skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Totalitarianism" loses all meaning if you apply it to states that imprison foreigners captured in war.

Many of the detainees weren't "captured in war" in any meaningful sense, they were civilian noncombatants sold to US forces by various local militias during the occupation of Afghanistan; but its correct that that's more a symptom of the US being a global empire and than of the metropolitan system of government within that empire being totalitarian.
Has this research been peer reviewed anywhere?
I love the Mono project, and I follow its progress with great hope. But I've tried to use Mono apps on my Mac (Popcorn Hour configuration things) and they flat out wouldn't run. The gui came up and it just hit a brick wall. I tried it on my Linux laptop... it showed a bit more... and then got stuck. I ran upstairs to a windows machine. Finally it worked. So the write once, run anywhere mantra hasn't exactly hit all Mono developers yet. I think C# is one of the best languages I've ever been blessed to use, but Mono still has a ways to go.
> It reads like English

My sentiments exactly. Atoms and pattern matching make my programs highly readable.

When I was starting out in erlang I read a lot of complaints on erlang's syntax. But after a day or two I got comfortable around it.
How many programming language should I learn?
How many and what programming language are you programmers learning.
http://musicthing.blogspot.de/2006/09/finger-stretching-for-...
That was Robert Schumann.
I semi-understand that (intellectually), I just don't have the brain circuits for internalizing any of that. This is illogical and I simply have problems with illogical things. (That is probably probably why the medical committee deemed it a severe disability in my case.)
Google is going now after DOD (defense = war) contracts? This is frightening indeed.
New ISP customers will have porn filters turned on automatically
The flag is bleached and the other things are dusty, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood solar radiation.
A Genetic Programming Application
I don't understand why I'd use this over Trello, what does Belt bring to the table here?
1080p makes it somewhat harder to "photoshop" any accidental "boogieman" out, which may be the hardest technological challenge of a moon landing.

On a separate note, I was hoping the Chinese would install a big Bitcoin banner on the moon to further boost its adoption.
The second argument is also nonsensical. The welfare state is larger today than it ever has been. The key difference is that old people have taken over as the primary beneficiaries. And they're more politically active then any other group. Ironically, they also support many of the "external" policies Wolin rejects.
> Surely if anyone can change things in the USA for the better, it's you, Mr. President.

The US system of government is engineered to assure, more than anything else that a single actor cannot unilaterally effect major change.
Same. Any country at all thats pushing the exploration of space is brillant for everyone in the world.
"Scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that never has been." Theodore von Kármán
Anti-male hysteria. That's why.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Just_Didn%27t_Do_It

Comment referred to this story (where new accounts are not allowed to post):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6904274
If I say Marxism, I can skip the explanation. People know what Marxism is. It enhances communication.

If I say Inverted Totalitarianism, I have to explain what I mean by that.

Based on that, Wikipedia should not be the second step after an author invents a word. Marxism didn't end up in the Encyclopaedia as soon as Marx published. Useful -isms are not established by authors, but by people who discuss them.
If you think that would end it then you don't know conspiracy theories. It would just be proof that China is in on it too.
These are my thoughts as well. Hacking on an open source project during vacation time sounds awesome and is something I would definitely respect if interviewing a candidate that was previously working as a teacher.

Hacking on open-source and side projects is also an incredibly important thing to do in order to be a good role model for your students. You should make it clear to your new employer that side projects and open-source are a huge part of success in tech and that you need time to work on them and also share them with your students.

What are you going to be teaching and for how long? I would imagine that you don't necessarily want to be teaching the same subject year after year. 1-2 years may be fine, but more than that spent on essentially the same task would strike me as off, but I can't put my finger on why.

Could you hold the position of teacher at the same institution in a way that changes from year to year? If not, could you continue teaching, but change the institution from year to year to make sure you are teaching something new each time? Alternatively, could you maybe alternate doing 1 year of teaching and 2 years of coding to satisfy both itches without ever getting rusty as a professional software engineer?
I've owned L.A. Noire for over a year and I've never been able to play it because of a rare and enduring "synchronizing bug." I've probably spent 16 hours researching, twiddling and reinstalling to try to get it to work.

The only good news is I got it on deep deep discount during last year's Christmas sale.
I remember watching this awesome video from Bot & Dolly a few weeks ago, "Box" http://vimeo.com/75260457
Hey,

Drop me an email at bpindulic@gmail.com
A different topic, but http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/theslowwi... is a good read too.
What I want:

No object/primitive distinction, but you have to explicitly make objects and methods nullable, and the dereference operator is null-safe. (You use the dereference operator on a null object, you get null. You use the dereference operator to call a nullable method on a null object, you get null. It is a compile-time error to call a non-nullable method on a nullable reference where the compiler cannot prove that it won't be null. Pure functions are implicitly nullable.)

It is a compile-time error if you assign a nullable reference to a non-nullable reference and the compiler cannot prove that it won't be null.

I've also had an idea for what I call a "pseudo-statically typed" language: instead of checking types at compile time, it checks that you implement all functions called on the parameter at compile time. Public variables are just syntactic sugar for getX/setX, operations are just syntactic sugar for addX/subX/etc. If you define a method with an input type of X, the compiler checks that you only call methods that are defined in X, and then replaces the type with the methods actually called.

But nullable "primitives" can actually be useful occasionally, for caching, for example. Having a separate boolean flag works, but can be inefficient (you can store null internally as NaN with a specific payload, for example, whereas a boolean flag generally requires at least a byte, more with alignment. This also allows easier atomic updates.)
What Democracy?: The case for abolishing the United States Senate
As I understand it, much of NASA was manned by Germans who had worked on their rocket program (weaponized rockets) and 'importing' that knowledge was the kick start to the American space program. Project Paperclip? Was that the name?
> And then you read about how they're dismissing candidates that don't have an adequate social media presence...

Is this a real thing? I'd like to know more.
Genetics accounts for more than half of variation in exam results
drop me an email at bpindulic@gmail.com
So was he really a spy, or the suspicions were unfounded? If latter, then the cost of losing his talent and subsequent achievements to another nation seem quite high.
Bitcoin start-up raises $25m venture capital funding
Even better: use the NaN payload to distinguish between null and "standard" NaN.
There is a way to get rid of the cloud save but you lose your progress. It happened to me and I was pretty pissed.
sure you do, Xamarin.iOS.
It's like comparing a hammer and a screwdriver when you really like screwdrivers using comparison points such as "Does it put it screws?" Point being, they're not tools designed to solve the same problems.
asan being less feature complete than memcheck is arguably wrong. if you look at their feature overview https://code.google.com/p/address-sanitizer/wiki/ComparisonO... you'll see that they do detect stack oob and global oob (buffer overflows), and some use after return. being 10-20x faster also helps, that rarely someones uses valgrind (we found a lot of bugs even valgrind would have detected, if someone would have tried), but you can ship betas compiled with asan.
Seems to be having trouble deciding on a game to build.
So much work with digging deep and pipes (putting plastics in the ground...) when he could simply have made way for a small rivulet and built a small environment-friendly gravitation water vortex plant that can actually be crossed by fish in both directions (it even adds oxygen to the water) and probably requires less maintenance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitation_water_vortex_power...
> his brilliant career in the United States came to a screeching halt in 1950, when the FBI accused him of being a member of a subversive organization

Yep, looks like the FBI created the problem they were ineptly trying to prevent.
I had a difficult time understanding the value/functions of this as well. Is it a browser plugin? Does it utilize my address book to autofill contacts? Do my friends need to download the application as well in order for me to send them things? Can I copy/paste files with it?

Sure, I'm kind of playing the dumb user here - but it did take me about a minute to figure all of that out, which is probably more than most people would spend. For me, the most helpful page was in the Chrome Web Store where there were screenshots - that made everything click.
Although i applaud the effort of putting this publication online in such a nice, interactive way, i'm a bit saddened to see the license underneath the page leading to a Creative Commons Noncommercial (BY-NC-SA) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

This means that the images are not usable on, for example, Wikipedia, that only allows CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licenses. Also, there seems to be no easy way to get those images and reuse them, apart from reverse-engineering the application and scraping the files.

Apart from that, adding any license to a work that has been in the public domain (Gutenberg died in 1468) is questionable in terms of copyright law. Reproductions of 2D public domain works (such as this text) are not applicable to renewed copyright law, considering Bridgeman vs Corel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_vs_Corel) and many other similar rulings in other countries.
I took this class in person at Stanford, and it's hands down one of the best and most useful courses offered in CS/ML/Stats. If the online course is anything like the real course then this is a must.
HR facilitates but it's the hiring managers - i.e., the people who will actually manage the new employees - who define the requirements. So, the managers have the crazy expectations, not HR.
Perhaps; it seems obvious. I'm not debating that point.

The premise of democracy is that the will of the governed gives legitimacy to power.

This (I argue) doesn't presuppose that the governed have security of income, a positive view of the future of the nation, perfect information, or anything like that. What matters is they choose, not their reasons for choosing.
> the Bush Doctrine that the United States has the right to launch preemptive wars

Strictly speaking, preemptive war is a universally understood prerogative of every nation -- "preemptive war" is proximate self-defense against a specific, real, imminent threat before the attacking blow lands.

What Bush did is redefine preemption to include preventive war -- "self-defense" against a vague, general, nonspecific, distant potential threat that an enemy might, someday in the future, decide to attack (using capacities that do not even yet exist and which are themselves nonspecific, speculative, and distant potentials).

Preemptive war is problematic in practice, but generally regarded as an essential corollary of the right to wage war defensively; the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, OTOH, is equivalent to allowing the "self-defense" as a defense to murder charges because the killer had a belief that the victim might, someday in the future, get a gun and kill them and so they needed to kill them before that occurred.
I didn't know there was an area of CS called "Byzantine fault tolerance". Now, I'm completely astonished by both the intelectual honesty of people that call their field something that reads "known impossible problem that can only be dealed with by increasing complexity" and that the same people try hard to deal with the problem without bringing extra complexity.
Ask HN: do you use ER diagrams or UML?
Hi,

when you design a database for a startup that is maybe used by 2-3 developers, do you use ER diagrams and in detail like logical,physical etc or UML

or

do you try to be quick and draw a design so that the rest know approximately whats going on and then go with viewing the sql schema directly from mysql workbench or whatever.
10 Lies YOu Will Hear Before You Pursue Your Dreams
NSA is coming to town
That's because being convincing at interview is much easier to learn than writing good code or laying bricks fast. So for a bad coder (or bad bricklayer) it makes sense to train for interviews instead of training for the actual job.

One thing that is hard to work around is where the interviewee must demonstrate their skill first hand (e.g. implement FizzBuzz followed by strcpy and a binary search.)

Many common interview questions are too indirect (Show me a certificate; Answer this trivia question about a Java API from 1997) or misguided attempts at personality tests (How many sewing machines are there in West Virginia) all of which one can prepare for without having the actual ability to do the job.

These kinds of questions can still work, as long as they have not yet made it into "How to succeed at interviews" type books. Or when the applicants you want to filter out cannot resist outing themselves even with training (e.g. "Tell me about a time when you have been wrong / publicly changed your opinion" will probably always be a useful filter.)
5 CIA operations that went south -- spectacularly.
Well, Python is duck typed, but None doesn't pretend to be a duck, a cow, a pig, etc. That sounds extremely dangerous.
Right. Pressure, though, doesn't invalidate their decision. Cfr. how a purchase is valid even if you saw an ad for the product.
Behind the Scene: The Design of WordPress 3.8
I seem to recall them overthrowing the one the US installed, too.
Varnish Cache 4.0 Technology Preview 1
Anitype - what if letters could move?
Just spent about 5 minutes watching him program and test a game... Can't watch anymore, do people actually enjoy this sort of thing? I think its more fun to program than to watch someone program...
Yahoo Is Using Google And Facebook Bus Stops As Recruiting Centers
also just so you know i think AI, for example, is beyond the scope of this web stack quest. When "complex" is used in a web app it means concurrency issues, asynchronicity, eventing. Not necessarily computational stuff beyond that
Let the author present it however he wants. Wait for it to get traction before using his personal vocabulary on Wikipedia.
The vendor lock-in is true, I suffered from it. But other points make the post look bad. THe comparions should be more mature and give concrete examples, use NoSQL when you need ... and SQL database when you need ... , these are too much opininon based.
In my experience, the hiring managers have been the problem, not HR. I've been very frustrated by my managers' attitudes and expectations when trying to hire folks for my team.
They've rejected resumes against my recommendations. And after interviews, they've declined to offer jobs to people that I thought would be great fits. And then they continue to complain to their managers that we just aren't getting quality candidates. Not true!!!
And again, this is not HR. . .these are the hiring managers.
"Laws are spider-webs, which catch the little flies, but cannot hold the big ones." -- Anarcharsis
The trend of jQuery becoming the dominant standard for everything web has been reversing for 2-3 years now, and that is only going to accelerate as more people are able to abandon support for IE6, IE7 and IE8. JavaScript in most modern browsers makes most of jQuery redundant.

A dependency on underscore strikes me as usually being more reasonable if you use more than 1-2 functions from the library. I regularly use many functions from underscore when I include it in a project since it includes many utility functions for functional programming that are missing from the basic prototypes in JavaScript.
“我们的征途是星辰大海。”

Our Conquest is the Ocean of Stars.
Great stuff. I don't know how I missed this when it was first posted. I hope Hal gets around to Part 5 at some point.

From this history, ISTM that WinFS was doomed as soon as they decided to build it on top of the "Mighty Mouse" embedded SQL Server. SQL Server is, by all accounts, a well-designed piece of software, but something doesn't become "platform layer" just because you say it is. I don't blame Microsoft's other BU's for not wanting to put what is essentially another application layer between their code and its persistent data.

On another note, the proposed client use cases 10-15 years later read as almost quaint. The vast majority of photo management these days happens on the web and in HTTP-using client applications, where sharing, not editing, is the killer feature. The right client bet was not to help users manage data on their own PCs, but to take over that responsibility for them. Through SkyDrive and other "cloud" capabilities, Microsoft can do that today, but imagine if they'd started 12 years ago. Facebook only exists because they got photo sharing "good enough"; there's no reason Microsoft couldn't have beaten them to it.
Sorry, but in groovy, [[1 : 2]] - [["b" : "a"]] seems to be []. As long as they don't get fundamentals like this right i consider groovy only useful for demonstrating it's own deficiencies. The fact that this is in their Jira since 2010 and a fix would would be easy for anyone who understands the basics of hashcode and equals doesn't paint an all too rosy picture of the people behind groovy.

I'd rather work with a language that _i_ don't fully understand (modersky seems to provide me with an infinite supply of intellecutal challenges) than with a language that gives me reason to doubt that it is fully understood by the people who made it.
He scrapped that too and is now back in the forest :D
How the NSA Piggy-Backs on Third-Party Trackers
nasa and jpl aren't the same thing.
Takes me longer than that. My typical flow is to email sthing to myself. I have to type my own email, which is far from optimal. Haven't tried the app yet though so can't comment on potential improvement.
Kotlin seems to do exactly what you want.
Marijuana was made legal only to increase government revenue, not in form.of taxes, but by having a law mandated monopoly

So what? It's better for the money to end up in state hands than in the hands of a multi-national mafiya network. Hey, I bet the US budget crisis could be solved by properly taxing drugs and shutting down law enforcement/DoC institutions not needed for a "War On Drugs" any more...
Reminds me of the old joke comparing iPhone 3G and Nokia 3310.

* MMS: Iphone: No, Nokia: No

* Bluetooth: IPhone: No, Nokia: No

* Making Videos: IPhone: No, Nokia: No

* Video calls: Iphone: No, Nokia: No

* Memory cards: IPhone: No, Nokia: No

* Colour display: IPhone: Yes, Nokia: No
;)
The Online Demo Pit
> While implying that the US is a totalitaian state will get you lots of up votes from insecure europeans

You are putting words in my mouth - I said no such thing. But getting caught up in this kind of debate is exactly what I was trying to avoid by wording my comment carefully.

Let's discuss it from a different angle, and ignore the world "totalitarianism" for a moment. Looking at my (incomplete) list of recent developments in the execution of power in the United States, consider the following questions: Are these things good for American society and the world at large? What is their implication for the potential oppression and persecution of political opponents? How about other abuses of power, perhaps less systematic, e.g. the oppression of certain demogratic groups? Are they to any degree at all used for such purposes already?

I think these questions are interesting from a purely intellectual point of view, and very worthy of being discussed. Although personally I do believe that the current situation in the United States is worrying in the light of previous world history.
"Request" is a pretty broad term. An ask is focused, specific, planned. It's something more like "negotiating point" or "initial position" or "requirement" or "demand".
I think he uses Das Keyboard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
Three men arrested for Anti-Semitic tweets after Premier League match
> So was he really a spy, or the suspicions were unfounded?

for a question like this to appear on HN makes me realize why mccarthy-era tactics were popular for so long.

they obviously work, even on smart people, and even in retrospect.
When I see a hypothesis which is THAT sweeping, there's no reason to waste the time of trying to find data to support the hypothesis or a refutation of it. I mean quite literally it is so sweeping as to be meaningless. The more broad you make a hypothesis, the more difficult it is to find evidence to support it. This is especially evident in economics, which is not nearly as hermeneutic and self-sufficient as, say, physics or mathematics.

You may be right that I'm espousing a lack of a certain kind of imagination, but I don't want to adopt the kind of imagination that tacitly accepts the validity of a hypothesis to be explored. The willingness to accept THAT kind of a hypothesis to me, in fact, belies a different kind of lack of a imagination. I am critical of the value structure that would create the assumptions that would lead to the OP's hypothesis, and my prescription is simple: pare down the scope of the hypothesis. Be specific. It's not that the debate between capitalism and socialism has never been purely economic, but in fact has mostly been ideology driven. Statistics are contextualized in rhetoric by ideological worldviews, and I've never been a fan of arguing/accepting arguments by leaps of faith. Skepticism of the law of excluded middle and all that.
ugh, curse you WSJ and your incremental paywalls.

> The government man in the bedroom helps himself to a seat, leans toward the lad and says: “I’m afraid you’ll have to write him a letter, Philip. . . . There’s to be no more transmitting out of the United States.” He explains: He is from the Federal Communications Commission’s Radio Intelligence Division; “the R.I.D.,” he says, enunciating each letter. He tells the boy: “Today it’s chiefly by radio that the enemies within a country hope to get their stolen information out of it. That’s why the R.I.D. was born. . . . It is our job to police the ether.”
Site seems down (Nginx bad gateway error)
I don't see why the idea that "the universe might have been around forever" is so surprising since as far as I know, the prevalent theory is that time started at the big bang, which means that saying "before the big bang" makes as much sense as "going north while standing at the north pole".