skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I was just refuting the assertion that "S-expressions are about as semantically sane as you can get".

His comment was equally nonsensical. S-expressions are consistent and easy to parse, that is all.

> I do not particularly care what data structure is internally used. That is the compiler's business, not mine. I want to reason about my code in terms of the semantics of the language I am using.

>I do not particularly care what data structure is internally used. That is the compiler's business, not mine. I want to reason about my code in terms of the semantics of the language I am using.

Good, that data structure generally isn't used internally in the compiler (not efficient enough). I'm talking about the data structure that is used for the programmer's brain. The semantics and way of reasoning about the code is in terms of a very simple data-structure.

My business is the compiler's business.

> Names may be misleading, documentation may be incomplete, but types never fail to accurately guarantee properties about my code. Hence my preference for types.

Why would you write such shitty code? There are many ways of skinning that cat. You can use types, you can use tests, you can use assertions.

You could make it overly complicated and long. A stupid person is going to have a bad time writing code, no matter what language you hand them. Shitty code is shitty. This is a tautology comparing the language I'm currently into to a language I'm not currently into. Don't use it. You're good at writing Haskell, good for you.
Because I turned down the offer and gave him advice before he published his story.

I took the decision then not to out the behaviour - however given that Im targeted in the article I've since slackened my ethics on how to treat the situation.
where wizards stay up late isbn 9780684832678

weaving the web by berners-lee 006251587X

the master switch - tim wu

the soul of a new machine - tracy kidder 9780316491976

dealers of lightning
I'm curious why they chose libRocket instead of cocos2dx or unity3d?
is the data plan just US/Verizon or broader?

My "problem" is that I'm in Canada. I could buy one in the US but then what?

I suppose I could tether to my phone
Humans can choose to be non-violent. This is what makes us human.

The moment you remove that choice - either personally or socially - you become an animal, again.

Genetic traits? Well, we've overcome them before, with our free will - we'll do it again. We had lots of genetic traits that predetermined our inability to live on the Moon - but we soon decided that wasn't going to get in our way. Why can't we do the same thing with War?

Because viewpoints such as yours are contagious diseases which fester in the mind of Mankind, and very few are ever prepared to cure themselves of it.
I don't think it's exactly what you're looking for, but you might enjoy James Burke's series Connections, as well as The Day the Universe Changed. It's always fun to watch Burke connect the dots from technical advances to historical events.
Rails 4 brought along Turbolinks which is a step in the framework direction. I really think those frameworks are overly complex anyway. I've never seen a site that used one and didn't suck to use (slow/buggy UI).
Sorry if I came off a little aggressive. No 1 is my pet peeve, but I'm not sure if I can uninstall apport without messing up other parts of my system.
The public should also know that all this long range drone stuff can be done for cheap.

Also, they pixelate the feed on purpose, to remove hesitation when hitting the trigger.
It sucks to be part of the human element making life and death decisions about armed robots being used in non-traditional war situations.

That's about all I got from this. And yes, it does suck. There was a third claim, that the public is misinformed/misled, but I take issue with that one. I think most people understand that somebody, somewhere is pushing the button.

This essay didn't go into the rationale for drone warfare, or the situation that brought the west into armed conflict in the first place. So it's not hitting on a lot in terms of talking about the geopolitical issues, it's just a plea for more empathy about what's actually being done.

I share that concern. We should be more empathetic. However -- and this is a big deal -- feeling more fully the terrible things we are doing does not in any way make those things less necessary. Those are two separate subjects.

I think we are going down a bad road with armed robots, but I don't think essays like this are helping the discussion much. Still, it was good to hear this voice.
Again with the drone bashing.

Civilians got killed by manned aircraft too. A-10s launching Hellfires at a wedding party, or AH-64 Apaches gunning down farmers in a field. It happens. And whether the pilot is sitting in the aircraft or a thousand miles away makes no difference. It's the same imperfect people making the same imperfect decisions based on imperfect information.
Thanks for the tip - is this going to be habit forming, by any chance? :)
How can the world be getting so much better when US power is waning?
We need an international ban on harmed US citizens
It's not easy. Call it out. Respond to the biases that come from that position.

Yield the floor to those with less structural support when speaking. Encourage people who are ordinarily excluded. NOTICE AND CALL OUT. Use your privileged position to help where you can, and step out of the way when you can't.

It's pretty powerful when a room full of dudebros is silenced by the one guy who says "Uh ... that 'Aunt Tillie' you're designing for is actually damn smart, just hasn't used a computer yet" or "Uh, guys, you're forgetting HALF THE POPULATION". Or "That was sexist, jackass. Don't ever do that again." Or "Maybe we should acknowledge that having people who have families and would like to see them might like to participate here."

Some of these are actual statements of differing values. They are sharp instruments on wall of the bubble of the echo chamber. They're powerful.

And then, when you've women on your team, listen to them. Remember that status isn't conferred as readily on us. "She's just a junior dev" ... well, yeah, and might have been passed for a couple promotions. When you go out for an expensive meal with folks from a funding firm or industry cohorts, remember who might have had to check their bank balance before coming and may have passed. Try to include those voices. Call 'em up. Offer to pay for a meal -- or if you're in a position of company power, fix it structurally by making it not an individual problem.

And look for sources of bias and privilege. Don't just focus on women. Look for all the myriad ways that you can explain how someone ended up in the social heirarchy how they did, and think long and hard about what's fair. It won't feel nice if you came out on top by accident and you'll try to explain it away. Don't.

Even more telling is when you fail: What are the repercussions of failure for you? What might the repercussions for a woman on your team be? Are they different? That's an especially telling place to look, and it explains a lot of why women are paid less: their risks are bigger for the same gains.

Do spend your life checking it. Don't spend your entire life keeping your experiences to yourself: just be aware that your experiences aren't universal nor even prototypical. Don't be the default voice. Just a voice.
When I lived in Ecuador long ago, voting was mandatory. The people with your views ran a spirited campaign with posters that said "VOTA NULO", vote null. I'm not sure exactly how it worked there, but in some places there's an explicit "vote for nobody" choice, and those choices are counted and reported: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voto_nulo
The article talks about one of the risks being a "value-destroying takeover".

Is there anyone or anything out there that could even try this with Apple? Is that even really a risk for them?

It would seem in their market that any competitor or threat to their business would be spotted miles and years away..
Getting Started with a Horizontal Grid
Isaacson's biography of Jobs was obtuse on technology. Caveat lector.
With a proper oversight regime and individualized warrants, I can see this being an acceptable use of NSA power. With the absurd degree of intrusive latitude the NSA possesses now, it just makes it easier for them to violate civil liberties on a massive scale. Very few people can avoid being compromised by backdoors in these devices and companies, the same way very few people can avoid the physical threat of government aggression. The difference is that the latter has a far more robust system of controls to ensure it is used judiciously and ethically. Until the former has the same, we need to do everything we can to limit or invalidate the NSA's power.
I expect them and their staffs to do it, yes. Some do it better than others.
> de-Godwin

If we never take hard problem to a philosophical discussion, what can come out from the discussion?

> We do not live in a world where War is necessary. We live in a world where War is created, for some purpose.

And why is war or violence created? Because we have desire, we as thinking things have thoughts and emotions. We become jealous and angry. We become depressed and sad. We harm others for these reasons.

> We don't need another B1 bomber. We do need schools where our children can learn to respect and love each other.

And we have schools. And we teach them to respect. The world you are describing does not exist. As long as there is freedom for someone to think, there is violence. Violence can be physical or verbal. You can kill someone by saying something very harsh and this person may go depressed for the rest of his life and ends up in a messy, unproductive life.

I will respect you being a pacifist, but I urge you to think about other ethics theories as well.
Formerly self employed here. One trick that worked for me, which was inspired by some book w/ a tomato on the cover...

1. Set a timer for 25 minutes.

2. Work until the timer goes off.

3. Take a short break, 5 minutes or so.

4. Repeat :)

What I did was determine how many hours I wanted to work total, usually 40 hours. Then I'd shoot for 80% efficiency, so I'd try to work hardcore for 32 hours. Divide 32 hours by 25 minutes (32 * 60 / 25), and I'd work that many blocks of time.

I found it really helped me focus. It also helped me separate my work time from personal time. It also... well, it helped a lot.

You can play with the numbers to find a pattern that works best for you.
In 35 years I've never been able to write more than ten lines of bash-level scripting without saying "Screw this, it's unreadable and unmaintainable" and writing the thing at hand in something else. (I think the longest non-trivial batch file I ever wrote was about 20 lines. I hated it). The "something else" changes with platform and decade, but usually it's native, or at least something like Python or C#.

Makefiles make me feel the same way, but here I have little choice. You can structure them "well" but they remain essentially undebuggable bits of hell that always seem to fall apart at the worst time.

I've worked with systems that had multi-thousand-line batch files and shell scripts, and my reaction has been "this crap is unsalvageable". A lot of those systems are still in production, and the people on them hate their lives. The code is a mass of spaghetti with a bunch of behavior modified by global and environment variables.

About 30 years ago I made the statement that "BASIC programs should self-destruct after 50 edits", as a way to encourage users of that language to move on to something more better, and to limit the damage that a "mission critical" 2 KSLOC hunk of bad code incurs. I maintain this would be desirable for bash and batch-like stuff, too...
Shakespeare Refreshed: Half the Page is a Stage
Rest assured that not all of us Americans think it's a-ok that the NSA is spying on other countries' citizens either.
And what should we do with such people if we have no wars where we can direct their activities to?

Randomly start wars just to keep them occupied with something?

I'm pretty sure that those people are actually very rare and that most people that join the military do it because of patriotism and propaganda.

Most soldiers probably don't know what they will be facing and how it will affect them in a negative way, which would explain the high suicide rate.
> All of us foreigners are fair game

Americans feel this way, sure. But Americans are only 4% of humans, and soon 100% of humans will be on the Internet.

This worldview is not an economic survival trait.

I suggest relaxing, brewing some tea, and waiting for this to play out in the global market. Either they'll change, or they'll go out of business.
I'm upvoting your comment because you should have to deal with its dehumanizing effect. You imagine the victims of drones to be, perhaps, no different from those voluntarily participating in medical trials.
Howard Rheingold's 'Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology' - covers George Boole, Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, John Von Neumann

Jon Gernter's 'The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation' - very cool story about the formation of Bell Labs and covers the Transistor, Satellite comms, the laser, and a ton of other stuff up till, but not disappointingly not including Unix.

John Markoff's 'What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry' - what is says!

Ted Nelson's 'Geeks Bearing Gifts' (or any of his YouTube Computers For Cynics videos) - awesome, curmudgeonly alternative (but accurate) version of computer history.

Michael A. Hiltzik's 'Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age' - as someone else mentioned, really great history
> The right to defend yourself is not the right to kill, especially on a mass scale.

He is not asking not to kill at a mass scale. He is against killing others, regardless of what the reason is. There will be no ground for fighting for democracy. There will be no ground for protecting my life, my lover's life, or anyone's life. There is no mechanism to defend the things I cherish when a murderer comes to my doorstep with an AK47.
I'd actually like to go the other way, a Gnome-less setup. Have seen some interesting setups with Awesome WM to that affect.

Bit too lazy/would like to keep coding and not spend weeks replacing the good in Gnome with whatever the alternatives are.
The entire concept of targeted drone assassinations is so surreal. Executing a convict in the US civilian court system requires a trial with a high-burden of proof, and the convict is afforded multiple appeals before the sentence is carried out. But in this case all it takes for the state to execute a suspect is the interpretation of some mid-level analyst. More perplexing, there are no qualms around civilian collateral damage. In what universe is striking a convoy carrying a suspect but also carrying innocent (or even if not innocent, not deserving a death sentence) civilians, deemed acceptable?
Because it's not clear if dropconnect actually outperforms dropout. Also, this is a generalization in a very weak sense, dropconnect is very unlikely to perform the same thing as dropout.
I'm going to guess wildgift was being sarcastic. COBOL syntax is so needlessly verbose it interferes with the understanding of the actual formula. I contend that

return price > 100 ? 10 : 5;

is way more readable.
Undergrads reinvent the cardboard box
> If this question even comes up once, drones should never, ever be armed.

Mistakes are going to happen whatever you use. It's not clear that sticking better cameras on the things wouldn't give you enough information to make it comparable with other attack vectors.
Neither of my parents were programmers. However my Dad did buy me a Vic-20 and a Commodore-64 which is where I started to program in Basic. I have a few computers after that, but when I was 17 my Grandmother loaded me $300 so I could buy a Pentium Motherboard and processor so I could run the new Borland Turbo C++ compilers. My 486 wasn't cutting it :-)
Show HN: Fake Facebook Notifications Chrome Extn
You know that there is something more efficient than the mouse, like the HUD or keyboard shortcuts?
The classic "Pick any two" triangle.
Well said. Removing risk implies removing accountability.
None, of course; except perception.

People perceive money to be something of intrinsic value (Or that it _should_ be that. Krugman's complaint about arguing normative versus positive is at play here, for sure). People perceive credit as merely a record of a debt.

The gold-standard freaks seem to not understand this non-difference. A large subset of folks who ideologically back Bitcoin also indulge in this fantasy.
They're concerned about Apple taking something over, not Apple being taken over. With a massive cash reserve, it becomes easier to buy up interesting new companies, and something like 80% of these destroy value.
Citizen driven website in Argentina reports when the lights go out
Making one is a good table saw woodworking project. Bonus points to stick magnets into holes so it snaps into place.

Right up there with using Golomb rulers as a decoration theme. Although I think OGR's are best implemented in paver brick patios using contrasting color bricks...

"Real Math" decoration themes are an interesting topic. Not "fake math" like art majors drawing a square root so now its math themed, but art based on real math.

Comp sci art themes are fun. Mosaic tile game of life "still life" perhaps with some interesting gliders or if you've got the space the legendary glider gun... or a still life of a partially completed quicksort?
Positive Disintegration - Higher Sensitivity & Development Potential
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Stephen Levy (http://amzn.com/1449388396)

A great look at the people involved in the early years of personal computing, including Stallman, Gates, Wozniak, etc. Apart from the technology, Levy discusses the basic philosophy and motivations of the personalities involved.
Just as in the past we outsourced our repression to client states in the region, those same regimes are now outsourcing their counterterrorism to us in the form of drone strikes. We are helping to consolidate the power of creatures like Saleh, at the eventual ruinous cost of American lives and global legitimacy through the inevitable blowback.
This true, except for the part where the US military is cutting forces[0] and it is becoming harder and harder to join[1]. It's probably easier to pretend the majority of the military is comprised of barely pubescent country bumpkins with no training past the Boy Scouts, but that's just not the case.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/army-to-cut-its-forces-...

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/15/news/economy/military-recrui...
Email is the only universally-accepted federated notification system.

Emails such as "your card has been used 1000km+ from its last use" or "you just made this >$1000 purchase" are very useful indeed, and should be encouraged to detect fraud.
Some of the academic authors for the history of computers in particular would be Mahoney, Cerruzi, Aspray, Abbate, & Campbell-Kelly. For history of technology in general look up authors publishing in Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), including oldies like Lynne White, etc.
>Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars.

What war are we in currently?!
What did RBI said?
You're really into protecting your rhetorical devices, aren't you?
Is Google Our New Heather?
The pads appear to be sensitive to pressure, if I've read it right, which is a start
If you want a handy outline for a persuasive blog post (or any other communications medium), try the "Decker Grid".

*

1. Opening: SHARP (a "hook" to catch reader's attention), your point of view, general action step (what you're asking them to do), and what the benefit will be.

2. Main body (1): Key point, sub-point 1, sub-point 2, sub-point 3

3. Main body (2): repeat

4. Main body (3) repeat

5. Closing: restate your point of view, suggest a more specific action step, restate the benefit, and end with another SHARP (memorable hook).

*

SendGrid's Elmer Thomas published a comprehensive write-up of the Decker communications training, including the grid, here: http://sendgrid.com/blog/principles-of-a-killer-hackathon-de...
I face this problem all the time, I still don't understand why those banks can't understand security risk behind this.
Media in general gives you skewed and unrealistic expectations about all facets of life. What is special about porn?
The biggest reason that audio software/hardware manufacturers tend to ignore Windows is its latency problems. Latency is the amount of time it takes to send input to the system, or to get output from the system. Total latency is the combination of the two; how long it takes from the time I pluck a string until I hear the processed version play back through my headphones. High latency throws your timing off. It's a lot like when you speak into a microphone in an auditorium and the delay between when you speak and when you hear your voice is confusing.

The two primary audio APIs available on Windows have very high latency, to the point where they make tracking with effects virtually unusable. You can increase your sample rate to improve the latency, but that is far more taxing on your CPU.

OS X uses a system called Core Audio, and it has very respectable latency and is comparatively easy to develop for. We're at the point where a sort of self-sustaining feedback loop is well under way. Poor latency causes musicians to prefer OS X to Windows. Audio hardware manufacturers want to release products for platforms that people are actually using, so they target OS X. Now musicians who were on the fence about switching to a Mac have to in order to get access to decent recording equipment.

I have an Apogee Duet that works on OS X and iOS(!), but it doesn't support Windows. The really weird thing is that I get better latency when recording through my iPad then I do when recording through my beefy gaming rig.

tl;dr: Nifty controllers won't fix the problem. Microsoft needs to get serious about audio performance if they want musicians to use their platform.
I wholeheartedly agree with your comments about war.

> There's a high cost in both money and American lives.

Likewise, there's huge financial opportunities in a war for the military-industrial complex which just so happens to have strong ties with our political leadership.
I've only read part way through, but good grief, you owe it to yourself to read this. Also, in retrospect, it seems obvious. Nonetheless...

Not having finished the article, one of my initial thoughts: I guess my thoughts and intuition were right. It's not time to throw away those optical disks (and drives), yet.
I honestly don't know :) I was simply reporting my results experimenting with this (I'll try to write a blog post about it some time in the near future), so I'll defer to those with a deeper knowledge of the Linux kernel.

I have read that the Linux scheduler exploits some heuristics if it can guess how soon a blocked thread will need to be woken up, so this might have something to do with that.
Once you start giving penalties for this kind of behavior, then you open up the possibility for really black hat people using this against their competition.
It atleast opens up the possibility of that happening if it was open source
“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his.” Patton

All weapons are the weapons of cowards. It isn't fair that almost all the weapons we use in Afghanistan are superior to our enemies, and it isn't fair that they resort with IEDs and suicide bombs.

If you have equal weapons then you look for superiority in numbers or tactics. Long gone are the days when "honourable" war meant agreeing to fight pitched battles on terrain that suited neither side and both sides knew was coming. Those "honourable" wars were also the most brutal to both prisoners and civilians.