skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Technical comment, ignoring the Paul Graham drama (which seems like a non-controversy to me):

English is definitely phonetically-inconsistent (it's almost funny how many different sounds vowels, diphthongs, etc. can make). I realized this a while ago, and suddenly felt sorry for people learning English.

However, to dismiss the difference between spoken English and "textbook English" as some problem endemic to the English language is superficial. Colloquial versions of languages are almost always different than what is taught in standard coursework.

Further, arrogantly claiming that English is broken because he, a non-native speaker, can't understand UK English is idiotic - I can barely understand a Caribbean Spanish accent, compared to a "textbook" Latin American one, but that doesn't mean Spanish is "broken." I can understand a UK accent pretty well, as can most native speakers.

Most languages have really weird problems and seem completely illogical (just from what I know personally, Russian has a phonology which can get complicated, due to the stress system), and mastering any of them is very difficult and usually sucks. It's been my experience that many people who tout the number of languages they know or claim to be a "polyglot" are actually very unskilled in day-to-day use of the language. No matter what you see in movies, a character who could intuitively speak, read and write 6 diverse languages on a colloquial level would be an exceptional human being.
Linux on the Desktop was a bug until Mark Cuban closed it (controversially). I'm not sure why referring to it as a bug is disturbing.
I love Coworking and even I help run a space here in Madison. I should've mentioned that as one of the major things that keeps me sane.
it looks like the request goes to the person who posted the photo first. presumably so that person can delete the photo without getting support involved. it looks like the problem was you could control the profile_id so it was different from the profile that owned the photo.
I think there is something else going on here. While it's plausible that different browsers may introduce some processing latency, we are definitely not talking about 100ms+ delays, or 30 to 8Mbit throughput drop. More likely.. try disabling your extensions, see if that helps. If that doesn't help, try creating a new profile.
I was surprised to see a multi-million dollar corporation (nameless) using wordpress. It's slow and bloated but I guess it gets the job done. Naturally they went to someone and said they needed a site, then that someone did what they do best and installed wordpress with some theme. Naturally when it came time to make certain changes or something broke the installer couldn't do anything about it. This is a B2B company and I doubt any sales come from their site so from a business point of view it's understandable how a cheap WP installation got there. However, in my experience it always turns out being more expensive down the road. There's money to be made with broken wordpress installations and moving sites off wordpress altogether.
>Given the high dropout rate of anyone attempting to learn programming

Its about the same as any other major. I googled around and found the 1999 cohort for Southeast Louisiana University (no particular reason, just google found it easily...) and they tracked freshmen's declared major and what they actually graduated with, if anything, after six years.

In comp sci, it is true that 93% of self declared freshman comp sci majors failed to achieve a BSCS degree within six years aka dropped out (well, at least dropped out of the BSCS program..)

Before you start cheering, lets check some other stats. In the school of nursing, 88% dropped out. In accounting, 83% dropped out. In criminal justice 93% dropped out. In psychology, 90% dropped out. CS is only a couple percentage points harder. I don't see how you can justify from an engineering perspective reporting so many sig figs when the sample size is so small. For all practical purposes, the dropout rate for all majors is about 85%, and none are much higher or lower.

Its pretty unusual not to switch majors. (Pointless Anecdote Time) I didn't go to the particular school listed above, but I was a ChemEng in my freshman year and eventually (took awhile) graduated with a BSCS and almost enough EE classes to double major (which is partially why it took so long).
For the last 5 years , or even more it has slowed considerably. Nvidia even claimed in a famous article that next generation manufacturing processes have no price benefit.
I have seen 55 - 65k for ~1 year experience in NYC.
75 - 100k+ for 3 years experience in NYC.
The thing is, BBC or other foreign media always push things like this in a way that Vietnam Government is against "human rights", and "freedom"... From my point of view, they just want to attack Vietnam Government and make it look bad, by telling half-truth. This is not the first time.
My English is not good enough to give you a clear understanding about that law, but it's not about "prevent people to discuss what is being done by the government".
The exact word could be more close to "bring down the government", and that I think no government in the world let someone do that "in freedom". I dont say Vietnam Gov is good, but at least they are not that bad to bring down right now. All the people that "oppose" Vietnam Gov always close to "bring down", and tell half-truth or lying, and related to foreign countries.
So I am fine with that part of the law.
The other parts are about management, providing and using Internet services and information.
Certainly in the UK, 'or' and 'awe' or very similar. But I'm pretty sure the same is true across the states. The 'awe' in 'awe, shucks' is not even really a word, just a sympathetic utterance in the same sort of class as 'um' and 'aaah', so I don't think it has an official spelling, just a phonetic approximation. It is certainly distinct from the word 'awe' that's the root of 'awesome'.

Edit: I meant to point out that I have never seen 'awe, shucks' written before, always 'ah' or 'aww', but I can see how it might be written that way based on a Midwestern accent.
Good comment, but I have to disagree with it.

The web and app stores are extensions of google/apple etc. There's people making money across the country and around the world.

The difference between auto workers and programmers is that programmers are not workers, but 'inventors'.

A better comparison is mechanical engineers in the 50s and programmers today.

Good mechanical engineers designed or started factories, and there was so much work that the backlog has still not been filled even today. The same can be said for programmers today.

There is the 'creative class' and everyone else. The true creatives never had a problem finding work, and that's the real 'education crisis'. Far too many 'creatively illiterate' being churned out by our failed education system.
Sounds like we need a couple more Snowden's to come out from NSA.
Introducing Examples, a behavioral testing library for Go
Well an production line's efficiency is defined by how well the line is engineered - the humans are effectively fleshy robots.

Though there are/where a lot of "spanish practices" in traditional engineering.
Aren't you guys using the economic definition of 'best' as in best = brings_in_the_most_money_per_unit_of_time_expended
> Other than kernel-integrated UI, its NT core is micro-kernel by design.

Care to elaborate on the kernel-integrated UI. That seems like a weird place to break from a micro-kernel design.
So your comments have nothing to do with testing in clojure or even code level automated testing in general, and this is just you telling 'most developers' that you think they should work with QA more?
how much does 3/4 years at a tier 1 college cost these days
Como cuidar y limpiar el hígado
Is this:

def fibonacci(max=Float::INFINITY)
# ...
while i < max
# ...
end
end

better than this:

def fibonacci(max=nil)
# ...
while max && i < max
# ...
end
end

?
(genuine question)
The vehicle industry covers a lot of verticals. You've got your cars and motorbikes for consumers. Your 18-wheelers that stock large retailers. Your smaller trucks for home deliveries. Pickup trucks and vans for tradespeople. Special logging trucks and refrigerated trucks and vehicle transporters. Backhoes and bulldozers and oil tankers and cranes and RVs and quadbikes. Look around you right now - if it isn't air or water, chances are it travelled on a vehicle to get to you.

And that's just vehicles that travel on the roads, there's also rail air and water vehicles.

Covering a lot of verticals does not exempt you from price competition.
Facebook should make a "Hack Me" profile for people to mess with, so they don't have to use Zuckerberg's instead.
There are a lot of well-understood techniques to get around this problem, FYI - from "How To Win Friends And Influence People" onward.

For example, you could ask questions about the interests of the person you're talking to - "Really? I've not listened to much Miley Cyrus, I must admit. Which of her CDs would you recommend?". You could draw parallels between their entertainment and yours - "Yeah, we spent a lot of the afternoon watching video too! How was the football?". You could sympathise with any complaints they're making - "Aww, man, you're having to do this meeting hung over? That sucks. Can I grab you some water or something?".

It's definitely a problem, though, agreed - and it's something that's very worth thinking about if you're doing business cross-culturally.
https://www.facebook.com/whitehat/accounts/
Why JavaScript Will Become the Dominant Programming Language of the Enterprise
It also depends on which British people you speak to - I don't pronounce those words like that.
The Economist:

>Does the NSA have a quantum computer in the basement of its headquarters in Maryland (pictured above)? It is theoretically possible, but pretty unlikely...

A Canadian firm called D-Wave is presently selling a specialised kind of quantum computer—Lockheed Martin, an American defence giant, and Google have each bought one—but it is not suitable for this kind of work.

In-Q-Tel - "About Us"

>"We make investments in startup companies that have developed commercially-focused technologies that will provide strong, near-term advantages (within 36 months) to the IC mission. We design our strategic investments to accelerate product development and delivery for this ready-soon innovation, and specifically to help companies add capabilities needed by our customers in the Intelligence Community.

"D-Wave Systems, Inc., the World's First Commercial Quantum Computing Company, Secures $30 Million in a New Equity Round From Investors Including Bezos Expeditions and In-Q-Tel" [0]

"Burnaby, BC - Milpitas, CA - October 4, 2012 -
D-Wave Systems, Inc. today announced that it has closed a $30 million round of equity funding. Bezos Expeditions and In-Q-Tel (IQT) have joined the investment round. Bezos Expeditions is the personal investment company of Jeff Bezos. IQT is the strategic investment firm that delivers innovative technology solutions in support of the missions of the U.S. Intelligence Community."

[0] http://www.dwavesys.com/en/pressreleases.html#investment_201...
Somewhat misleading title. No answers, just more questions on the topic.
Never assume anything about names. Never attempt to validate them. It is probably a good edge case (depending on the system in question).

I think a sibling comment has mentioned this, but it deserves repeating (http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...)
The Baby and the Baath Water
For what its worth i made a tool a while back that takes a big image and makes a bunch of sizes for you as well as the code etc.

I've not touched it in over a year but it still gets used every now and again.

http://allthefavicons.com/
One of the "nice" things about the NSA: they rely on pretty standard crypto--the same kind the rest of us do!--for their less sensitive, but still classified, secrets. NSA Ciphersuite B (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_B_Cryptography) is built into a lot of gov/mil communications technology. And it's just RSA, ECDHE, and so on--all that same stuff available in TLS.

In other words: if the NSA break one of these "public" algorithms, you'll be able to tell; they'll soon be picking new Suite B ciphers. (There will be a time-delay, but not of the intentional "let's capture+break foreign transmissions before scaring them away from this cipher" kind. Re-securing our own transmissions takes priority, always. Even if it was broken because of some "quantum leap"--pardon the pun--we have to assume our enemies are advancing their own tech at roughly the same rate, so if we can crack it, they can too.)
This article does a few things that make it seem poorly written. First, there's the sentence "But, analysing a particular colossal number and trying to determine whether it possesses prime factors is colossally difficult."
No, it's not difficult to determine whether a large number has prime factors. The answer to that question is yes. Determining which prime numbers are factors is extremely hard, and what they should have said.

Second, they use an example from GCHQ's public key cryptography work rather than the more relevant NSA work on differential cryptanalysis, which became public knowledge in the late 1980s, was discovered by IBM in 1974, and which the NSA was already "well aware of" in 1974 [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis#His...
I would argue that software engineers do have a long hard road to becoming successful much like a doctors or lawyers however in most cases it's been amortized over their life using computers and much of it driven by the desire to learn rather then the requirements of some degree. I would go one step further and say that if you pick any random person off the street and throw them into a college CS program the vast majority would not do well even if they were very intelligent, there is a certain personality type required to excel in writing code if you're not good at concentrating on a single task for hours at a time well I'm sure there is something else out there for you. Also lets not forget that finishing a degree does not make a good engineer, shipping production software does and that is not something you can learn in 9 weeks or even four years at college. The lower end jobs may get tighter as time goes on but I don't see an "Auto Workers" type future until Skynet gets off the ground (Machine Learning FTW>?)
Stages of Attractiveness In Approaching Potential Partners
I don't see how either example supports your argument.

If Bolt had pursued cricket, rather than athletics, he would have looked different, too, but that does not mean he isn't a genetically good fit for a sprinter. Now, if you had a pair of identical twins where both trained identically, weren't hit by different strokes of luck/misfortune, but got wildly different physique, that would have been an argument.

As to your second argument, the fact that we do not know what genetic makeup makes a fast sprinter does not imply that there is no genetic makeup that makes a fast sprinter.
Indeed.. but honestly, I'm not hopeful. I would have thought that shenangians on the level going on in the NSA (for as long as they've been at it) would have led to more conscience-burdened folks blowing the whistle either in public as Snowden did, or more covertly.

But who knows. Maybe Snowden emboldened a few people who will be able to shine some light on these things in a more quiet manner.
Why? Because the government doesn't deserve to have any secret programs whatsoever? I've said it before and I'll say it again: Even if leaking XKeyscore and PRISM was morally justified, leaking the intelligence budget or leaking other programs is probably unwise. Remember that when we talk about leaking, we're talking about weakening the American government. We should at least think about the implications.
Catholic -> Catholicism is my favorite.

Even as a thoroughly American monolingual English speaker, I didn't get that until high school. The stress moves from the first to the second syllable thanks to the addition of a suffix two syllables distant. God help a non-native speaker trying to understand why that happens; I'm not even sure I do.
All valid points, but you were comparing a world median with a U.S. average. Surely comparing two medians (or two averages) would be more appropriate. For example, one could establish a median "poverty level" representing the point below which 25% of Americans fall (or another percentage on which people agree). That might be more enlightening.

It would be interesting to know how many Americans fall above and below the average represented by the poverty threshold, i.e. using a straightforward count -- more in keeping with using a median measure.

> yet the term "poor" keeps getting revised upwards into historical levels of luxury.

I agree with that point, entirely. I also think it's bizarre that so many people end up being defined by absence of an arbitrary property -- homeless person, childless couple, unemployed worker -- which to me seems an underhanded way to enforce social conformity.
My comment did not make a direct comparison between a craftsman and a programmer in terms of absolute difficulty and height of entrance, and neither do I claim an oblique equality in terms of capability for everybody. What I do question, however, is the grandparent's insistence that critical thinking and continues learning are what makes a programmer special.

I agree that more mathematically inclined people will be better programmers when it comes to harder areas, however, that is a question of ability and preference, like language or manual skills, not one of a fundamentally special disposition. Somebody who is mathematically inclined might become a banker, or a programmer, or a physicist or any other profession out of a myriad of possibilities. The same, however, goes for any other form of abilities and inclinations, somebody who is "good at languages" might become an author, PR person, translator or whatever else he/she wants. Somebody who is manually inclined equally has many different professions to choose from.

None of that is something I fundamentally question. The original article, however, makes a good point when it explains why developers are in a relatively good position: People will go were there is money to be made. That goes for language people (e.g. translation on a state-level), for manual people (e.g. mechanic on oil rigs or in mining) or mathematics people (e.g. programmers or finance).

Not everybody can or will become a developer, but there is no magical ingredient that keeps people from going into software who are capable to do so but might choose other jobs for a myriad of other reasons.
Income Gap Grows Wider (and Faster)
Autoworkers used to earn a decent salary, now it is programmers; Wow, now you need to have a degree in order to be somebody. And in a hundred years you will absolutely need to have a PhD in order to make ends meet ?

Maybe its all about supply and demand: only rare skills are worth something; if the once valued skills get common then all the advantages go out of the window (tm).
Breaking public-key crypto would have to be the biggest coup in SIGINT in the history of ever. Much bigger than cracking the Enigma. Just thinking about the sheer volume of internet traffic at every level and in every country that relies on the security of encryption makes the possibility of it being fundamentally broken a literal nightmare.

I don't think it has happened. But if it had, that would be the kind of secret that would go in the President's book of secrets right along with the existence of National Treasure or the Men in Black. :P Snowden would never have a clue.
Mutex Nintendo
Accent and dialect are distinct. Maybe it's because I was born in Scotland, spent my teenage years in the English midlands and north, now live in London and watch TV from the states, but I've never met an English speaker whose accent I had difficulty understanding. And that includes all the heavily accented (although generally second-gen) immigrants I've met.

Dialect on the other hand means words I don't know the definition of, and sometimes there isn't enough context to intuit it.
But in away this is always been with us.

Before ww2 in some technical fields you more or less had to learn German as that where a lot of the research was done - in chemistry it was effectively mandatory.

Before that a natural philosophers had to learn/know Latin.
The exploit is easy, but the implications are very dangerous. Such an exploit could have been automated to take down hundreds of photos before it was even detected.
No. He has been done with that for years. He is happy where he is. The leader of the board.
This is a complicated issue, and I think you are confusing things a bit. Of course, for a gene to take an effect (produce a protein) it has to be activated via a certain chain of chemical reactions that is triggered by environmental conditions. So, sure, genes give widely different results depending on the environment of the organism. In professional competitive sports however we have a large group of people that undergo really similar stimulus. They all train the same discipline, follow similar training regimes, eat really well etc. To think that in such situation genes do not play a huge role is I think naive in the light of what we know about biology. I also don't see what your examples have to do with it, really.

By the way, I find it a bit silly that those articles about genetic differences concentrate on sports so much. Somehow it is much easier for people to swallow that our bodies are shaped by our genes, that it is to accept that a large part of our mental makeup is as well, despite strong scientific evidence for it. For the same reason I think any notion of "fairness" in this context meaningless, genes make every one of us who we are and we have vastly different capabilities concerning all activities, from chess playing, through math problem solving, to sports and entrepreneurship. There is no fairness at all in any human activity.
Syrian Waves: An examination of the U.S.'s response to Assad's chemical weapons
It implies that privacy is somehow wrong, as opposed to a perhaps fundamental right.
yes. The first one does what it's intended to, the second plain fails :)

Voice-of-Evening:~ $ irb
irb(main):001:0> max=Float::INFINITY
=> Infinity
irb(main):002:0> i = 0
=> 0
irb(main):003:0> i < max
=> true
irb(main):004:0> max = nil
=> nil
irb(main):005:0> max && i < max
=> nil

The second version will only provide any result when a specific max value was given, while the first one will loop into infinity.
>You already can do it. Canvas, WebGL, SVG, and a bunch of 2D and 3D libraries.

Sure, and you can even do it with a brainfuck to js transpiler.

But I think he meant do it EASILY, without first hacking a full GUI stack from a 2D/3D primitives library.