skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No one is suggesting that we should focus on computer education over literacy. That's like saying we shouldn't teach mathematics because literacy is more important.

The school I went to had computer classes. And they were crap. I took all of them hoping I would learn to program or do useful things. But they are entirely about teaching Microsoft Office and Excel. Not a useless skill, but it shouldn't take hundreds of hours of class time to learn that.

>What’s more, a society where people are expected to know how to code is one where powerful players like big corporations and government are more likely to ignore responsible design obligations — design decisions such as building in privacy protections and making sure technologies have a degree of transparency about how they operate. It would be like saying safety-enhancing features in vehicles aren’t necessary because everyone learned the basics in driving
school… or worse, who needs to learn when autonomous cars do it for us anyway?

No, this makes no sense. Even programmers don't want to have to manually inspect and work with the code of every program they use. I feel like the author might be misled here.

>If coding becomes a required skill to navigate a technological environment, then a large part of the population without the privilege of becoming fluent in code will be left behind. It will be the gap between the coding haves and have-nots. A world where filter bubbles and sameness rules over the messy realities of life.

This isn't entirely wrong, but still seems like a zero-sum fallacy. Some people learning how to code doesn't mean everyone else is therefore worse off. And hey, you can say this about literally anything at all. Does driving skill being normal make the world more unequal and worse? Or math education. Or internet access. Or numerous other examples. Would taking those things away make the world better?

That is, I don't want people to be poor, but making everyone else poor for the sake of equality doesn't actually improve the situation.

Sidenote: Is OP, Libertatea, a bot? I thought there was a reddit bot of the same name that just posted articles, and he has a lot of submissions and only a few comments. Just curious, don't mean to accuse OP of anything.
Yes, I use it. Once Google Now gave me a fantastically useful recommendation for an Indian restaurant when I was on a trip out of town. The restaurant was within walking distance of my hotel, but I never would have known it was there without Google Now. That alone made me glad I have Google Now on my Nexus 4.

http://kckormasutra.net/
jkl.io tries to attack this problem in news by ranking with blended ranking signals, then clustering from a variety of sources so that even unpopular views will be in the top topic clusters.

I am currently building a comment system to go with it that will promote informative comments in new ways and across threads/clusters if they are in the same time period.
Site is farked. Relevant YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agpB5FVMkOg
Top Technology Bookmarking Websites
My point is that a startup is going to look at how he crushed the nook and decide not to compete in this space now that Bezos has a head start and all the resources of Amazon at his disposal. The nook was a 'me too' effort that never managed to provide the level of value the kindle could.
There's a lot of attention around the objectification of women. Objectification is a problem. What people fail to appreciate is that objectification of men happens also but it isn't as overt as a wolf-whistle.

Women are objectified sexually. Men are objectified by status. A sexually attractive woman always has to ask herself "does he like me because of my looks?" A man with status often asks himself the parallel question "if I was poor or a nobody would she be with me?"

It doesn't happen with a wolf-whistle, but it is just as insidious.
While you are right from a certain very point of view, a doctorate is really not the pinnacle in any sense of your life or your career. Nor is it meant to be. It is as the parent said the beginning of your career. The gateway into research. Really, there is only so much you can accomplish in a few years. However, hopefully it will provide you a solid foundation for many years of fruitful investigation. All to often however the research conducted can turn out to be a dead end after the PhD is completed. It is a start not the goal.
Maybe bottom to top would be a better approach :)
Thanks! I though of that, but my team is in a state that if I plan to take leave, they'll hire someone immediately and they may not take me back later as my position will be filled. Its not a big company.

However, if I decide to quit for personal project, I will start with asking for leave or part time work. That was the plan. Quitting is kinda the last option.
Waterdown WildWing Still Sucks
NGINX dynamic reverse proxying using Lua
my take is that the first rev usually is completely thrown away. So I'd suggest continuing the current rev in mysql - but plan rev 1 to be in the language that makes the best business decision.
I'm interested in reading opposing views, but not stupid ones. If there's a large inferential gap, it often takes me a while to tell the difference. Does this software have a way to distinguish?
Why does it seem like threading and fibers in Node have been abandoned?
You can use pattern matching with custom extractors to define partial functions only accepting positive numbers.

object Positive {
def unapply(x: Int): Option[Int] = if (x>0) Some(x) else None
}

val onlyPositive: PartialFunction[Int, String] = { case Positive(x) => s"check out this positive number: $x" }

This would throw a MatchError for non-positive Ints, but you can also handle the failure case like so:

def onlyPositive(n: Int) = n match {
case Positive(x) => s"check out this positive number: $x"
case _ => s"not a positive number: $n"
}

This is a quick example, but in practice the lack of dependent types is not a huge handicap.
The best way to get out of the bubble is to argue the opposite of your position for a while. Do it anonymously. Even argue a position that you ridicule, just for fun. It's a great excercise that often leads to a deeper understanding of an issue.
Sun Tzu believed in spies. And what respectable HN groupie doesn't have a copy of The Art of War, next to a dog-eared copy of The Prince?

Then there is the tale of the Lucy spy ring discovering the impending German attack at Kursk.

Finally, the Bothans who sacrificed their lives to retrieve the plans for the Death Star.
"so penalties for transgressions like this can be handled extrajudicially"

Do you actually believe that? Because you might want to seek professional help if you do, that is delusional at best.
Would be interesting to see if the pages are still usable (i.e. you can get to and read the content) if they just load the css and html.
Toast notifications are those little gray popups available to developers in the Android OS
That’s not accurate. If you look at the article that image is used in[0], you’ll see that while only 24% of the world’s population uses a comma, 60% uses a full stop. So while yes, it’s pretty much ubiquitous in Europe, worldwide 2.5x more people use the full stop.

Luckily, grouping by 3 digits and typically only displaying 2 decimal places makes it easy to determine the intended number based on context.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark
A mouse? That's one of those archaic precursors to multitouch trackpads, right?
Show HN: CQErl - Cassandra for Erlang
I'm pretty confident it's a slowban. Logging in with this account again, I go from instant page loads to 12 second page loads - only on HN of course.

After re-reading the terms of use of the site, I emailed pg on 11/22 stating that I believed I was slowbanned and that I didn't believe I had violated any terms of use. I hadn't spammed ever (I have nothing to sell), I don't participate in flame wars. I didn't get a response so I emailed him again on 11/27 just saying it's clear I was slowbanned and that it would be nice to know why but that I guess that's not going to happen. I figure there are a few possibilities:

1. I said one thing one time that rubbed someone the wrong way

2. An admin thought it would be funny to give someone who uses the username 300bps a slowban thereby effectively causing their web experience to be equivalent to a 300 bps modem

Who knows? Seems random to me to be honest.
How has low cost index investing worked out for the investors in the Japanese Nikkei? Low cost index buying works if you are willing to accept significant drawdowns, similar to 2008-09. Even if one bought index funds alone, its important to have an exit plan. Maybe learn what a simple moving average is and dont be long when price is below it. Risk adjusted returns doing this beats buy and hold.
Simulating a Market in Ruby
I think the point the parent was making was lack of real-time feedback for the pilot.
Honestly, I think the bones of Excel's language are fine. It's very natural for anybody who knows highschool math. There are obviously a few features I'd want redesigned - like the inline-if stuff, and a good lambda syntax would be nice. Better Boolean support would be a big thing.

Basically I'd want something like C# or Python.

The big thing is that Excel is for non-coders, so you can't use programmer-centric syntax. That means that C's ternary operators, double-equal-signs equality test, and the ampersand/pipe boolean logic is right out.

On the other hand, I like curly braces, and the "BEGIN" "END" keywords of wordy languages seem more confusing than simple braces. Or indent-based since the environment can be trusted to enforce them and make them neat. But curly-braces are good for one-liners, which are important to Excel.

.NET support would also be a huge plus.

Oh, I just designed Boo.

Yeah, Boo (or something very close to it) would be my language for Excel. Except for the silly double-equality thing, screw that, since most variable declarations will be a cell anyways so the assignment operator isn't too useful for Excel and you can make assignment verbose with a "let" keyword.

My biggest problem with Excel isn't the formula language but the muddy-thinking nature of spreadsheets themselves. I'd rather see a middle-ground between a database and a spreadsheet, something like Lotus Improv.

Make the user specifically define the names of their variables they're using and whether they're a scalar, an array, or a 2d array. Make the formulas visible above these things.
My original plan to get rich once I got my $60,000 software engineering job was to live in a cheap apartment and use TradeStation to write a program to make me a bunch of money.

failed. (fees to high, stocks went the opposite of the way i bought)

Plan two: Read fundamentals, read stock history, make smart investments, use cheaper trading company

failed. (Stocks go the opposite of the way i bought)

Plan three: Options, Paid Optionetics $5,000 for "education". I would make trade low risk iron eagles, canaries, or whatever the fuck they were.

failed.

Fuck the stock market
That is a big potential issue, but really, you can deploy a standalone binary written in go within 2 minutes that supports the state of the art(minus perhaps some subtle but important fixes) in TLS.

If not anything else, that is pretty damn cool.

Like the other fellow said, it's not as though fixes to attacks will not be accepted into the language.
>I have a bug, sure, but an obvious bug that will be fixed very quickly

I love that there are people who say things like this totally seriously.
You're getting downvoted because:

1) It's not a great insight in the first place. It's common sense and well known that you shouldn't access data this way.

2) It doesn't answer the question, which is about the mechanics (how does it happen?), not the quality of the programmer (what kind of programmer does that?)

3) It's needlessly insulting.

4) It's plainly wrong. It might be "idiotic" to access memory this way, but that doesn't mean that only idiots do it, either with intent (e.g to hack into something, or speed up some code with pointer arithmetic), or without (e.g by accident). It can happen (and it has happened) even to Dennis Ritchie.
The Definitive Brogramming Primer
Or look at Glue : )

https://glue.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
I learned my lesson in like that as well. When I started college I had about $2k in savings from my summer job and I decided to invest in the market. This was in 2008. I bought a few stocks (AAPL, INTC, GLD and some others) and watched some tank, some rise.

In the end it was essentially a wash, I did well on those three, lost on most of the others and have never invested in individual stocks ever again. All my investments are in Vanguard index funds.
If range is a problem (and I have to assume that Bezos and team are aware of the performance characteristics of current/near term drone tech) they don't have to limit themselves to batteries.
Bye Facebook
Literally my first thought, and glad this was the top comment. It seems insane to me that someone ruins the lives of THOUSANDS and is only given a 3 to 5 year sentence. True irony at its finest.
I am left wondering: When did coding become not part of the public education system? My father recounts learning how to program on punch cards when he was in school. In my day we learned BASIC in elementary school and Pascal in high school. I've talked with people who are several years younger than me and apparently they learned on different languages again, but were introduced to coding just the same.

It certainly wasn't an intensive computer science education, but I'm not sure anyone is advocating for that anyway.
Sex sells, and that works both ways.

It's hard for me to come up with a better analogy, because I don't watch the traditional female equivalent of a Bond movie, whatever that may be. However, I sure know that Thor's bathing scene, with his perfectly tanned, flexing muscles glistening in the candlelight in the newest movie sure as hell wasn't for my benefit. And from the annoying hoots from the group of girls behind me, I can surmise they felt their price of admission justified.

Again, I know it's not a great analogy. Thor, while not being the most interesting character by far, is surely not just on screen as simply a flexing bicep. That said, the Beast from Beauty and the Beast didn't transform into a scrawny ugly man, either.
It's not entirely true that inflation effectively results in a pay cut.

It's true only if you are buying the exact same things today, that you were buying, say a decade ago. This is true for some things such as food, housing etc.

However for other things such as computers, gadgets, medicines, cars, etc. are much better today than they were before. For these things, you get much more for the same price(taking inflation into account).

For example, phones used to be only communication devices; but now they are also a camera, entertainment device and even a computer. Others, such as medicines, they have become cheaper and much more effective. In short, improvements in science and technology beat the effects of inflation.

In some markets it can actually cause a deflation.
For example, computers used to cost thousands of dollars, but now you can buy a much better one for a few hundred bucks.

Inflation is bad, only when stuff that you buy doesn't improve over time.

Perhaps one could even show that inflation is somehow related to the introduction of newer and better products in the market. For example a new car, with a more fuel efficient engine, will likely cost more than the old ones.
However I don't have enough evidence to justify this claim.
LOL. Thanks a lot. Building the project the way you suggested would be great, but I have seen that managing outsource work is very difficult, and am not sure if I am good at that.

Also, in the process of building the project, I want to improve my skill sets. I do plan to do some part of works through freelancers.
Google Now is great if you travel a lot by road and have regularly occurring destinations and/or at regular times. It has a great ability to predict "Are you going to xyz?" - If you answer yes, it already knows where you are going and presents the satnav all ready to go with traffic reports etc.
I find that so so handy.
Randomization isn't necessary though. Just give one player a deterministic advantage and see how high the handicap has to be for the other player to win. It's essentially the same thing.
Maybe a hybrid approach could work? Automatically scroll down and to the right simultaneously. If I understood it correctly, the events in the timeline will go diagonally down. So if the scrolling happens intelligently by following the events, that should work, shouldn’t it?
Too Late to Get Into the Cloud Game?
Are you late getting into cloud? Read more about how half of channel firms see faster revenue growth and larger profits from cloud offerings than from traditional IT products.
He is probably referring to something like this [0]

[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/SheepMarketplace/comments/1rvlft/i_j...
I'm not quite sure how it isn't a fundamental. You'd at least most certainly have a very hard time do any code without using any other fundamental area.

Anything with a GUI? Ok there's all your principals of design to chuck in. Geometry, proportions or what have you can't be ignored so hello maths already.

It might not be a fundamental application but its skill set certainly is.
I think that I wouldn't build spreadsheets today. I'd build a tool which allows me to build simple forms which store, edit, and view data, and a separate tool which lets me work on and transform that dataset through a visual programming pipeline.

This would allow me to decouple the storage format, the views, and the transformations from each other, and make for a significantly more maintainable system for most things that spreadsheets are commonly used for.
HN will then change the url to the actual article bypassing the blog post.
Said earlier discussion was also full of people suggesting that doing so was "blogspam".

IIRC, text-only posts will fall off faster, so it seems that this just hurts the OP.
A couple comments have addressed the issue of people potentially shooting down the drones. I think this is very likely, as it appears even a decent slingshot or arrow could take one down if the shooter was close enough.

But another scenario I didn't see mentioned is the potential for the drones to be captured. Let's say a carder orders a delivery to an unoccupied house. When the drone lands, the carder tosses a big net over the drone. Once it's disabled, the control unit can disconnected and either replaced or re-programmed.
Ah, yeah, I WFH in a home office with a standing desk. Right now I'm using 3x1080p + my rMBP panel and I find it pretty solid.
Torrent Client in Ruby
I'd love to see this as a zoomable timeline, where less important events are less visible when zoomed out, so that the timeline itself is fully visible at 100%.

Draggable timeline in a max 100% w/h window would fix the scrolling weirdness for folks who care, and would also be usable on a touch device, but I think the interaction should always feel full screen, regardless of where you are in the timeline.

Love this idea, quite a lot actually.

Perhaps this is marketable to the folks at Timehop? :)
this article has an active agenda and seems to overlook signals intelligence successes against militaries and governments. history is filled with (public) success stories where espionage delivers the goods, ENIGMA, purple, ivy bells, etc... espionage also played a very large role in deception and counterintelligence in concealing facts around d-day from the axis powers.

to be fair, espionage and intelligence gets it wrong very often. the goal of intelligence, though, is to find some truth in an uncertain situation and the presence of active deception. this is hard enough when you're talking about figuring out another government.

I think there's an interesting argument around whether or not a "traditional" government spy agency is "nimble" enough to analyze and understand modern organized crime and terrorist groups, but it's both an argument that I think intelligence professionals have been having for quite some time, and an argument the author of this blog is not interested in considering...
Ask HN: how do you escape from logic?
Unfortunately, I can't click on your embedded link... and it's not easy to cut and paste links from my mobile device. So if people started doing this, I would probably just stop clicking on outside links unless I was on my computer and the link looked extremely interesting.
Also I would imagine that the drone could be transmitting a live video feed. Anyone trying to steal/attack the drone would be recorded trying to do so.
Where? I just paged through and saw a bunch of mildly controversial news headlines (which did seen an intriguing collection of conversation starters, like hard income limits for Medicare), and then a pile of ad spam for "hot celebrity pics" and testosterone for sale.
If you enable optimisation, you probably would see something other than 5.
It's time to embrace your inner geek
Nope. Google Now would piss me off no end so I disabled it. It'd constantly disturb me with crap I didn't need to or want to know. In fact, it really didn't contribute any value to my life and at times just felt creepy.
That's odd, HN converts URLs to links in comments, e.g.:

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/02/thanks_for_killing_the_plane...

It's surprising that it doesn't do so in text submissions.
So a too-long article (with a corresponding thread that is way too pedantic for the topic of bread and butter) makes it to the front page of HackerNews but solid articles on entrepreneurship and technology get missed by lack of votes? I'm in awe.
Fair enough, but sh is a scripting language also :)
Simple Bitcoin Scenario
Microsoft does that publicly all the time. I work for a large enterprise organization, and we get notifications from Microsoft of vulnerabilities that have not been patched yet. The point is that we can mitigate the risk while waiting for the patch.

We're not running out to exploit the vulnerability in our competitor's system. The NSA or other malicious actors may be, sure, but I have doubts that this is what Microsoft wants to have happen. The goal is to mitigate the risk while a patch is being made. Microsoft doesn't want their software to be exploited, period.
Thanks for getting in touch showsover. Hope the info helps you decide.
> This needs to be protected by applicants valuing their time.

To me, this reads as "This needs to be protected by applicants changing their utility function." Applicants do value their time. Everyone values their time. They just value it differently.

Your claim basically hinges on your belief that some aspects of utility are objective. The essential point of your argument then, as I understand it, is that you want job applicants to correct their utility functions according to that objective evaluation, to help out the rest of us whose utility functions are already 'correct'.

This would actually be pretty cool, but the trouble is that you really are not going to have much luck trying to convince everyone else to agree with your utility estimates, even if they do strike you as objective. I think I would probably agree with many of them, personally, but they cannot be made normative.

At the end of the day I agree that you are probably worrying about nothing. I'm not going to claim that the market does an excellent job of setting salaries. There are a lot of irrational agents at play in that market, and the results are skewed accordingly. That said, I think this particular brand of irrationality is highly unlikely to be a driving force.