skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Only his first point (about getting a fair number of senators) makes sense. Senate representation is a big problem for our country. Things have gotten to the point where many small states can flat out extort the US population as a whole. (Our terrible corn based ethanol legislation is an example of such extortion.)

Unfortunately, I do not think splitting CA will get us more senators. I am pretty sure that additional states have to be approved on the federal level. And considering Washington, DC. still to this day does not have Senate representation, I really really doubt the federal government would allow California to have 10 more senators.
Buy and fix up a nice used van to live in, grab a high end MacBook Pro, and invest the rest in BitCoin.
The Path to Better Vi Skills
Presumably because if you don't like California, the other states are often far away. You can't just move across the border (unless you live in Tahoe).
As a 4th generation native, I've been hearing ideas such as these since I was a kid. I can't tell you how many times the idea of how easy it would be to secede from the rest of the US was brought up, but this new one seems to take the crazy a little more public.

I'm a bit confused as to why in 30 years, anyone from "Silicon Valley" would give a damn about what those people from "West California" thought or why the Senators from West California would vote to get a new bridge in Silicon Valley for instance. This wouldn't create six Californias, it would dilute the power of California by breaking it up. Nor do I understand why the Federal government would allow such an obvious ploy to increase Senate representation.

I'm actually kind of surprised, given the almost Texas-level pride (minus the Texas-sized ego) Californians can have for our state that Draper would propose such a thing.
i have an intimate, decades-long knowledge of both northern and southern california, and let me tell you, they're basically the same thing.

anyone who tells you otherwise probably hasn't spent much time in both. the real differences run east-west, not north-south.
Yes, crazy and wrong. Let me tell you how this is going to go. A bunch of wealthy people, of limited diversity, will make their own country and exploit all the poorer ones. I would have no problem with your plan if you can assure me that the wealthier country doesn't bully, pollute, wage wars or otherwise compromise the people or natural resources the poorer countries nearby.
Yeah I am just pointing out that the movie itself was clearly marketed for the female audience, and the toys available reflect that strategy.
I did something of this kind recently and it was to enforce more of an api in my object, like internally I call some low api method that either gives me the object I'm looking for or false / null when doesn't find it, but in my interface I don't want to leak that object, just true or false. So

function isAvailable(){
objInDb = findByName('Joan Carlos'); // the object or false

return objInDb ? true : false;

}

But all this could be because I'm a noob in a language I don't really know... Php that magical land where nothing is what it looks like and is always ready to stab you in the back, can't say I'm a fan of it... Or dynamic languages, or anything magical... Ok, I'm going to places I don't want to remember, sorry...
How easy is it to side-load on Android?: Very Easy out of the box. Just open the apk and the installer will install it.

Browse the file system? Very easy. There are many free and paid file managers. You can also use a terminal emulator.

Obtain root access? OEM unlock bootloader, throw su on the phone and you are set.

Recompile and update the kernel? I has never built my own kernel, but there are many custom kernels popping up all the time.

Replace the window manager? To change the desktop environment, most people just install a different "launcher". That changes how the desktop, windowing, and general interface operate. If you really wanted to have the full freedom of Linux, you can install something like Debian on an android device with a dual boot setup or run it on top of android through a VNC client.
We would have to know they are suicidal ahead of time. By that point if I knew they were suicidal, I would definitely talk to that person a lot more and invite them to events with my friends.
If you're referring to "the governed" a group rather than an individual (which makes little sense to me, since consent is an individual phenomenon), I don't see why any particular numbers looks good if you squint at it. It seems logical that the smaller the group, the better, but then we get right back to the individual.
Dual EC was not particularly common. Here's a metric: name a couple of products that you or I use regularly that ever used it.

It's not as if you could design a system with Dual EC instead of HMAC DRBG and not know it; Dual EC requires bignum math. It is incredibly slow for a CSPRNG.
Autocorrect, code completion!
New data compression method reduces big-data bottleneck
Agreed, but asking people to downvote comes across as bullying.
Would California's perpetual budget problems be better solved

California has a budget surplus.

A pretty large one in fact: $5.6 billion surplus by June 2015, with annual surpluses reaching $8.3 billion by the 2016-17 budget year.
Sent you an email, Brian.
Maybe. I'm actually on the other side of this as a freelancer, so might not have the best info. But one thing I've noticed is that one of main the ways I get gigs is by assuring people that the whole thing is going to work. In other words, there's a lot of inherent and perceived risk in outsourcing and if I can start a conversation, I can allay some of their fears. So it seems to me that with an upfront fee, you're tacking on this perceived extra risk or hurdle before they get to talk to anyone.
I don't know what the psychology of money-back guarantees is. They don't have much affect on me, for some reason.
Just another whiny rich person trying to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.
http://golang.org/pkg/go/ast/

this is a pretty powerful package.
If you're not employed you have a very poor BATNA.
My lightning talk - "Traversing the Montreal Métro with Python" - was accepted, and I'm super-excited!

But also I'm super-excited about the rest of the schedule. There are 36 talks that I'm really interested in seeing, and I don't think that's even physically possible. So I guess I have to decide which ones I'll have to settle for watching on pyvideo.org.
I think there is a place for this kind of article. Someone who has just given their first talk may be able to relate to the needs of other soon-to-be first-timers more closely than an experienced speaker. Also, I think an article like this serves the author by forcing self-analysis of his or her procedure and discovering the ways of improving the process for future speaking engagements.
There are absurd anti-science sects of Christianity, but mainstream Catholicism isn't one of them. I was taught evolution in both Catholic grade school and Jesuit high school --- in the late 80s and early 90s. It wasn't taught as a controversy or one of many possibilities, but rather as scientific fact.

For what it's worth, if you're not familiar with Christianity, most Christian religions aren't biblical literalists. I was taught in grade school, by nuns, that the Old Testament wasn't to be taken literally.
Apparently, most of the ones categorized hard seem to be some thing related to hardware i.e. not a software mistake of some programmer. I would narrate a couple which were not the case.

a) I used to work on deep packet inspection software for a multicore network processor. It was kind of c but with restricted api's and some unique concepts related to multicore. Among the concepts was, same binary being run on multiple cores to process packets, but still no hardware locks, because there was an implicit tag - a kind of a hash computed on 5 tuple (src/dst ip, ports, protocol) to ensure only one core gets packets from one session / 5 tuple.

So the scenario was a protocol parser whose job was to parse some other info along with ip, call an external api to add a subscriber. When this parser was ran for like 10-15 minutes on live setup, it used to seg fault after processing some 60-70 million packets. The behavior was reproducible, but was not occurring at the same time, nor in the same piece of code.

Narrowing down didn't exactly work, since it stopped occurring with either of the subscriber addition api call OR the parser was commented. But each worked perfectly on its own.

Finally, after a couple weeks of long debug cycles and notes, it turned out to be AN IMPLICIT tag switch inside the subscriber addition api. Since we were not locking through apis, the tag switch would lead to same packet being sent to multiple cores, and any where along the line in the follow up code, an allocation (which turns redundant) or a shared mem access or deletion (free) it could turn into a seg fault.

Now implicit switch of locks in the subscribe api was also a documented and needed feature of hardware. Just that it should have been DOCUMENTED in BOLD on the api, which was not the case.

b) In the same dpi product, once we added two fields to look for in the incoming traffic which should not have matched but were still matching in results. Unique thing was, they only fail when those were together and would work fine independently.

Going deeper in their code, showed a strncpy which was intended to use as a safety against strcpy, but with MAX_STRING_SIZE. So basically when the actual string was much shorter, it would just wipe off the entire length with padded zeros in the buffer, there by over writing the originally appended fields to look for. The author seemed to have missed the following comment in strncpy's definition.

"If the end of the source C string (which is signaled by a null-character) is found before num characters have been copied, destination is padded with zeros until a total of num characters have been written to it."

Since then, i have been really careful in choosing to use strncpy instead of strcpy as often mistakenly advised in general.
It's not pretty simple though.

In particular, if you have any triggers in your API they may need to be deferred until after undo is no longer possible, or have explicit commits.
Lets say you have the ability to add a user to a group, and they will get an email about it. You accidentally add your boss to the "I hate my boss" group. How do you support undo in this case? Some sort of timeout before sending is really the only valid approach, but where?

One was is to do the deferred part on the client side, but this means closing the browser after adding somebody will mean they won't get notified at all. You really need to have support for undo in the API for this to be meaningful (or the "add to group" api returns a notification ID that you can cancel).

As an aside, I'm pretty sure the inverse of deleting a model is typically going to be far more complex than just recreating it.
Deleting a social network profile, for example, involves deleting all photos, associations, posts, etc. Easier just to deactivate models so you get easy undo, and periodically flush deactivated objects.
Post Production Engineer/Technical Director here, built several million dollar facilities in NYC, worked lots of commercials and a few docs here and there (latest one airing on ESPN 30for30).

Very few high end pros use Adobe Premiere Pro as it's all the worst parts of Avid and FCP without the good sh!t, although the tiny one man shops seem to love it.

Any shop that is busy uses tons of firewire drives and big ass SANs, internal drives are mostly for the OS and occasionally often used assets.

Apple isn't perfect, their QC has definitely faltered as they've grown, but in Post it's a shit ton better than Windows, even facilities that aren't using FCP prefer Avid and After Effects/Photoshop for Mac. Windows is bigger in the 3D world, Linux is popular for color grading and compositing software.

Hell is a Post Facility relying on Windows. I used to know a few, never liked working for them, always seemed to cut corners if it saved a few bucks. That's fine if you're cutting web videos or local spots, but not when you're cutting Fortune 500 national brand campaigns.

As far as looking at these problems pragmatically, you can't rely on an OS that's going to crap the bed because the editors spent their down time trolling shady websites.
And the need for memorization is pretty elegantly solved with Fischer Random Chess.

And draws are only very common at high-level play. It's not even clear this variant would solve that.
When I was in high school, I had a little business running on the side to install servers to backup files for physicians. I got paid about 300-400 for about 2-3 hours of work. Though I told them it usually takes about a full day.
When you pay someone in shares instead of commensurate wages because you want employees to bank on your future success, then yank the shares when there is future success...I consider this to be real damage. He basically robbed those workers of their fair reward. Yeah it's not killing people, but it's still very wrong.
Yeah, we are gonna keep talking past each other, but here's my last shot...

Just trust me on this: there are people, good people, who don't think like you do. I think more like you than probably 95% of the people out there, and I might even want to live in the country that you and people with a like mind establish. But I'd have to see how it turned out, and I'd like to have the option to bail if it ends up not being my cup of tea.

The social environment that they live in matters intensely to a large subset of humans. That's OK, even if you aren't one of them. We have enough room on this huge continent for their kind and your kind, and even my kind.
So in a deflationary currency you'll have:

"More people are buying my shit. I'm running out of stock. Maybe I won't decrease my prices this year. My prices didn't decrease, now people are buying the same amount of shit they did before. I am making more money. I feel good. Oh crap, my supplier didn't decrease his prices this year. My supplier is an asshole. But people are buying my stuff, I didn't have to lower prices, things are good!"
Dichotomy of Guest Blogging - Spam vs Authority
That was brilliant. Said something important. Got the message across clearly. Did it quickly.

It may have seemed pretty trivial, but I think it was brilliant.
Should newspapers ban climate deniers like Reddit's science forum?
Owner of Segway Company Dies in Segway Accident
I think you're looking at this wrong. The kid is an example for why the budget gets tight, it could be anything (buying a house, deciding to pay off your credit card), you're correct the company has no obligation. Hence why you're asking, not informing that they'll pay you $20k more.

"If you were worth $100K and you negotiated for that, then that's what you make" was true at the time of the initial negotiation. This is a separate negotiation, with a source "hey, company X will pay me 20% more"

No, you don't deserve $20k more as you didn't ask for it, you might if you reopened negotiations.
It is, but the original idea has already been distorted by two-plus centuries of evolution.

The House, for instance, was originally supposed to be extremely close to the people; the first Representatives served districts that had just 30,000 people each. That's roughly the same number of people as live today in Butte, Montana, or Fairbanks, Alaska. A district small enough that everybody could know their Representative personally.

As the country grew, though, the House chamber started to get crowded. In the first Congress, the House had all of 65 members; by the election of 1900, there were 386. And this had practical consequences -- all those people had to squeeze into one room. People started to worry that further growth would make it unmanageably large.

So in 1911 Congress passed a law, the Apportionment Act of 1911 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_Act_of_1911), that essentially waved a magic wand and said that from that point on the House would have exactly 435 members, and changes in population would be dealt with by shuffling seats from shrinking states to growing ones rather than by adding new seats. That's more or less the system we have today.

The problem is that, as the country kept on growing, each of those 435 seats had to represent more and more people. Today each one contains something like 700,000 people. That's more people in one district than any of the original thirteen states had in their entire state. (Virginia, the largest state in 1790, had just 455,000 free citizens.) Which sort of demolished the idea that districts would be small enough for everyone to know their Representative -- today's House members are even more distant from their communities than the first Senators were.

(Which is why there are occasionally calls to radically expand the size of the House; see http://www.democracyjournal.org/8/6587.php for an example.)
I dislike this solution.

Draper's concerns mainly reference representation and regulation. Both of which can be achieved by (1) amending the CA and US Constitutions, and (2) delegating more power to the existing counties.

The waste inherent to operating five additional state governments, just to circumvent the status quo, does not seem appropriate.
Heya are you in Phnom Penh or in the provinces? Am doing the same (many folks like us increasingly in Phnom Penh, all of us contributing somewhat to ever-rising prices though I'm sure ;) -- should hang for coffee!
> you could say that "infanticide" happens all the time and is ignored in English-speaking countries

It does, but most cases can be covered up as SIDS.
Seriously. As left as I am, this is crazy talk. SV can't just be its own state. This Silicon-valley-arrogance is out of control. They think they have it all figured out and know better than generations of wisdom before them. What if everyone who didn't like a few things decides to just not co-operate and run off? So now SV is its own state. San Francisco is going to be part of this state and it already has gentrification-type issues. What if those people get mad and wanna make their own state too? A state where the non-techs can keep their apartments and not be displaced by techies. So, now where do the techies live?
Nah, sane and correct.

Massive super-states: bulwarks of peace, clean living and respect for both the individual and their local cultural groups... Sure, man. Whatever.

At least give it a chance in your brain: I know it doesn't fit the classic left/right divide, but would a continent of Switzerlands of varying cultures be that bad? Worse than todays USG?
It's a corrupt system. Both parties have the same attitudes towards fundamental state issues and they collude to prevent any other parties from entering their contest for lobbyist dollars (note the lack of third parties in the televised debates on network television).
I guess that makes sense. What is novel and slightly confusing about your viewpoint is that it involves the interaction between the size of a country, and the diversity of a country. Only large, diverse countries are a problem for you.

But there is still the issue of elites (remote or otherwise) imposing diversity on their citizens against their wishes. If this hadn't happened in the US, California wouldn't be so diverse in the first place.

You claim this is not such a problem with small countries, but exactly the same thing is happening in Europe.
I thought the same. The old underground Seattle used to be a tourist attraction 40 or so years ago. What's new about this?
"Having the openness and formula makes it easy to say no to arbitrary salary-increase requests"

It more likely makes arbitrary excuses to deny legitimate salary increase requests.

I think this forces unnecessary arbitrary restrictions on an already difficult process. I highly suspect this is simply an excuse for management to avoid uncomfortable conversations and very difficult decisions...

I can foresee about a dozen likely HR nightmares that can surface from this transparency.

Personally, I would never want to work at a place where everyone in the room knows how much I make...especially if many can't appreciate or quantify the value I create.
I really want aphyr to run this through jepsen now...
The cabling, cowling, and RAM were mentioned as being a little difficult. To me, 'a little difficult' would suggest that it can't actually get perfect marks for 'easy to do'.
I can assure you that the rich will group themselves away from the poor. So, I repeat: If you can assure me the wealthy won't take advantage of the poor, then I'm fine. But you can't assure me that. It's going to end up like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oblongs

>>The series focuses on the antics of a family who live in a poor valley community and, as a result of pollution and radiation exposure, are all disabled or deformed. The pollution is the direct result of the lavish lifestyle of the rich community known as "The Hills", whose residents exploit and harm the valley residents with absolutely no regard for their safety or well-being.

Social commentary

Many reviewers and fans see the series as a commentary on social stratification. While the residents of the Hills live in wealth and economically dominate those in the Valley, there is no rallying cry for wealth redistribution or fairer working conditions.
If it makes you feel any better...

NONE of these nations would be bullies... because they would be unable to defend themselves. They would rely on some bigger, stronger ally to guarantee that other nations would not trample their sovereignty or, most importantly, their property rights.

I DO think that a bigger, stronger nation would dominate in the area that would be formerly known as California... I just don't think that stronger nation would be one of the new nations formed.

It would probably be the US actually.

So the rich of the new nations would not dominate the poor of the new nations...

It's far more likely that the US would dominate both.
I'll tell you what, God is the ultimate programmer.

Let me guess, was the universe written in javascript?
Interesting, states have been created in the past via splitting. Maine out of Mass., both W. Va and Kentucky out of Virginia, and Vermont from NY+NH, according to Wikipedia. [1] "Any such creation [must] be approved by the legislature of the affected state(s), as well as the United States Congress." [1]

Also according to Wikipedia, "Throughout the state's history, there have been more than 220 attempts to divide California into multiple states including at least 27 serious proposals." [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_partition_pr...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_and_secession_in_Cali...
I worked with a guy who went golfing on one of the hottest days, drank too much and died of heat stroke in his sleep. Healthy guy too who was in perfect shape and ate disciplined nutritional food everyday and ran 5km in the morning while we ate mystery noodle bowls from a chinatown takeout window and rolled out of bed late
The Arcanist is probably the closest to what I can see in myself. I tend to be protective over the systems I design in order to preserve them. This comes from years of geeking out about things like memory allocators and networking stacks, so when I catch a whiff of someone talking about introducing a terrible inefficiency or unreliability into the system I helped put together I put up the defenses. This post is a good satirical look at this aspect of my work, and probably a bit of a wake-up call.
> 1. It is about time California was properly represented with Senators in Washington. Now our number of Senators per person will be about average.

The Senators aren't supposed to represent the people, they are supposed to represent the State's interests (though that seems to have been forgotten).

The people are represented by the Representatives, the number of which is proportional to population.