skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It seems like there are two separate things needed -- overall increase in wealth creation, and better survivability of structures (or at least shelters)

I've always had this theory that one at least partial explanation for the differing economic states of different cultures is ability to properly assess risks and prepare for them accordingly. If every <x> years a typhoon is going to come along and wipe out <y>% of your infrastructure putting the affected regions of the country back to square one yet again, coming up with a workable solution to that should be a super high priority. If your work is constantly going into relatively persistent projects and you can minimize setbacks, standard of living constantly increases over time and generations.

Cindercrete blocks are the first thing that come to my mind, but maybe that's too expensive? Could some sort of reinforcement mechanism (perhaps anchored to the ground, providing strength but still allowing movement/flexibility) for bamboo huts be designed that uses affordable cabling such that they could withstand the force without disintegrating?

Personally, I'd be more likely to donate money if there was a specific engineering cause like this that I knew it was going to, rather than just general relief to recreate the same environment that will simply be wiped out again next time. Wrong way to think perhaps, but so be it. Charity success is partially a marketing problem, and this is a way to approach it that I think would have some success. If you could sponsor a specific family (as you can with children in Africa) for some housing upgrades, and get some photos in return, I think a lot of people over here with excess money might share a bit of it.

Yes, obviously I don't know all the parameters involved, and it's easy for me as a rich white male on the other side of the world to armchair quarterback, but I simply don't believe that everything that can be done is being done - over here we have our own solvable problems that we will never solve, for different reasons, so I don't think it's racist to believe that just perhaps, people in the Phillipines aren't undertaking the 100% optimal solution to their problems.

EDIT: I read below:

It's worth reiterating that for all the obvious destructive power of sustained wind speeds of almost 200mph, it was the associated storm surge – the rush of water into coastal areas – which caused the worst damage in Tacloban, and most likely many of the deaths. The storm surge in Tacloban was estimated at 6m, sweeping away even concrete buildings, and bringing the sort of devastation so reminiscent of the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Storm surges washing away even concrete structures.....now that's depressing. So now what? Can we affordably elevate everyone's shelter? But 6 metres? Not a chance. If 6m stomr surges are somewhat common, I just don't know how that are can be considered habitable. I have no idea if there is somewhere else those people could be relocated to. Oh man it's a tough problem.
I had a Windows Mobile 5 device, and it had MSN, at least I could write to my buddies who are on computer via my mobile. I miss those days.
You have some of it backwards. Your skin color and the shapes of various body parts have bearing on your race, not vice versa.

Race is a human construct. That's not to say that there aren't real differences, but merely that it's a categorization based on fairly arbitrary things. Now it turns out that skin color and such in some cases correlates with other, less visible things. But it's not what the determination is based on.

For example, the President of the United States is racially black. Genetically, he has equal influence from the "white" side, but racially he is not generally considered to be "half white".

For an example from the other direction, consider that Africa contains more human genetic diversity than the rest of the world put together. We would generally expect to find there both the very dumbest and the very smartest of humans, at least for the genetic components of intelligence. It makes no sense to place that whole group into a single "black" race when the people in that group vary so enormously from each other.

We can certainly talk about genetic differences in intelligence between different population groups. But "race" is not a good way to come up with the groups to examine.
Well all of those solve concurrency and scale problems in the VM and build a language on the top. C++ is just a language in which you are free to build those abstractions into in any form you choose. Batteries aren't included but are easy to construct. If that wasn't possible, then our SQL server installation (all c++) wouldn't quite happily run a single process on each of our 48-core nodes with 128Gb of RAM, nor would it cluster and replicate amongst all 8 of them and deliver 10,000 queries a second whilst yawning.

Cats can be skinned in a multitude of different ways. No specific knife is required but some experienced knife-wielders are more important.

Rob Pike is pretty cool but has blinkers on as he's a captive research executive rather than someone with dirty hands on the ground in some enterprise outfit.
Isn't Ripple centralized though?
Shouldn't you be blaming the site for only giving you only one option? Why didn't they provide a second?
That's not really Facebook's fault though.
You can't say "Nintendo will fall because Atari and Sega have both felt" because, well, Nintendo hasn't felt yet, unlike the other two. Nintendo is still here, dominating the handheld market and defining the consoles one.

Only time will tell, sure. But until Valve or Ouya or any other company actually achieve something that big, they are just newcomers.
Obviously, in today's theme, Facebook is not using mapreduce effectively to figure out who of our "friends" we actually care about :)
Heh, now you're throwing Socrates' critique of Democracy at me? :)

Sure -- democracy is no guarantee. Referendums go wrong. Aaaand we're back to the Enlightenment political question of how best to balance the will of the masses (which can become a mob in the right circumstances, or an instrument of oppression to the minority) against the wisdom of representative government -- a republic. A sticky wicket indeed. The idealism here -- and I freely admit that it is based on a naive Modern optimism -- is that a transparent, representative democracy, rather than a direct democracy, corrupts more slowly over time and retains the highest possibility of self-reform of all types of governments.
Any theories as to why? Whatever the truth is, it's even more important to understand why something is a certain way.
facebook is part of our collective culture too, does Zuckerberg share profits?
It seems like FB's Instagram purchase was a good move then.
Comcast About to Screw Customer's Charging for Bandwidth
This means that any customers that use Dropbox, Google Drive, or other backup services will need to most likely stop using those. They are also going to charge for video streaming and download, EXCEPT from their Xfinity on-demand service. There goes Netflix and Hulu.

Most people that work from from home average well above 300GB/mo.

Ridiculous!
Open source it. You independently did all the work, you're not making any money from it, and you're not using any of his trademarks. There is no "business" here.
If you are trying to find someone in the Philippines in the aftermath of the typhoon, you can try using one of these sources:

PeopleLocator (https://pl.nlm.nih.gov/)

Google PersonFinder (http://google.org/personfinder/2013-yolanda/query?role=seek)

alternate source for Google PersonFinder (http://google.org/personfinder/global/home.html)

Red Cross request for help restoring contact (http://familylinks.icrc.org/en/pages/home.aspx)

If you would like to donate, here are some organizations that could use your help:

Red Cross Philippines (http://www.redcross.org.ph/donate) via Paypal

Ayala Foundation's 'Laging Handa Fund' (Always Ready), overseas donors can use this online portal(http://feedthehungryphil.org/ayala-foundation-inc/) for donations

GlobalGiving.com(http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/philippines-disaster-re...). Credit and debit card donations accepted.

Save the Children (http://www.savethechildren.org/site/c.8rKLIXMGIpI4E/b.885610...). Save the Children has a team on the ground in Tacloban working to respond to this emergency.

Now, unfortunately we wait for lack of sanitation, clean water and associated disease to take their much higher toll.

The situation report has the following information:
2,055,630 families or 9,497,847 persons were affected.

The number of confirmed casualties is still low, at 229. This number will inevitably increase drastically when response efforts proceed and communication lines are repaired.

The number of damaged houses is currently at 19,551 (13,191 have been totally destroyed)

A state of calamity has been declared in the province of Antique, as well as in Janiuay and Dumangas in the province of Iloilo

Flooding, landslides, and fallen trees blocked several roads, but most are now passable thanks to ongoing clearing operations *Several networks are still down but are in the process of being restored
Flaskr: Intro to Flask, Test-Driven Development, and jQuery
If someone wants to use a website, they should use the website. If they don't want to use the website (this includes the login mechanism) then they don't. If your belief that Facebook logins are a bad thing is widespread, people will stop only implementing Facebook logins because it's a bad business decision. Stop whining because the market doesn't agree with you.
for now I have a system that has been successfully using it for weeks, so I pretty think it works.

And yes I have watched the code and found a bug. The clock used in python is mononotonic but may change its frequency and the the time structure is wrong on 64bits architecture there is a cast to signed long long where it should be unsigned long long.

So if I can find stuff easily and see bugs, it means to me the code is well architectured and readable.
What could Project Flare do a generation from now?
Thanks for the clarification but reading the FAQ again for both Unstable and Testing in the context of your comment I'm still struggling to compare it to how Ubuntu gets security fixes for example.

I checked the security site listed in the Testing area in the Debian FAQ and don't see the recent SSH fix or the recent Linux kernel fix.

http://www.debian.org/security/

I do see them on the Ubuntu site:

http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/
The USSR had dozens of nuclear ICBM's pointed at every major European city, and, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. city. They also had massive armies.

If war had occurred, The U.S. could have been completely annihilated, utterly destroyed, ceased to exist. That's simply not the situation we face with today with Islamic terrorists.

It's reasonable to ask the question if we might be willing to accept a handful of causalities in exchange to remaining a free country. Than, take the money we're spending on the MIC and use it for safer pools and bathtubs, saving an order of magnitude more lives.
Extending JavaScript with inline unit tests
Some people might have multiple addresses that forward the same mailbox.
I think this will be less of a problem as responsive mobile design takes over. When I'm looking at a mobile website, I don't mind that it appears slightly different as long as all the same content is there.
You seem to think I'm dismissing C. What I'm really trying to express is that I'd recommend people learn C++ and consider C an old-school 1980s, unsafe, rather laborious, subset of it.

> We do still have a need for a low-level language

C++ can be 'low-level' if that's what you're going to label C. How can you dismiss C++ as not being low-level and then later say it's 'polluted by low-level concerns'?

> There is also quite a bit of C code out there... not knowing C means being cut off from all of that.

I agree. Fortunately, you can't really effectively learn C++ without understanding its C legacy.

> The high-level features of C++ are polluted with low-level concerns that serve as nothing more than a distraction

Until you're working at a high level and need to dig deep and implement a gritty data structure or algorithm with a high-level interface. Sure, you can drop down from Java to C, for example, but then you're in the mud writing JNI bindings. Why do languages have to be constrained to 'high-level' and 'low-level' pigeon holes? Why can't there be room for a language that's good, but perhaps not elegant, slick or beautiful, across the spectrum?

Honestly, I don't want a religious war about it. I just think some of your assumptions are typical of people who have obvious had a bad experience with C++, having used it in a specific context, and therefore think "It didn't work for me, therefore it must be horrible".

On another note, C++ is at least improving and rapidly becoming better tooled, with a growing sense of developer community. C has had a few sprinkles of improvement, but has otherwise reached the end of its natural evolution.
Twitter being constantly mentioned is a nice ad for them. I think they're ok with that setup.
"it would be a great humanitarian thing, plus a show of strength for one of our key Pacific allies"

Are you suggesting that there is excess money for something like this in the Navy budget? There are an unlimited number of things that we could do to make the world better and we can't do all of them. Like in business you have to undertake a cost/benefit analysis and see if it makes sense then to do or not. Not to mention how many people die in this country that would live if that money was spent here?
I would say that the lack of a standard garbage collector ("smart" pointers do not count since programmers must manually break cycles and decide among smart pointer types) is a pretty serious deficiency. I would also point to the abysmal error-handling support in C++; you do not even get a reliable way to report errors that occur in destructors.

Really though, my big issue with C++ is that the high-level features are bogged down by low-level details -- if I wanted to deal with low-level details I would not be using high-level features in the first place. Why should I have to manually determine how to capture variables in a lexical closure? Why should I have to manually declare "virtual" inheritance to deal with the multiple inheritance diamond? Why are destructors not virtual by default? Why are string literals still pointers to character arrays, why are arrays still not bounds-checked, why are integers still fixed-width (and why are integer overflows not reported as errors?)? Yes, these things all make sense sometimes but in most cases they are the opposite of what you want -- you should have to write more code to get this behavior than to avoid it.
Does anyone know if Batangas (more specifically: Nasugbu) was hit badly?
> C++ is pretty much exclusively used in the gaming industry

I'm curious how you've come to that conclusion? C++ is used in most of the major web browsers, most of the major database engines, most of the major office program suites, it's widely used at Adobe, Microsoft and Google... C++ is in the top 5 of most language popularity rankings (TIOBE, langpop).

Sure, C++ has its issues, but claiming it's only used in one industry is way off base.
I know somebody who's dealt with it for a lot more than weeks, and according to him and from what he's shown me the code inside of it and the bugs it has are pretty laughable.
Wikimedia Downloads
Jane Street would be another one, especially if you are interested in OCaml. http://www.janestreet.com
Well, in the case of Heston and "demographics", I'd have no problem calling that racist because he almost certainly means it as "black people are inherently less intelligent and/or more prone to crime", while ignoring the centuries of systematic and brutal oppression based race.
The reason why Python works the way it does is specifically to keep the magical syntax as simple as possible.

Consider the following:

menu = [("Apples", 5),
("Cream Pie", 2),
("Tea and scones", 3)]
for food, price in menu:
print "To buy %s, please pay %d dollars" % (food,price)

Right now, it works unambiguously -- just the way you'd expect. The above prints:

To buy Apples, please pay 5 dollars.
To buy Cream Pie, please pay 2 dollars.
To buy Tea and scones, please pay 3 dollars.

What if we implemented your rule? Would the intprereter print the above, or would it say this?

To buy 0, please pay ("Apples", 5) dollars.
To buy 1, please pay ("Cream Pie", 2) dollars.
To buy 2, please pay ("Tea and scones", 3) dollars.

What if you wanted to print the first one? If your syntax were implemented, the programmer would have to write something awful like

for index, (food, price) in menu:

or even

for food, price in destructuring_without_index(menu):

which puts us in full circle again!

The reason why most of us don't like your idea is because it introduces ambiguity and doesn't even remove the trade-off. No matter how you implement it, there's going to be a trade-off.

The zen of python, by Tim Peters:

Explicit is better than implicit.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
Facebook provides VERY similar functionality. It's the HN user base that just complains about problems instead of trying to fix them.
What's the full progression of vapid casual enthusiasm?

Like -> Love -> (Have Sex With) -> (Worship as The One True God) -> (Idealize as The Genius Successor of Steve Jobs) -> (Give Read/Write Access to My Bank Accounts) -> (Grant my Power of Attorney To) -> (Dissolve Myself and Transfer My Full Agency as a Human To)
This and so much more is in http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html - well worth perusing if you're needing to do a lot of bash.
The pet headcrab in Half Life 2 was named after her.

http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Lamarr
I keep seeing everyone say that people are communicating via Instagram. Can someone explain how that is possible? It sounds extremely inconvenient, since you can only post pictures and comment on said pictures.
Maybe in your second paragraph you're discussing science vs engineering? For example from a science perspective the Wright Bros got to check mark "flight" pretty decisively, mostly because of their windtunnel work, although the engineering has mostly failed for most of the species and most of the species has never flown and due to massive resource constraints probably never will, so defining "flight" as a success is iffy.

The genome project is another science to engineering transition problem, where the science check mark is done, but as far as I know there are no widespread engineering applications for the data at all, although someday there might be in the generic sense that all research is potentially useful.

Something like this could happen in AI. OK the science proves conclusively that it could work, its just human engineering might not be up to it for a few centuries (like the Babbage experience WRT computation) or even the engineering is possible but the economics and politics make it impossible (like building a massive power generation dam across the straits of Gibraltar) We could prove the science of AI works, and then nothing happens for the next 500 years. Or maybe not.
Yup. This. Once I filter down to the data I actually care about, I typically find I'm no longer anywhere near "Big Data" size.
why delude yourself that exploiting people is ok

I don't accept your interpretation of "exploiting".

They have jobs. They get paid for their jobs. They're getting paid more by doing their jobs than whatever alternatives they had since this isn't slave labor.

You're redefining what "exploiting" means and you're casually throwing concepts around like the perpetual victim status of entire societies due to colonialization.

Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the USA were colonies too... we got over it.

If there's an evil in the whole colonial relationship, it's do-gooder Westerners who think they should care for and dictate to other societies rather than just letting them get jobs, sell their products, sell services, compete on the worlds stage, learn lessons, improve their lot, etc.
No it's not. It'll show a friend commented on something irrelevant in a public group I'm not a member of in the morning and not show the same friend broke up with their fiancee who is also a friend later that day. Removing them as a friend wouldn't have solved that. It's impossible to correctly guess the 'importance' of these types of things 100% of the time but surely they can do better than they are doing now.
Talking about "the nature of startups" seems pretty shallow in comparison. It's like asking "how close are we to a Mars landing? What could it do to the nature of startups?"
google.com/ncr

For no country redirect.
I think the first true strong AI will come from research on non-equilibrium thermodynamics. We need to get down to the basics: where do entities come from that self-organize, more specifically that are able to use information in structured energy arrays to find and dissipate negentropy deposits, and dissipate that energy in order to maintain their own state away from equilibrium and hence avoid dissipating themselves? In short, strong AI will not come from top-down research on problem solving or learning, but bottom-up research on what makes autonomy and agency possible.

Goedel machines might actually be the closest thing to this in the computing literature, my reaction is less about the work itself than the rhetoric surrounding it, to be honest. JS should collaborate with a physicist on the thermodynamic side of the problem.

If you're intrigued, you could start with the article I linked above, or if you have journal access, anything from the same special issue. I chose that article just because it's the only one not behind a paywall.
I was objecting to filling "all" the domains. I was referring to classes as inherently C++. For example, constructors, destructors, virtual functions, namespaces.

For example, AFAIK you cannot have a naked struct in C++. A struct is a class, and therefore can have methods, thus can have constructor and destructor.

Also, exceptions are a big part of C++ that I don't think you can remove?

If you want simple, obvious separation of data and logic, and you don't want exceptions or name mangling, then C is probably a better choice for that domain.

I like C++, but it is not C and is unlikely that one will ever replace the other in all the domains.

OTOH, if you want to write OO and you like C++, then it is not a bad choice.

I think both are being used to write new systems, so neither is legacy :-)
They keep saying I will be charge INR 55 from next year, everytime I install the app on a new phone. They never have in the last two years.