skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, that's an insane death toll. To put this in perspective, last year, another super typhoon, Pablo, killed close to 2000 I believe. The year before that another devastating typhoon, Sendong, killed something like 1200. The Philippines regularly gets hit with 20 typhoons each year and the typhoon season isn't over. Each of the above mentioned typhoons hit in December. This has to be among the deadliest in Philippines history and the season isn't even over yet.

I'm located in the southern end of Negros Oriental, which was under warning signal 3 (out of 4) but we were on the edge of the storm. We got off very light. If it weren't for the news, we wouldn't have even thought that we might be affected by a typhoon.

Unfortunately, the Philippines isn't like Japan, where the country can mobilize the resources to make the country highly resistant to it's own nemesis of nature, earthquakes. Many of the people here live in bamboo / wooden structures which stand no chance against a strong typhoon. The most vulnerable are also the poorest. In Dumaguete, minimum wage is the equivalent of $6 per day, but that's a well paying job. Most businesses here use loopholes to pay employees half the minimum wage. The people who have lost their entire towns in the Philippines have no resources, nothing to eat and nowhere to go. There is no no longer a functioning economy. All they can do is wait for help.

I don't know if this has anything to do with global warning, but in the five years I have lived here, our area has been hit with two devastating typhoons in the past three years. Before that, strong typhoons hitting our area were rare. Though we dodged this bullet, the above mentioned typhoons hit us head on. If this is something that the Philippines can regularly expect due to changes in weather, then large portions of the country could become unlivable without huge changes.

This is the sort of area where we could really use some innovation. Typhoons bring a double threat of high winds and floods. Add volcanoes and earthquakes (just a few weeks ago we got hit with a 7.2 earthquake) and the Philippines is among the most dangerous places to live on the planet. We need low cost structures which can shield people from high winds, floods and earthquakes. Sure, we can hide in a shelter, but we can't deal with the possibility of losing our house and possessions every year.

Edit: Changed tornado to typhoon.Facepalm

Edit2: Recovery also can take a long time in the Philippines. Not far from where I live is an area with temporary structures (basically a squatter area) which was setup to be temporary. A year later and this area is still full. I suppose Katrina was similar with the temporary housing situation, but in this case we are talking a flimsy bamboo / wooden structure with plastic tarps on the sides. These structures could easily get wiped out by one of the 20 yearly typhoons which hit the Philippines every year.

Also, the people of New Orleans at least have government safety nets. The mayor of our city, Dumaguete, set aside something like $9,000 as an emergency fund in anticipation of Yolanda. Like I said, not a lot of resources here.
Historically they didnt, until hardware floating point wired up some registers to special hardware. Which is why C lets you cast; BCPL just has bit patterns.
U.S. military will support typhoon recovery efforts in various ways.

The U.S. military announced that Secretary Chuck Hagel has directed troops to support these humanitarian missions. That includes deploying aircraft for search-and-rescue missions, bringing in aid and providing logistical support.

The U.S. force will be led by Marines out of Okinawa, Japan, according to two U.S. military officials. Other military services will participate.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/09/world/asia/philippines-typhoon...
Their target audience would generally also have a subscription to Springer.
I don't know about Ruby but Perl certainly isn't strongly typed. You can run 'print "5.0" + 6' and get 11 as the answer. That's weak typing and types are implicitly converted to whatever.

Python is strongly typed only for the basic scalar types. With objects and classes there are just objects that may or may not have certain bound functions and attributes. Duck-typing is mostly perfectly sufficient since any errors do come out in practice, and there's no need for interfaces or classes as unique types, but what would be really helpful would be to have Clojure-like multimethods where dispatching of a function is itself a function of the arguments given in. That would be what would most alleviate the problems that arise from everything being a object() in Python.
Open Source, OSX status bar app that puts textual smileys into clipboard
In the past, the real deal-breaker for me has been the involvement of massive arms manufacturer British Aerospace. Not sure if that's still going on.
Totally agreed. The US (including the rest of the First world countries) has the means and the ability to do so much in the name of humanitarian efforts. It is sad to see these types of disasters fall by the wayside. Anyone still remember Puerto Rico?
Facebook is about 4x over fair value, so it's a pretty decent sale. It's too bad for the public investors that bought that shit up though. There should probably be a basic financial test that people should have to pass before they get access to a brokerage account. At some of the prices I'm seeing stock clearing, it's obvious that the buyers have not actually read any financial reports.

Something like a basic written comprehension test on a random 10-K filing would efficiently and cheaply filter out those who are, and aren't, qualified to manage their own money. In fact, I'd wager that it'd probably reject a whole bunch of finance/eco/accounting majors as well.

If you don't know your balance sheet, from your income statement, from your FCF, from your capex, then you probably don't have any business buying or selling financial assets. To anyone who says that this is an unfair statement, I have no knowledge of airplane mechanics, and hence, I probably have no business repairing airplanes. The same reasoning applies to investments.
My GUESS was that he/she means that the code has asserts in it that check if something is not right at runtime. I personally would not call that a replacement/alternative for unit tests. In fact, it may be counterproductive ... a small error in the code would bring down and entire application.
The fact that Shuttleworth describes fixubuntu.com using the phrase "folks behind a “sucks” site" demonstrates his entirely dismissive attitude of a very important issue, here being raised by ONE person, not in a "sucks" style whatsoever.
I don't see a difference between "I am 10000 years old and the 4000BC-creation theory isn't true" > "You were just created with memories that way!" and "That man dressed as a woman is a man" > "Something is clouding your perception, it is actually a woman!". The first is a statement of something you physically perceive to be true, the second is a rebuttal saying that your perceptions are false in the first place.

It's less about saying what you believe, and more about the weight of evidence you allow for each option. One option allows for the creation of the universe in an instant, the other brooks no supernatural interference.

For the record, male cross-dressers aren't necessarily 'trying to be a woman'. Some just like wearing clothes traditionally worn by women for look or comfort, others get a kick out of doing so because it breaks social norms. Look at Eddie Izzard, who frequently does standup as a cross-dresser, yet never suggests he's a woman nor that he wants to be one. The gay nightclub culture is also full of drag-queens who neither want to be women nor want to have sex with women, and aren't intending to be mistaken for a woman.

I think it's funny to equate cross-dressing with the trans people that the GP was talking about.
What is the best definition of a closure?
You can live in Spain for example and work and generate revenue and pay taxes within you country of origin. I think the criteria is you're officially living and working where you spend more than 50% of the year.

So I know people that spend less than 50% in a different country, and making revenue and paying taxes within their country, legally.
Wall Street's issue is one of filtering. Because they are the easiest perceived place to make money, they have to set up absurd barriers to maintain staffing qualities.

The tech world is also at risk of going in this direction as well as the wider economy collapses and startups actually start to look like a somewhat conservative career path. The symptoms are all around us. Look at the proliferation of accelerators and short-form bootcamp style tech programs. Google-style hiring process starts to make a lot more sense in this kind of environment.
I personally think #2 is quite important: it proves the employer knows why they're employing you, and that they have thought about the scope for career growth in the role. If the employer hasn't got a clear idea of why they're employing you, then your role becomes an amorphous "do whatever I want done" job, that won't necessarily meaningfully contribute to your skills or remain interesting. If the employer hasn't thought about the scope for career growth in your role, then that -- to me -- shows they don't value their staff enough to care about whether they get anything more than a salary out of the job.

I think it's a little strangely phrased (sounds a bit obsequious), but I think it's a valid and important question.
Don't focus on the competition. Finding your first job is always super tough. I know it seemed impossible when I was in your situation. (I felt so desperate!), but somehow things work out in the end. In the current economic climate, it might take a while, though: don't be upset if you don't get a career job immediately; it can take a year or two sometimes.

You have the grades, so stick with your current course. You do not need a computer science degree to build a career as a software developer. Practical hands-on experience counts more than qualifications.

I believe that a multi-skilled / cross-disciplinary software engineer can expect to earn more money over the course of their career than a straight-up developer. The skills shortage (and therefore the demand) always seems to lie in-between disciplines.

Software development skills + math + business gives you a possible (eventual) avenue into quantitative development in the financial industry, which can be a lucrative career path should you chose to pursue it. (Be prepared to spend a significant amount of time (10 years?) building up skills prior to making the move, though).

Once you have finished your degree, you might consider doing a software-oriented masters degree, or spend 2-3 years with a small company picking up the basics. Your multi-disciplinary skill-set should stand you in good stead. If you cannot find a company willing to hire you, start one! Even if it does not work out, that experience will be golden. If you don't have any ideas, ask in this thread. I have a ton that I am never going to pursue. I am sure that others will pitch in as well.
To me, it's more that Android forgot to include other languages. But maybe it was intentional? You have no choice but to write drivers for the phones special hardware, but you don't have to write bindings for all those drivers to other languages ... only the ones (one?) you chose to support.

I'm not as familiar with iOS ... is there broad language support for that OS?
"Feinstein is apparently of the opinion that the program could be useful and her tactic is instead to put additional oversight in place."

In other words, oversight has failed, let's use oversight to fix it. The only real reform in that list is this:

"Any individual who circumvents access to the phone records database will be fined or imprisoned for up to 10 years"

Of course, without periodic public review of the NSA, we will never know if people are being punished for that sort of thing. At this point we have no reason whatsoever to trust any secret oversight or secret courts. We got into this mess because everything the NSA does is done in secret, and because the FISC operates in secret, and because when someone breaks the rules it is reported to people who are sworn to secrecy.

Of course, public review is conspicuously absent from that list. Only privileged members of Congress, long out of touch with the public, will be reviewing this -- it's business as usual.
This could have clearly been avoided. See what India did with Phalin, with an early warning system and planned evacuation: http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/10/13/india-cyclone-phail...

Less than 20 people died.
I am an author of 1-2 books about programming (Cocoa & Objective-C). The books my co-author any myself wrote are very "thick" (about 700 pages each) and we get about 1 Euro per copy sold. Although the books we wrote are among the best selling programming books in Germany we do not make a fortune. We make most of our money indirectly from the books: consulting, seminars.

When I found the torrent for our books I was pretty happy about it to be honest. :) Of course our publisher does not like it for sure. I have thought about publishing new books on my own so that I get more than 1 Euro per copy. Then again: The German speaking audience is too small in my opinion.

So if I had the balls I would make similar statements.
Assert driven testing means that the tests are part of the actual code that is running. It's helpful because when an assert fails, the stack trace is right at the position where it failed. In many ways it's an easy way to incorporate testing into your application without the need for an additional framework.

A simple example can be done by writing a single function in the root scope or some global function (javascript)

function assert(assertion, description) {
if(!assertion) {
console.log(description);
//could also have other application error handling code
}
}

Then in a function in your application:

function myFunc() {
var x = 1;
assert(x == 1, "x does not equal 1 in myFunc()“);

\\Continue code...
}

This is obviously a very simple example and can definitely be iterated upon, but it gets the basic point across and I'm on my phone so writing code isn't the easiest :-P

Some systems have something like this built in, such as node which has more features.

http://nodejs.org/api/assert.html
Isowall: an isolating firewall
People vote for the lesser of two evils. At some point people stopped understanding that "the lesser of two evils" is still evil.
Seems to me like they are trying to get libgen into the spotlight so it might be shutdown. Remember library.nu?

"If you want to steal the text, it's pretty easy to find an illegal copy, but you can get a nice illegal copy from LibGen. There's little risk in stealing stuff off the internet,"
1) Great, more textbooks need to be available for everyone.

2) The EZ version is an interesting idea. Somewhat automatically generating easier/higher level versions of textbooks sounds like an interesting problem.

I think automatically changing the examples to problem domains that interest the readers (or that make less assumptions) is an interesting subproblem. Textbook mass customization if you want. I've come across quite a few textbooks that used examples that were pretty common for someone who is already familiar with the domain but for someone coming in with 0 knowledge they just seemed esoteric (think programming books that use compiler/parser examples). Simply swapping those out for something more approachable for the general audience could increase the value of some textbooks quite a bit.
Bit of both I think - though these sorts of marketing/add agencys are still living in the past.

As the sort of work they are doing becomes more computer/technicly based - they have to change to be able to properly execute - you cant just pick up the phone and bully the printers any more.
"People positively hate incompatible changes – especially bad for dynamic languages", "Never again this way – the future is static analysis and annotations".

Wouldn't it be better to pick a better-suited language then?

John Carmack put it nice way:

"One of the lessons that we took away from Doom 3 was that script interpreters are bad, from a performance, debugging, development standpoint. It’s kind of that argument “oh but you want a free-form dynamically typed language here so you can do all of your quick, flexible stuff, and people that aren’t really programmers can do this stuff”, but you know one of the big lessons of a big project is you don’t want people that aren’t really programmers programming, you’ll suffer for it!"
Here's the problem:

There's a certain type of person whose apparent intelligence is exaggerated by the reward system of lifetime in a Victorian-era education system that emphasizes obedience and checklists. Such people whether created by nurture or nature, are disproportionately represented in the MBA world. However the type of skills developed there are all about thriving within existing systems, whereas to build a successful startup requires a completely different kind of thinking.

I'm not painting MBAs all with one brush either, there are many brilliant ones I've worked with. But there are also many who think they are hot shit because of a lifetime of being "gifted" and "elite" far out of proportion to their actual ability to contribute to a tech startup.
A better analogy would be to say losing all your money due to corrupt and greedy bankers is "Jewish Banker Syndrome". Still not offensive?
Right now the important things needed are hospital ships, helicopters, medical supplies, drinking water, food and shelters... I feel so helpless donating just cash, so many lives need to be helped.
Good Timing. No data to back what I'm saying, but I don't see FB going up any further. The time spent by me (almost none) and my other non-techie friends has decreased drastically on the website and I still don't see a very effective monetization strategy.
Right. We Israelis have National ID cards and National ID Numbers, the number being printed on your driver's license if you choose to carry that instead.

Both cards are small, fit inside any adult's wallet (and children aren't required to carry), and just overall tend to make dealing with any kind of officialdom massively easier than it was in the USA. Why? Because my National ID links to an Interior Ministry database about things like, for instance, my residential address.

So rather than having to provide several different pieces of official documentation to prove local residency and some others to prove citizenship, I provide one card which then proves both residency and citizenship and entitles me to the services of my municipal government and the local branch of the Interior Ministry, while also unifying all official identity records under one number.

Strangely enough, there have not been mass purges of Israeli Communists or anything. I should know, having been to a few party meetings.
I'm currently watching the commemorations from London live on BBC1, and the ambassadors from the various countries of the ex-British empire countries (including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, various Caribbean countries etc) are laying wreaths of poppies at the Cenotaph (the war memorial in the centre of london).

In order of precedence they lay their wreaths after the royals and the heads of the UK political parties, but before the heads of the UK armed forces.

I've seen Polish, Irish, and Dutch ex-soldiers today and probably other nations march in the past as well. Oh and the Gurkhas obviously (who are Nepalese, but part of the British Army).

So not only British soldiers get commemorated, maybe many people only remember the soldiers of their own country but that certainly doesn't lead to the conclusion that others aren't worth commemorating, only that people think of things that are close to home first.
I imagine they will. About the time the hurricane was about to hit, Aquino assured the world that the Philippines would be ready and that even one casualty would be too much.

Currently there are areas which are completely isolated. After the hurricane passed, there was no way to know the status of these areas. There is no functioning communication for these people.

Just yesterday the headlines started out with something like "8 confirmed dead" then it went up to "100 confirmed dead" and of course now the numbers are exploding. Getting a solid grasp on the level of destruction and which areas need the most help takes time.

I'm seeing that the Philippines is starting to put out the call for help. I imagine that call will be answered.
The danger with that approach is that Linux is not a mainstream product. It's come on leaps and bounds, and Ubuntu has been hugely responsible for the broadening of desktop linux's appeal, but it's still not mainstream. Windows is mainstream. OSX, some people have heard of, even fewer have tried. Linux is still very much the domain of us geeks, a group that a) is very willing to switch based on principle b) is very capable of switching c) understands how our privacy is being violated.

Canonical COULD get desktop Linux into the mainstream, and stand a better chance than anyone else of doing so, but this is a massive shot in the foot. I give Ubuntu about 6 months of sticking with this policy before they realise they're slowly, irretrievably losing most of their customers.
It was clear days before landfall that this was a huge storm; the ships should have already been enroute, and other supplies staged in Guam and Okinawa.
What does it even mean? You can dump everything into one class hacky Python way if you want. You can use dynamic keyword if you don't care about type safety.
> Incidentally I don't know if that scoping example is intentionally ignoring the fact that Ruby does support lexical scoping (EDIT: for blocks), or if it's lack of understanding of what what "def" is

I also don't think it is fair to say that ruby "failed to nail lexical scope in fundamental ways".

I like how it enables lexical scoping with blocks, instead of enabling it in, maybe, more common way with embedded functions. To me, the ruby way is more intuitive.

Also, 'breaking scope' with block (that acts as anonymous function) instead of defining new (embedded) function feels more explicit wrt real scoping intentions.
Wait - my race has a bearing on my height, skin colour, susceptibility to disease, proportion of fast to slow twitch muscle fibres, the shape of my nose and eyelids, the amount of various hormones in my blood. Why would it not have a bearing on intelligence?
Fortunately we missed it here in Manila also, this is very devastating for the country and it is going to be that way for some time. People without housing, food, water, and daily requirements.
Isn't it why Python guys are trying to use more annotations? To patch it with some sort of semi-decent static analysis?

Check the Dropbox's pain presentation: https://www.dropbox.com/s/83ppa5iykqmr14z/Py2v3Hackers2013.p...
Case Study: how imgur uses CloudFlare
> there is freedom of speech, there is no freedom to not be offended.

Unless, of course, your employer is knowingly or unknowingly inflicting a hostile environment on you.
I really hope they are better prepared next time, because there will definitely be another super storm typhoon like this. And I hope when they rebuild new structures in these coastal areas, they will be higher and stronger to withstand these things.
The article is obviously a joke, but it's worth mentioning that the square root of any non-perfect-square number would do as well as Pi. All of them contain infinite sequences of apparently perfect randomness.

Also, not only is it true that any imaginable sequence appears in Pi, but it appears there an infinite number of times.
Could it be the reason Symbian was slow and eventually failed?
Were they interpreting or compiling Python?
Dude, seriously, what's this? Random horse tips using google voice? I can't even understand those tips lol
You could ask to see where you'll be working?