skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I read the title, I thought this would be a blog post about what would theoretically happen if a teacher were to teach naked. Would students pay attention? Would they view their teachers more as equals? I'm not going to describe my reaction as I read the post, because it would likely be insulting.

What would a male professor do if a male student joking wrote they should teach naked? If they were conservative, they might be offended that the student wasn't taking the opportunity to provide actual feedback - a reasonable reaction. If the male professor were more liberal, they wouldn't even think about it - put it off as that the student didn't want to fill out the form in the first place - another reasonable reaction. I'm not saying that no female professor would choose to react in these ways, but since the blog post is obviously written by a [radical] feminist, I'm giving a more contrasting viewpoint.
Привед, а как пишется "код"?

(Spoiler: "код" (code) is pronounced the same as "кот" (cat) but spelled differently.)
Huh, it looks like the api is ignoring the gender option entirely. It seems to return a random gender no matter what the value of the gender parameter ....
Looks useful, thanks for the link. In case its news to you, with iOS7, a few more suggested dimensions have been introduced than what is available on allthefavicons.com at the moment. More details at the cheatsheet.
I like your metaphor up to the point where I manage to shoot myself in the foot with a knife.
I would add my friend's hpy - which ket you write in Hebrew (compiles into python) http://nirs.freeshell.org/hpy/
By adding "parts" to the submission title, at least we're still talking about a subset of the car.

Can't say the same for "rumor."
My rather simplistic view: as a native Portuguese speaker, I strongly refute the idea of programming languages (and even coding) in a language other than English. Besides the obvious reasons (globalized world, outsourcing, multinational corporations, etc), English is much less expressive than the Romance languages [1], which makes it a better formal language.

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages
Before starting, let me say that I've found this conversation very interesting. Thank you for participating in it with me.

I discounted it for several reasons.

1) There's no corroborating evidence that the population was that high. I haven't found anything more than "sparse", but http://www.sharprazor.com/palma-history.htm gives some of the history of La Palma:

> The Guanches named their island Benahoare, and divided it into 12 kingdoms, each with its own ruler. Estimates of the Guanche population at the time of the conquest range from 1200 to over 4000.

La Palma is over twice as big as El Hierro (708.32 km2 vs. 278 km2) and it seems to support better agriculture and easier access to the sea. I find it difficult to believe that the population density of El Hierro was at least 4x more than that La Palma, when the best I can find is that the population of El Hierro was "sparse."

2) The numbers I see for modern fog harvesting are about 5 liters per square meter per day. The account says that a tree could fill 20,000 tuns/day, which is about 20 million liters. This needs about 4 million square meters. Assuming an 80 meter high tree and 32 meters across (the size of a larger redwood tree) gives a cross section of 2,500 sq. meters. There's no way these numbers are close to compatible.

3) Let's assume the tree can capture an excess of 1 liter per sq. meter cross section, even though there's no evidence that any tree can do that. Let's assume also that a single tree has a cross section of 2,500 sq. meters. That's 2,500 liters per day. Not bad, but people need about 2 liters per day as a minimum - and more if they do much activity. Even in this unlikely and extreme case, that's only enough to provide basic water needs for 1,000 people.

The WHO says "a minimum of 7.5 litres per capita per day will meet the requirements of most people under most conditions", so that's 330 people. And no animals.

(Another estimate is to look at the amount of water in fog. A cloud has about 0.5 g of water/cubic meter. However, this is too complex for me to figure out, because I don't know how much water you can extract with fog mining, I don't know what a tree or other plant can extract, I don't the wind speed, and I don't know the capture area.)

4) Why use lead pipes to lead to the cistern? Since clay is good enough for the cisterns, what's the advantage of using lead for those pipes?

Since each individual detail is not trustworthy, I find it hard to put any faith in the overall account. How are you certain that it isn't a tall tale, with little to no basis in reality?
My favorite title of all time is Tim Ferriss's "How to Learn but not Master any Language in 1 Hour". All others are merely vying for disingenuous second place. I guess it is all about marketing your blog posts.
Were would the money needed for BIG come from? Increased taxes on the rich?

And why Medicare and Medicaid would cost so much in the future?
The most advanced math a quantum computer has done to date is "factored 21 into 3×7, with high probability (Martín-López et al. 2012)."

Remember: companies are in the game of marketing hype to ride your scifi hopes and dreams. When you see a company saying "quantum" anything, discount their unqualified claims greatly. (Investors are not immune to being manipulated by hype. Claiming "they must be good because they have fancy investors!" provides no more weight to their ability than a hobo claiming he keeps the airplane aloft by snapping his fingers every 3.2 seconds.)
Tell me more about how the non-aggression principle absolves you of any social responsibility. You didn't earn your money in a vacuum outside of society, you earned it with the implicit knowledge that you will be taxed while reaping the real benefits those tax dollars and the rest of society provided you.

It's an unfortunate opinion to hold, as anyone who opposes is violent and abusive thug in your worldview. It's incredibly childish mental gymnastics that people who feel that they owe nothing to society adopt to justify their greed while they take, take, take the fruits of our society.
With large software projects you want a language that is relatively easy to read. This is the biggest problem with JS, it's pretty easy to write but can become unreadable pretty easily.

Even best practises as described by "the good parts" are full of nested parens and functions , .call()s and IIFEs
Raising capital for a startup in a particular geographic place and selling a product there from a multinational megacorp are very different propositions. When you have the capital to hire an entire local sales division you're in a very different world than when you are trying to raise your first capital investment. But of course you knew that.
Stripe beta in the Netherlands
And to keep it complicated every once in a while we make it so you need to respect the origin words. One that always makes me think twice as a native English speaker is "infrared". I always have to stop myself from saying it such that it rhymes with "compared".
Saying that something will have the same language on client and server is misleading: javascript (and most other languages) have very simple syntax - it's more about the libraries involved. Node.js and the browser environment are totally different (and I doubt there are many packages written for both settings).

Even if everyone were working in JavaScript, seems unlikely that you'd be able to be both an awesome client-side and server-side developer.
English is the 'most Latin' of the Germanic languages because of the norman conquest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England). Since then, you could almost say that english has a double vocabulary; one anglo-saxon (germanic) and one norman-french (romanic). This is why english has so many synonyms and allows for very nuanced expressions (as mentioned by the parent post).
> No, without evidence that assumption is false. Correlation can only be evidence for an unexplained link

I did not say it was conclusive evidence; I said it was evidence. I'm well aware that "A is correlated to B" does not prove "A causes B" or even "A causes B or B causes A", but it is a data point in favor.

Saying "We should evaluate other evidence before we decide if A causes B" is reasonable skepticism. Acting as though "A is correlated to B" has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether A causes B is another matter.

(Not that I actually disagree with most of your post, mind you! The real message of "correlation is not causation" is "don't overrate this specific data point; it's a common mistake". But the realist shouldn't underrate it either.)
Just because something is supposedly legal in one country, doesn't make it legal in the rest of the world.

What if the Saudi Religious Police mounted operations around the world - beating women for wearing mini-skirts or chopping heads off men for being gay?

Would you be okay with that because it's legal in Saudi Arabia? Would you just shrug your shoulders and move on?
Try writing anything larger than 10.000 LoC and JavaScript becomes a pain in the ass. No matter how many frameworks will appear unless there are fundamental changes in the language I don't see it making it to the enterprise.
Finally, somebody confirms for me the way that I've always used to learn to pronounce very long words.
Thanks :-) That is a go-to interview question for us and we actually all do it slightly differently and take it in different directions depending on your expertise or specialization.

It is really closely aligned to what our core service is (distributing and streaming files) and is a great chance to talk with the interviewee and figure out where their strengths are.

Totally encourage other people to interview this way. It's what I've done at the past few companies I've been at and really worked excellently — just think of a problem you're working or have worked on, and distill it into an interview problem.
> Perl – While Perl's keywords and function names are generally in English, it allows modification of its parser to modify the input language, such as in Damian Conway's Lingua::Romana::Perligata module, which allows programs to be written in Latin or his Lingua::tlhInganHol::yIghun Perl language in Klingon. They do not just change the keywords but also the grammar to match the language.
That's impressive
For centuries, at least, 18 year old teens have had legendarily terrible judgement WRT dating, sex, illegal drug use, reckless driving, excess alcohol consumption, studying or lack thereof, clothing, dancing, music, sometimes doing all of the above at the same time. Seems a little too optimistic that out of all that screwing up, the one thing they'll get correct is school major selection.

Note that the graduation rates for "some" major are a very small multiple higher. This is solely "I'm 18 and I want a degree in XYZ" compared to six years later, "I'm 24 and I have a degree in XYZ". (Edited to emphasize the degree specific grad rate is constant across all majors, but some majors are more like to graduate with a degree in "anything" rather than drop out. If I remember the stats, failed art students generally just drop out, but failed physicists tend to go into engineering, insert infinite jokes here)
Could it instead be ASIC technology on a massive scale? This might help break some of the hashing through very specialized chips.
I imagine culturally wasting that money and remaining homeless will be less prominent over time.

You have a much more optimistic view of how culture evolves than I do.

Right now, there is a hyper-consumerist culture of spending everything you have and then some on immediate pleasure, which isn't sustainable regardless of what fiscal organizing of society you have.

But instituting BI doesn't help this problem, because the main incentive people have for not spending everything they receive is the uncertainty of future income. If everyone thinks they are getting BI forever no matter what they do, they have less incentive to save, not more.

It would be helpful if everyone understood that BI is all that anybody gets--i.e., that BI replaces all the current government services that are given to people, like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, section 8 housing, etc. In other words, if everyone understood that it is their responsibility to use BI wisely. But the only way to enforce that understanding would be to let people suffer the negative consequences of using BI unwisely. You spent all your BI on junk food and liquor, and then you get sick and can't afford to pay for health care? Fine, then you don't receive care.

I doubt that BI would be as popular a proposal as it is if that aspect were included. But without it, I don't see how BI fixes the cultural issues you speak of (which I agree are genuine issues).
Why more programmers are no threat to programmers jobs? Because more programmers create more programs and more programs need more programmers (for updates and maintenance).
This collection of vendor-specific hacks is an excellent demonstration of the failure of the Web standards process.
p=np yo
The uncle of a company leader (CEO owner etc) owns a software company. Through a complex deal involving government grants, and a development deal with another company, the software if developed through them actually makes them money to build. Three of the developers are hired to the other company as consultants for a while, so they can explain how it all works. The rest of the developers are let go. Finally the original consultants are let go, at which point everything is outsourced to a team based out of Lithuania, India, and Brazil.
I like JavaScript and node.js but I simply can't wrap my head around callbacks. Some people simply love to nest callbacks... Anytime I see that it drives me crazy....
Sounds to me like the big difference here is that this guy made a video when he couldn't communicate verbally (honestly seems like a smart way to do it even if American English is your first language; describing UI interactions verbally is generally pretty non-trivial). And critically, he did not actually use the exploit against another user. He just showed that he could have.
You are assuming everyone has the same goals, context, and motivations for doing things as you do. The answer for how best to live one's life is still very much an open problem.

Edit: Even more so, ignoring the problematic assumptions laid out above, others have stated elegantly that if efficiency, etc was your true goal, then we should focus on learning the most effective and efficient language, not simply the most widely used (currently English)
> 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.

But its "key" services would be still run on forcedly stolen money, right? Because everyone "needs" police protection (and it surely can't be provided via free market), there still will be armed criminals who take the money from people in order to "provide" their "services". And as they have sovereign control over some area of land, you won't be able to opt out by any mean other than moving out to a different country.

Minarchism is better than the current systems in the same way small theft is better than murder, but it's still not ideal.

("National defense", by the way, is a myth. There would be no need of one if there are no governments.)
Simple learning curve? The thing is its really easy to write bad Javascript and a lot harder to write good Javascript. For that reason I think it has a much higher learning curve then most of the current languages used for web development.
I want a surface, but everytime I get close to buying I do the same thing every time I consider buying a tablet, realize I have a laptop. Android, iOS, Surface, doesn't matter, they're all a luxury for people who already own a laptop or smartphone. Doesn't help that I already have a WP8 phone.
Agreed. I'm also a native portuguese speaker. Another point is that you get used to English, and begins to "think" in it. Guess that, besides the whole globalized world thing, i would find very confuse a portuguese programming language.
Ask HN: How can you find the best hackers?
Problem:

The best hackers do not look for work. In my experience, they do not care about badges or rankings (Hacker Rank, Hacker Meter), nor do they have the time because they have actual gigs.

On that note, badges and rankings have little to do with performance. Technical skills are easy to find. Soft skills are not. Someone who finishes what they start, who will pick up the phone and actually call an employer when there is a problem rather than ignoring it altogether .. Open source contributions are great, but, again, I've met some amazing open source developers who have poor social skills.

Rankings only tell half the story. As both a hackers and a hirer, I do not really care if someone is number 1 or 50. There's little difference between them. Plus, if sites do not disclose the ranking algorithm, it doesn't mater anyway. Heck, I've been hired to write ranking algorithms that used trivial measures. The site didn't care: They just wanted a ranking system. Their argument was that people don't care. And in a way it's true. I see how many people use search engines - not looking to find the right answer, just some sort of answer that they can mold to fit their needs.

Anyhow, I quit that gig.

So - How do you find the best hackers?

Solution:

You can't through an open job board. It must be closed to developers. It must be a cross between a consulting firm and a job board stacked with good developers who are even better hustlers with killer soft skills. Perhaps having 10 of them who have a reputation of finishing gigs and who can talk to clients.

That's a job board that I would pay a lot of money to use. Does this exist?

Oh - and GroupTalent is not the solution either. Try before you buy? I shouldn't have to try - and I'm not looking to hire someone full time.
This is great. I am working on a simple Arabic (Actually Moroccan arabic) programming language to help popularize programming in some remote schools I work with. Mind helping me reach out to your friend about how this has been used and what challenges faced in general?
I have a dual language database publishing system and I use English and German as a language source. While the obvious advantage of using english as lingua franca, I tend to use my mother tongue (German) system. It feels a bit more natural to me and it's really nice to use in presentations to non-technical people. It seems as if the barrier to use the language is much lower than it is when the programming language is English.

http://speedata.github.io/publisher/manual/index.html - Switch to the other language in the footer
That's actually a neat idea. It could be very useful for teaching.

(For bonus points, make it output a legal COBOL programme.)
>The only thing I've never done is masonry, but I'm told it's not too tough.

My wife paid a contractor to show her how to cap a foundation. He spent two hours with her, and we saved $50k+ by doing the rest of it ourselves. So no, not too hard.

We don't have enough of the rest of the skills you enumerate to think I could build an entire house to code, but your analysis is spot on.

As a game developer/embedded systems engineer, I also agree that there are tiers of development complexity. Even within these fields there are clear levels ability.

Some of the stuff I do on a daily basis is well beyond the typical HTML/JavaScript/PHP developer -- I spent years learning to be a good low-level developer and honing my skills, not just a few hours. And I've directly observed people who were plenty self-motivated who run into an "abstraction wall" that they can't get past; I've even spent hours with some people trying to come up with ways to help them understand, even though no one ever did that for me.

From the other side it's extremely clear that there are tiers of developer skill levels, and that even the bottom tier is out of reach to much of the population.

>It's not popular to say because we like to think everyone's a special snowflake with some predetermined number of "ability points," just allocated differently, but the bell curve is real and some people just can't do what we do.

I think the difference on "ability points" is that, by spending concentrated time on learning, you can actually earn extra ability points. Just like there aren't "muscle points" that are distributed differently between people: You exercise your muscles and they get stronger. "The brain is a muscle" isn't entirely a bogus concept.
The rest of the magazine would be like, "patio11's dos and don'ts of summer SEO", "can lisp trim your application's waistline?", and "infosec schadenfreude! how to protect your app". viz., HN.
Genetics set the ceiling.

Try as they might, achondroplastic dwarves will never make it to the NBA, and severe, congenitally retarded people will never have a significant, active contribution to human knowledge.

These are off course extreme examples. There are several ways to be a good basketball player, or to become an intellectual (athleticism is less open to variety).

But for an equal amount of work some people will end up better at some tasks than others.
In environments outside of tech hubs like the Silicon Valley bubble, I would strongly agree. For instance a friend's wife moved from Georgia to San Diego as a teenager, and quickly found that as long as she kept her accent, everyone assumed she was stupid.

In Silicon Valley there are so many people from all over the USA, and from other countries, that this type of bigotry is less important. I can't promise it will entirely not be an issue, but I doubt it would be a big deal.
He promotes hatred of and inequality for homosexuals, for a start.

http://www.williamkwolfrum.com/2009/07/12/behind-chuck-norri...

http://www.queerty.com/chuck-norris-wants-to-keep-the-boy-sc...

We've reached a point in history where homophobia is at roughly the same point as racism was in the 50s and 60s. Plenty of people still espouse those hateful views...but, it's long past time for society at large to stop accepting that kind of thing as merely a "difference of opinion". Hatred of black folks is not viewed as a "difference of opinion"...it is viewed as what it is: Hatred and bigotry.
Six impossible things, or what I've been up to lately
That's exactly what I was thinking, but I couldn't find the link. Too bad it's still the top comment.
> Most countries wouldn't even dream of spying on other countries

Contradictory to all known history. They all dream of it. Some of those are even full out wet dreams.

> Somebody really believes that, say, Belize spies on Germany? Or Nigeria spies on the UK?

Infantile, small, and poor countries don't have the knowhow and resources to effectively spy on other more-advanced nations.

That's the only reason they "don't",... because they "can't".

It's not a moral stand.

> A lot of small countries not only do not spy, but they voluntary let other large countries spy on them and handle over their citizens data.

Don't worry, they either get paid, or get some benefit from that arrangement.

> One could imagine people saying the same thing to blacks fighting for civil rights: "Well, of course you don't count as much as whites in this country, duh, welcome to the grown up world".

Nice analogy, that's broken in every way.

I'm also not going to fall for the trap of paralleling this to a race issue.

Nations fight for self-interests first and foremost, not for the interests of other nations, big or small.
I am pretty sure only plastic parts were affected.