skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Minor correction:

... still lack any educational curriculum.

Plenty of preparation for institutional living and blind obedience to authority. Education? Eh who needs it, we have standardized tests to prep for. Unfortunately it seems citizens and college students need education. Whoops.
NSA 'spied on communications' of Brazil and Mexico presidents
>Are you saying that the fact the NSA spies on every country on the planet hitting CBS news changes anything?

Of course it does. Public disclosure changes things. Even things that everybody "just knew" went on, act differently on public discussion when they take front scene.

>Everybody knows the NSA spies on everybody, anybody who doesn't or expects otherwise is hopelessly naive.

Well, tell it to the "hopelessly naive" people on HN that for years maintained otherwise.
I prefer this version, if only for the spiritual component:

http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg.html
This is a problem with most professions though; most people feel they learnt something (in or outside of the educational system) for years and they are automatically entitled to a job for life.

As a programmer I try to have enough hobbies which can be used to make money; making/selling icecream (made enough with that this summer for 7 month of living including the working months), making/selling beer, making/selling cheese, welding, creating little RVs out of normal vans, electronics... And that is next to me not seeing anyone 'hacking a bit of WP' replacing any but mediocre coders anyway.
If you wrongly entrust your partner, you might be cheated.

If you wrongly entrust another country, millions of persons might die.

Different consequences, different rules.
Totally. I used to see those types of headlines in magazines that my sisters would read. Like "10 things that will make him crazy for you" etc. (I won't even get into the all the weight loss ones).
Chances are, if this system exists it will be accessible by only a very small number of people and kept a secret from the others with obfuscation and compartmentalization. So we'd need a very specific leaker out of a small group of people. It would be akin to hoping we'll see the secrets of the "nuclear football".

Now one day over-the-counter quantum computers will probably become a reality. In that age we'll see more information on it because the secret will be no secret at all.
>> Node.js has over 30,000 modules available

how many of these are over a year old? how well maintained are they? how battle proven? how well is v8 going to be maintained 10, 15 years from now? can we buy an extended support contract for v8 from Google?

these are also questions people in enterprise want to know. how well does it interact with our existing CLR/JVM stack that we've used for the last 10 years?

I have never been convinced by the "writing server side and client side code in the same language is good" argument, different jobs require different tools. Someone once said of this:

'you know how to use a knife, so you bring a knife to a modern war fought with guns, tanks, and missiles while shouting "at least I can use the same tools when I eat and when I fight! I save so much time!" before somehow managing to shoot yourself in the foot anyway.'
as far as i understand it, ciphertext is indistinguishable from random text. and, afaik, this is true of all modern algos. so, how do you notice they switched? you don't.

you only notice once they call upon the more public parts of gov to switch to another 'secure' algo. also, NSA themselves probably use the Suite A algos that we know batshit about.

but, reality check: THIS IS ALL SPECULATION. there is no evidence that they have broken anything.
What Google glass aspires to be
IMHO, it's not which accents are strong enough. It's the baggage that an accent brings. Yes, people pattern match an accent but not just the words. For example, the content of what a woman with a strong French accent says will be diluted with thoughts of sexiness instead of being taken seriously (except Christine Lagarde :-)). In this sense, the validity of PG's claim is not cut and dry. There are other factors.
Ballmer is a casualty of the personal computer’s rapid decline
do you consider taxis as public transport ?

I would like to say no, but I do see the need for personal transport on occasion. I would need to think this through more, but I notice that in my local city, the place is awash in taxis - I think the numbers would have to be regulated better and people encouraged to use buses/trams/trains/bikes instead. Ideally, the public transport would be (somehow.. I admit) set up so that the need for individual point to point transport would only rarely be required...

Of course, this is easier said than done!
Crop pests and pathogens move polewards in a warming world
And if you select those extremely tall Japanese people and transplant them to the United States, they will be far more likely to find success in basketball than if they had stayed in Japan. The Japanese culture (assuming) does not value basketball as a sport. Being in Japan, those athletes won't have the chance to develop their skills to the degree that they would elsewhere.

Yes, it could be said that the Japanese do not value basketball because they have historically not found success in it on the international scale, which would be because of their genetic predisposition to being shorter than even the Chinese. Genetics shape culture and culture can reinforce genetics. But it's not all about genetics. That's my entire point: there is no single variable that can claim why Kenyans run so well. But people want to say that it's genetics that make a good marathoner. That's just not the case, it takes both genetics and environment.

This is not a novel concept, but for some reason when it comes to lay people talking on the internet about sports, they don't want to admit it. The world is complex, there are shades of grey, nothing is black and white.
jobs@gaiagps.com
Listen to audio books. Problem solved.
If php were british:
The author constructs a ridiculous false dichotomy of tallists vs shortists as a comparison for libertarianism vs statism to say that you cannot equate non-libertarian views with statist views. However, he immediately follows this by stating that some American Libertarians believe government can do no right and private industry can do no wrong.

The author is confusing the central tenet of libertarianism with a false dichotomy of the author's own construction between government and private enterprise. The primary goal of libertarianism is individual liberty. Each person should be able to live their life as he or she chooses without having force used against their person to coerce them to do things they otherwise would not do.

To interpret some American Libertarians views as 'all government is bad and all private industry is good' shows an incredible amount of naiveté. The author is inferring a general principle from specific arguments having missed the primary point. The reason you see so many specific arguments against government and for private industry in the modern day USA is not because anyone believes that government is inherently wrong but rather because what the government provides must necessarily be provided by the use of force. The government's chief source of income is taxation which is the application of force to private citizens to extract money.

Most libertarians support the government providing a few limited key services such as national defense and operating a police force. Where you see libertarians start balking at government services is when they reach out beyond the scope of protecting an individual from the use of force by another. In so expanding its scope, the government becomes that which it was created to defend against.
It seems there was a "shortage" of American cleaners willing to work for what employers were willing to pay (nothing, if possible), so they had to be imported. Similarly, it seems there's a shortage of qualified programmers in Silicon Valley. Good thing FWD.us and the like are working on solving that problem!
The original seems fair enough to me. Are you insisting that the entire car is melted into a puddle before the title can leave the 'parts' bit out?
Yep, and that's were it gets very expensive very fast and that's also were 'cheap' programmers cannot help at all. I have 3 friends who quit their jobs and went into website creation. They make simple sites based on WP and make nice money with it. They look mostly horrible but clients can talk to them on their level and feel comfortable. These sites go between E1500-2500 per site. Now when anything breaks / doesn't work / has issues, they have to hire someone to fix it and they have to trust this person; in most cases, the cost of fixing/adding on by this 'more capable' person is more expensive than the site was in the first place. So it's a good market for capable coders / admins to dive into. Optimizing, securing, fixing, extending. All money makers far beyond the boring setup of the initial site.
RIM tried the same thing with the Playbook... We all know how well that worked
Epic Fail Selfies of All Time (25 Photos)
Is there any long-range order? For example, am I allowed to deduce from the layout that mathematical physics is "the" bridge between condensed matter and high energy physics? Would I also be able to use this graph to plan my career (e.g. working on topics located at strategic points)?
I wonder if this is Jaguar specific or because it was an aluminium monocoque. But I would hope that Jaguar would have something to say about this. Especially since one carrying dick van dyke went up in flames. And especially since i have one and am now a tad worried.

Also < £1k for those repairs sounds very very low.
Will there be support for languages other than Javascript?

Also, are you planning on wrapping native GUI/forms elements or rendering your own via your abstract drawing layer (or both)?
>Can you make an IC without understanding quasiparticles?

Yes you can, in the same way that you can build a telescope without understanding quantum mechanics. And you think we understand quasiparticles?

I do see your point though, however spurious it may be. His claim was that companies never come up with major innovations. My response was that they do, and that they do it so often that his claim was laughable on its face. "Knowledge genesis" occurs at the confluence of motivated individuals and funding, which can happen anywhere.
Would PG (or his predecessor silicon valley VC) have made the same comment about strong accents 30 years ago? I don’t think so. For one, the diffusion of Americanisms (idioms, accent etc.) were weaker and founders had stronger accents. It would be inconceivable to say this in public. To me this signifies, perhaps, a shift in the valley from investing in technology heavy companies toward more consumer branded companies. What I mean by this is if I look at Andy Grove and Intel (30 years ago), I don’t think his accent prevented him from being successful. However today you need someone who is more US market oriented. Maybe in 10 years Silicon Valley turns into a modern day Madison Avenue, where it is filled predominantly with marketing/adverting type people who have mastered the medium of Internet and smartphones. They spend their time trying to get people to buy ‘stuff’.

As for people who are standing behind PG’s statement, just look outside your window. The US has had a number of immigrants who came to this country and did not speak a single word of English. Yes, they did not speak English forget about a strong accent – who built successful businesses. I think that is great. Somehow lack of the right accent didn't prevent them from interacting with customers/vendors etc. Also, most businesses are international and you can’t expect to master the local accent and idioms everywhere. Does Tim Cook have Chinese accent, or German accent? Last I checked the iPhone is selling quite well in China and Germany. The idea that you need the right accent and master the local idioms to do business makes no sense today where your major customers are half a world away. You partner and figure things out. Having the right accent is not the top or even important in that list. PG is a great guy but he slipped big time this one time.
My favorite part:

would_you_mind {
// Code here
} actually_i_do_mind (Exception £e) {
// Politely move on
cheerio('Message');
}

Clearly this is not a programming language for canadians... (they are too kind to throw this kind of an exception)
9 Things You can do with Chrome, apart from browsing
I don't always seize my means of production.

Why not?
There will be another distinguishing mark on programmers. Those that can write their own code and those that can fumble the pieces of other's code together to create a product.

There will be a lot more of the latter in the future than there has ever been.
Who the hell offered a fresh grad with only a BA in philosophy a development position with a salary of 180k!?
>Has anyone changed their opinion on Edward Snowden?

Certainly not.

>There is a difference between this, and exposing potential crimes toward the American people by the NSA.

Yes. The difference is that this assumes that other countries are people too, and they should also have a right to privacy, instead of just caring for his own people.

>Now he seems to be attempting to embarrass and weaken US-interests as much as possible.

Well, they can always stop.
Who said Mexico and Brazil are friends of the US? Mexico and Brazil both represent significant economic threats to the U.S. And Brazil's fast growing economy and military power, with a population 2/3s that of the U.S. and unbelievably vast untapped natural resources will likely continue to skew the center of power in the Americas south. Brazil is now a larger economic power than the UK and a hair behind France if that puts things into perspective. Brazil has the largest and most powerful military force in Latin America that includes limited deep water force projection capabilities.

Mexico is a larger economy than South Korea. It's a "partner" in the war on drugs and is the major conduit for illicit drugs entering the US. It's military is supplied by countries that aren't necessarily "friends" of the US, it has a reputation for rampant corruption and out of control criminal enterprises. And oh yeah it shares one of the longer land borders with the U.S. and unbelievable number of Mexican citizens skirt border checkpoints in one of the largest human migrations in history that will inevitably result in massive cultural, economic and political changes in the U.S.

I'm not upset about these things, it's just the nature of changing times. But thinking that the U.S. and Brazil and Mexico and special BFFs and wouldn't ever, under any circumstances even do super secret double probation spying of any sort on each other has no other word than naive to describe it.

> And, am I not a grown up for seriously being angry about all this then?

Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm saying. Welcome to the very scary, duplicitous, wretched grown up world where friendship is only out of beneficial convenience and allies work to subvert each other while still trying to achieve mutual goals.

When you start getting sad about this, instead of angry, then you've grown up.
"Hired to serve", but it brings to mind the following quote from Noam Chomsky, regarding who is being served:

"Governments should not have this capacity. But governments will use whatever technology is available to them to combat their primary enemy -- which is their own population,"
So, rather than having two basically identical candidates every other election, we'd have two basically identical candidates every election.

I'm not seeing any possible way this could improve anything. In pretty much any way.

So you go into the restaurant and and she says 'coke or pepsi'. You want lemonade, so you send a message by alternating between coke and pepsi each time you go there. That's not gonna work wonders at getting lemonade on the menu. Doesn't matter which of two "choices" you pick, you're going to be stuck with over sweetened corn syrup cola either way.
Professional athletes all (well with the exception of primadonna athletes) work as absolutely hard as they possibly can. If there were a way to work harder to have a better chance victory, they would.

That seems very obviously not true, unless by "primadonna athletes" you mean "the vast majority of athletes". Athletes face opportunity costs just like the rest of us, and different athletes come to different priorities. They aren't robots.

For instance, stories about pro athletes coming to training camp out of shape are very common. An article I recently read about Andre Miller comes to mind. Andre Miller is a basketball player that most would say fits the archetype of "wily veteran" rather than "primadonna". How does he train? http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/15542/the-secrets...

"I have no regimen," Miller says. After the season ends, so does Miller's working out -- no weights, no cardio, no nothing. "I really don't pick up a basketball." Eating right also falls by the wayside. "(My diet) isn't healthy at all," Miller says. "Hamburgers, hot links on the Fourth of July, all that." To control his weight, however, Miller uses old-fashioned discipline. "I starve myself," he says. Seriously? "Yeah, I'm just starting to learn about calories and all that."

Yep, that's the guy who owns the active NBA record for consecutive games played. And he competes against players like Kobe Bryant and Steve Nash who are famous for their impeccable training regimens.

Another example... literally every female athlete who gets pregnant is hurting her chances for victory. Yet tons of them do it.
Do you know anything about the comparable economic stability of these communities? Do you know anything about their own cultural differences?

People in my hometown love baseball. The next town over they love football. My hometown has never produced a professional or semi-pro football player, and the next town over has never produced a professional or semi-pro baseball player. But they each have had one or two people at least show up on the rosters of a professional team in their favorite sports. That's a difference of 11 miles, with highly mobile people who do intermarry between towns.

There can be significant enough differences in the culture of particular communities to allow for varying sports values. I would expect smaller towns to tend to emphasize one sport over all others, to the point that the townspeople in large part will live and breath that sport in a way that people in larger communities with more diverse sports options would not.
There is no protection to uplift you from poverty if the value of flesh bodies performing unskilled tasks isn't worth what it costs to keep you alive.

And how does BI fix this? Now instead of paying people for doing less work than it costs to keep them alive, you're paying people for doing no work. That makes the problem worse, not better.

The only way to fix this problem is to have the people do more valuable tasks, so that what they are doing actually is worth more, and therefore merits higher pay. BI does nothing towards achieving that, and in fact probably does the opposite, on net.

you don't have to fear exploitation of the workforce if people are employed to meet their wants and not their needs

This is a serious misstatement, because if there are people who are creating less value than they are receiving in BI (which is what your statements imply), there must also be people who are creating more value than they are receiving through BI. That must be true because, for BI to work at all, the total value being created must be at least as much as the value of BI for one person times the number of people in the society. Otherwise the whole system doesn't work, because there isn't enough value being created to fund it.

So consider the position of a person who is creating more value than the value of BI per person, and then sees a significant portion of that value taken away from him and given to people who are creating less value than the value of BI per person. Why, exactly, would that person not have a strong incentive to either (a) create less value, since it's not going to him anyway; or (b) figure out a way to game the system so it seems like he's creating less value than he actually is, and pocketing the difference--i.e., exploiting the people who are creating less value than he is?

I'm sure there are plenty of people who would not choose (a) or (b) in this situation; but I think there are also plenty who would. And it wouldn't take too many of them to destroy the system.
It sounds to me a little bit like Qt Quick (ie QML + JS + remote QML files + Canvas + SVG) with WebGL added on[1], perhaps designed a little more specifically for remote files than Qt Quick is.

I really like Qt Quick, so this seems interesting too.

[1] Qt Quick supports OpenGL ES (the entire QML rendering system is written as an OpenGL-based scene graph), but I don't think you can make direct OpenGL calls without dropping to C++... You can add shaders to components from within QML though.
I see your point, but nowadays English is not merely yet another foreign language, in a way it belongs to people of all over the world by right of their contribution to universal English-speaking culture (think Vladimir Nabokov or Linus Torvalds).
Today Runglish (flavour of English spoken by those whose mother tongue is Russian) is nothing but derogatory term, but some day, when most of Russians will know English well enough, we are going to start to skip articles out of pure pride.
Syria crisis: MPs 'right to reject military action' - BBC poll
Halal Groceries same day Delivery
I saw quite a few people revisit their decision about not owning a car post hurricane sandy. Zipcar etc are well and good for everyday use but good luck for peak usage scenarios during natural disasters.
When Stalking Steve Wozniak Pays Off
He is doing a workshop (southern oregon / not online) next month - as part of the "Rogue Rails Workshop & Conference" - see http://www.roguerails.com/ - maybe this is the direction he will head in going forward?
You honestly think programming will become such a vital skill in everyone's job that it'll be taught along side reading and math to young children?

Even at the high school level students are forced to learn algebra and calculus but they don't really learn it. They memorize a few formula and apply them on tests but how many people can even take a simple derivative a few years after leaving school? Just cause someone took high school calc doesn't mean they're challenging for the jobs of mathematicians.
Syrian Electronic Army Suspected of Marines Website Hack
Unnamed semaphores and OS X
Of course that's the key point of the essay, but I've never observed that anyone who says "There's no silver bullet in productivity" has made it past the desire to misuse the title of a Fred Brooks essay to support a middlebrow dismissal to the nuance of distinguishing between accidental and essential complexity.

After all, much of programming culture is stuck on the idea that the clarity of syntax of a programming languages to novices is more important to maintainability of programs written in that language than domain knowledge, for example.