skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Haha I laughed to this. Specially because I'm brazilian.

And yes, it is the same word, 'program' is a slang for prostitute work. We programmers here joke a lot about this :)
Poetry and Medicine
I get all of my science news from celeb gossip sites.
What do you mean by better? The site is pretty solid technology-wise, but I think we could all do without the comments.
How Online Retailers Get You to Spend More
Personally, I'm floored... On one hand we chastise everyone around the world for attacks on activists/suppression of free speech and talk up our high morals, then on the other hand we do the same damn thing, just to further corporate objectives, as opposed to internal political ones.

The environmental issue is especially short-sighted, as damage to Ecuadorian rainforest will affect US mainland overtime.

Anyone know if there is any kind of appeals process or defense fund for these groups?
Because a big chunk of what we once might have thought of as the "left" in the US are really just cheerleaders for the blue team, without paying any attention to actual policy.

Of the remainder, a lot of people seem to buy the narrative that Obama's hands are in some sense tied, or believe that his judgement should be trusted and that he has our best interests at heart etc etc.
The "grep test" doesn't just help humans and IDE's. Closure Compiler's ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATIONS mode (https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/docs/api-tuto... ) only works with JS code that can pass the "grep test". Setting or getting properties using dynamically generated property names won't work (even if Closure Compiler could understand your intent, it would have to know at runtime which minified name the concatenated parts should result in).

So in this case, writing longer, "grep-friendly" JS code can actually reduce the size of the JS payload you serve to your users.
RECURSIVE Query is Recursive
If you think this is good, wait until you find out about statically typed languages and IDEs with code navigation features.
Interesting, enlightening, and thought-provoking article.

To me, another interesting experiment would be changing the first name of the resume to something that's nearly unambiguously male, say instead of Kim O'Grady to just Robert O'Grady, and seeing if that has the same effect.

Another interesting experiment would be adding "Mrs." in front of the name Kim and seeing if that has the same effect.

Personally speaking, I believe that technical people are sick and tired of the sausage fests at most technical companies and all other things being equal would go out of their way to hire more women.
I don't consider the sort example to be a quirk at all, though some of the other examples are reasonable. It's more a definition of what methods are supposed to do in the first place: a behavior that is applied on the instance of the object. Unless you're doing functional programming (or implementing certain specialized design patterns), you wouldn't expect dog.move() to return a new dog, so why should list.sort() return a new list?
Good point, These Darpa terminators are just the visible threat, its the classified nano robots that control us from inside that we should fear
That's pretty funny. In case anyone's wondering, the full term is "garota de programa", literally "girl of program" or "program girl". Obviously, the English is "call girl".

Normally, "programa" just means events, like "what's the program for the evening?". Here, of course, you can figure it out yourself.
> 1979: Invented the spreadsheet

Not to diminish his accomplishments, because I consider him one of my heroes, but he didn't invent spreadsheets. That honor would go to Richard Mattessich 18 years earlier.
I don't support him. I think it's wildly hypocritical of him to run to China and Russia because he's so opposed to government spying. I also think that the NSA spying is less troubling that the other numerous abuses of the Obama administration, including using the IRS to repress political speech.
My Product Has Failed
Yes, I saw that too. Pretty fucking cool.
He is already a civilian and will not be court marshalled, which is why Bradley Manning is in a military prison. Ellsberg enjoyed the full rights of being a civilian when he leaked from RAND Corporation. The thing that a lot of people do not get is that the Snowden case would go through the civilian courts system. Sure the more sensitive subjects would be subject to injunctions and have be argued before being admitted to court, but the same thing is going to happen with the EFF case in the Northern District of California.
So, basically, everyone who is capable of producing excellent code is bared from using a powerful technique, largely because some people can't understand the code they produce.

It's a difficult trade-off, one one I've had to make calls on several times. Do you use the full capabilities of incredibly gifted and talented programmers, and then allow code into your codebase that maintenance programmers can't understand?

Tricky.
Actually, this comment is correct.

S3 may indeed serve it using Static Website Hosting (and you need to enable it anyway to use CloudFront with it).

Still, S3 is quite slow, and not globally distributed. It's indeed good advice and practice to use CloudFront in front of it.

CloudFront for a static website not very expensive either.

-----

I run my company's website runs off of S3 + CloudFront, and S3 alone is slow.

Load time is usually 2x to 3x when accessed via the S3 origin
Boeing 787 Catches Fire at Heathrow
>> The political landscape would have to be so incredibly different for social security to go away I can't even really comprehend it.
>I have no problem with that description, but that's an argument against any assertion you might make about what would be likely in that case, not an argument for it.

You're basically arguing that the status quo is, and always will be, the predominant way of the world working unless a person can provide direct evidence to the contrary in a big way. I get that, and it makes a lot of sense. I generally feel the same way.

What I'm trying to suggest is that the world where social security gets eliminated is so different that your assertion that the status quo is, doesn't hold. You'll probably disagree with me on that issue but ultimately there's no way for us to know either way. It's all speculation. The evidence that I would give to support such a notion is that when serious political change happens, it often happens in a big way.

I think it's highly likely that the only way social security could get eliminated is some kind of a revolution, peaceful or not. Since there are so many people who currently benefit from social security right now having paid very little in (they like the program) and plenty of people who paid in their entire working lives (they desperately want to get their money out of it) that they constitute a large entrenched interest.

You're saying that the minimum amount of energy to get this 1000 ton rock moved from point A to point B doesn't imply that the other 1000 ton rock right next to it would go anywhere at all. I'm suggesting that for a rock that friggin huge to get moved there's some kind of bigger thing happening like a landslide, an earthquake, a big explosion, etc and thus, perhaps it might.
That doesn't help you if the problem is that your origin is down. Or am I misunderstanding you?
The reason is that human size and shape allows for replacing a human in any situation such as driving a vehicle or fitting into airline seats or what have you.
> As far as I'm concerned, S3 static file website serving is completely indestructible. I only need one bland Apache server to bump requests over to it.

Is this generally the experience of everyone here?
Whomever is speech writing these statements (or editing them) is doing a great job. Not only does Snowden make the US out to be a corrupt and despotic nation, willing to subvert its own laws and principles to shut one person up, it manages to position the US' character below that of countries run by South American dictators and ex-KGB colonels.

It is my sincere hope that this event ends the political careers of a number of US politicians, and engages enough voters to disrupt the status quo.
EBay goes 3D printing
After quitting facebook I realized that my true friends would still be my friends. Two months have passed and (in my case anyway) I feel like I am building better friendships with my friends because of using email/sms/voice calls more often instead of facebook.
"It just needs some good software."

This is of course the hard part. But this robot was built to be a common platform for DARPA to build a project around: the DARPA Humanoid Challenge. The idea is to supply a very expensive robot to a few groups and a simulation of it to lots of groups, and have them compete on the control software. No guns this time around.
This is something I've just gone through building Anonymous IRC (http://anonirc.co/). I found the best way to do things was to just jump in and get dirty. It probably took longer than it would have if I had a good tutorial, but I couldn't find a tutorial that was worth using (albeit I didn't try very hard). Express' documentation is just the worst though. Just play around with it.
> Paying out of pocket was $1200+/month for a family plan. It was worth it to take a perm job paying half the rate just to have health insurance.

0.5 * Previously Monthly Revenue <= $1200

so...

Previously Monthly Revenue <= $2400?

so...

Current Job <= $1200/month + Health Insurance?
Yeah, you're right. I meant to type "days" but for some reason typed "weeks".
you seriously pay 1000 dollars every month just for insurance??? Im so happy i'm not an american right now....
The Two Most Important Questions for Understanding Your Customers
I hate the trend of calling people who code 'engineers.' It's just not a good title for anything to do with software. And invariably people who embrace its usage seem to be trying to compensate or ignorant of what a real engineer actually does or is.
That's really, really sad.

And the worst part is, it's surely conscious on nobody's part. There have even been studies showing this effect.

What's even sadder is that there's no obvious or easy way to fix it.
Annnd, we do. No doubt. But that's cultural too. We love hockey. It's in our bones. You'd think siberia would have the best players by your logic.
I've been down this same path for five years now, leaving five years of corporate behind. It has not been easy, but the flexible I've gained has allowed for travel and piece of mind. I also enjoy talking with business owners and visibly seeing my efforts helping their growth.

Smart move with leaving the SEO/affiliate game, as that is racing towards the bottom as more people flock in (you know the type, following the marketing formula to sell an ebook to get that email to eventually close) and search engines tweak their algorithms. I always felt a unease doing that kind of work. Once all the noise dies down, it comes down to doing good work for good companies. Since focusing on being open and transparent and proud of my work, I'm getting close to the point where I am not chasing contracts and can pick and choose clients. And like you, I've been living lean and don't need six figures to live a full life.
No, you can do this sort of madness in C too via function pointer tables. Give the function pointer field in your struct a commonly-grep-spammed name like "close" and watch your readers go mad trying to figure out what xxx->close() does.
I generally agree with you but I think the recommendation would be that list.sort() should return the original list in its new, sorted state, not a new list.
PHPPHP - PHP VM written in PHP
So update your blog post to say that. I had the same reaction as GP.
A lot of businesses are desperate for good workers and put up with a lot of predatory worker behaviors.
Monads in PHP
Nope, same last name. Pretty positive the insurance company knows we're married.

It did mean, though, that I have my own policy and my kids are under my wife's policy. So if my wife and kids go to the doctor a bunch and pay their deductible, should I need to go I'll have my own deductible to pay.
This has to be the coolest use for a Raspberry Pi I've ever seen. I honestly wish I had the skills to make this happen.
Tufts asks prospective students to explain "YOLO"
I for one, donate to the EFF; I'm honestly not sure if it is the best place to put the money, but every time I read an article that pisses me off like this, they seem to be the ones defending the right side.
This is less suited for hacker news, and more suited for stack overflow. You may get a better response if you post it there.
There is a simple way to fix it. Namely providing a means to submit your resume that anonymizes name, gender, age and anything that could bias the reviewer's assessment. The best HR departments already do that, at least that's the hope.
S3 works for static websites but in general the latency without Cloudfront in front is not that good.

I'm actually working on something that'll make it incredibly fast to get a static site up and running with a powerful CDN and get form submissions working. Will be up at http://www.bitballoon.com soon.
Honestly, in my professional opinion probably 60% of the usages of metaprogramming seen in the wild fail the "for a good reason" test pretty badly. Most of the time it's just the author being clever to save a few lines.

But I don't see why metaprogramming should inherently fail the grep test anyway. Sure, your property/thingy/whatever (an access method for a field automatically generated from a database, say) might be generic and generated at runtime, but its name should still be written down somewhere authoritative, even if it's in a schema or (if nothing else) a documentation file. That stuff should still be in your tree and greppable, and if it's not your code has discoverability problems.
It may be what you meant, but it wasn't what I read. Anyway, fine.

If I apply to companies A and B, where A is ethical and B is unethical, but only B offers me a job, which I accept, have I freely chosen my employer? Let's assume these are the only companies available.
I've done a bunch of work with statically typed languages and am not about to argue that dynamic languages can be as easily navigated or statically analyzed by IDEs as statically typed ones can.

That said, dynamic languages still have a great deal of value, and a significant portion of the programming population uses them, so I still think it's worthwhile to set down some useful rules of thumb.
Note that besides all their indications, for CloudFlare "down" means returning some specific HTTP error codes, not that the server itself is down (as in "completely unresponsive" or not running), I was burnt by this and they actually changed the wording in their documents when I pointed it out.
Is there anyway we, as a people, can help other than just support? Is there a petition running to the UN?
No, I wouldn't. That person would still be a citizen of North Korea, but without their authorization to travel internationally.

Just because returning to your country would likely be unpleasant for you doesn't mean you no longer have a country.
Yeah, that's why the citizen oversight. We can't trust the government to police itself, obviously.
Obama is already using the IRS to harass his political opponents. I don't want that to get easier for either party.
I think the point of their post, is that this is their "oh shit we are down" setup, which will consist of a small static site that S3 will happily serve up to anyone anywhere in the world very quickly. This isn't meant to be a full wack highly performant copy of their existing website fronted by CDN's.
Agreed. I suppose the more important test for library code is "googleability" rather than "greppability".
Phew - I agree. Just making sure I'm not completely insane here, and frankly the hero worship of him is really starting to creep me out. I worry that too many people blindly see this as getting back at THE MAN without giving enough consideration to many other aspects of the ordeal.

I think his actions while on the run are just pathetic. He's such a weasel, like a guy who sucker punches someone on the street then takes off. The to align himself with these other countries who in the grand scheme of things are far worse actors than the US takes some serious balls. I still get the sense that 90% of the reason he decided to pull this off was for selfish reasons, that he wanted the notoriety.

EDIT - I suspect numerous downvotes will confirm the consensus
You mean by recombining other people's work and calling it your own?
Updates on the ISTE Conference, Gamification and More ICT News
Or... we improve the tools, instead of limiting the expressiveness of languages we use just to make grep happy.

(See Yegge's grok project, unfortunately he doesn't blog anymore)
You should raise your rates then! Perfect opportunity with proven history and track record!
airexec.ca
Wow, that's quite a setup for confusion. Who named that town, Abbott and Costello?
It isn't a fact. It is an unsubstantiated opinion.

Your assertion that my comment was the political one is nonsensical.

We've got serious long-term and structural problems in this country. We've got to find a way to discuss them that rises above trite generalizations.
This certainly shows my age. I had to google YOLO.
I think this all hinges on when or if these things can get produced/maintained for less than or close to the cost of a human soldier. Imagine if these got down to $10,000 to produce. Then it would be cheaper to arm a 1-2MM unit militia of humanoid robots than it would actual human marines.
Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox
Why would anyone be bothered? I believe this whole ordeal has shown no western country takes human rights seriously. We've known for a good while about Guantanamo, shady extraditions (from US allies), Israel's complete disregard for basic human rights on the West Bank... This isn't just western countries though, no country whatsoever seems to care about human rights unless it gives them a political edge.

What Russia is doing with their anti-gay laws for example, is similar to what western countries have done to privacy, all in the name of an abstract idea like terrorism/protect the children/drugs.

Just because Snowden is against human rights violations it does not make him exempt of having to dance with the devil. Being a complete rebel, even in a world where it's obviously ruled by fake morals, is not a wise thing to do, specially when your life is at stake.
There are many applications of humanoid robots when they become good and cheap. Right now they are neither, but DARPA is funding people to work on this.

Cheap, good humanoid robots will fill the slave niche in society, without the ethical problems (at least in terms of the slaves themselves - it might not be good for us to be slave owners, but we'll see how that pans out). Who said the researchers are or should be thinking about only this century?

By the way, a mobile gun platform on wheels is not going to be great in built-up areas. This is why we don't have combat soldiers fighting in powered wheelchairs, and why Daleks suck.
Title should have quotes around "joke".
This is a standard case of what I like to call a tradeoff.

Making code that passes the grep test allows many more programmers who are vaguely familiar with the codebase to make changes.

Making code that fails the grep test allows a team of a few highly skilled developers who know the codebase inside and out to do the work of hundreds.

It's like mathematical notation, you generally need experience in that sub-branch of mathematics to understand the notation.
(I work on Route 53).

As __lucas has mentioned, this can be achieved with Route 53 Failover, which we'd recommend.

Route 53 Failover is (hopefully) pretty easy to configure. Just mark your ELB as the primary and enable target healthchecks, and add the S3 website bucket as the secondary. We'd also suggest that you use an S3 website bucket hosted in a different region than your ELB. This should take no more than a minute or two of setup in our console.

The difference is makes is that Route 53 failover doesn't depend on any "make this change" control plane ; the status of every Route 53 healthcheck is constantly being polled from at at least 16 locations and then sent (via 3 redundant networking paths) to every Route 53 DNS server. The system is always operating at full-load, with a tremendous degree of fault-tolerance and redundancy. We hope that makes it very robust against very "hard to fix" internet and power problems, and also API outages.

So for an awkward "worst case" example; if there were a large networking outage in an intermediate transit provider your customers might not be able to reach your ELB, and likewise you may not be able to reach the API to make the changes necessary. Route 53 failover should work anyway by detecting the reachability problem and flipping to the pre-configured secondary - an action which is triggered at our edge sites.

If you'd rather not use Route 53 as your primary DNS provider that's ok; all of the above can still be achieved by using a dedicated zone on Route 53 just for managing the failover, which you may then CNAME to, just as with ELB. Each zone costs $0.50/month. Of course we'd also like to make this kind of functionality easier to use and built-in, and that's something we're constantly working on.
There is much better data out there concerning the effect of gender (and race) on CVs. That would be much more useful than this guy's anecdotal experience.
Why cord-cutting won’t be killing cable anytime soon
Correct. You can also use Dynamic Proxies, for metaprogramming, which are built right into the language.
CIA Admits Using News To Manipulate the USA (1975)
Nothing you can do is going to take S3 as a whole down, and it doesn't appear to have EBS dependencies so it generally dodges the bullet when AWS has troubles. I'm not aware of any significant S3 outage in the last five years.
Up to this day I'm still wondering if the girls thought that "Java" was a very special service I was requesting.
There are days when I want to chuck it all and become a greeter at Walmart...

You definitely need the right personality (or develop it), and be mentally tough to endure this lifestyle (especially in the beginning) or it will beat you to the ground.
App Engine is also a good way to do this. Let's say you have the bulk of your site running on AWS (assume for whatever reason you don't want to use GAE as your primary environment)

* Have a heartbeat task on GAE that polls your server, and if its running, write to "serverisrunning" on memcache with a short time to live.

* (normal operation) : redirect initial visitors to your AWS site.

* (server not responding to a heartbeat task on GAE, or memcache miss), serve static content from GAE, or a limited functionality version of your app hosting on GAE (for example, a static site with signup form).

This type of setup has the added bonus of automatically detecting an outage and responding to it. While App Engine has its own downtime issues, outages are transient. Since they migrated to the high replication data store, I haven't seen anything that lasted more than a few minutes.
The answer is clearly, and obviously: no you can't trust CPUs, memory, compilers, disassemblers, microcode or anything else.

The better question is: what is being done to address this? What can be done (are you going to trust an "open source" CPU producer who swears they have no back doors?)?