skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember when I was in Russia back in 2205 and it was so much simpler than that. I just went to the edge of the road and raised my hand. within seconds a car pulled up. How much to go to the central bus station I asked. He quoted the price, I knew that I had the right change in my pocket because in Russia, you always keep mental track of what you have. I got in, we drove a few km to the station. I got the cash out of my pocket, handed it over and got out. Simple.

Of course it was because in the uber-capitalist Russian Federation either there were no laws about taxis or everyone ignored them. Anyone needing to earn some spare cash offered people rides. Always round numbers in cash negotiated in advance. Simple.
> So instead of being famous and having millions of dollars and a huge tour train, you'll produce music on the cheap or electronically and sell it via you-tube, streaming deals, shows, and direct album sales for the super fans.

This isn't a new model. Most artists already rely on both performance and recording revenues (some add licensing and/or merchandising). So we're essentially talking about the old model, except with the apparent proposal that we remove revenue from recordings.

That's removing a leg from a stool that's already frequently shaky to begin with, except for mass-market pop acts that have already made it (Iron Maiden is, more or less, one such act).

> Innovation always has its side effects good and bad

Can't make an omelete without breaking a few eggs, eh?

You can, of course, break eggs without making an omelete, and so far, it looks to me like the instructions for the recipe under discussion stops at cracking them open.
Why? The illegal activity was done by the same company that made the legitimate profit.
6 Worst Tech Blunders of 2013
Starting with 3 would be a lot more interesting. Los Angeles metropolitan area (Southland), San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area, and then the rest.
> Yes, using the same code everywhere is cool, but if it takes longer to load, is less responsive, and has a worse experience, you have saved yourself time, but made something worse.

You see, this isn't an issue with the latest, incredibly fast phones. And all phones are getting faster, so this becomes less and less important.
Updated Lampson's Hints for Computer Systems Design
I completely agree. It was more that I ended up going into finance, so GPA became a sticking point. It all turned out okay - I just wonder whether Columbia could make CS less brutal.
>This is equivalent to saying that criticisms of the Soviet Union have nothing to do with socialism because, "Workers controlling the means of production has never been tried!"

The word you want is communism, not socialism. And the criticism is valid: the USSR was far from a communist state. It was more like a mixed economy leaning communist. Nobody is going to deny that there were elements of socialism in the USSR, just as there are elements of socialism in the USA now. Socialism != communism.

And I'll repeat: we're talking about a specific thing, not all capitalism. This thread is re: whether or not pure free markets work, not whether or not capitalism works. Hence your link misses the point; as, I suspect, do you.
I've been telling people about the problems in China for a very long time. The Chinese embassy staff may have been videotaping out the window when I joined a large public protest outside the embassy.
Whether or not people want to pay for apps or not has nothing to do with whether they desire polished apps. Most people don't know a thing about development and the effort required to create a good app, but do seem to appreciate quality.

I don't have good data on this either, but from personal experience here these apps have spread like very quickly through my circle of (iPhone-using) friends:

Square
Instagram
Clear
Snapchat
Letterpress

These apps all have something in common, which is that their creators clearly put a lot of care into their products. Most of them still manage to be free, except for Clear.

During the Apple Maps debacle, none of my friends used Google's web app, but many downloaded the native app as soon as it was available.

I really don't understand how you can think that "App consumers aren't interested in well-crafted apps." If you're right, then how do you explain the success of Apple and the developer community surrounding Apple?
I was going by Health Canada numbers -- either way, there's a difference.

What we know is that the AIDS epidemic was at it's worst in Africa where it was largely spread through heterosexual transmission.

Agreed.
Iron Maiden's really never on the radio? I thought I'd heard it on the radio before.
I will never forget OS 1... I still have nightmares
Actually it is more like privatization of taxi regulations. Instead of paying for a burdensome and ineffective government bureaucracy, a libertarian would let private companies handle it.

The tricky part is avoiding monopoly and arguably, monopoly is at the root of the problems with burdensome and ineffective government bureaucracy.
This is politically motivated nonsense. At right wing government trying to prove its not homophobic. Yes the Queen issued the pardon, but it wont have been done without the government being consulted. Pardoning one person like this when thousands suffered is an insult. They should have either pardoned everyone who was convicted under these laws, or none of them. Favouring one man because of his historical significance is creating a two tier justice system.

And frankly, I find the whole thing problematic. Judging the past by todays standards is just wrong to my mind. He did break the law as it stood, right or wrong. Its not like we now have evidence he was innocent of the charges. What do we do, go over all the past laws that have been repealed, pardoning every one who was convicted along the way? That would be insane. What about the reverse? Surely if we are to pardon people who got convicted under laws that we have now repealed, we should go back and try any one in the past who has committed acts which are now crimes but were not then.

Yes, Turing is of huge historical significance. What happened to him was awful and tragic. If the notion that he wiped 2 years of WW2 is not over exaggerated, millions owe him their lives and freedoms. There for not just a great scientist, but a world figure of huge significance. But, this is not the right way to honour him. And from what I can see, is shameless political points scoring by a weak government concerned with its gay credentials.

If it were me, I would have left the conviction alone, let it stand as a reminders of our stupid homophobic past (1), and perhaps done something like having a national Turing Day, which could celebrate science and open humanity. Or something like that.

(1) Not so stupid. Problem back then was that the vast majority of people were disgusted by homosexuality. So, obviously they kept it quiet. If they got found out, they suffered. Problem for organisation concerned with secrecy, is that the social pressure placed on gay people made them easy and obvious targets for espionage. They were easily black mailed. Now a days, most people have no problem with homosexuality, so the threat of being outed is weak. The problem back then was not government, its was the social attitude in general to gay people. There for, to me it is wrong for the public to point fingers at the government. Had the public not been so prejudiced, the government could have kept their genius employed, and alive. Its our fault as a society. Government had to operate in that context. It had no choice really. And of course many people in that government would have had the same attitude as the public. But in the end, it was our fault, our shame, as a society. And that is what we should remember.
People in academia simply don't care about the quality of one particular implementation of their ideas. There's no value judgement here, it's just not their job to write and maintain good software. Just as it's not a mathematician's job to maintain a cryptographic protocol or a physicist's job to keep a satellite in orbit. The people who went to schools with strong research programs are trained by people in that mindset.

It's a simple question of motivation. If they're brilliant and they have motivation, then of course they could write great software. They just don't.

Make no mistake, people from schools like Cal Poly SLO (a state school, and my alma mater) who excelled in their CS programs can software engineer circles around most. Why? Because Cal Poly has no research program, three quarters of their faculty come from industry, and their faculty have no job requirements outside of teaching. They literally had us managing five to ten thousand line software projects with teams of students in year two.
Well, the author's "palm-to-head moment" was going TO the airport. But even getting picked up at the airport can be a bit nicer in a town car. No line, no wondering if they take credit card, no dirty car, no tip, etc.
Why shouldn't it be? Except for the question of the presence of life Venus is a much more exciting planet to study, with thick atmosphere with high-speed winds and it's shrouded surface. It might be suitable for human colonization too — at 50 km altitude the gravity, pressure and temperature are almost the same as on Earth. Also, most of the missions were Soviet, so it might be that USSR wanted to secure the lead in Venus exploration.
Don’t Just “Learn to code”
People who claim they'll never use computer science in their job as a programmer remind me of the people who say they'll never need math after school.

It reminds me of the old xkcd: you can get by without it, but the fun things in life are always optional.
The "don't use it" argument drives me absolutely nuts. It's a terrible argument and extremely lazy.
I think that saying you can 'learn Haskell in a week' is really short sighted. You can learn to parse a Haskell program and write a guess-the-number program in a week, but learning how to write good Haskell is going to take months, if not years, especially if you want to do fancy things. Hell, I'd guess it'd take me a month or two just to learn the ins and outs of the lens library and I'm already a good Haskell programmer.

> 1) What would give greater and longer-term benefits than that? Learning Reactive Extensions? Yet another ORM framework? Node.js? Those are only tools. One can learn them in some days when a project requires it.

I think that unless something is completely and utterly trivial, you can't really learn it in 'some days'. You can get enough of an understanding of it to solve a small-medium problem with it, but you can't actually learn it. If you want to learn something really weird, try playing with higher-order polymorphism, type theory, dependent types, or something that's not 'yet another OO language/framework'.

> 2) What is the rush for? Do you remember the time you learnt OO programming? I would say to learn it properly, in the beginning of your career as most of us do it, required much more effort than to learn Haskell and FP when you are already an experienced programmer.

Not for me. Really learning Haskell as an experienced programmer took as long as it took to learn Python as a novice, and I've heard similar reports from other people. I certainly agree that if you know, say, Java, learning C# probably isn't going to maximize your 'skill increase per time'. But saying that going from Java to Haskell, or even farther to something super-weird like Agda or Forth or Prolog, is just as easy as going from Java to C# is just wrong.

Personally, the reason I'm sticking with Haskell as my current thing-to-learn as opposed to jumping to other things is that I've hit that point in the curve where the language is really opening up to me; I had a small problem recently that I wanted to solve, and I was able to use some really cool techniques that don't really have simple equivalences in other languages (the pipes library, if you're curious) to solve it in a nice way.
This depends on where you are. A lot of "regulation" appears to me to be monopolistic pricing because there were no other choices. I'm in Australia so the below is my experience.

Moving to Uber as I have means I don't have to pay the ridiculous 10% to use a card. Originally the only way to pay card with a taxi was to use the company "cabcharge" who put their terminals in the cabs and the 10% was charged anytime card was used instead of cash. This has nothing to do with regulation and there has been an investigation started around it.

Further to this the cab companies are charging $2.50 (flagfall) + ~$3.00 (booking fee) if I book through them online or over the phone. The booking fee doesn't go to the cabbie, just to the company for picking up the phone. Uber charges me $3.50 flat. Once again, not regulation.
Have you thought about using Varnish in front of your web servers? That would do nice static content caching.

Unless the mess of code under the bonnet of Wordpress is a concern and you want more flexibility in controlling it then I see your decision as sound.

However it is hard to beat Wordpress's extensibility and ease of use for publishing content online.
I think Dr. Nassim Taleb, author of Fooled By Randomness put it the best. Real knowledge is gained from tinkering, trial and error. A degree from a recognized academic institution is largely a social credit that is earned through memorization and the ability to recall and recite those references.

I studied Economics, so I had to figure out how to code (still at it) by relying on the internet and experimenting. Doing things that seemed interesting. I didn't study CS because at the time it seemed impossibly hard, so instead I focused on learning by reading books, experimenting.

I have friends with computing science degree yet they cannot code or have shipped software. Ironic that they cannot work as a software developer but it's the same reason I feel about my Economics degree (not working as an investment banker as I'd dreamed but thank god). Rather their theoretical knowledge in computing science degree seemed to limit their true potential to realize coding involves a different part of the brain then the ones used to pass final exams.

I often find the computing science questions in job interviews puzzling. How does the ability to recite an algorithm from the textbook translate into being able to ship code? How does one learn how to play a concerto by simply reading a book listing instructions and being asked to recite specific pages? It's my belief that coding (in terms of shipping software) is a highly organized and rational form of art. You are writing words but it's strictly limited to what the creators of the programming language have selected. How you form the sentences that the computer can understand really comes from trial and error until you've become familiar with it.
How Justine Sacco Took A Bullet For John Mayer
At least some of the Haswell core i3's also support ECC. The 4130T in particular uses about half the power of the Xeon mentioned, for a bit less money.
"If you hire too many computer scientists, your code base could be full of fascinating technical tricks, but creaky and hard to work with. Too many craftsmen, and you'll get stuck on simple problems. It's a balance."

Your whole post is full over hand waving and overgeneralization. You've never met a CS major who wrote clean code without resorting to fascinating technical tricks? You haven't met a non-CS major who did his or her due diligence to learn the mathematical fundamentals?

Please cut the hyperbole.
The key piece of context about this quote is that Ryan Carson has a vested interest in people deciding they do not need a computer science degree to code.
The One-Sided Hackathon
No I didn't. I implemented the core of the backed at my last job in Erlang. Training newbies and hiring was not difficult. I interviewed the candidates coming in when I needed to pass the baton too.

And no, Erlang is not new. It is stable. The interface changes once a decade, and usually for the better. Stop making these wildly unsubstantiated claims based on little to no evidence. Even if you had a direct experience, it's certainly contrary to mine, and definitely not enough to warrant your sweeping assumptions.
Steve Marquess, the originator of that post on nabble, is the main point of contact for OpenSSL commercial contracting. It's interesting that he used that phrasing.
Well, I can't say I'm happy about Google's self-promotion either.

I guess I see Google search as this key entry point into the Web. By using backlinks as input for ranking results, Google is tapping into the power of social proof to organize this massive amount of information. When you cheat that system -- when you make deals for backlinks -- you're undermining the integrity of this system, and you're degrading the quality of people's interactions with it.

I might just be overly sensitive about this, but I really dislike when people cheat systems to gain an advantage.
IFans – China? Piracy? 太极助手? Pod2g? i0n1c? winocm? evasi0n7? Scandal?
> It's not about good ideas, its about their implementation's good design.

That's true, and I've heard it often. But I have to have some idea to do, and the skill or smarts to pull it off.
Kanye Alive: the limits of human personality
Ugh your comment is so stupid I don't know where to begin. For those "99.999999999999999999% of people whose website does not get hundreds of simultaneous requests" you know what? They don't need a fucking benchmark at all. They could write their shit in BASIC and get the job done.
And strengthening the NSA would directly cause the further fall of the USA. The cheapest way to to attack the USA as an institution is to attack the USA in way the gives the most radical factions power in the short term.
Ho Rudolph
Yes, likely the 10M was just a token amount. Being friends with the NSA no doubt lead them into other deals.
I am in awe of this man. We all owe him our thanks for bringing this information to the public, at considerable risk to himself.
The winner is the last player with a card.

If there is a battle and the player's card still has HP points, then the turn goes to the next player, clockwise.
Notwithstanding all of these excellent points, is the timing. Jacking up traffic or revenues or other valuation metrics at the end of the {month/year/quarter} is a typical act of desperation/opportunism. It may explain why the bothered to try an implement/get away with it. Like you say it doesn't pass a certain smell test.
Everyone is a terrorist.
I believe that's called Russian Peasant Exponentiation.
Thank you. He has done some playing around with Kodu Game Lab, and we have played with some very basic Arduino stuff.

Troy has already done a bunch of sketches for what his tablet game will look like, to make an electronic version of the card game. I hope that is an incentive to learn more for him.
The browser does do this already to an extent.

The difference is that React constrains the operations a user can do (i.e. we only give them the DOM node if they explicitly ask for it and only let them manipulate it at certain times) so we eliminate the operations that cause the DOM to be slow.

If the DOM were to implement this it'd have to break backwards compatibility.
Obviously effete. The only real point of distinction is where to open the egg and the answer is never 'middle'.
Jesus Christ some of the comments on that article. I wonder if there was some way to analyse what percentage of it is astro-turfing and what percentage is real red-blooded Americans just brainwashed into thinking government knows best. Americans you are lost. It's been nice knowing you.
> And before you say that the CIA is connected due to their aid to the Northern Alliance, correlation doesn't mean causation.

"correlation doesn't mean causation":, you're using it wrong.
I ran the numbers based on voting percentages from the 2012 presidential election. I also added a rough guess at expected House members; hard to guess the breakdown given gerrymandering. Anyhow, yeah, this marginally tosses some electoral votes to the Republicans and you have to expect that South California would be more heavily contested so a bit of a tossup. Central California too, but South California is the big deal.

DEM	REP	DEM %	REP %	POP	HOUSE
Jefferson	175,551	187,898	48%	52%	949,240	1
North California	889,742	599,778	60%	40%	3,742,229	5
Central California	542,933	573,944	49%	51%	4,124,776	5
Silicon Valley	1,904,135	608,154	76%	24%	6,597,332	9
West California	2,543,219	1,157,864	69%	31%	11,335,455	15
South California	1,798,705	1,712,320	51%	49%	10,504,924	14
This would be "dark pattern" approach to load the Senate. Yeah it would be great for the squaky wheel, but at the federal level CA needs no more resources.
Your comment makes no sense to me. He was born and raised in United States, not in China and/or Russia. Why would he be trying to fix those countries?
> rufie

Roofie? Or something else?
It is emotionally difficult to back out of decisions. Many doomsday cults find their fanatics get even more enthusiastic after the predictions are false.
So you want Oracle to include a "shared" and "auto" keywords and break millions of programs?
Also maybe some other reasons for downvotes:

- 1.5 years experience isn't very much to base an opinion like this on

- Finding other people's code hard to read is pretty common, no matter how good those coder's are. Your own code generally makes perfect sense to you, same as your writing. But communicating so that all can understand it is hard. That's why flame wars occur. You probably think your comment is a reasonably argued piece of writing, just like you think your code is nicely refactored and understandable. The fact that people disagree and downvote proves the point I think.
You can post to here, or to the facebook.com/legimon page.

There are some issues caused by the fact that these are the first 27 characters of more than 100 written out so far. Not all of the characters in this set have "x 2" enemies.

Nevertheless, we have played about 5 games where the action went down to the last card. I have been surprised by that.
The future is not available here.
> I look at this from the other side as well. I've worked with brilliant people with ivy league CS degrees who wrote much messier and less maintainable code than me, an autodidact designer/js dev with 1.5 years of experience.

Be careful, everybody writes worse code than you, because you wrote the code. And these is a difference in writing nice simple code, and rewriting the same function to work on a bunch of different machines that does the core of the application, and you have until the end of the week until it goes live.
Oh so you're working on fixing China already then! Good. I'll handle Uganda, we'll find a Russian on here to take care of Russia and let's leave the US to Snowden then.. Deal.
Perhaps he will, if he ever swears an oath to defend the Russian or Chinese constitutions.
hahaha that is a whole new can of worms...

In my experience, mentors matter more than the course title. I've had the privilege of being taught by some of the best teachers and witnessed some of the worst. When your instructor deals with the course material as the sole purpose of a student being in class then the important lessons of computer science become nothing more than an exercise in regurgitation. However I've had my eyes opened by certain individuals who showed me what mathematics means in real life, how algorithms fail, why project management is important and how it's done and even how all coding has a mathematical basis (like SQL and compiler decisions). Personally my CS appreciation was a byproduct of being in the presence of these mentors rather than reading a book. They showed me the essence of the science. Mind you I love the books and still read my university books sometimes for fun, sometimes to brush up on the science after getting rusty.