique flavor of a neighborhood if that rents, prices, and property taxes go up by multiples? How can you maintain "affordable housing" and clean up urban blight at the same time? Etc.
Will do. Think about medical records or 911 call data in a git repo. This is evolutionary stuff that no one in the fire service is thinking about. Hell, our IT guru's can't seem to get clean data from one database to another. Its a sad state in .gov IT at the local level.
The irony (and not in the hipster sense) is that Hating Suburbia is about as suburban as it gets.

Don't get me wrong: I really find sprawl distasteful and think Americans drive too much and walk/bike too little (for their health as well as the environment). I'm a snob and I'll admit it. I don't know that I'll be in New York or San Francisco forever (Austin seems pretty neat, so that may be where I put down roots in a few years; Seattle is a strong possibility) but I'm never moving to a place that involves a 30+ minute commute. I'm not joining the Driving Dead.

I like cities and having a good job usually involves being near one. That said, I like trees and lakes and animals (I grew up with foxes, bears and bobcats on the property, so there). If suburbia is how a person achieves that, then good for it. Not all "suburbs" are horrible, environment-raping places. (The Buda Hills are suburb-like and amazing.) The evil is traffic congestion and over-driving due to outdated norms about physical presence amid middle-class mediocrity and conformity, in addition to large houses required by people favoring quantity of possessions over quality. It has nothing to do with whether one's postal address is a notable city versus a no-name bedroom community.
This is needlessly complicated; instead, I offer:

1. Am I free to leave?

2. No.

OK, now you've made it clear you are under custodial interrogation (I suppose there are safety exceptions to that), Miranda is invoked according to the Orin Kerr, and you can keep your mouth shut beyond the requirement to give your name in some states.
>except to the extent required by law.

Depending on the state and situation, you are required to by law to answer certain questions. I would answer these questions and otherwise ask if I am free to go.
Duolingo Helps Student to Propose to His American Girlfriend
Uh, the programs are subject to excruciating punishment, not the programmers. Just to clarify.
If I were Snowden and if I had that power. I would first release all this information to the public. And then to hear what the 3 letters had to say. And then, release emails for 1 month of each and every Senator and representative. That in it self I believe would have caused the most change.

completely theoretical, but would have caused the most change for the better.
I wouldn't call a statement four days later without a response an "exchange," though I suppose some people might.
Adding a bit: Here is a real quote from Alexander Hamilton. Less pithy but more powerful.

"I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colourable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why for instance, should it be said, that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretence for claiming that power. They might urge with a semblance of reason, that the constitution ought not to be charged with the absurdity of providing against the abuse of an authority, which was not given, and that the provision against restraining the liberty of the press afforded a clear implication, that a power to prescribe proper regulations concerning it, was intended to be vested in the national government. This may serve as a specimen of the numerous handles which would be given to the doctrine of constructive powers, by the indulgence of an injudicious zeal for bills of rights."

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/bill_of_ri...
Great article with many excellent points, especially those about unblocking/blocking - essentially the two main activities you'll participate in to keep a project moving forward. Everything else exists just to serve these two goals, in my opinion.

I'd also add that a great tool that a tech lead can direct is post-mortems (corrections of errors, whatever your company calls them). Effectively leading these discussions improves a company culture, educates individuals both involved and those not involved in sometimes obscure errors, and elevates the team's overall experience level.

Thanks for the write up.
I think 'top' lists have their purpose but with the addition of a 'time decay' factored in. A perfect analogy is the Hacker News front page to rank trending stories. Over time, the posts will drop down the list based upon a combination of both popularity and how long it has been there.

This would keep the top list 'fresh'.
Here's an idea: show me the top lists without the apps I already own! Why do I need to see Mountain Lion at the top of the App Store constantly in the #1 position? Just so I can know how little Mac Software gets sold and completely dissuade me from ever considering writing Mac software again? EIGHT of the top 10 apps are Apple apps. Most of which people probably already own (I happen to own all of them). Is this the image of the app store they want? If you really want to compell people to download Mountain Lion, just make it a banner at the top of the store that shows up if you don't have it!

The same applies to the iOS App store though. After I owned Angry Birds, why on Earth did I have to look at it as #1 for years? Showing a top 10 with apps you already own filtered out is good for everyone. The top selling apps still show up for new users. After its purchased, it gives other apps a chance to percolate up, which means more sales for everyone, and more 30% cuts for Apple.

EDIT: I'd like to point out that the OP's reference to a purely "editorial" list has the exact same problem. I don't understand why the Apple ecosystem seems hell bent on refusing to take advantage of the digital age. Creating a one-size fits all top 10 list, or editorial list, is a fine strategy for a brick and mortar store where they have to show everyone the same thing at the front of their store. And mind you, this is the absolute easiest online market place feature you can possibly program: don't show me what I already own and thus am literally incapable of repurchasing.