skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am a member of one of the underrepresented groups aphyr mentioned in the "who is this for" section of the intro. Let me tell you what effect the discussion these HN comments threads have had on me.

aphyr's introduction seemed to me like a kind of warm "you can do it". I felt pleasantly fuzzy -- it was good to hear that someone was looking out for people like me, and other groups that are more obviously disenfranchised than mine (mine has it comparatively well off I think). Because of this encouragement, I read the entire post. In this respect it was absolutely effective. It accomplished precisely what it set out to accomplish.

Cue HN comments. I read them and my first reaction was, I didn't understand why it's not ok to say what aphyr said. It seemed so positive and innocuous. Why is it not ok to explicitly encourage me, or my sister, or my partner, to program? Never mind that aphyr put it in the "who is this for" section, which seems (to me) to be an eminently appropriate place to put such a thing.

But as I read more of them, I began to wonder whether what I thought and what other people think are so different that I'm just never going to fit in with this community. For example, people are complaining that this seems out of place -- do they just not understand how positive this was for me? I felt profoundly comfortable and accepted reading the tutorial, and I seriously doubt anyone felt excluded -- how could someone object to such a thing? Another commenter explains that, actually, this statement is bad for groups like mine because it reminds us that we're separated. But it was so warm I thought, I don't see how that could be true -- maybe I'm missing something. I started to think that maybe these issues are not reconcilable.

So, I began to doubt myself. Eventually the entire effect of the introduction was reversed. Soon I felt worse than when I started.

Then today happened. Let's consider some facts.

* The "who this is for" section appeared yesterday.

* That was part 1.

* This is part 2.

* Not only were the HN comments on part 1 dominated by this issue, but also the HN comments in part 2.

* So, merely writing this once is enough for the issue to follow you around in subsequent posts.

As a member of one of these underrepresented groups I'm both shocked and -- honestly? -- kind of hurt that the community can't even let this go when we're supposed to be discussing an entirely different section of the book. Besides this, if aphyr can't write this in the "who is this for" section, then where, precisely, is it appropriate to have this discussion?

People of HN, you may not be convinced that this was the right thing to do, but do know that this type of discussion is actively hurting your ability to be diverse. At the very least, I hope this pins a human story to this issue. What you are doing here does affect people. As a community it is time that we take this seriously.
You realize the hypothecation is a bad thing and has some serious downsides
If you're allergic to propylene glycol then you're allergic to pretty much everything.

That same propylene glycol is used in cakes/cupcakes, frostings, many ice creams, beers (as a foaming agent), some coffees, candy, many salad dressings, flavoured coffees, dried fruits, some brands of milk, many beauty products (makeup, shampoo, soaps)...

There are a lot more people with peanut allergies and we don't ban people from eating products containing peanuts anywhere in public. Why is this case different?
I don't know how someone types up the 1000th iteration of this article with no acknowledgement of the 999 times people have written it before now or of any of the responses or counterarguments anyone has made in response.
Pet peeve: Default z-index makes elements farther down in the code display on top of elements higher up in the code. With multiple backgrounds, the first listed has the highest z-index.
How to make your TV a touchscreen
Know More About Designer Handbags 
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I'm not saying that you can't or shouldn't distribute risk across many small projects, I'm saying that in this case doing so would not have helped you at all. If you had a competition to build a MVP of healthcare.gov where the requirements didn't get delivered until 48 hours before it was due, then the requirements changed substantially 30 minutes before the cutoff time, none of the teams would have succeeded.
The Velvets. Such a hot photo of them from 1969. I think that death is the biggest science mystery of all.
That is what Germany wants to know.
Another option, which isn't 100% free but still manages to avoid the Google Play Services layer, which is what the article focuses on, is running an alternative ROM such as Cyanogenmod, skip flashing the Google apps package, and install an alternate package repository such as f-droid.org which features only FOSS apps.

Most alternative ROMs have binary drivers pulled from the official ROMs, but it should be no worse than running a Linux distro with, say, non-free binary firmware images which are loaded on demand for wireless cards, and you strike a better balance between a fairly open system and the latest hardware.
I don't know about that - this system is supposed to help people track their expenses on drugs and treatment, and so on .. so to me it seems its not 'just' a billing software package, but rather a healthcare management system. I'd certainly feel better about using it if it had some sort of safety-critical level certification, but then again I don't have the problem of needing healthcare in America ..
I'd love to see an analysis of the risk embedded in the future profits that everyone talks about. What these analyses completely ignore is that Amazon's future cash flows are risky, while the current cashflows at the dying business are not.

There are countless examples of giant companies that haven't realized the enormous future cashflows embedded in their stock prices. It is obvious that Amazon generates lots and lots of revenue, no one disagrees with that. What remains an open question is will they be able to ease off of massive infrastructure investment and actually harness the future profitability that everyone seems certain of at this point.

These straw man arguments that profit-less companies have huge market caps so they will turn hugely profitable ignores the actual argument of whether they can actually achieve that. Can profit does not equal will profit.
It will be. It has languished for a very long time, but I have resolved to get it out the door soon. I will put it up on a github repo (https://github.com/bitexploder) so watch there.
What I find is that the people who criticize the ACA on this point are also often opposed to the solutions that would shrink the number. It's dishonest.

1) Offering insurance to undocumented immigrants would shrink the number
2) Strengthening the mandate would shrink the number
3) Expanding medicaid to the states that "opted out" due to the Supreme Court decision would shrink the number
Oregon is doing exactly this, apparently. The Economist had an interesting article on it recently.

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21588097-oregon-...

It does seem like raising the gas tax would be an easier option.
The problem is government contracting. CGI will continue to get contracts.

The problem is a system where if you don't deliver you get paid millions of dollars and still get jobs.
It's a pun on an existing Scheme implementation, Scheme 48 [1]. This was a research implementation by Jonathan Rees and Richard Kelsey that was so named because it was supposedly written in 48 hours. The idea for the tutorial was that "Hey, anybody can write a Scheme in 48 hours, you don't have to be an accomplished professor!"

48 hours is actually somewhat ambitious - it took me about 3 months of nights & weekends time to write it (although that also included teaching myself enough Haskell to write the implementation all the way through first before writing it up as a tutorial). It's probably technically possible to go through it in a weekend and write yourself a Scheme, but to really learn things in depth may take a bit longer.
To answer your question: I believe it would be, yes. There's nothing 'hard' about SIL-4 programming - its just a process that you have to follow in order to ensure the quality of your software..

Of course, SIL-4 may not be the solution .. but it sure seems to me that there is no way healthcare.gov would have gotten through the process if SIL-4 was applied to it..
Real nice :-)

I've just released a project that achieves similar results via a slightly different path. I've called it Hot Redis:

https://github.com/stephenmcd/hot-redis

It basically deliver local Python types backed by Redis, such as lists, sets, etc, finally building up composite examples like queues and multisets.
It's certainly cheaper to move bits than bodies, so why don't companies realize this already?

It is the whole 'working at home' issue which not all companies can deal with. Whether it is employees who take advantage of not being visible or managers to fret over what they aren't able to see, it challenges them to be as productive as if they were all in the same room. There is also a certain energy "boost" from having everyone together for whatever reason.

On alternative might be something like the dedicated co-working spaces with high bandwidth connectivity. Imagine that you're "office" is a just a mile or two away, has perhaps 8 or 12 offices/cubes/spaces and is set up so that it is connected at 10gbit to the main 'campus. When you are there you are "virtually present" in other working spaces around the country connected similarly. Large projection screens providing views of the other spaces with real time teleconferencing type audio links with spatialized volume management. The result is you are "near" your home in the lower cost area, everyone at "work" sees and can hear the other folks at work, and rather than paying to heat/cool/lease a multi-floor space in downtown you are paying for a bunch of dedicated 10G point to point lines between many smaller, more efficient spaces.
What is the advantage of creating my-working-branch-squashed over just

git checkout master
git merge --squash my-working branch
git commit

You have to `git diff --staged` or `git diff master^` at some point to check that what you've done is right, but you would be doing that anyway with my-working-branch-squashed.
Because if it doesn't fulfil the habit accurately (the e-cigs' major strength) then it's useless to get people off the paper ones.
Nissan is bringing a new, higher energy battery chemistry online soon, but it's unclear that it will double range.

Nissan's execs promise a 65% range boost by 2016 [1].

[1] http://insideevs.com/nissan-exec-reliable-125-miles-of-range...
Would C-- be a good choice for JIT machine code generation, or is it mostly for static compilation?
Simple image processing with CUDA
What was your CPU time? I run GKrellM so I notice when something starts hogging the CPU, the animation did play just fine, should it take 90% CPU time to run an animation on modern hardware? That was the point of my post. That CPU usage costs me money.
To expand on that, I was thinking about some standartization of sources (BUILD file in this case), standartize the way build tools could be plugged in, and also standartize the build outputs, so that they can be correctly included AND linked even without the sources.

Then you can build a lot of things on top of that, not only source sharing and automatic dependency resolver, but also remote build servers, sharing already built libraries to save time, and easier integration of various editors, IDEs and other tools.
I don't know about US gov procurement but I do know a bit about European, which I don't think has a particularly better track record.

On these big gov projects you would not believe how terrifyingly thin the margins are for integrators due to politicians being very sensitive about being seen to be responsible with the public purse strings, particularly given that they don't understand the technology. In addition to the thin margins, you therefore also see extensive offshoring and very low blended rates.

The projects are still incredibly expensive in the end and barely perform because the cheap labour incurs massive technical debt - and the thin margins means that the integrators try to insulate their risk with many layers of project management, and huge amounts of rigid enterprise architecture and planning up front.

Given this mentality of cutting cost to the bone via forward planning, even proofs of concept are hard to get through, let alone investing in 15 prototypes. I think the way to do this would be as part of a gov tech investment scheme rather than attached to a specific project or program.
As far as I can tell, some similar features, but overall completely different.

For one, I think C-- still looks a lot like C, i.e. still an imperative language. CIL is a stack language (also with a built-in object system).
A.L.F.R.E.D - Almighty Lightweight Fact Remote Exchange Daemon
I work in a team of about 10 at a large company and it's convention to squash. The alternative is turning a potentially very messy history into something we'd care to look at two months from now. This doesn't seem worthwhile, especially since you now have a situation where some commits on master are intermediate, unshippable states.

What am I missing?
If you stand close to anyone else you're probably breathing air that came out of their filthy, mucusy lungs too.

THE HORROR!
Given that Simon Peyton Jones is listed as a co-author on several of the papers, I find that a bit too coincidental to be true.
Spyder is a really nice interface, but it has one huge problem (on windows at least), you can only have one instance of it open at any given time. It's hugely irritating for experimentation and so mostly I use IPython Notebook these days.
For me the unfairness that matters is how much I'm being paid.

If I'm making significantly less than others who produce the same amount and quality of output that I do, or making less by people who produce less, then I raise it as a point with management.

If nothing is changed when review time rolls around then it's on me to take action and look for another job. If I decide to stay somewhere that I'm unhappy, that's on me too.

As an adult, I'm not going to stand around and whine about unfair conditions. If I perceive a problem, I create a change in my life.
Given the relatively low cost of excess PC hardware these days it is extremely helpful to install one with a Xen, HyperV, or some other hypervisor type system and run multiple instances on it. By doing so you will get a much better feel for what is going on when you "start", "stop", "buy" etc an EC2 instance or 'Droplet' or VPS etc.
Am I missing something with Moleskine notebooks?

I kept a diary for two decades, going through over two dozen notebooks in the process. In graduate school I also kept lab notes for years. I used cheap notebooks. Never did I see the value of Moleskines justifying their five- to ten-times higher cost.

Am I missing something?

They only remind me of this Onion article -- http://www.theonion.com/articles/privileged-little-artiste-w...

Privileged Little Artiste Writing Something Oh-So-Precious Into His Moleskine Notebook

SAN FRANCISCO—After gently unfastening the elastic strap keeping his dearest musings safe from prying eyes, little literary artiste Evan Stansky penned a few more darling thoughts into his clothbound Moleskine notebook Wednesday. "These are much higher quality than the notebooks you find at CVS," lilted the auteur, who couldn't be bothered to use—dare it be said—a journal of lesser craftsmanship or pedigree, or one not famously used by such legendary artists as van Gogh and Hemingway. "They're a little more expensive, but I try to write on both sides so I don't go through them as quickly." At press time, the princely scribe was seen finishing his apricot jasmine tea, asking a mere mortal sitting nearby to watch his literary accoutrements, and then prancing off to the Starbucks powder room, light as a feather.
Still not quite as bad as when McAfee DAT 5958 misidentified svchost.exe (the parent process for all DLL-based services) on XP as malicious (and succesfully deleted it!) ... As you can imagine, this didn't go over well. I remember our shop being very glad we were on a delayed deployment for their DATs.

http://slashdot.org/story/134550
Electric cars degrade the road at the same rate as gasoline cars and we'll need to keep the funding for road maintenance at the same level as more and more people move to electric cars.
A secret is kept secret by sharing it only with someone you trust, and with the smallest number of people possible. Ultimately, you have to share your credentials with your email provider, because they have to authenticate you in order to gain access to the information stored on their systems. Each additional party you share your credentials with increases your attack surface.

Given the number of security disclosures -- oops, someone got our database full of passwords, but don't worry, they're MD5 hashed -- that have occurred over the last couple of years, I'd be extremely cautious of that practice.
I'm using version 2.2.4 on Mavericks without a problem
Indeed. Although I'll note the not all plans really eliminate maximums, some require 20-30% (from what I've seen) copays after you max out your deductible.

People are going to be trying to figure this out for a long time (even if the ACA gets terminated with extreme prejudice in a few years). There are a LOT of factors:

The cost of guaranteed issue and community ratings is huge price increases for the under 50 set to subsidize the inherently more expensive 50-64 set (or so I've read, but I'm sure its roughly true).

A lot of people are losing the ability to work more than 29 hours at one place, or are just plain getting fired because they now cost more than they can produce, and that loss of wealth will have significant effects. Heck, the #1 piece of advice to get more subsidies is to make less money.

Then we get into the messy dynamic effects, where "Europe" is the object lesson: due to the changed game, a bunch of companies are not going to be founded or make it, or fail ... and in the longer term people are going to notice that there's no scenario where being married doesn't result in higher costs. Accounting for the effects of the latter is supremely difficult.

And then there's the argument this with all else Obama et. al. are doing (most certainly including the eGOP) is moving the US rapidly to failed nation status. It's hardly beyond the realm of possibility that will kill 10s of millions. If it denies me the medications I need to live, I'll be one of them....

ADDED: now that you've labeled me as dishonest (e.g. for not wanting to provide health care for illegal aliens (which, yes, is a harsh position)), I'm not sure there's much point in continuing to discuss this.

But also add the effects of reduced medical innovation. Starting with the 2.3% excise tax on medical devices, which we know from the history of "socialized medicine" will continue. One reason health care is so expensive in the US is that we pay nearly all the burden of new drug development....

If we manage to curtail the already feeble new antibiotic development efforts the results world wide will be measured in ... biblical proportions.
Nicotine, on the other hand, is harmful in its own right. It is less damaging to consume pure nicotine without the other harmful effects of smoking, but it is certainly a toxic substance, in the medical sense.

Citation needed.

Before responding, you might want to read http://www.gwern.net/Nicotine.
Seems like Android really gave Chinese and Korean companies a lifeline in the mobile phone market. Those phones either wouldn't exist or would be running the windows phone software I assume. Chinese and Korean companies benefit from Android. Blackberry and Microsoft are losing as a result.
I'm using NoScript and there is no problem reading the article.
Standardised doses, known ingredients etc etc.

Regulation doesn't have to mean restriction, as an ex-smoker that used e-cigs to quit, I think it's a great idea to get them regulated and legit.
Whats the difference between Android/AOSP and RedHat/Linux, or nginx.com/nginx.org, or DataStax/Cassandra? I believe the Android platform itself is free, however the many components that Google provides that run on Google's backend aren't, and understandably so.
Yeah, I like how Netflix even goes so far as killing instances randomly: http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/10/netflix-chaos-monkeys/
The valid argument for not taxing a flat rate ($xxx per car per year) is that it unfairly penalizes those who use it very little. For personal vehicles that makes sense, so their 'costs' are mostly paid by the gas excise; but for commercial trucks you can just tax them directly - for example, here local semi-trailers pay ~$350 annual vehicle tax; does USA have something like this?

The food argument is bullshit, of course, but probably effective because it sounds nice. The truck fuel cost is a very tiny part of the actual food cost - taxes on farming fuel would impact food, but not that. Of course, extra taxes always create inflation; but fuel tax is probably the one most evenly spread across everything, as it affects burger prices just the same as Barbie prices.
It, more or less, has a separate "Fuzzing Template" system which it uses to generate the brute force test cases. It was never meant to rise to the complexity of Sulley's fuzzing system. I wanted an in between complexity for the dumbest fuzzing and something completely flexible like Sulley and Peach. To solve that 80% problem of, "OK, I just grabbed an HTTP request, let's turn it into a quick and dirty fuzzing template." and from that, "And make sure it runs really fast on a single machine". In the time boxed assessment world you rarely have time to do all that you would like so this seemed to be a reasonable solution.

I will put it up at http://github.com/bitexploder soon (a week? Maybe two?).

The beauty of the "fuzzing engine" I built is that there is nothing to it really. You put in "scriptlets", which are really just small bits of Python that generate lists or sequences, and it combines all of them. My goal was to just write up a lot of the common HTTP fuzzing scenarios (integer sequences, alphabetical sequences, demonstrate common encoding and other scenarios giving you a simple list of things you can copy/paste/modify into a template. And then it runs, logging it all into a SQLite database.