skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They may not move their country forward, that doesn't mean they don't move the world forward. Say what you will about the French revolution's effect on France but it greatly influenced the spread of democracies and republics world wise. Similarly the presence of socialism(in the production owned by the people sense) hugely encouraged improvements in working conditions in countries that feared similar upheaval and loss of property.

But I wouldn't argue with you that the majority of these 'elite trimmings' set the society back. The question is after the set back does it move forward faster than it was or in a better direction (Often the answer to this would be hugely reliant on your personal values).
That's horrible. It hurts me to think about her family.

I think people should really give it a second thought when riding bikes along side automobiles. It doesn't seem like the best decision one could make. It's really scary.
> "This is about quality, not safety. You can make your own decision about whether a food still has an edible quality that's acceptable to you."

> "It's a confusing subject, the difference between food quality and food safety. Even in the food industry I have colleagues who are not microbiologists who get confused," she says.

Great. I should make my own decision... when even people who work in the industry get confused.

What the heck do I know if food has an "edible quality" or not? I'm not the food scientist here. Just put the goes-bad date on it.
Outside of America I can assure that bud and miller both have very negative connotations ;)
I haven't met any programmers with unpaid internships but I have met individuals in other fields who did them. If I recall correctly it was an internship for a television company (not public) and was just a part of the culture of their industry. A "paying dues" if you will. What exactly are you supposed to do in that situation?
Wow. Ok, here's some details on the accident based on news stories linked there.

First, background for people who don't know the area:

So this is in Woodside, the hills just west of Palo Alto. It's a nice area where you get more space and nature than living in Menlo Park/PA/MV, at the cost of having a fairly slow drive to get anywhere.

Skyline, the road she was on, is the main north-south way through that area. It's a one-lane-each-way, narrow-shoulder, trees-on-all-sides (leading to weird lighting at most hours) road that is fairly straight for that area, but still has some curves. I think the speed limit is 40mph.

The stretch of Skyline she was on is a very popular bike route. Some people will bike a lot of Skyline, but that ~one mile stretch is especially popular. Old La Honda Rd is a narrow, windy road that is one of the most famous cycling climbs in the area; it's got good shade and is a very steady 7% grade for the whole 3.5 miles. It's intense. Go out on a weekend and you will run into other cyclists, usually many others.

When you get to the top and want to loop back towards Palo Alto/etc, you basically have two options. One is to just go back down, but descending a road that steep and windy, especially given that there's basically always a cliff on one side, is pretty frightening. So I always take the other option, which is to take Skyline down to highway 84, the same direction and stretch of road she was doing.

That always feels like the safe part of the descent to me--it's mostly straight, people drive slightly slower than on 84, and it's not as steep of a descent as 84. 84 is frightening because there still isn't a shoulder, there's some really steep sections, there's some tight switchbacks, and people drive 50 mph.

But, sure enough, where her accident was on Skyline, there's a big blind curve, and not very far after it there's a tiny road (basically a driveway) off to the right. It sounds like as she came around that curve, a van that was headed the opposite direction on Skyline turned left in front of her into that small road, and she ended up hitting the van.

Scary.
You've also prematurely absolved the bicyclist of any responsibility for the collision.

"It's a very blind curve and bicycles come flying around that corner, and right before the corner there's a turn on Elk Tree Road and sometimes things happen too fast," Lazarus said. "People are driving 45 miles per hour on the road and there's no place for a bicycle to go."

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news%2Flocal%2Fpeni...
C4 in a carbon-fiber tube with an open end plugged with wax and ball bearings would make a hell of a political statement.

Even shotgun shells, if you prefer your weaponization pre-fab.
If you're interested in this topic, I recommend you peruse the archives of LEAPSECS mailing list ( http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/leapsecs/ ), where experts have discussed some of the thorny issues over the years.
Reddit is a heterogeneous collection of wildly different subreddits. Some subreddits (/r/pics, /r/funny, /r/WTF) are "average" as you described, but others have different demographics.
The story of the Cizeta-Moroder V16T Supercar
Improved healthcare, reduced war and so on have already made society much more risk-averse. This would just be another bit of improved healthcare.
There was a time when I put more emphasis on what people should be able to do vs what they actually do. That time in my life has passed.
Because good is dumb.
Anyone knows what's the story behind YouTube using its own bar and not the uniform Google bar.
Labor Voices
There is no longer a "Navigation" app: it's been merged into the new Maps, which loses a lot of functionality.

Not sure whether or not it prevents screen locking.
Based on other news accounts (http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news%2Flocal%2Fpeni...) it appears that the "accident" truly was an accident. The car was making a legal left turn shortly before a blind curve. There was no way that the car--or the biker--could have seen each other.
(https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Elk+Tree+Road,+Woodside,+CA&h...)

This is apparently not an isolated incident, as other cyclists and motorcycles have had accidents on this street, due to its winding path and poor visibility.
Article on Business Week:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-16/laborvoices-...
Why can't the FDA mandate labelling from a narrow range of options?

"Use by" for food that will cause illness if eaten after that date; "best before" for food that becomes less tasty but not dangerous after that date.

(http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Goodfood/Pages/food-labelling-ter...)
programs aren't very interesting
"Enjoy GC"
"Enjoy living on a boat"
"Enjoy waking up at 2AM"

and other ways being not free is freeing.
If this is true, why we continue to allow helium to be used for something as frivolous as party balloons baffles me. Clearly the true market price of helium is not being charged? Or is the reality of 'peak helium', and the availability of new sources, harder to understand? (e.g. here in Australia we have significant natural/coal seam gas resources, presumably an 'abundant' source of helium?)

Also, if helium is the most abundant element in the universe, is there a practical, economical way to harvest this from space; I'm envisioning some sort of solar-sail powered scoop sucking up helium for return to earth in a heat-shielded flask parachuted into the oceans.
Here's where the accident occurred:

http://goo.gl/maps/6ROov

Apparently there have been accidents there before.

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/peninsul...
No the article is clearly about C++.
It's easier to start from a GC'ed language, and use escape hatches when you need them, then to start without GC and then realize that your program has become a mess because you don't have it.

Many GC'ed languages have such escape hatches. Those that don't, well, don't start writing performance-critical code in them would be my recommendation.

And also, do not miss his point about reference counting just being a form of GC. "Manual memory management" isn't really a thing that exists, there's a whole suite of memory management techniques and alternatives, and it's easy with something like "C++ with ref counting" to actually be experiencing the worst of all worlds (all the work of "manual" memory management with all the disadvantages of GC) if you don't deeply understand what's really going on with your memory.
I try to keep my workspace _really_ bare:

https://db.tt/63QQsAI0

https://db.tt/B6qSYtyk

Some days I go to my university's library or a coffee shop.
Please explain how the internet is not populated a teeming mass of faceless opportunists, deliberately avoiding any and all efforts to be controlled. You are fucking wrong.

Your fragments in strike two are literally paragraphs apart, and ignore huge details that add context. But even so, there's nothing evil about asking someone you know personally, when they've openly told you they're going to write about you, if you can read it before it goes live. And very obviously, they're both professional writers, so it's actually a pretty collegial courtesy that acquaintances extend to one another. It doesn't grant him any undue influence over her creative process. Asking for that isn't wrong.

And nothing but MEH for your third strike against the guy. Both of you are entitled to your opinions, and I'm entitled to my opinion of your opinions.

Your classification of "sinister" is head-up-your-ass unfounded, sir. You deserve more downvotes.
> If someone gets physical access to a device, it is compromised.

This is the same with your computer. What's your point? Do you have no private information?

(Don't say "everything's encrypted": it's the same with passworded iPhones, and again: same issue with your PC. There are numerous simple hardware compromises like keyloggers, or removing and chilling RAM to get keys unencrypted from memory, etc)
In your theoretical scenario, the doctor himself violated HIPAA when he emailed himself the document. He exposed the document to his email provider and all those along the transport path of the email. So, to agree, technology can only do so much, you have to use it correctly.
Why 5 billion people will never use your app
Hipsterism is nothing new (we were complaining about it back when affluent kids started hitting juke joints in the poor part of town). We call it a sub-culture but it isn't one and never has been.

It is most often upper-middle kids (generally white) adopting and gentrifying sub-cultures and then abandoning them when all of the cool has been drained out. What is left becomes fodder for "ironic" mockery.

That is what the author never thinks of addressing. What he boils down to "they hate me because they think I want attention" isn't because he wants attention, it is because he has taken on the trappings of a group who devour other groups.
The author definitely does not consider them all rolled into one; the author was a member of the C++ standards committee. That quote is discussing the C-backwards-compatibility baggage of C++ as a design flaw in C++. In the context of C itself, it might not be a design flaw, and the author appears less interested in that question (he's been writing about C++ since the '90s, and doesn't really write about C).
I don't find implementing the tests very difficult at all - but I am comfortable with regular expressions, and ruby.

It's no more burden to write step definitions than it is to write RSpec directly. I use SOLID OOP to write my tests, most of the logic lives in regular old methods, and my steps look like:

Then 'the current subscription payment date should be tomorrow' do
verify_next_payment_date(Date.today + 1)
end

Since I start with the Gherkin file, I type less than 10 keystrokes to make the step.
I'd rather Edward than Samuel Boxingglovehands
It's premature optimization if you're caring about this in your prototype. It's not at all premature optimization to look at battery life before you ship.
Perhaps the cultural pendulum has swung a bit too far into elevating the voices of those with traits of psychological neoteny. How could we insert a counterbalancing force of support for mental gerontomorphic features in online discourse?
I thought AdWords was the interface for making ads for AdSense. The logo even says "Google AdWords." And the ads I made look a lot like AdSense.
The fact that drivers are regularly violating the speed limit[0] implies the bicyclist is responsible?

[0]https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Elk+Tree+Rd,+Woodside,+CA&hl=...
Jetpack 2.5: Google Integration, VideoPress, and Facebook Embeds
We know programming is not incremental, often what we did to get 70% of the requirements will be completely useless to achieve the remaining 100%. C++ will take you everywhere, and I find it a solid choice for any project especially because I am often unsure of performance requirements. I can confidently say my C++ code will scale.
If you think Apple fans can be rabid, check out Amiga fans :-) -- I frequently got flamed by fellow Amiga users for having a realistic view of the Amiga's limitations (such as not having a single usable word-processor -- and do not say ProWrite or Excellence -- neither could handle a 10-page document without choking).

Commodore did not turn an operating profit during any year in which they were selling the Amiga. The idea that it was just a patent troll is ridiculous.

The Amiga was ridiculously superior to the Mac as a piece of hardware (ignoring the lack of a good graphics mode for doing office work on -- you could pick between flickering display and rectangular graphics). It's OS was absolutely awful (AmigaDOS 1.3 or 1.4 -- don't remember which -- was actually created by Commodore licensing the ARP from hobbyists who'd rewritten most of the OS to suck less.)
I think drivers should be more aware and conscious that they are piloting a 2 ton or so vehicle. We all drive our vehicles next to everything from scooters to double tractor trailers. I have people turn in front of me in my car or motorcycle on a fairly regular basis because they are poorly trained and misjudge my speed.

The driver sounds like they were fairly young and inexperienced. I drive slowly around that area because there are so many cyclists and I take my time passing them. Their safety and peace of mind is worthy of a few moments of my time.
France has the resources to make Pu-238, though I am not sure if they currently have the facilities/equipment. If the situation really is politically impossible in the US and Russia keeps on flaking out, we could always try buying more from the French again and let them deal with the politics.

If we are shitcanning missions because we don't have Pu-238, then why doesn't NASA just take the money they would have spent on those programs and spend it on more Pu-238 instead? Surely that should buy us enough Pu-238 for at least remaining uncancelled missions.
If you look at the intersection of Elk Tree Road and Skyline on Street View you could see how this could happen. Turning left on Elk Tree (http://goo.gl/mBIpK3) someone coming around that turn at high speed heading south would have little stopping distance if there was a car in their lane. Not really sure what the speed limit on Skyline is there, and we don't know how she died, if she broadsided the car, or swerved into oncoming traffic behind the other car.

So there's a couple of scenarios:

1) driver sees cyclist and tries to turn left in front of her at too close of a distance, causing cyclist to collide with driver, or swerve into other traffic, or fall down

2) driver starts turn just as cyclist comes around corner, but for whatever reason, driver is taking too long (e.g. car that made left turn in front of it suddenly stops), cyclist does not have sufficient stopping distance, or may be exceeding speed limit. Cyclist evasive action leads to crash.

In many of these freak accidents, the knee jerk reaction is to blame the person who is more in power (the person with the car), but I wouldn't jump to conclusions. It might be a bad intersection that is just waiting for this kinds of accidents of bad timing.
This is a tragedy of course but I always wonder when journalists repeat things like this:

"Then she used her 173 IQ to pass California's high school-equivalency exam. At 19, she graduated from California State University at Fresno and took the CPA exam (scoring second best in the country that year). "

While it would be possible to verify that someone graduated from CSU at 19 (you call them) in general I would imagine that there is no easy way to verify someone's IQ or that they were 2nd best in the country at the CPA exam. I would imagine that journalists repeat things like this blindly and they become the truth about people when stated as if fact.

Of course journalists are generally going to repeat things that they are told but certain things are much harder to verify by any third party reading (as opposed to "graduated from Harvard" which could be disproved by anyone).
Probably a non-issue, because more Plutonium-238 can be easily created using existing infrastructure. As demand of this stuff goes up and supplies dwindle, someone is gonna make more of it sooner or later.
How CLR ninja skills are better than C++ ninja skills? Both might kill average developers.

The named C# implementation came from .NET experts and an army of consultants from Microsoft. The final advice was "yes, C# is easier to develop, but it comes with a price - just pay the price and drop in some additional servers".
What is the point of learning 6502 now?

I've wanted to try writing for NES. Learning 6502 seems like a fun intellectual exercise - certainly the most fun way to learn assembly.

Even if I could write NES code, I probably can't find working NES hardware to test it on. There are emulators, at which point I may as well write in another language.
I don't see any features that are completely unused. We had one called `auto` and its now gone. So what do you want to cut?
As much as I like Github, they really are concentrating on some very niche features.
> NEWSFLASH: If you're doing something specifically to get attention, it's possible the attention you get might not be to your liking.

What on earth was he doing to get attention?

He was doing a job.

If you are writing stories for people in a park, a typewriter is probably the best way to do it, how else would you?

How was he trying for attention any more than the ice cream van I'm sure was down the road? Since when do people working in public have to be "NEWSFLASH"ed that they are trying to get attention.
With inflation that number is around $33 bucks. But jeez what a silly metric, who's happier that deal didn't happen - Yahoo or Microsoft?
Yes, I expect ads will make them more on average, but they could certainly make more from me (well... my household) if we could just pay them to remove the ads, and perhaps have some other premium features.

My wife is a normal computer user. A savvy one, but still a normal one. She's a bit behind me on the curve of getting pissed off about ads, but not as far behind me as Pinterest et al might hope. If Pinterest fills up with ads, I'm not sure she'll stay.
At least in the US, the general rule of thumb is that you can have unpaid interns as long as there is some sort of training program for them. The specifics behind this vary, and while I'm not a lawyer, I've seen a lot of companies with unpaid interns operate in what I'd consider a gray area. Just enough training so you don't get in trouble.
Apple iOS 7 surprises as first with new multipath TCP connections
While I agree with you that we shouldn't prematurely absolve anyone of responsibility, the speed limit on that road is 40mph. It's possible that Covey reached this speed or above heading downhill, but very unlikely that she was traveling more than, say, 45mph.

If a driver had turned in front of a car going 45, causing a collision, no one would talk about the speeding car "flying around the corner." It would be a failure to yield to oncoming traffic, period.
I wouldn't call it a "no comment zone", far from it, but inline comments are nearly nonexistent where I work.

We write in the same way you did - short methods, lots of classes, descriptive (but not overly-so) variable names. The code should more or less document itself.

One place you will find comments are docblock style in projects providing an external API to allow us to generate the documentation from the code - it's the easiest way to ensure our docs are up to date.

The other is one or two word comments in the code, usually to avoid overly-verbose variable names. For instance, a variable named 'distance' might be immediately followed by 'in meters'.

As an added bonus, it helps make the code testable and improves (at least my) confidence in the results because complex logic is instead broken into lots of bits of simple logic which can more easily be thoroughly tested.
> It might be a bad intersection that is just waiting for this kinds of accidents of bad timing.

Is there any kind of big-data-gathering programme looking at accident data to see where the accident black spots are?
Ya, I had a manager laugh at me when I told him I had learned Erlang over the weekend (I am the resident "language lawyer", and Erlang's really not that complex). He didn't seem to be able to grok that a language could be so simple…
> Every so often an atom of neptunium-237 absorbs a neutron emitted by the core’s decaying uranium, later shedding an electron to become plutonium-238.

Doesn't it shed a proton to become plutonium 238 and, as a consequence, loses an electron?
This guy Marx wrote a bit about it...
> The Drive edits Doc/Docx files

I've just tried it, and no, it can't. On the webapp, editing is done by converting to google docs format; that option doesn't seem to be available on mobile. It can't even view them natively, if QO isn't installed it appears to show them in a web viewer. Only quickoffice can edit .doc/.docx's. But you're right you can open a .doc in QO from drive (assuming it's installed, it'll register an intent), which does alleviate the problem.

But it's still silly, and confusing for non-technical users, to have two similarly-designed office apps, published by the same company, which can each edit a mutually-exclusive set of document formats. And that using intents to edit works one way but not the other. I'll be surprised if they're not merged at some point.

On the other hand you're right about the icon. My mistake, I'll correct my post.
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/09/18/bicyclist-killed...

Definitely not. However, the woman in the audio clip points out that there is both a blindspot and the sun makes it doubly difficult to see people around that corner.

We have no context of the situation on which to assign blame. I trust the police and witnesses involved will help sort things out. Whether or not we assign blame on Hacker News seems somewhat irrelevant.
Negative connotations as in "these are very bad beers", or negative connotations as in "anyone who drinks these must be wildly uncool"?

The first exists in the US, but the second doesn't really (outside a few circles typically called 'beer snobs' ;).
During The Great Depression, farms were having their equipment repossessed for non-payment. The John Deere Tractor Company decided to do no such thing. They told people "At some point, the weather will improve and you will need your tractor. Pay us when you can." Supposedly, for decades afterwards, if a tractor salesman for a different company saw a John Deere on a farm, there was no point in stopping.

John Deere is still going strong. I imagine a lot of their competitors went under during The Great Depression. It was impossible to sell the repossessed tractors since no one had any money.

I am feeling pretty bitter (about my personal situation) and feeling like, yes, evil wins. But I am not convinced the objective evidence really bears that out.
I don't trust Greenpeace, I think they are there to fulfill other interests.
If you're really doing the exact same thing, then why not just move to an industrial lab -- problem solved? Presumably there's a reason some people want to stay in academia, which seems to imply they're doing something different there?