skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your proposed bill has some flaws.

- It could be considered an unreasonable search.
- The data would be accessed and used by police without warrants, despite your admonishment that they shouldn't.
- The system would be used by criminals to track gun-carrying police and identify gun-owning households.
- Criminals would remove, disable, or spoof the trackers, or simply make guns that didn't have them.
- Gun rights devotees would flip out and kill the bill deader than a mayfly on the Moon. There are perhaps 10 districts in all of America where supporting such a bill would not seriously endanger any supporter's chances at re-election.

Additionally, you are a horrible person for even suggesting it. If you have guns, agents of the state will be arriving shortly to transfer them to more worthy owners with less unfortunate bone structure. As compensation, you will be given a cake--not that you need to eat another one today.
Ironically, Google's own toolbar(which was bundled by OEMs who took money from Google), sent people's web site visits even after configuring it to say no.

http://www.benedelman.org/news/012610-1.html
I'm happy to hear you're donating to charity, but you're missing out on a great opportunity to reduce your taxable income and save for retirement. The 2013 contribution limit is $17,500, and most financial planners would be aghast at a well-paid professional like yourself not taking such an easy step to lower your tax liability. The good news is that if you max out your contribution either today or tomorrow, you'll still make the 2013 contribution deadline.

Say hey to the folks we both know for me when you see them.
The easiest way to achieve your goals
For this case, the "fast" int types are provided, eg. uint_fast8_t is the fastest unsigned integer which can hold at least 8 bits; uint8_t is required to have exactly 8 bits.

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7999959899/basedefs/std...
Is there a way to turn that off? I don't mind the adwords ads since they sometimes help me find what I am looking for. They are useless, though, if they display ads for things I've searched for in the past.
i wish i were still at the point where i could believe that government agencies weren't interested in the doings of 14 year old girls (or kids in general).
Just today I learned of https://www.healthcarebluebook.com/
For anyone who's not familiar with the term: A wantrepreneur is an individual that desires to be, but is not quite yet, an entrepreneur. It sometimes has a negative tone that suggests they'll never be an entrepreneur.
The specific claim that they don't track users by phrases inside the texts of their emails does check out.
I wish him luck on his follow-up essay about female founders. What's valuable about a PG essay is 1) his careful analysis and 2) generalization from his wealth of experience. But if he does (2) at all, he's going to piss off Social Justice Warriors.

Writing nowadays is like playing football in a minefield.
That's why the "disheartening". He's obviously very smart and compassionate. I add a Code of Conduct to all my sites now, largely because of his example. The way he flew off the handle so quickly without taking the time to understand first really bothered me.
Mea culpa. I was looking for a formatter that would always format the year as 4 digits and never as 2, regardless of locale. But I didn't read the documentation correctly and thought that %G was what I needed.
You know there's a root index file at http://cdn.media.ccc.de/INDEX

Also you should use the CDN to redirect to the correct mirror
> the illegal status of drugs certainly contributes to the criminal and violent nature of the cartels, it's naive to believe the cartels would be upstanding, respectful organizations were drugs legalized.

Were drugs legal, the same measures taken that constrain lawful business in other industries could be brought to bear on the narcotics industry (which would really, then, just be an offshoot of the pharmaceutical industry.)

Now, certainly, that doesn't necessarily mean that there would be no bad things associated with the industry -- particularly in developing regions where the supply comes from, as you point out with diamonds and bananas (and one could point to oil and lots of other things there, too.)

OTOH, even in those developing world supply areas, pressure -- both government and consumer -- in the developed market countries where most of the retail dollars chasing the product comes from have often time been useful in curbing the worst abuses in many industries. But when there is already a "war" on the industry, the marginal costs such pressure imposes doesn't exist.
Whether or not private companies can provide better health care than public institutions is an entirely different argument, and was not one I was trying to make.

Bankruptcy has nothing to do with whether an organization is for-profit or not. It has to do with whether it can pay its debts or not.

Trying to figure out how to pay for things you can't afford isn't nonsense. Believing government institutions are exempt from debt is.

No matter how valuable a service is, someone must pay for it. Saving lives is a wonderful thing, but doctors still want to be paid.
Great article. For me personally, the issue is not so much dying but aging. Seeing your hair thin, your eyesight deteriorate, your memory weaken and your energy decrease with time must be a profoundly depressing experience -- one of the major reasons why the old in general are more solemn than the young, I think.

These changes are still in the future for me (thankfully), but I imagine they will happen some day if I live long enough.

I think a world in which people would keep remain mentally and physically fit, but simply die (maybe from a lightning bolt type event) at some point, would be much better than one in which your body and mind slowly fade with time.

I'd be happy with medical advances that let you keep the mind and body of a 25 year old till you're 80 and then simply die one day. Unfortunately, some period of old age and infirmity seems to be present no matter how much lifespan extends.
It's not really a problem with the tech industry, so much as it is in general with the mainstream media and consumer society. People have loved sensational stories for centuries.

The only difference is the persistent toxicity of extreme social justice and how they've invaded tech, for some reason. Perhaps because it's a big and booming field, but I've always found it odd how a lot of feminists decry geek culture as outcasts, losers and misogynists, yet simultaneously want desperately to be a part of it.

Ultimately, I think you'll do yourself good with a social media detox.
ReconnectingWebSocket
That's my biggest problem with this whole thing. I care deeply about trying to fix the gender imbalance, but these sorts of dishonest shenanigans make the whole movement look bad. At the risk of committing the No True Scotsman fallacy, I don't think the people responsible really care about gender equality. If they did then they would have checked their facts, rather than making people doubt them and the views they claim to hold.
Embracing change in life and at work
Publishing remarks made as background when you make it clear that they were made as background and that they weren't part of an actual interview is not unethical--though it is still unfair to the person being quoted, IMO, for reasons which are well explained by pg in his article.

Publishing remarks made as part of background for a completely different topic, in such a way as to make it seem as though they were made during an actual interview on the topic quoted, is unethical, IMO. And since that's what happened, I stand by my remark.
> The universal background check law means that it's illegal for me to give or lend my firearm to my brother, my cousin or my good friend. The existing law was fine: it should be illegal to knowingly transfer a firearm to someone ineligible to own one.

To improve the efficacy of the existing law, I think it would be useful to provide a free and anonymous service to the public that allows private gun owners to query the ATF, asking if a particular person is ineligible to own one. Use of the service would not be required by law (and possibly would be done with the permission of the person in question? I'm not sure there; there might be privacy concerns) but would allow law abiding citizens, who almost certainly have no interest in selling guns to criminals, to make an informed decision when selling a gun privately.
One of my friends now gets large numbers of ads for schizophrenia medication.

You have to wonder how these kinds of things happen. Or perhaps Google knows something we don't...
Its actually a good idea. If you take the charge off the ticket price, and put a cash register with the agent checking your id... i'd imagine people would react differently.
India - Is politics and acting genetic?
Regarding do ... while(0): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1067226/c-multi-line-macr...
As a woman in this industry that has been programming since I was ~8, I wasn't offended in the slightest. In my opinion he said there was a problem that he'd have to think about before offering a solution.

"It's easy to be offended by things. It's also obnoxious and often irresponsible."

Personally, this sort of behavior affects my career. When I first started at my current job people were afraid to speak to me because they expected me to get offended at the slightest thing. I want people to treat me equally, but I don't want people to be afraid to come to work because I might sue them for looking at me. That's not what I'm about at all but unfortunately I'm pre-judged to lash out at people when I see something I don't like.

I want everyone to come to work and get fair treatment/compensation/etc. but I feel that incidents like this set all of us back. The discrimination is different now. People don't see me as incapable of STEM, they see me as incapable of working with other people. It sucks. A lot.
> Python 3 runs on operating systems older than 2013 and, while it might not be the OS default, there is no reason a non-library project can't bundle its own interpreter in the distribution and use that instead of the OS default interpreter.

You are absolutely right, but the overall cost of deployment skyrockets at that point. Not to mention pernicious bugs from grabbing the wrong library & whatever other weirdness happens. Unless the project is reasonably significant (deployment cost is insignificant to development cost), it's much easier just to work from the system python.
Currently, "can we" is indeed a question. It is followed by the question, "Oh dear God in Heaven, why would you do that!?". I mean, seriously, there are large numbers of computer security breaches each week. Now what are you going to do if those computers are substrate for people? Hell, it's even worse if they're running people using cloud computing: one attack on a datacenter could let you obtain root access to dozens or hundreds of living human minds.

And then we have to decide on scheduling and resource-sharing algorithms. Oy gevalt.

Though actually, trying to devise a secure system architecture for running real people would be a hilariously evil joke-project.
Yes, the campaign is childish, but so are the article's misrepresentations. For example:

(1) Google Docs - not Drive - does not have "nearly the same capabilities" as Office by any reasonable definition. FFS, they don't even seem to have proper support for custom paragraph styles, widow/orphan control, etc. There are certainly ways in which Google Docs improves over Office, especially wrt collaborative editing, but there are also massive gaps that make it almost unusable for anything medium-size or larger.

(2) Microsoft's characterization of Chromebooks as "useless without the internet" is not entirely wrong. Constant internet connectivity might be the norm everywhere the author has gone, but it's still not something one can rely on in every corner of the globe. That being the case, "suitable for use while traveling" really might not apply sometimes. By the author's own cited definition, Chromebooks - like the one I'm typing this on - might not be real laptops for many people.

In both cases, the author starts with a grain of truth and then destroys his own point with exaggeration. The piece would have been far more effective if he had stuck with the facts - which are damning enough - instead of letting his bias shine through.
> How does a government funded org ever face bankruptcy

When there is no money to pay its debt. Simple as that.
But they already defaulted it to using integrated graphics before to save battery. It's too far when you can't even change the setting, even when you're on mains power.
Quantum Craziness
The NSA's Spy Catalog (Interactive Graphic)
Did you read the article? I'm not sure you can argue she doesn't know anything about being poor or the experiences of the bottom 20% when much of the article was describing how she used to be poor and the difficulty in surviving in that world and getting out of it.
This is to test private/commercial applications, not government.
Yeah, I didn't really mean willy-nilly sacrifice on-a-dime.

No, I've never been tested for "sociopathy" (I cannot imagine that this is something that a lot of people do), and I'm not sure that I wouldn't sacrifice myself for somebody else, but regardless of my personal feelings on the matter, regardless of whether or not it is sociopathic, isn't it still a little silly?
In Vim, Ctrl-W followed by i will try to open the definition of the identifier under the cursor in the files included by the current file (sometimes it only finds references or useless mentions inside of comments, though).
what was your total profit from releasing apps to this date?
Sorry for this utter lack of meaningful contribution, but I read this in my head in a Morty Seinfeld voice and laughed.
What I don't understand is that when I get a bill for anything healthcare related it's just a generic description. They don't explain what I am paying for. I can match it up with the EOB by amount usually but it's almost as if they make it so vague so they can just keep sending you bills for the same procedure.
Well I don't think I will be able to change your opinion if you feel so strongly about it. However some pointers perhaps might make it less painful:

> Iterators everywhere are incredibly annoying, especially with my development workflow, where I don't put a line of code into a file before I run it manually in the interpreter. When I run a map over a list, I just want to see the freaking results.

That's what list() is for:

>>> list(map(lambda x: x * x, xs))

> Default unicode strings are obscenely annoying to me. Almost all of my code deals with binary data, parsing complex data structures, etc. The only "human readable" strings in my code are logs. Why the hell should I worry about text encoding before sending a string into a TCP socket...

> The fact that the combination of words "encode" and "UTF8" appear in my code, and str.encode('hex') is no longer available, is a very good representation of why I hate Python 3.

I'm afraid I don't understand your complaint. If you're parsing binary data then Python 3 is clearly superior than Python 2:

>>> "Hello, Gådel".encode("utf-8")
b'Hello, G\xc3\xa5del'

Seems much more reasonable than:

>>> "Hello, Gådel".encode("utf-8")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 8: ordinal not in range(128)

Because they're not the same thing. Python 2 would implicitly "promote" a bytestring (the default literal) to a unicode object so long as it contained ASCII bytes. Of course this gets really tiresome and leads to Python 2's, "unicode dance." Armin seems to prefer it to the extra leg-work for correct unicode handling in Python 3 [0] however I think the trade-off is worth it and that pain will fade when the wider world catches up.

> In Python 2, the rule of thumb was "If it makes sense, it's going to work". In Python 3, this isn't true. Not often, but often enough to annoy. This makes Python "feel" like Java to me.

Perhaps this is because you're a used to Python 2 and anything else is going to challenge your perceptions of the way it should work?

I don't understand the Java comparison.

> And worst of all, Python 3 has so many excellent features, like sub-generators, a better performing GIL, etc. These sometimes force me into coding with Python 3. I hate it every freaking time.

> I said to myself that with Python 3.4, due to great stuff like the new asyncio module, I'll have to make the switch. It's really sad that this is because I "have to" do it, and not because I "want to".

Well you can always attempt to backport these things into your own modules and keep Python 2 alive.

I think going whole-hog and embracing Python 3 is probably easier in the long run. I'm not sure how long the world is going to tolerate ASCII as the default text encoding given that its prevalence has largely been an artifact of opportunity. Unicode will eventually supplant it I have no doubt. It's good to be ahead of the curve.

[0] http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/7/2/the-updated-guide-to-unicod...
He was far from the only one.
I find that doubting anything that Gawker says about anyone or anything is generally a good idea.
Where can I find the Wolf of Wall Street culture? (not in prison)
I've personally seen 18yr olds making ~100k/month and office antics that match those seen/read in the Wolf of Wall Street. The industry was subprime mortgages.

I'm sure there are other industries/jobs where the same is happening right now. Anyone know?
Read both sides of the story rather than just Google's accusations:

http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-...

http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-ac...
Me too. Ageism is also a huge problem in tech, independent of gender and racial issues.
There are people who wake up in the morning, just like you or me, and instead of doing something productive with their time begin the day's hunt for a topic to be offended about. These are people that spend every day searching for something that offends them so that they can bitch to their followers about it and feel like they are producing some real change in the world. Think on par with "Fox News commentary," except militant feminism instead of hyperconservative. Facts just get in the way of the rage train. Can't have those.

You are getting a glimpse of those people. Spend your days looking to be offended and, my God, it occasionally happens and you get your chance to rabble! Welcome to social justice warriors.

I used to think I wanted out of the industry too. Now I just keep a list and act accordingly when I am asked to hire. I've also learned to spot the signs, including certain phrases, retweeting of certain people consistently, linking to the Geek Feminism wiki because it's a wiki and it has facts, and so forth. A good example of a red flag tweet: https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/417775128831741952
Year Of Motivation - New Startup Motivates You Every Morning
Awesome book and project! Give them a dollar or two!
> How does a government funded org ever face bankruptcy, unless the government wants it to for political reasons?

It depends on the bankruptcy laws, and its possible that a "government funded" org still would be covered by them.

OTOH, in this particular case, its probably the common confusion of "bankruptcy" with "insolvency" playing a major role. Insolvency is usually the reason an entity enters (voluntarily or not) bankruptcy, but the two states are not equivalent.
The approach I use, and that used many places in the Linux kernel, is to use goto for error handling:

if(failure_1) {
goto error;
}
if(failure_2) {
goto error;
}

// Do stuff
return 0;

error:
if(f != NULL) {
fclose(f);
}
if(s != NULL) {
free(s);
}
return -1;
Why your startup is going to fail
'If I Need ID to Buy Cough Syrup, Why Shouldn't I Need ID to Vote?'
Part of the interview is to see how the founders interact with each other and the investors. Taking that away by masking their appearance/voice would have a pretty big impact on the interview process I think.
Ford: New Cars 2014
Ford Transit (January, Q2) Ford Australia will overhaul its Transit commercial vehicle line-up in two waves in 2014. The short-wheelbase Transit Custom will arrive first in January, promising more car-like dynamics, styling and technologies, including the Sync connectivity system...
For those who can't read sarcasm over the internet, he's kidding. Go ahead, implement ECB mode, what could go wrong, LOL. I've also got a really nice "special" RNG for you too, although its really slow it is NSA approved.

If you only need security theater just stick to ROT-13.

As a tiny little sub area of computational activity, writing crypto is total sorcerers apprentice territory.
I had high hopes for The Information that their business model would lead to better quality reporting… Their page states:

The Information recently sat down with Mr. Graham. We covered a wide range of topics including “mass producing” startups, Mr. Graham’s controversial statements on founder accents, his wife and YC's secret weapon Jessica Livingston (link) and some little-known stories about YC alum Airbnb.

https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete...

…which implies that it was a formal interview. I don't have a subscription but something still doesn't quite mesh there. If I were PG I would be writing to them to demand that they change that lead-in to the story.

edit: Another part of this saga that stands out to me is how very few people commenting on it actually have a subscription to the supposedly first hand source at The Information. It was a bit strange that we had a scandal caused by a news report about a news report that most people don't have access to.
We have privatized prisons with quotas for the number of prisoners.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/private-prison-quot...

What is a cry of "entrapment" next to incentive?
"I think everyone should have the media perform a hatchet job on them at least once. It’s this really scary feeling when you know you’re trying to be honest and do the right thing, and yet you see how easy it is for a hostile writer to cast every single thing you do as corrupt and destructive. And how quick everyone is to believe them. And how attempts to set the record straight get met with outraged “how dare you give one of those typical sputtering non-apologies!”. It reminds me of those computer games where “ACCUSE” is just a button you press, and it doesn’t even matter what the accusation is or whether it makes sense."

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/15/things-i-learned-by-spe...
Blind applications would be great if they were possible, but I suspect they would be as helpful as a blind audition for concert conductors -- i.e., not at all.

When you evaluate a team, you need to be able to judge their confidence, see how they interact with each other, get a feel for the trustworthiness, the way they look at you when they answer a question, and so on. If you can't see them, and their voice is distorted, then you might as well just ask for a slide deck and forgo an in-person interview altogether. Which doesn't seem like a good idea.
This is great advice at any age not just 15.
I think it might have been more efficient to hold a company meeting that said, "Hey guys, we are having a problem with empty boxes getting shipped. If you have an idea of how to make sure empty boxes get removed from the line, let us know!" Note that the simplest and most cost effective solution will be used, and offer a thousand dollar bonus to whoever suggests it. (The bonus might motivate people who otherwise might not care.)

That is orders of magnitude more efficient than commissioning an $8M consultation, and is likely to find any low-hanging fruit such as fans-on-conveyor belts. If no one has any ideas in the first month, it's possible that such insights are not commonplace, and then you can go commission your million dollar consultation.