skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ooooooh, this really makes me angry..............

How dare you?

Those two arguments are very valid and absolutely need to be included in any serious discussion about this. Just because you so arrogantly dismiss them, does not mean that other people wont, worse still cant have those concerns.

To suggest that mentioning these two issues means one is not "better than that", what ever you mean by that but clearly it is intended to put down and dismiss any one who is concerned about them, is frankly vile. You have loaded your statements outrageously.Especially in such a fundamental question of life, where people will be at their most vulnerable. Essentially you are saying that unless people agree with you, they are some how stupid.

Worse still, the idea that some how doctors are so special that they can be wholly trusted alone with this is insane. Heh, here in the UK, one of our most frighting and notorious serial killers was a family GP. Oh, and one of the London bombers was also a doctor. Doctors are a flawed as the rest of us.

BTW, I fully support the idea that in some cases ending life humanely is the best thing to do. I would want such for me, and any one else who wants it. I too think that is right. However, with such a serious fundamental issue like this, we almost have to be guided by the serious concerns people have first. We must get people who are deeply worried by the implications to also go along with any solution. Its like drilling for oil with the consent of environmentalists. We need solution that satisfies all, or all we will have is a god almighty mess. We much not have such a mess when it comes down to legally killing people. I can accept people being divided on war, welfare, economics, which programming language is best, etc, etc, fine. But the sanctity of life is a little more important than that.

Its too fundamental to humanity. Its about how we regard life it's self. This is one debate no one gets to lay down the rules on.

(Deep breaths............ calm.............hmmmmmmmmm happy place......)
Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original Adventure in Code
of course that's true. I think in this one particular case, I'm skeptical. That's all.

The guy says he had to check the PET machine before he removed the blinding.

He says his parents showed him a lot of love. he would have to understand how love plays out in other families to really claim that.

little things make me feel skeptical. but it's possible that he's a psychopath.
In Ruby, using explicit "returns" or ternary operators can be a hint that someone is newer to Ruby. On the other hand, using symbol-to-proc syntax indicates some experience (I.e. list_of_objects.map(&:method))
"As an example, having the questions "Are you male?" and "Are you below the median age?" will not work "

First question is "Are you male?". Made me laugh.
Yup. Which is why I'm personally a bit uneasy about Ruby's long-term future. It's attractive for the same reasons that Perl was attractive, but that means it also invites some of the same issues that Perl experienced.

Wild speculation follows:

There's always a need for a solid "just get shit done" language, but maybe any good language in this space is doomed to die by its own success. Crufty, hard to maintain code accumulates over time, because quickly banging out code you don't expect to still be maintaining in 10 years is the whole point. As that cruft accumulates, people start noticing it and inevitably blame the language. That leads to casting about for the next "just get shit done" language, and the cycle repeats.
How would one know this in advance?
If you don't mind saying, in what country did this take place?
Bash is for most things, one of the easier languages I have dealt with, being even beyond python, etc. That is though, for shell type scripting.

There's many problems with it, but the only one I've run into that keeps it from being more useful is that there are no multi dimensional arrays built-in. There are super hacky ways I have seen them implemented, but by default it's something I basically never am able to turn to when scripting in bash and have to turn to other languages, even when the particular task I was working with would be mostly simpler in bash.

That said, there are associative arrays in bash these days.
"I will just need to _read_ it on wikipedia."

Not even knowing it exists to google for, is a bit of a problem.

Knowing of 100 algos is more worthwhile than knowing everything about 1 algo.
The longer you read the article, the further and further he gets from accusing Apple of anything, really. He's quick to point out that the blacklist tactic shouldn't affect how you see the tech press. Towards the end he admits that the difference between a whitelisted journalist and a blacklisted one is practically nil.

Read between the lines and you see it's just a matter of status and pride. You get one kind by being on the blacklist and another by being on the whitelist. The author is clear which side he'd rather be on.

And that's the real point of the article. To show off how 'independent' he is by daring to compare Apple to Joseph McCarthy.
Disgracefully, that site isn't accessible to UK users.
Suffix Trees. That kind of hyper efficient recognition is even harder to think about without the finite automata theory behind regular expressions.
> Rule of thumb, if you haven't touched your own code for a long time, think of it as being written by someone else. You are not the same person you were when you wrote it.

This is really insightful, most especially the part I italicized.

I can think of a few particularly embarrassing moments when I've dug through old code of mine and immediately thought "What kind of idiot wrote this crap?" followed by a brief moment of horror when the realization sets in that the idiot was me. :)

I think it would also make a fantastic addendum to this [1] discussion (and the article to which it is attached), especially since many new programmers often don't think much of code maintenance. Usually it's comprised of "I (or someone else) will eventually rewrite this." Then it enters production.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6789504
Along with the other excellent answers, one thing Perl never got was a faster runtime. This drove me into the arms of V8 (via Node.js).

Ruby got jRuby and Rubinius, PHP got the excellent work Facebook did, Python got PyPy, and many cool languages started to appear on the JVM.

Perl got stuck with /usr/bin/perl.

Having said that, the internals of Perl continue to improve in the current interpreter, and there's some long standing amazing work such as the incredible performance of the DBI drivers (look at the techempower benchmarks to see how well Perl shines even versus Node.js when it comes to database access).

I still use Perl for small scripts, but I'm just not building anything big in it these days. Perl6 was a huge lost opportunity, and a massive failure in vision and leadership.
You can have one, but not both.
My BMW did just that: if the battery voltage decreasde under a specific threshold (when the engine was off), any light was switched off.
A good idea, anyway.

AC
The one I've heard as being somewhat more accurate is "Thou shalt not murder."

That is, pre-meditated and with intent. The current version could wind up damning you for self-defence.
Henry Ford's Minimum Viable Product
localbitcoins.com is a safe and anonymous marketplace to buy bitcoins. I've found that cash deposits are the fastest and safest way to buy on LocalBitcoins.
cool writeup. while not a node.js user, i love these sorts of tours of system internals - i always learn a lot, both specific tools and also processes of using them.

thanks for the details, very articulate and useful stuff.
Why Class?
Not sure what I was confused about. It was late and it's been a while since I've seen that scene. Thanks for correcting :)
How I Automated “Finding Almost Anyone’s Email Address”
I should reword that sentence to make the point clearer. As psuter said, you can have one but not both
Fresh out of highschool so don't expect TOO much ;) but I'm working on it. jessehorne.github.io Check it out and tell me what you think.
Pet health insurance does exist, just isn't widespread.

re: "medical industrial complex"

Right now, some arguments against euthanasia center on the heirs bumping someone off early to keep their estate. We rarely hear the opposite view which you so cynically bring up - it's in the financial interest of many megacompanies that we continue the practice of prolonging life at all costs.
I was once one of the most prolific authors on CPAN, and this, along with my answer above about lack of performance, drove me away.

Perl(5) just needed classes and clean up a few bits of historic cruft (like the need to end modules in "1;", indirect object syntax, etc) and it could have been an awesome language. Perl6 decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats That Prove It
SpotifyNotify
SpotifyNotify is small app written in C# + WPF, notifies user when song in Spotify has changed.
I sort of don't understand the thought of turning "Thou shall not kill" into "Thou shall do everything in thine power to keep the person alive"
It was much more clear after having it pointed out to me.
The processor plus the RAM is a Turing machine. If you decide in advance what input go to the input pins, regardless of the output, and you just record what goes out the output pins, the processor is pretty much a DFA.

When you add the RAM, you provide a feedback loop: input depends on previous outputs (in plainspeak, when you write to the RAM, you can read it later). No feedback loop, no Turing machine.
A lot more JS coders could benefit from adding "use strict" to their code too. It's frankly amazing it isn't used more.
The earliest cars were hand built, one by one, and very expensive. The peculiar machines were seen as toys for the rich.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Quadricycle
So sorry to hear about the current situation, found myself filled with a lot of emotion as I read through it. Reminds me of a talk I had with a good friend of mine where we basically acknowledged that we're not afraid to die but that we're more afraid of the dying process.
A number of Linux distributions have moved to the BSD-licensed dash[1] for running their system initialization scripts, as it's noticeably faster than bash (resulting in faster boot times). Ubuntu made this change back in 2006 [2][3], and Debian switched to dash for Debian Squeeze.

Bash is still the default user shell on those systems, though.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Almquist_shell

[2]: http://lwn.net/Articles/343924/

[3]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh
I taught myself beginning HTML/XHTML/PHP using Vieka Wordpad on a Samsung SGH-i607. 3G was my only connection to the net at the time.

I never did use an IDE until lately, but Geany isn't much of an IDE compared to some other choices.
It's actually regulated quite well here in te Netherlands. Strict protocols to follow by at least two "independant" doctors. Doesn't mean stuff never goes "awry" though.
This. Micron's in memory automata is going to eat your lunch on many algorithms. Bye bye Van Neuman bottleneck. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...
Press release: http://www.micron.com/about/innovations/automata-processing
My compiler is better than C/C++. If you do not have arguments, you do not need parenthesis on function calls.

You are a nigger. I wrote a compiler.

If you were not a nigger, I might have thought you found my "PAREN_WARN" compiler option. I have different precedence rules for my language, so to keep everybody on their toes, I give a warning if you have extra parens.
Can't step in the same river twice is true in all domains, not just software. Admittedly with some languages it is worse than others, assembler and APL come to mind but same truth still applies.
I've found vrome to be a more feature rich alternative to vimium, it still can't compare to Pentadactyl though.
https://github.com/jinzhu/vrome
"If you run a tor relay you can hide your own traffic in the noise."

Assuming you don't have way more traffic than noise.
I will reread this post many times as I stay on this path, especially the last sentence. Thank you.
Her talk at Hacker News London is also well worth a watch

https://vimeo.com/37306611
Google Now’s latest update is… “In your face”
I've come to (try to) document / code like I assume the next person reading it will be both insane and stupid.

Usually that's me. Usually it was worth the extra effort :) And at the very least it's a measure of progress, as I'm no longer that insane and stupid.
I wonder if that announcement would lead to more or less mining going on. If less, the announcement would mean the attack itself gets cheaper.
The Northern Hemisphere has roughly 90% of the population[1]. That is far from 50% what we should be looking for.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Hemisphere
Very interesting thought experiment. A few random thoughts:

Reminds me of Panoptic by the EFF: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Everyone's ID would change as time passed (if they move, if they age, if they get a sex change, etc).

The best questions for this are inherently "irrelevant", since "relevant" questions tend to be statistically linked. So, questions like "Was the second letter of your first girlfriend's middle name between A and M?" is better than "Were you younger than 20 when you had your first girlfriend?", since we can likely guess the latter based on the other statistics.

It's very unlikely every ID will be unique if only asking 33 yes/no questions. I mean, look at two twins living together -- very few questions will be able to differentiate between them.

I think it's possible to do based on a random snapshot in time, however less possible if it's meant to last a lifetime.

I also think the questions exist, but not in a manner that we'd be able to come up with on our own. As in, I believe that a program that knew every detail about every human could create 33 yes/no questions that differentiated people, however I don't believe we could do it ourselves.

I also wonder how many questions would be required to ask non-yes/no questions and get a completely unique ID for everyone. For example, questions like "weight? languages spoken? birth place?".
Raw, uncut, Gas Pedal Freestyle
How Learning to Code Helped My (Non-Engineering) Career
Right, what a joke. Of course, fortunately it's trivially easy to bypass.

https://web.archive.org/web/20131121213728/http://www.bbc.co...
Of course I had to contact the Kingdom of Heaven admin to see if they made it to the comet: rep@heavensgate.com.

I wonder if their nads were waiting for them?
Adding to the above:

While in most algorithms books, we treat integer operations (addition, multiplication) as an O[1] operation, most do not even mention that this is only because these integers are constrained in size to a limited number of bits. Storing an integer in mathematics would require infinite amount of memory. Analyzing the Big-O complexity of the algorithms is too much more fun when you take the integer fixed-width assumption out.

A single integer can serve as a "stack" from the perspectives of computer science. Without loss of generalization, assume that the set of symbols has digits 1..9. Now push operation is multiplication by ten and addition of the digit, while pop is taking the units digit and dividing by ten.

In other words, if you are using a single integer in your program, and do not want to simply return incorrect answers or throw exceptions due to overflow errors, then your algorithm may already be beyond an NDFA. This would for example happen if you are trying to match parenthesis in a string like "(()())(((())))". You can easily do this by having an integer in your program, reading the string from left to right, incrementing the integer when you encounter a '(' and decrement for a ')'. The computer science books would however show the above problem to be unsolvable using a NDFA. (You have solved the problem for all practical purposes since the strings you'll encounter may never be that long, but a computer with finite memory is in principle incapable of solving this "correctly" for all possible inputs.)
bubble sort is useful for two cases:

you have a small (3-5) fixed size array that you need to sort with very simple code.

A classic case is to enforce a defined lock ordering when you have more than two locks in dynamic objects that you all need to acquire. In this case open coded bubble sort is good and beats calling a complicated library function.

The other case is your objects are known to be nearly already sorted. In this case bubble sort is a very good algorithm too (although it may be better to avoid a full sort then)

In short bubble sort is often a good choice when anything else would be over engineered.

To expand on this point: simplicity ("just do what you need") is often under valued.

One simple data structure trick I learned recently (from Knuth) is: people often use complicated balanced tree libraries like b or rb. You only need a balanced tree library when the sort keys are in-balanced. One simple trick is to hash the input keys. As long as your hash function is good enough, the keys will be already spread out and you can then use a much simpler non balanced tree.
Follow the money

Today patient has to pay lot of money to be kept alive. Also deciding about death is expensive and this burden would be on government.

In a few decades elderly people will be 40% of population. Government will probably have to pay bills for most of them. Only then will this become norm, but in really hideous way.
Reminds me of a good C.S. Lewis quote:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
That rationale may be a bit revisionist, here is Olin Shivers' take on RMS's justification for elisp's dynamic scoping:

"Some context: Common Lisp did not exist (the effort was just getting underway). MIT Scheme did not exist. Scheme was a couple of AI Lab tech reports and a master's thesis. We're talking the tiniest seed crystal imaginable, here. There was immense experience in the lisp community on optimising compiled implementations of dynamically-scoped languages -- this, to such an extent, that it was a widely held opinion at the time that "lexical scope is interesting, theoretically, but it's inefficient to implement; dynamic scope is the fast choice." I'm not kidding. To name two examples, I heard this, on different occasions, from Richard Stallman (designer & implementor of emacs lisp) and Richard Fateman (prof. at Berkeley, and the principal force behind franz lisp, undoubtedly the most important lisp implementation built in the early Vax era -- important because it was delivered and it worked). I asked RMS when he was implementing emacs lisp why it was dynamically scoped and his exact reply was that lexical scope was too inefficient. So my point here is that even to people who were experts in the area of lisp implementation, in 1982 (and for years afterward, actually), Scheme was a radical, not-at-all-accepted notion. And outside the Lisp/AI community... well, languages with GC were definitely not acceptable. (Contrast with the perl & Java era in which we live. It is no exaggeration, thanks to perl, to say in 2001 that billions of dollars of services have been rolled out to the world on top of GC'd languages.)"

http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html

(emphasis not my own)

That whole page is a good read, particularly if you are a fan of Shivers' writing style.
It's doubly impressive that she attained such success as a woman in a very male-dominated society.
That's quite a conspiracy you have there.
Even with questions invariant over a lifetime, edge cases like identical twins (same gender, same age, likely same upbringing, etc) are likely to mess with it.
Pebble steals your email address from an unsubscribed form
I'm saying that its an arbitrary choice for a society to allow companies to base compensation on supply and demand. As soon as you institute law to keep laborers from occupying factories and taking them over, everything subsequent is arbitrary and can be chosen to achieve whatever social goals you want. Supply and demand is not some law of nature. Its a phenomenon that emerges in particular legal regimes.
Your development environment with Vagrant and Ansible
All lessons learned from the Foundation interview series
How would one know in advance that submitting to HN would result in traffic consisting of more than a handful of users?
PHP is wells suited for software that you want the users to install on "their" server without requiring any server configuration skills.

Two simple projects I'm needing:

- A Tumblr like app where I can post / tag / search the link s I stumbled upon in my daily browsing (with screenshots?).
- A secure but simple commenting engine that I can attach to any of my pages (spam / attacks detection; confirm / delete from links in mails).

Of course I need them as free software. And I'm probably going to work on them soon.
Seems impossible to me, for example what question would separate two identical twins( identical in dna and when born ).

And let's say you find such a question, there is no way that question would divide half of the population.
Maybe some controversial advice: Go ahead, fall in these pits.

I write my fair share of shell scripts and I've hit practically every one of these snags in the past. However, for the majority of tasks I perform with bash, I genuinely don't care if I support spaces in filenames, or if I throw away a little efficiency with a few extra sub-shells, or if I can't test numbers vs strings or have a weird notion of booleans.

Your scripts are going to have bugs. The important question is: What happens when they fail?

Are your scripts idempotent? Are they audit-able? Interruptible? Do you have backups before performing destructive operations? How do you verify that they did the right job?

For example, if your shell scripts operate only on files under version control, you can simply run a diff before committing. Rather than spent a bunch of time tracking down a word expansion bug, you can simply rename that one file that failed to not include a space in its name.
Your brand is your career insurance: Dorie Clark, CEO
I've been using Linux since 2006... And only this year did I finally type 'man' into my terminal. I no longer use google for finding those sorts of things out.
>But if it were true, phishing would be largely a nonissue for workforces (other than the police, who often do set ultra-low thresholds for their screening).

I think you and I are on the same page.

I am curious on why you think I'm off the mark, even if people under the 2nd percentile are less likely to get hired, it doesn't really change the math, it's the same as saying: "but it's only people under the first percentile!"

Side note: I feel that 150 million people are employable in professions that don't require a competency with computers. At the very least I'm grateful that same property doesn't apply to carpentry or construction. As I'm easily in the first percentile for these trades, I'd NEVER get a job. I can't even hang a picture! Why does it always go wrong? T.T
Just use:

- Birthday (19~ bits)

- Rough Location (remaining bits)

And base the questions around those two, for example, where you born on a 1-15th, does the city you were born in start with the letter's a-k. This part would be an exercise in statistics, I would think.

edit: And one bit for if you were the first to be born of two identical twins =p
India to emerge as largest global talent provider
I had a similar post, has some links to app ideas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6067537