skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>They are teaching children a skill. If that really bothers you, take a minute to reflect on yourself.

It's not the teaching of the skill in itself that is problematic, or even (in my opinion) the attempt to make up for various sources of disadvantage.

What I object to is the idea that it is of great importance to eliminate racial and gender disparities, or that our society is incredibly bad because these disparities exist. This idea is what drives articles like this to the front page of HN.

Racial and gender disparities exist for a number of reasons, not simply the oppression of one group by another. Different groups have different cultures, interests and possibly innate abilities. I don't think anyone here would want to instantly eliminate the cultural differences between Black and White people.

The claim that the differences between groups are solely attributable to disadvantage and oppression is simply a claim. It is backed up by nothing but moralizing and posturing (note the number of posts here disparaging White "kids").

I also don't think that it is possible to entirely eliminate the disadvantage that minority groups often suffer, simply because people by nature tend to favor people who are similar to themselves, by any measure. I certainly wouldn't consider it wise to go to a random country, say Israel, and mandate that all cultures and viewpoints were to have equal status in that country, and that the majority would have to give up on all aspects of their culture that were not sufficiently inclusive or friendly to minorities.
No, the house in the article was built for $11,000 dollars. That's the cost of provisioning about 5 square feet of London real estate. You're mis-reading be-tween the lines, by a couple orders of magnitude.
This is a good point. Traditional recruiters have different ways of knowing how good you are at programming (often they don't). By starting with your Gridmancer competency, we can potentially find and qualify you for opportunities that traditional credentials couldn't. (And we're not going to send candidates who aren't good enough to higher-skill positions.)

One weakness is that we don't have a good way of measuring how much software development (as opposed to core programming skill) you have. In this sense, we don't yet have an advantage over traditional recruiters.

Traditional recruiters do have better connections, for now, but we are going really high-hustle for this initial batch of players, so it's not like we're just sending off resumes.
These pushes for housing like Earthships are curious, especially in light of your comments (which mirror my expectations). Not curious by themselves, but curious in what they represent. Humans developed modern housing specifically to combat weather, slow ingress by pests, etc. I wonder if this Earthship (etc) movement represents a shift in where we are living. Ages ago, Europeans & Mediterraneans lived in a lot of unfavorable weather. Do more people live in temperate regions today, for a movement like this to happen? Why would that be the case? Perhaps shipping & the global economy have created a class of peoples that can live wherever they choose, where such a class of people did not exist before?
They are sharing a torrent
I gave this book out as a Christmas gift to a lot of people. I read it six months ago and it has dramatically improved my life.
Here's the concept, neatly illustrated: http://stackoverflow.com/a/6634668/116546

(Offtopic rant) Guess, I'm not really suited for programming. When I read I remembered I've heard about an algorithm for such tasks, Googled the details up to freshen my memory, and things instantly became boring. :(
In both cases you have to either remember a lot of details, play with it in the reply, or look at the docs as you are writing it. Once it is written the ruby code is far easier to read.
Bootstrapped indie startup Arcen Games made a couple of awesome games this year: A Valley Without Wind 2 and Bionic Dues [1].

Also, Creeper World 3 [2].

And while it wasn't released in 2013, Spacechem [3] is very HN relevant and I did play it in 2013, so...

[1] http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2013/11/holiday-guide-for-arc...

[2] http://knucklecracker.com/

[3] http://www.spacechemthegame.com/
Your numbers are badly off. Jewelry is the use referred to when Krugman says "you can use it to make pretty things". (Gold in industrial use is generally invisible).

Gold isn't used in jewelry because it's expensive. It's used because it's pretty, it's soft and workable, and it doesn't tarnish. And it's gentler to your skin; my sister's ears are too sensitive to wear cheap nickel earrings.

Now, I agree with you that the statement you quote from Krugman is invalid. But there's no reason to go around interpreting him as saying something wildly different than what he said. Gold bars are a store of value. Jewelry is not.
The positive part of Krugman's argument that discusses floors is saying that external forces have ensured that dollars and gold are useful even in the event that people stop wanting them as a value store. Your infrastructure argument seems to say that, all of that spent electricity has second order effects that make it a net positive for society. Not sure I agree, but fine. But that does not provide a floor of Bitcoin, because infrastructure being useful for other things does not make Bitcoin more useful. If BTC starts collapsing, perhaps all that infrastructure will go on to do great things for society, but how does that help Bitcoin?

So either you're misunderstanding Krugman's argument or I'm misunderstanding yours. I think you're confusing his normative and positive arguments (which are entirely separate!). You have used an argument against his normative argument ("Bitcoin is evil because it's wasteful.") but then used it to challenge his positive argument ("Bitcoin won't work out because it has no value floor."). That a crypto currency might end up helping society does not make it a good value store. Why would it?
I only scratched the surface of Haskel, so I don't really know what's annoying and what isn't :-)

I think Arrays in Scala are more important, because Scala introduced its own collections library and you end up manipulating Arrays a lot, since they are so pervasive and it's rather nice for Arrays to be viewed as Seqs.

On the other hand I would have been happy with just extension methods and given that simple extension methods made their way in Scala 2.10, I hope they'll break backwards compatibility at some point and pull implicit conversions out of the language - which isn't possible without a source-code migration tool, ala Go, but I saw that people on Scala's mailing list dream of one, so there is hope :-)
Why be cruel to designers with your silly joke?
This just adds to the list of why to hate Google.

Basically if you are either a big brand or a spammy company or have a nimble operation, you can afford to do grey & black seo. If you are a small business/ up and coming company white seo practices are the safe choice.
In both C# and Java, methods themselves can be generic:

class ListExtras {
static <T extends Comparable<T>> T max (List<T> ts) {
T res = ts.get(0);
for (T t : ts)
if (res.compareTo(t) < 0)
res = t;
return res;
}

// ...
}

C#/Java-style bounded quantification is enough for this particular use case. My complaint is that bounded quantification in these languages is tied to inheritance as shown by <T extends Comparable<T>>. In Haskell and Rust, bounded quantification is tied to type classes, which, as you said, are open - a type class instance for a given type may be made anywhere in the program, not just where the type is defined. So bounded quantification in Haskell and Rust (and its emulation in Scala via implicits) is strictly more powerful than bounded quantification in C# and Java.

As an aside, C# is a little less retarded than Java, so even primitive types like int are objects, and, in particular, int implements IComparable<int>.
However, what I've always found him to be always clueless about is - technology. You have a better chance finding a more insightful tech article from a random tech blogger than from Krugman. He always misses the point. Without exception. I don't know even why he keeps doing this to himself. He just ends up embarrassing himself.

Yes, a textbook example of the Dunning-Krugman effect. He doesn't know what he doesn't know, and he's OK with that, because hey, Nobel Prize.
Can we make "Sadly, Javascript." a motto for computer programming in 2014?

#SadlyJavascript
While I don't have any interest in shifting to Chrome OS entirely, I do think Google has made quite a leap in their recent Chromebook offerings.

I, for one, was one of the original pundits that lambasted the Chromebook movement in the beginning, but I am starting to warm up to the idea of owning one in the coming year. It surely will not replace my MBA, but there is room for it to serve as a secondary machine to people like myself.

Lastly, Microsoft should feel threatened by the recent uptick in adoption, because this kind of exodus towards ChromeOS will only eat more into their once massive share of the OS market. If Google continues to make progress in this space, $MSFT will most definitely have start paying attention and counter their growth. The new CEO in Redmond has a lot cut out for him upon taking the reins from Ballmer.
I'm not sure Bitcoin is money, at least not in the traditional sense. As I said on another thread: one of the reasons I think Bitcoin is probably a fundamental innovation is that nobody quite seems to know what it is, including me.

Nearly all Bitcoin's critics criticize it for being a poor replacement for cash, or for gold, or for some other traditional monetary unit. Automobiles are poor carriages too, and engines are poor horses.

I sympathize with some leftist critiques of deflationary currencies and libertarianism, but since I'm not sure Bitcoin is a currency I am not sure they are applicable. It is true that many bitcoiners have a libertarian/anarchist ideology, but I am not sure that matters much. A thing is what it is. Bitcoin is... whatever it is.
Monsters, calculus, lasers, trains (and Corinthian columns)
Everything is done. It's all done. Shut it all down.
Seems it's only decentralized to a degree. Go to the Bitcoin Foundation website, they say they want to keep Bitcoin decentralized. So how much influence does this Bitcoin Foundation have over the future of Bitcoin? No idea. There's only one (unpaid) Bitcoin developer responsible for the whole thing? Sounds like a tremendous responsibility for one person, considering what's potentially at risk. How are changes rolled out, how are changes vetted and to what degree are new changes a threat to Bitcoin's supposed ideals?
Similar topic...

Anyone know of a good short C implementation of TCP that includes SACK?
You can not. They are protected by copyright. I am fairly sure you cannot legally download them either.
The reality is inevitably more complicated than stylised examples: most obviously because wages tend to be directly or indirectly linked to inflation. In general, a person tending to spend virtually all their income within a month of earning it will lose out less than someone who hoards their wealth; if they're due a 2% annual pay rise and the Central Bank is pretty good at keeping inflation within a 2% range they're not going to suffer, particularly not if they can find a decent savings account for the money that isn't paying their monthly bills.

Ultimately, calculations of the alleged losers of moderate positive and predictable inflation are meaningless without taking into account its positive sum effects: when "bury it under the ground" isn't an acceptable investment strategy earning average returns, more real goods and services will be produced.
Facts about Jeffrey Dean: http://www.quora.com/Jeff-Dean/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-fa...
> write a Haskell -> JavaScript transpiler

There are at least three of them already - UHC's JS backend, Haste and Fay.
Interestingly, the patent even mentions the actual use case:

>Therefore, if the ECRNG is used to generate the encryption key K, then it may be possible that the escrow key e can be used to recover the encryption key K. Escrow keys can provide other functionality, such as for use in a wiretap. In this case, trusted law enforcement agents may need to decrypt encrypted traffic of criminals, and to do this they may want to be able to use an escrow key to recover an encryption key.
Immutability, MVCC, and garbage collection
Sure, I'm already using that option. I had to go and find it on my own, at the time. It wasn't as simple as updating the ports collection and installing from ports, but I suppose it's not much different than waiting for a maintainer to update a package and then installing it.

I use ports to mean compile on my own and packages to mean installing precompiled binaries. In my experience, FreeBSD seems more amenable to managing, building, and installing software from source code than a linux distribution. Perhaps I just haven't learned an efficient manner that integrates well with yum/rpm on CentOS? I've always had more dependency nightmares on a linux distro than with FreeBSD. Using FreeBSD's ports collection (single repository) has been less error prone for me than trying to manage all the different yum repos one must manually organize to get up to date software. Am I doing something wrong or is it really that clunky?
My thoughts on wind:

1) Rustling leaves in an aspen grove.

2) Wind-whipped snow covered mountains (howling winds)

Both quite different but pretty cool in the right mix.
An idea to "fix" this:

In the beginning (after signing up) a bunch of orders are created and sent out to the drivers. The orders technically exist, but the drivers are told to not show up right now. Then, at least 15 minutes later, the user can tap a "show up now" button which tells the driver to actually pick up the user. So in the end you have to wait 15 minutes when using the service for the first time, but after that it is a lot faster because the orders created in the beginning can be "activated" immediately.
- clean code so straightforward to extend, port and embed
- lightweight
- suitable license
- I still use it a surprising amount on Desktop

Hugs hasn't been maintained for a few years, but Im quite fond of it. Once I get it refactored a bit, I hope to bring it up to date
We must not mistake principles and guidelines for absolute rules. I'm not judging this particular case, but I see the SOLID guidelines treated as absolutes far too often.
> Ask yourself: why buy today what can be bought tomorrow cheaper?

I know the the correct, rational answer to this question: "I won't buy it today, or ever, because it will always be cheaper the next day." (And then the deflationary spiral begins!)

But if this is really true, why has anyone bought a Playstation 4 or Xbox One? They will undoubtedly be cheaper in two or three or ten years. Well, consumers might be totally irrational; what about firms? Why has any company in history ever bought a computer when the price of computing power has been falling rapidly and (mostly) predictably for fifty years?

I don't think the question "Why buy today what can be bought tomorrow cheaper?" fully explains the behavior of people in the face of increasing purchasing power; there seems to be something else going on. Any thoughts?
FWIW, "A typical reddit thread" is as ridiculous as a "typical twitter exchange" -- there over 90M people using the platform every month.
I agree.

I believe OpenCL is the way to go. I did a very simple Sega Genesis emulator and basically what you do is control with a very slow CPU a very fast hardware that does very simple things like drawing tiles.

You control the tile with something like a pointer with the CPU but it is draw by hardware. Same with sound.

It is not hard to do, it just takes time.
This seems like an amazing plot for a screenwriter to sink their teeth into and turn into a movie. Great read.
Doodling in math class: Dragon Scales
Indeed, they didn't do anything for those values to be increasing 'exponentially.' And landlord and rents cause problems such as gentrification and a reduced quality of life for all, among a few of the core problems.
In Uzbekistan, the Practice of Forced Labor Lives On During the Cotton Harvest
Sure thing! Thanks for spreading the word about my fundraiser!
I got one just for surfing the web in the living room for the most part, doing a little bit of coding sometimes, and taking it to meetup groups. There is an app called Caret which satisfies my editor needs. Anyways, I'm pretty satisfied with it and it wasn't very expensive.
Siddartha - Herman Hesse
This is a really useful feature ! I am already using jsdelivr so I like it.
Every bit helps. I'm trying my best not to use that starfish cliche....
I cobbled together a similar service [1] a while back, but lost interest since I figured it wouldn't be profitable. FWIW the tech behind doing something like this is pretty simple, in my case a small shell script that uses imagemagick to dump the frames of the GIF as well as its framerate and then pipes into ffmpeg compiled with x264 and libvpx support.

[1] http://www.qwikgif.com/
A Developer's Introduction to jQuery
Presumably, the particular problem that the founders perceive and want to deal with is that coding isn't accessible to black girls.

Poverty may be a component of the problem they are seeking to address, but it may not be the only component. Whether or not it should be the case, different demographics -- whether divided by race or gender -- are socialized differently and its not unreasonable to think that they may be best reached by different means, and that part of the reason certain groups are underrepresented is that existing routes into the field serve some groups better than others, and that equalizing access means, in part, finding better ways to serve those groups that are currently underrepresented.

There are groups whose focus is gender but not race, e.g., http://www.girlswhocode.com/
Gah! I am just now seeing this...looks really awesome.
Huh? It wasn't a common computing term at all.
Yes to all of the above.
> SIP/SIPS is nice. You can just use your IP[:port] as your phone number

You just contradicted yourself.
>"Leaving it off here, but I hope I showed how Zed’s points apply to using C++ in all its glory"

All you said make sense but some points are still arguably. The thing is that C++ feature set is big enough so any combination of them would probably be a good fix for a given project.

For instance, you showed some advantages of using “C++ as a better C”, but I had seen horrible bugs originated by a careless use of a void* that could be prevented by using templates. So I would say that the experience change depending of the project requirements.

Also, about the C++ cast style thing, it is verbose indeed but it is almost like that on purpose, Stroustrup really wanted to discourage casting and in a lot of cases I am agreed with him, most casts can be avoided.
Hi, i never thought much about it, because in my view the beta phase is just there to get many feedbacks on the product itself. This might be usability, bugs or even more fundamental feedbacks.

But like you mentioned, it also might be a good chance for promotion ... if you want to promote an unfinished product ... depends on the basic "revolutionary" idea you are trying to spread.
It says I need Chrome.
Duly noted. Thanks! (Added)
> Where're the free events to help white men code?

Groups focussing on improving accessibility of a field to underrepresented groups are typically working from the premise that the status quo, superficially neutral, system already serves certain groups very well, but other groups poorly.

That absence of the overtly-labelled events of the type you ask about could be an indicator that few people think that the status quo system underserves white men compared to other groups in this area.
Presumably, the taxi industry is "heavily regulated" for the benefit of the customer, then shouldn't customers flock to this excellent, regulated service on their own? Why are those artificial and arbitrary limits necessary?
My addition to the algorithm: Every time your check if arrays is sorted and it isn't, start from the very beginning throwing away all progress made so far.

I doubt this way n == 6 would finish in some normal time period.
I'm glad you like it. Let me know if you have any feedback or feature ideas.
You could argue that it's Uber's attempts to "fix" pesky regulations that have got them into this mess in the first place. I doubt trying to circumvent this in the way you describe would really make the regulators any more sympathetic towards Uber.

There's an interesting business case study to be done between Uber and Hailo (based in London, far more popular there than Uber, expanding overseas), the latter of which was founded by cab drivers themselves and has taken a far more 'softly softly' approach to compliance (arguably at the expense of revenue, but the benefit of not having to deal with this kind of thing).
Voting is a solved problem. I’m not saying that the idea of using bitcoin technology to solve problems beside monetary systems is a bad idea (in fact, I think it’s a very interesting concept), but really, democracies around the world already have established and efficient voting systems that work well enough.
>The problem is, they tend to always be ran by the majority group to try to "give a helping hand" to the minority group. It's kind of a patronizing position. I didn't need a "helping hand" to become a programmer, and women are smart enough that they don't need a "helping hand" either. And they won't want it.

I'm a white guy from Brooklyn who's been successful in tech -- I'm not running this organization, I'm just doing a crowdtilt fundraiser for it.

http://www.blackgirlscode.com/about-bgc.html
Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of The Thing One Sees, on Robert Irwin's life: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520256093?tag=morgasuthe-20

Many lessons in discipline, joy, and taking time to see.
Sometimes people can't contribute back to the projects (lack of time, lack of wilingness to create a fork + put a 'marketing page' up and convince others...).

Constructive criticism (like in this article) is a valid way of trying to convince others that a better way is possible. He is cleary stating the use cases he would like the tools to fix.

Shooting down the critic by saying 'so fix it yourself/so fork off/so go code another lib out of the 30 000 that exists' is, on the other end, not constructive. Do you have better arguments?
Too many of them.
PS: For those interested, programming in OpenCL-OpenGL is way harder, painful and slower(in developer time) than in the CPU.

In particular, you extract all the performance in OpenCL from knowing how to manage memory. We talk about orders of magnitude difference(100x-200x times faster).

This memory management is hell for anybody trained with garbage collectors, Object oriented constructors and so on. It is way harder than pure c and the feedback loop is way longer(unless you invest a lot in hardware).
There are a limited number of bitcoins that can be mined. Would inflation even be possible once 100% of coins are in circulation?
These high graduation rates are quite impressive and certainly nothing to scoff about, but I'm curious about the employment rate or median income of the graduates. The article doesn't mention these things at all, even though offering a path to the middle class is the ultimate goal of the program.
You misunderstand me. I know he is talking about jewelry. My point is that people are buying gold jewelry mostly because it is expensive. Yes gold has certain properties, but there are other precious metals with similar properties (platinum, etc). So given the choice between similar metals with similar properties, people will tend to use the most expensive one for jewelry.

In other words, Krugman's argument is circular (gold has value because it has value).