skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's hard to say--I definitely expected there to be more of an after-effect, so it was a little disappointing to realize that that wasn't going to happen. I think a lot of it has to do with the setting in which I live and work--big cities simply have a lot of stressors in them: noise, crowds, cars, etc., that are all triggers for me. At the time I was also managing a group of co-workers, and the responsibilities that came with it also were stressful.

I think I would have been able to persist the state longer if I lived in a suburb where I could avoid those things more readily.
Legacy code, at some point in the past, was somebody's new and beautiful code (or so they thought -- little did they know it was hideous). If the tools that existed then didn't allow them to do the hideous things they did, you wouldn't be calling their code "legacy" today.
That's a good point, and he's largely right. On the other hand, I've been burned before (Macs were always going to be 68k until they went PPC, they were always going to be PPC until they went Intel, they were always going to be Intel until Apple made these tiny mini-Macs that were ARM) and I'm wary of making assumptions anymore.
Intro to CS Course at Harvard
Only because it seemed to be closely tied to entering The Deep. But of course, it's possible that reduced heartrate is an effect rather than a cause of the meditative state, so I'll certainly try it out.
Raphters: A web framework for C
The non-leading utf-8 bytes all are in an easily detected range that doesn't overlap with ascii.
I live in the UK, and the thing I thought summed up the British and Irish obsession with mayonnaise best was when I recently bought a hoi sin duck wrap at the local Tesco and it had "No mayo" in big letters on the front, as if the lack of may was something highly unusual and/or edgy.

Since then I've looked at the ingredient list of every other product with great suspicion, expecting to find mayo everwhere...
That was sarcasm, yes? Just checking!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Effective_tax_rates,_US_hi...

[edit]
Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Effective_Corporate_Tax...
[/edit]
PERSONALLY...I wish people would stop defending Awlaki. The guy was an avowed asshole and it just gets reaffirmed with each passing day.

I wish there was another, less controversial candidate to debate USA's killing of its citizens.

I don't condone the US's actions, but I sure as hell understand the reasoning for doing it.

ALSO, don't forget that he renounced his citizenship and Yemen tried him in-absentia.
> Security is a judicial procedure, which is why we try and convict spies of espionage using evidence gathered by investigations rather than disappearing and executing people suspected of being traitors.

No, it can escalate into judicial procedures if security agencies decide to make an example of someone, but it is not inherently judicial. When someone is denied clearance, it is not because they were put on trial by a jury of their peers and found guilty by majority vote after an extended trial with all the safeguards afforded citizens by the constitution.

> Algorithms don't have moral agency and can't act of their own accord. This analogy is unhelpful.

The analogy is apt. Both people and software are part of systems (have we learned nothing from social engineering?) and are attack surfaces.

> That he had been strongly linked or associated with activity or actors that were engaged in espionage? Fair enough. If you are claiming that his ancestry alone

Yes, that his loyalties may be divided because he came from China and not some obscure country like New Zealand. And let's not forget, it's not just his 'ancestry' - he wasn't born in Peoria Iowa. He was born and raised in China and came to the USA for higher education. That's much closer ties to China than 'ancestry'.
this (kinda) happens already - algorithm would be along the lines of - take existing DNA - splice with added DNA code - run PCR - insert DNA into a host cell with minimal own DNA - allow it to Grow. The Craig Venter Institute pioneered this.
Hey, thanks James! Maybe an Om-themed Top Coat is in order? =D
"weak willed" may have negative connotations, but I can't think of a less loaded word that would express the poster's meaning better.

"suggestible" comes to mind, but I don't think this is really the same thing.

And if the poster really believes that the parents are weak willed, I don't think that saying so can be considered as failing to use reason. In fact censoring oneself to use adjectives that carry less negative connotations, is a violation of reason.
It reads to me as though speaking in Congress can't be made a felony (or treason, or breach of the peace) because that would involve the Member being questioned for their speech in another place (i.e., a court) — but then, this is the sort of thing that makes American politics such fun to watch, from a bit of a distance.
> I see a lot of criticism of OOP, but when I get to reading the details, it's all about Java's flavor of OOP.

The OP actually did a very clear job of distinguishing between Python- and Java-style OOP. I think you're the one cherry-picking his Java example and then extrapolating that to refer to all of OOP.
Sequential instruction is learned before expression reduction in real life...

So what? That is kind of like saying that people need to understand how an airplane works in order to ship a package overnight.

But people DO need to understand a bit about the process of shipping a package, if they want to estimate when it will arrive, or if they want to be able to read the online tracker, or even know that they must bring the package to a particular place before fedex will ship it. Or if the package does not arrive, what would you have to do to find it?

Generally speaking, understanding how a computer works is important to programming because the essence of programming is mapping a real problem onto the available computational hardware.

Not that I want to argue against learning about expression reduction, I would agree that should be done sooner than later, but it's not an argument against learning sequential algorithms.
I can't think of any type of bread I've tried which is too dry to be edible without butter when it is fresh.
Well there WAS a Saudi guy being questioned.

Thats SoP for the Feds/police after a major event.

Round up the usual suspects and grill them down.
The Reichstag fire made way for sweeping authoritarian changes in Germany and to me this is pretty much what has happened in the US, starting with the Patriot Act. Furthermore the Recichstag fire was surrounded in conspiracy theories with many believing the Nazis framed Van der Lubbe to further political ideals. Regardless of the Capitol Building being hit I'd say 9/11 was the US Reichstag.
> Another way of looking at is this: every year, there are plenty of people who are acquitted of crimes they were prosecuted for. Can you say all those people turned out to have committed the crimes they were accused of, simply because the people in charge of finding criminals found them to be extremely suspicious?

Given that criminals tend to have long histories of crimes and that only a fraction of crimes are caught, then yes: knowing someone faced charges ought to massively raise your estimate that they have committed past crimes which they were not caught for. Of course there are many innocent people who have been charged, but crank your Bayes theorem here...

The reason we have a very high bar like 'innocent until proven guilty' is not because this is any sort of information-theoretic or statistically-optimal criteria which balances some chosen ratios of innocent:guilty convicted, but as a check-and-balance on the power of government and a mechanism against tyranny and abuse of the laws.

> But putting that aside, the null hypothesis is that there is no statistically significant relationship between being Chinese-American and likelihood of being a spy - the burden is on you, not me.

The burden here is on any kibbitzer who wants to engage in hindsight and accuse anyone of racism for suggesting that maybe Chinese scientists are not precisely as trustworthy as natives with regard to national security.
They have not been able to declare war on the entire world, including their own citizens, before now. Assassination has not been an accepted tool of foreign policy for decades since Ford.

Even in wartime (if this is indeed war), rules apply, so if you want to apply the rules of war assassinations of enemies who are unarmed and not on any battlefield are not permitted. Awlaki, and later his teenage son, and the innocents killed with them, were not killed on any battlefield or as part of any war, unless you redefine war to mean any killing outside the judicial process, as Bush and then Obama have done.

But I think it's more useful to consider the methods used rather than arguing about semantics - the US president now claims the right to kill citizens, and anyone else, without trial or justification. That is a huge shift in policy and also has implications at home. If they can kill at will abroad, why not at home?
C64 Disk Image Data Visualizer
Brief overview of the landscape:

For clojure/clojure-py/clojurescript, I start out with vim-sexp[0] (for vim motions over sexpressions; some people prefer the more common paredit.vim[1]), rainbow-parenthesis.vim[2], and vim-clojure-static[3] (for indention rules, syntax highlighting, etc).

You'll want those regardless of which way you use to interact with Clojure. On top of that, you probably want some way to access a REPL. The top contenders seem to be:

fireplace[4] (NREPL-based quasi-repl)

slimv[5] (SLIME for CL, Clojure, Schemes, etc)

vimux[6]/tslime[7] (copies from vim registers to a
tmux/screen window where you presumably run lein repl or something)

fireplace works pretty well. In theory, it can pick up the rest of the clojure world's nrepl middleware for advanced features. In practice, nobody seems to be doing this. I haven't looked into the codebase to figure out how to add support for various nrepl middleware, but it should be possible.

slimv doesn't seem to be as popular in Clojure land. Most new development is based around nrepl, but you get some (not all) of its functionality thanks to ritz[8] being abstracted.

I use vimux and normal vim shortcuts/macros to abstract my workflow. I like being able to handle cljs and clj in the same manner that I handle Python, Hy, Perl, and JavaScript. This is probably the route that requires the most vim knowledge and comfort with programming your lisp environment to make work.

[0] - https://github.com/guns/vim-sexp

[1] - https://github.com/vim-scripts/paredit.vim

[2] - https://github.com/kien/rainbow_parentheses.vim

[3] - https://github.com/guns/vim-clojure-static

[4] - https://github.com/tpope/vim-fireplace

[5] - https://github.com/kovisoft/slimv

[6] - https://github.com/benmills/vimux

[7] - https://github.com/kikijump/tslime.vim

[8] - https://github.com/pallet/ritz
> The way I would get the IP addresses is to threaten the redtube.com website with a copyright infringement lawsuit and offer them to sell the IP addresses instead. Win-Win.

Not by German privacy laws. IP addresses are considered "personal" data, and selling it to a third party would be quite costly if discovered.
Yes, I talked to Ukrainian developers and many of them care about code quality. It's a relatively small community but a very strong one.
> So you're saying the US government should make white guys the subject of their prime suspicion?

And they do devote the majority of their efforts to examining the overwhelming majority of their (white/black/hispanic) employees. But nevertheless, when they happen to be doing their checks of an immigrant from a hostile power, they should devote more effort than usual because it is more likely than the base rate...

> If I were a Chinese intelligence officer I'll first hire a bunch of white guys to do the dirty work.

Good luck.
Historically Emacs used to disable even its dumb regex-based syntax highlighting out of the box for performance reasons. The slice of time since a parser-based approach has become feasible is a tiny fraction of the time Emacs has been around.
> This company faces the problem that customers often complain about a lack of clarity about the process and insufficient quality of the produced websites.

> The department has understaffing and the requests are piling up. The waiting times are very high and there are many complaints.

Sounds like they just paved a new road IN hell, not TO hell...
I am not going to argue with this.
It would be fun to build this as a webapp in JS + canvas/SVG.
My main problem with OOP is that objects don't bound complexity.

If I call a function with some arguments, that function is composed of smaller functions which can only ever operate on the arguments I passed the parent function. As I follow the function down to primitives, each piece of code is operating on less data.

If I call a method, that method can operate on its arguments, properties of the object, and properties of the superclass. I often find myself ping-ponging around the code base as a class' method relies on a method of an abstract superclass which itself relies on methods of the original class, each step introducing more properties into the calculation, many of which are objects themselves!
From Wikipedia: "Edmonds testified before the 9/11 Commission, but her testimony was excluded from the official 567 page 9/11 Commission Report."

Publicly questioning the official 9/11 story is a great way to be ridiculed. The media and other propaganda outlets have so effectively labelled anything contrary to the party line as "conspiracy theory", discrediting anyone who points out the hundreds and hundreds of holes in the official story. The only credible theory (taking a cold look at the facts that have come to light over the past 12 years) is that AT THE VERY LEAST the US Government knew about 9/11 in advance.

Maybe, with time, it will become more socially acceptable to openly wonder what really happened. And probably by that time, most people won't give a shit.
> you started this whole crap, where are your numbers?

That's not my point. My point is that everyone here is enjoying their self-righteous anachronistic indignation & kibbitzing & moral superiority without even reaching the basic level of discussion of asking 'are Chinese immigrants more likely to be spying for China than regular scientists and so additional scrutiny warranted?' It's not that anyone has presented numbers or evidence - they don't even realize that they need to.

It's like if everyone was going around accusing me of racism and being an idiot and a Nazi and a Stormfront user (oh wait!); yes, maybe I have not presented a hard census of how many Chinese immigrants were working in sensitive programs and became suspected of being spies, but frankly, this discussion has much bigger problems than that.
Something like that exists(for android): MyScript Calculator. It's probably not powerful enough for a matematician, but works for me.
I certainly grant that the faddishness of Agile methods is a giant problem, and I've grumbled about that before. [1] But I'm not quite getting his point here.

I agree that wholesale adoption of Agile methods is problematic. But one thing every Agile approach has in common is an inspect-and-adapt component, so I'd call wholesale, ritualistic adoption essentially un-Agile. The Extreme Programming people are most explicit about this: they say that by-the-book XP is a good place to start, but that they don't expect anybody to stay there.

But when I read his examples, it seems like he doesn't know that. (Or perhaps that's the people in his examples.) Agile approaches aren't supposed to make everything better. They're supposed to expose the problems with how you're working so you can fix them. In the first case, it exposed the client's lack of interest and the conflicts of interest inherent in their organization. In the second, it made clear that the backlog was unreasonably large versus staff size.

Those aren't unintended consequences of adopting Agile methods. That's what's supposed to happen. Hidden problems are now obvious, which is progress. He seems to suggest that more planning is the solution, but I think just the opposite: with both those fictional shops I'd encourage them to fix the visible problems, and try to do so in ways that shorten feedback loops and help surface other hidden issues.

[1] http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how...
"Eternal War?"

I think the previous commenter meant the "War on Terror", which is essentially eternal because there is no opponent that could be defeated, and therefore it cannot be ended, only abandoned.

Most of the other measures are justified with the "War on Terror", including the removal of habeas corpus, removal of the 4th amendment, gutting of the 1st amendment, removal of judicial review and oversight etc.

1st amendment is also pretty much in tatters, with protesters now labeled as "low level terrorists", and journalists detained under anti-terrorist legislation (admittedly that was in the UK, but what do you think would happen to Greenwald if he were dumb enough to travel to the US??)

Yeah, to me that looks like civil rights pretty much gone. Of course, only if you do something the government doesn't like, but that's pretty much the point of civil rights...
Pointing out the fact of his killing in no way defends Awlaki.

The principle remains the same regardless of who Awlaki was, or what the administration has told you he was - the state should not be allowed to assassinate unarmed citizens or anyone else without trial, due process, etc. if he was guilty they should have tried him in absentia.

What do you think about the killing of his son a few weeks afterward?
> do you think the founders of youtube, yahoo

Are not relevant to a discussion of national security...? Why don't you try looking at the right populations here?

> is this something that your autistic world-filter can assign a number to? ...it's the same old shit, dude. go back to stormfront.

I'm afraid I am not a member of Stormfront and so would not enjoy going back there.
See Dawkin's response at http://www.richarddawkins.net/foundation_articles/2013/12/6/...

The Y in Dobbs’ article is my book, The Selfish Gene, and his main X is the important but far from new point that genes are not always expressed in the same way. He calls it phenotypic plasticity. Locusts are transformed grasshoppers: same genes, differently expressed. A caterpillar and the butterfly it morphs into have exactly the same genome, expressed in different ways. An animal is the way it is, not just because of the genes it possesses but because the context in which a gene sits affects how – and indeed whether – it is expressed. Dobbs makes some sensible points about all this, but there’s not a single one of them that I wouldn’t be happy to make myself – and in most cases did make, either in The Selfish Gene itself or in my other books. But his headline conclusion, namely that recent findings negate the thesis of The Selfish Gene, is not just untrue but deeply and perversely untrue.

The Selfish Gene has a lot to say about the social insects, laying particular stress on the fact that the difference between a queen and a sterile worker is non-genetic. Indeed, it has got to be non-genetic. If a gene were unconditionally “for” sterility it couldn’t be favoured by natural selection. It has to be conditionally expressed, conditional upon the environment. The difference between a massive-jawed soldier ant and the tiny minor worker riding shotgun on its head, is nongenetic too. As far as its genes are concerned, any female ant could have become any caste of worker or a queen. Genes express themselves differently when switched, by environmental triggers, into different embryological pathways. It’s a special case of another idea that received prominence in The Selfish Gene, the “conditional strategy” concept of John Maynard Smith.
The kindness shown at Pret a Manger, while exceptional is not completely surprising to me. While at their Chicago location, I walked in and ordered food one day, running on particularly little sleep. At the register, the clerk insisted that I take the lunch on the house, probably because I looked like death. I grew uncomfortable and insisted on paying, at which point he introduced himself as the CEO, on a quick US tour of their facilities. He said it would be their pleasure and was totally sincere. Love that eatery and their people.
They are not. The values can be redefined following the same CSS cascading rules as everything else.
Some products are better purchased offline... thoughts?
David Chalmers, actually.
> What's Bush's interest in protecting the Saudis?

Perhaps not so much protecting the Saudis, as protecting the established pretext for the administration's response?

For instance, it has been reported that within mere hours of the first plane hitting, high-level officials were specifically seeking ways to blame it on Iraq, without regard to whether that was a relevant course of action [1].

Additionally, senior officials have stated that they believe Bush intended on invading Iraq at the time he took office, or at least well ahead of 9/11 [2][3].

And it's clear that protecting the public story was important: The Bush administration outrageously persecuted those who attempted to move the public discourse in directions that contradicted the official line, for instance [4] which was nothing but retribution for pointing out that the administration lied (i.e.: already knew their claims about uranium and Niger had been specifically investigated and debunked).

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-9... Rumsfeld was "telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks" five hours after an American Airlines jet slammed into the Pentagon. ... [N]otes that had been taken at the time by a Rumsfeld aide ... quote the defense chief asking for the "best info fast" to "judge whether good enough to hit SH (Saddam Hussein) at the same time, not only UBL" (Usama bin Laden). The administration should
"go massive...sweep it all up, things related and not".

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq Former chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council Richard A. Clarke believes Bush took office with a predetermined plan to invade Iraq.

[3] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bush-sought-way-to-invade-iraq/ And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations. "From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," says O'Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair
Useful Python Functions and Features You Need to Know
In my experience, if you are really prepared for an exam, you know the formulas by heart anyway. I myself passed tests designed in a way that calculators could be disallowed.
Some of them even had a reminder section with all the needed formulas. But unprepared students still failed them, because they were simply not used to use them and they therefore ran out of time.
This translates in the real world: knowing things by heart and their mechanic is the difference between the guy that spends one hour on a problem ans the guy who spends 10 minutes on it.
Well, ever since Saddam tried to use power law to justify his invasion of Kuwait we've all been stepping on eggshells.