skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Speaking of pretentious-douchebag-grammar-nerds, allow me to explain the evolution of the “I’m going to refer to a singular noun with a plural pronoun” linguistic phenomenon. It’s a product of increased gender equality. People used to generically refer to everyone as males

That's entirely and entirely typically wrong. Singular "they" has been well-established in English for centuries. The great writers have always used it freely—that includes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and seemingly everybody else. "A person can't help their birth," says Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. (Edit: it's fun to dig up these classical examples, because they sound so modern and fresh. "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes"—Wilde. "It's enough to drive anyone out of their senses"—Shaw. "Everybody does and says what they please"—Byron.)

The ironic thing is that the "rule" about generic "he" (and later, "he or she" and all the other stilted variants) was fabricated by grammarians who looked at how English actually worked, said "Goodness no that can't be right because Latin doesn't do that", and started telling everybody their grammar was wrong.

(Notice how I just used singular "they". Should I have said, "telling everybody his grammar was wrong"? Or "his or her", or "his/er", or just "her", if you're one of those? Or, to adapt the OP's suggestion, "telling everybody everybody's grammar was wrong"?)

People never stopped using it, though, and by 1850 the grammarians were so indignant about this that they petitioned the British Parliament to make "he" the legal standard. And people kept on using "they", because it works.

Edit: There are so many sources on this that you can't kick Google without stirring some up, but http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-th... and http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html are particularly good and http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.h... is hilarious.
If you do decide to go the technical route, I'm assuming you've seen this from a few weeks ago: http://www.esologic.com/?p=665
Geeks.io : the best quality, 100% organic geeks
Please be aware that the Austrians are weird with regard to these things. AFAIK, Austria is the only country where the activities of intelligence agencies, including foreign ones, are by law legal as long as they don't run contrary to the interests of the Austrian state.

The Austrians are very proud of the role they played as a spy-habitat during the cold war and many look back at this time with nostalgia. Anything that the Austrian president says in a context such as this might or might not be tongue-in-cheek.
When Does My Package Arrive?
In three words: it is great! Not sure what lack of phone subsidies has to do with it though, or even if there is such a thing.

I lived in Russia and now live in Canada, and I would take Russian mobile market over Canadian any day. Dirt cheap, fierce competition between operators, over-abundant coverage, hidden fees are much less prevalent, there are contracts but pretty much everyone is on prepaid, buying new SIM card is a breeze.

I do not know if subsidized phones are forbidden, but much more likely the tradition of buying own phones is historical. Back in 90s owning a phone was a status symbol, there were no credit bureaus, no credit histories, inflation was rampant and ruble FX rate was very volatile. Everyone trusted only cold hard cash (preferably USD).

Later the country was swamped with lots and lots of cheap phones. So-called "grey" phones (euphemism for "smuggled") were brought in circumvention already lax or non-existent import regulations.

So I guess it is just not in the Russian tradition to sell subsidized phones.
I agree that compiling to C will not give you a great language implementation if you need this type of features; I think the implementation will be good enough for many cases though. To take an extreme example, CPython isn't a bleeding edge Python implementation perhaps, but it's still the most popular and practically relevant one; this is in fact true for many popular dynamic languages, one big exception in recent years being JavaScript.

Languages where a really great implementation might involve C code generation are probably indeed quite static, however. An example is Synopsys's VCS which AFAIK compiles Verilog to C++.

My own hands-on experience with this type of thing is with an in-house HDL and an in-house C dialect with (sizable, static) extensions for accelerator programming.
I'm not sure we disagree. Cosmological redshift doesn't rule out additional changes in observed frequency that compound due to the ones we observe by the expansion of the universe. Hubble originally explained his observed redshifts in other galaxies entirely due to the doppler effect but changed his mind when he observed a correlation between the distance of a receding galaxy and its redshift. If the doppler effect could explain cosmological redshift then galaxies would seem to have to 'know' how far they were from the observer!

If you go back and see the original 46 galaxies that hubble plotted by comparing observed redshift to the distance hubble had observed you can see considerable 'scatter' in the observations. This scatter is due to the Doppler effect.

The velocity distance relationship in hubble's law isn't due to the doppler effect but a model that relates recessional velocity to the general expansion of the universe.
In the USA this is the predominant model. In Europe and Russia customers prefer to buy a SIM unlocked phone and not have a contract. These carriers were getting killed selling subsidized iPhones because it is far cheaper to import an unlocked one and pay less monthly. T-Mobile is doing this in the USA now and eventually people will learn that that "$199" iPhone is not 199 when you are paying $30-40 more a month over T-Mobile unsubsidized cost forever.
That's not necessarily true. I imagine the data would most likely be targeted by a third party that's disinterested in you, but very interested in your adversary's money. I wonder what the going rate rate for all the WiFi passwords on my block would be. Or neighborhood. Or zip code.
Connect to your service via Tor :)
Would you remove the ability to load libraries, too? Because that's as dangerous as eval when it comes to purposely writing code to run external commands. The ability of a programming language to run code is not the cause of the problem, it's having domain-breaking misleading functions like a string replacer that can compile and execute.
No, people not using target="_blank" is bad design. It's not Chrome's fault people can't code external links right.
NPR sure is getting a lot of material from Reddit these days
Singular "they" is a real thing. People who get upset about it are the worst.
Bleh. I think his "correction" is as 'horrific a travesty against language' as the original:

"John Smith wanted to make your day so John sent you a gift card."

That is not even remotely elegant.
Read: http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americ...
cool dashboard but unfortunately none of this data is relevant for one's health
Flynn - Open Source PaaS powered by Docker
"I would have paid down the national debt" - This is a real hero!
So I assume they're also using them to exonerate people who otherwise don't have an alibi but could be falsely accused, right?

Right??
Startup Stories: Cloudability helps democratize the cloud
Short address bars make it easier to use fake urls. www.google.com.evilsite.com
Announcing Homebrew, A Seed Stage Fund For The Bottom-Up Economy
The web: less engine, more gas
ICE vehicles won't be disappearing any time soon and it'll be quite a while before the Bluestar goes into production (I'm guessing 2018). I almost bought a Model S last year (made a deposit) but reluctantly backed out. (I bought the stock instead -- at $33). I'll definitely buy one in the future once it passes the "early adapter" phase.

Although people buying today are enjoying the attention of owning the coolest car on the planet, the price is definitely inflated simply because it has to be... The costs associated with starting a car company are astronomical! Once they reach equalibrium, these costs will come down and the prices will follow. In fact, it's not hard to imagine that EV's will ultimately become much cheaper than comparable ICE vehicles (far fewer parts).

With that said, if I were you, I would buy a nice ICE and wait a few years for the EV prices to come down. Of course, if everyone did that the prices would never come down! What you do depends on your circumstances.
Yeah, but is it still angel investing?
> red shift as the result of light losing energy to radiation as it travels

Yet another incarnation of the old so-called "tired light" idea. Just google it. Or start here:

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

You run very quickly into all sorts of problems once you assume light gets "tired" as it travels.

> While the theory seems to be collecting dust, I've not found anything to fully discredit it.

Start here:

http://hep.ucsb.edu/people/bmonreal/Null_Physics_Review.html

> I've not found anything

Odd, since a simple google search for "null physics" returns several strong rebuttals on literally the first page. Maybe you haven't actually looked?

EDIT: Oh boy, this "null physics" thing shows all the signs of crackpot "science". The author working on it "for decades". Studies physics, but becomes "disenchanted" and switches to engineering. Is a "visiting scientist" at a "university" nobody has heard about. His theory is not published in journals because journals "help the establishment". Compares himself with Ben Franklin, Bill Gates, and Faraday. The only thing he's published is this book; no articles, no nothing. On and on and on. There are literally hundreds of woo peddlers out there like this guy, and all of them are made in the exact same image.

http://www.ourundiscovereduniverse.com/pages_author.php

That page lit up the pseudo-science detector, firing up another alarm at each and every sentence. The only thing amazing about this guy is how well he fits the stereotype. It's surreal.

Brilliant quote from a link I posted above:

Much crackpot literature gives the impression of an old grudge being played out: "I learned quantum mechanics from some book that made me feel dumb; thinking up Quantum Aethro-Gyromechanics on my own made me feel smart." The sad thing is, this illustrates a sort of can-do spirit that's admirable in fields other than science. Stubbornly defying a swimming coach ("You'll never be an Olympian, kid") or editor ("Your manuscript 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone' does not meet our needs at this time") or venture capitalist ("Forget it, Mr. Fred Smith, there is no market for nationwide express delivery"), turns out to actually work sometimes; the people who pull this off are praised as heros. But science isn't like that. Whereas coaches, editors, and entrepreneurs have to rely on (fallible, human) gut instinct for many of their evaluations, science relies on explicit, rigorous go/no-go tests. I think that the dissonance between the value of stick-to-it-iveness in entrepreneurship, versus the value of mathematical rigor in science, is the root cause of a lot of physics crackpottery.
Kaggle looks really cool. Thanks for this comment introducing me to it. They even have introductory competitions for those not well versed in data science with tutorials on things like python and random trees. Pretty sweet!
LLVM IR is less portable than C; and even where an LLVM back-end is available (say, x86 Windows machines), it's really nice to be able to compile everything with another compiler (say, VS) and get debug info and browse info in the generated files.
Because they had to pick something and you can't please anybody ever when picking typefaces?
Not that I'm aware of. They seem to be project specific boards. Though they track from sprints. Allow a product backlog, etc.
1. Sure, but it's entirely that brand's drivers would also not have been in AOSP.
2. You must realize there are hundreds of devices, and manufacturers change their support links all the time :(
Seattle is home to a pretty progressive culture, and is much more amenable to pronouns outside of the traditional gendered binary breakdown.
Well since the word engineer originated to designate people who built machines of war, this is not terribly surprising.

(Reference, most French language dictionaries)
Such as: http://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/ing%C3%A9nieur...
They isn't just plural, it's also gender-neutral.

Gender neutral pronouns: they're here to stay[1].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46ehrFk-gLk
Sure, I'll fix that in the next release :)
Synthetic Oil Change
Synthetic Oil Change
mobile contracts are very rare in Russia, almost everyone is on a prepaid plan
The real habits worth noting would be inheritance, started a company, took over a company from a parent, investing trends, etc. This is all bullshit
Shouldn't factory-pressed CDs and DVDs last indefinitely?
I look at the money.

Google made $10 billion last year.

In a cyber-war, how much would the Kremlin pay to disrupt every Chinese WiFi network to which an Android device has a current password?

In a shooting war, how much would the US pay? Keep in mind that the modern battlefield increasingly uses ordinary data devices particularly in counter-insurgency operations.

Jim McDonnell, Donald Douglas, Jack Northrup and Leroy Grumman did not start out as defense contractors. They diversified their corporations when voluntarily seizing the opportunity was a good alternative to the threat of compulsion during the Second World War.

This may in fact be the one time that the rules are different. But there's very little historical precedent upon which to premise such a belief. GM produces military vehicles. Westinghouse and GE produce powerplants for ballistic missile submarines.

[edit] The question of how plaintext leads directly to Google profits remains unaddressed. It is not as if Android users can recover their passwords by calling up Google customer service. On the other hand, storing passwords in plain text is usually a decision made to facilitate requests from a company's customers. Asking who constitutes Google's customers is a reasonable place to start when inferring motives.[/edit]
This is true, but even if you add half a screen of bookmarks you will still get at least 600pixels left for the address bar, more than enough to identify fake sites.
Sorry, I don't have my code/notes with me, but I wanted to put the link out there. Nokia has tons of developer resources so it can be hard to find what you need.

I will try to remember to post more later, but for now here is a basic geocoding example: http://developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/HERE_Maps_API_-_Us...
Change is often more frightening than a dangerous situation.
> some folks currently like to mount their Backbone.js applications at a root URL that contains a query string

That seems like the root of the problem. It seems like querystrings could otherwise be solved, but this case would certainly introduce a problem for pushState-incompatible browsers.

Is there a reason this kind of app root URL isn't considered bad practice that doesn't need to be supported? Everything about it seems wrong - now you're trying to put part of the path after the querystring.
This is the third or fourth post I've seen lately on "use the architeture of the web, don't fight it with client-side JS apps." I consider it a welcome swing of the pendulum.
Yes. Ask them. You can find start-ups pretty much anywhere (maybe try http://www.crunchbase.com/), they don't exactly try to stay invisible (especially if they have funding). I'm willing to bet if you sent in emails to 10 of them (personalised, pointing out how you know their stack) one of them will have stuff you can work on.

All that crap about 20-year old rockstars is just that - crap.
Drudge headline just linked to a similar article: http://news.yahoo.com/driving-somewhere-theres-govt-record-1...

It says the police cars can tag the location of 7K plates during a normal shift without burdening the officers at all. Doesn't sound like too much, but multiply that by about 10,000 (Chicagoland) and two shifts and it adds up fast.

Also here in Chicago, they have an "Open Road Tolling" system that grabs your plate # on the fly at 80 mph.

Then they mail you a ticket if the plate # doesn't match with a valid iPass (wireless box in most everyone's car).

The thing is, there's no way to tell which car in a group has the iPass - so they must have to run every plate thru their database and match it up with valid iPasses.

That means the Illinois tollway is grabbing and analyzing say 20 million plates and timestamps every day.

If all that data is stored indefinitely - wow.
My company transferred me to Texas. I'd probably still be there otherwise.
McDonald's employee budget journal asserts having a second job
Github: https://github.com/chjj/blessed and https://github.com/chjj/jitsu-ui
Yes I believe this could very well exist and I'd be happy using something like this. I thought about using WebSockets to send HTML/JS stuff down the pipe as the user navigates. Would cut some lagging due to how HTTP request are made and would decrease the load time.
Millions of Phonebook records stolen from Truecaller Database
Russian market is primarily prepaid.
Unless they have a very loose definition of smartphone or I'm missing something, it doesn't sound like anything is competitive with Android in Russia?
Given the success of well run hacker schools like Dev Bootcamp and Flatiron Schools, I am surprised no one has yet tried to apply that model to training data scientists. It seems like a sector similarly deprived of properly trained talent and also with a similar initial learning curve to develop the basic skill set.
This is a country which Apple has never found easy - notably,
Russia bans handset subsidies, making the iPhone an expensive
option for most customers.

The effect is exactly the opposite; those countries where phones are mainly subsidized have also the highest total cost of ownership and ARPU (average revenue per user). The subsidized phones aren't cheap, quite the opposite.

Carrier subsidized model should be ended to bring down consumer telecommunication costs. It only benefits the carriers.
I loved the "send a boy across the river" step.

I'm collecting a list of "things we did that you probably think are weird" to give to my son when he's older.

This kind of thing is going on the list. As are "party lines"[1] for telephones and me having to chop wood all year to have enough to get us through winter.

[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony))
Everhour Team | Our Startup Story
Launch rollout: "Here's a collaborative engine, to help you work and interact with others. Others who likely won't be able to use the product, because we'll make invitations rarer than six-leaf clovers until we pronounce 'failure to launch', kill the product, and then open it up more."
If you're on a Mac, try the Network Link Conditioner from the Hardware IO tools downloads in Apple Dev portal.

http://www.neglectedpotential.com/2012/05/slow-your-apps-rol...

PS. The sleep trick is helpful, but in addition to latency, you ideally want to experience packet loss and other weirdness.
I'm happy that the audio quality significantly improved from the first episode. But still Patrick is a lot quieter than Keith - which leads me to adjust volume constantly.

I don't know your setup, but maybe use a multi-track recording software and then adjust each speaker's track to match volume.
Windows doesn't run on top of DOS anymore, and with that, DOS Shell was deprecated in favor of the command emulator.
Soylentnaut
If, instead of being such a large amount, say it were twenty thousand dollars. Thinking that he had a generous benefactor, the recipient went on a shopping spree for ten thousand. Paypal, later determines that it was an error and wants the money back. What is the law with regard to this situation?

Aside: is it just me or does there appear to be a minus in from of the sum in the image?
For the Apple II Nerd: Program in BASIC on Your iPad
It's even easier to see how handy millions of wifi
passwords might come in handy if you already have the
information about the wifi networks you got from
war-driving (street view).

Do you have any idea what you're talking about?

Talk to a real live Googler (they exist!). Any one of them will tell you that:

(a) the war driving thing was one engineer's massive fuckup that was never wanted for any product, and the data was quickly quarantined (and only kept alive due to legal proceedings), and

(b) anything remotely close to nefarious conspiracy theories being posed for this .. sync protocol .. would never, ever pass peer review internally (let alone the flames of eng-misc).

User data confidentiality is one of (if not the most) serious topics within Google. Again, don't take my word for it, ask someone else.

To suggest that Google is collecting customer passwords for the express purpose of future network intrusion, or to share with spy agencies, is just ignorant.
Quite interesting. It gets easier as you teach your brain some tricks and gets the speed.
Oblig XKCD: http://xkcd.com/927/

I think also however that this post brings up a lot of good points. Specifically I feel it touches on a very important one subtly... we do have now a "web of data" even if it isn't exactly the W3C spec of such a thing, we still have one. Now what?
True, a dog that attacks a human is possibly dangerous.

Unfortunately many police forces have no training in dogs, and so officers don't know the difference between an aggressive attacking dog and a playful bouncing dog, and thus shoot them.

EDIT: It's especially unfortunate if the dog has been tasered and is safely caught in a noose at the end of a stick (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_22895415/police-dog-han...), or if the police have visited a family to tell them that their son has died, and then they shoot his dog while they're there. (http://www.timesdispatch.com/news/henrico-police-shoot-pet-a...)
Startup Weekend? Help
I have an idea that I want to take to start-up weekend with me in Seattle! The idea revolves around social encouragement mixed with different forms of social media. Can anyone offer some constructive advice (what to bring, best pitch practices, etc.) to get me prepared for the competition?
Thanks, I did not know about the results from biopsies of young and that was a good point about the quality of data just asking about how much people remember doing something like puzzles and games. I really enjoy this site thanks to the thoughtful comments, have a good one.
It varies country to country. That was the norm for Spain but has since changed, now you get two contracts, one for the service and another for the phone financing.

I pay 25/mo for my iPhone plus an 8/mo data plan. I don't do much calls but they're 8/c minute IIRC. I can move from a plan to another or cancel the data but the 25/mo will stay there until the phone it's paid.

It was 50€ cheaper to buy it this way than to pay full retail price.
Data vs Gut: How early products succeed
Singular they was covered on an episode [1] of Lexicon Valley, which might be enlightening to anyone who opposes its use (and interesting to pretty much anyone).

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2012/0...