skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not just the freedom of the subscriber: it's the freedom of startup founders who need a way for users to reach their sites. Suppose Comcast et al. had been able to decide that, say, Dropbox was "competing" with their own offerings of file space to subscribers, and either blocked or throttled access to dropbox.com, so subscribers couldn't even go there to view the "about" page without a lot of hassle (if at all)?
That people should care that their children's required Google-docs stored (and other methods) essays written in school are also being scooped up and subject to government algorithmic analysis with unknown present and future consequences. This isn't paranoid, it's the current state of things, and no one in either teachers' organizations or parents (or grandparents, uncles, aunts, etc.) seems to care at all about their own children. Apparently no one agrees that it's a problem, since the subject is never brought up or discussed.
aren't we overthinking this a little much?
The internet has an appetite for replace existing rent seeking with more scalable rent seeking.
3 7
- + -
4 8

Can't write that in Python. Looks like Python does not support even basic math notation.

Lisp does not even attempt to do that.

We have to write

(+ (/ 3 4)
(/ 7 8))

or

(+ 3/7 7/8)

Let's say we want to write a slightly more complicated expression in Python:

2 2 +-+ 3+-+3+-------+2 3+-+2 3+-------+
- 2b x \|3 log(\|a \|b x + a + \|a \|b x + a + a)
+
2 2 +-+ 3+-+2 3+-------+
4b x \|3 log(\|a \|b x + a - a)
+
+-+3+-+2 3+-------+ +-+
2 2 2\|3 \|a \|b x + a + a\|3 +-+3+-+3+-------+2
12b x atan(----------------------------) + (12b x - 9a)\|3 \|a \|b x + a
3a
/
2 2 +-+3+-+
18a x \|3 \|a

Not possible. It does not know basic math format for roots, exponents, ... Lisp also does not know it.

Balancing parentheses in Lisp is usually done with the help of an editor...
Treat people who know less than you with respect, deference, and patience. Nontechnical people who deal with developers on a regular basis almost universally hold the opinion that we are prima donnas at best and crybabies at worst. Don't reinforce this stereotype with anger and impatience.

That's nice and all but don't let your boss hire multiple cheaper "developers" and expect you to train them. I've quit a job recently stating if I wanted to be a professor I would have accepted a job as one (and I have turned down one in the past).
Sometimes you want to know who was responsible for introducing a breaking issue into an app - the person would be in the best position to fix it.
What’s New In Emacs 24.4
What’s wrong with the pictures in our heads?
i find that a phrase i started using some years ago has helped to drop my ego significantly. when asking for help, i phrase my question literally as "what am i doing wrong?" not "this is broken", no. "i'm trying to use X to do Y, here's how i'm trying to do that, and it's not working like i expected it to. what am i doing wrong?" in doing so, i assume the problem lies with me and my mistakes. it drops barriers immediately - both in myself and in others i'm asking of help - and forces me to be open minded about the solution.

a simple phrase but remarkably effective.
3. Part of the craft of programming involves knowing your environment. Learning how to get a production or even development environment up and running for a new technology or programming language is part of that technology and programming language.

4. I can't see why they wouldn't.

5. Sure.

6. You don't need to setup a git server. You just need to have git installed... Nothing needs to run in the background at all.
Does Haskell's implementation of Autocad typecheck?

Autolisp does not typecheck.
Even if cheap actively hinders them from doing something they want to do?
> Keep in mind, too, that female unemployment is lower than male unemployment. Your average female in the labor force has more options than your average male.

A society which views it as more acceptable for women to opt-out of the labor force may distort this: when employment becomes less scarce, women may be more likely to opt-out of the labor force -- since unemployment measures (actively looking for work) / (employed + actively looking for work), people dropping out of the active labor force when out of work shows up as lower unemployment, but it doesn't mean "more options" for those in the labor force.
Yet, a formal method should only really be needed once the bias is found to actually exist on a individual level. Everything else would be insane.

Wouldn't a better approach be incorporating formal, rational methods into everyone's individual thought processes from the beginning? In other words, I believe adopting the overt rationality advocated by the likes of http://lesswrong.com/ would almost automatically correct a lot of societal problems caused by bias.
I totally agree with wturner on the learning curve, as I'm also a 'noob'. I've taken up learning to code in the past year and it is very energy and time-consuming! I started with sites like CodeAcademy, but I've since turned to MIT OCW to give me a more thoughtful and full background in computing. And I want to know about a lot more than creating pages and formatting for the web.
Can you not see yourself contradicting yourself?

You admit that some other crypto currency may win. That means that bitcoin may lose.

Lose.

LOSE

What happens when it LOSES?

Like Krugman points out, there's nothing to backstop it and no floor.

Oh right, but he's just an economist, he doesn't see the "inherent value". He just doesn't understand...

You so easily swap contexts completely between all of this "inherent value" nonsense when you're addressing Krugman, and then a marketplace of cryptocurrencies which clearly is 'libertarian' and is going to have clear winners and losers -- without, obviously, thinking that last word through very clearly.

I'm clearly going to need to load up on popcorn, this is gonna be fun to watch...
You don't think similar conditions apply to overseas manufacturers? That equipment made by companies in, say, France is considered sacrosanct by the French government?
Also read the article "How To Fix the Gender Gap in Technology" at: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/0...
Pretty much. The definition of sexism also involves endless discussions about the almost last job category still ruled by the evil patriarchy - computer engineers - among the 15 projected to grow the most over the next decade [1]. For the record, the only other male dominated job category is janitors but I somehow doubt it faces similar outrage by the gender equality knight templars.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-...
Thank you for that. The situation is different in the UK, at least with my ISP. They have teamed up with Netflix rather than throttled them.

http://about.virginmedia.com/press-release/9410/virgin-media...

In the UK cable TV took a lot longer to arrive than in the US. When it arrived it quickly merged into some monster debt vehicle that had to be refinanced somehow. Nobody really went for cable, it took on a new life with the Internet. This competes with ADSL copper from BT and various competitors. There is no local monopoly, if I go for Talk Talk instead of BT then the same wire to the door gets used. Sounds like we have a better market over here.
Yeah, the key is interface testing. I have a MUD that I'm writing right now with which I fell into an overly verbose TDD trap recently.

Originally, I had a script that ran an AI character through a number of actions executed via the same series of commands that a user would use, then checked the results also through the same series of commands that a user would use, and that worked great. But then I started down this road of thinking, "I never even had my own code! Look at me, granny coding, not unit testing like I should." And started down this boondoggle path of writing a few kilolines of test code.

Long story short, most of what I ended up writing was completely useless. The most important feature of testing is coverage, to have a way to hit every corner of the code to validate that it's all still "not failing", NOT to verify that the design is behaving lock-step as planned. Which is very important in this case because the game is being written in JavaScript, thus there is no static compile-time checking.
> Modern [browsers] have security measures that do not allow scripts to capture values passed to constructors of a literal.

Actually, it's not security measures so much as implementing ECMAScript 5, which explicitly says that array literals must use the built-in constructor, not any override. See 11.1.4 [1], which reads:

> Let array be the result of creating a new object as if by the expression new Array() where Array is the standard built-in constructor with that name.

Object works similarly, and is in 11.1.5. I'm not certain what earlier standards said here, but I suspect they didn't say anything.

[1]: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...
The success of Chromebooks should put a question mark over some of the newcomer mobile OSs. Chromebooks illustrate that the sweet spot for Web apps is a big screen, a keyboard, and a pointing device. That's partly because the Web was not designed for finger touch.

If your mobile OS relies on Web apps, you might want to think about adding Android compatibility, as Jolla has done even though Sailfish also runs Qt apps.
Coach outlet
coach outlet
...And Steve Jobs let MobileMe out of the gate. If you rate anyone based on a few missteps instead of the aggregate of their performance, you are missing the big picture.
A Deadly Mix in Benghazi: Investigating the murky reality behind the attack
Tell them to get a good book. The value of having a single source from complete beginner to intermediate programmer written in the same voice with full knowledge of what you have completed so far at each point should not be undervalued just because web resources are free.
I am particularly interested in nailing this discussion down. I have two teen aged daughters. They attend a super-competitive public high school. Students are actually shunned if they are not academic. The peer pressure to excel in math and science is really surprising.

One daughter is known as 'nerd goddess' and wears that nickname as a badge of honor. She plans on becoming an English teacher. The other is the one to beat in her honors geometry class. She wants to study business in college.

They both participated in 'Hour of Code' last week. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/apple-...

I silently hoped that at least one of them would come home and say, 'Hey, dad, this coding thing you've been doing your whole career is pretty cool. Let's write an app!'

What I got was 'meh' and more 'meh'.

So am I supposed to chide them that if they don't get on the compiler they are going to miss their chance to found a YC startup? Really?
How Britain exported next-generation surveillance
My LTE is frequently faster than my home cable.
One concern is that: Can they perform well like the fuel-powered cars?
What would you say to the argument that economic interests and power blocs wield much more influence over nations today? The political, cultural and economic establishments of most nations are now heavily infiltrated/controlled by a relatively miniscule number of financial institutions. The void left by the declining aristocracy is now arguably filled by central bankers and hedge fund managers.
For the first part, it's still more intuitive (at least for me personally) to write

a = 3/4 + 5/8

than

(setf a (+ (/ 3 4)
(/ 7 8)))

and the primary problem that I have with the parentheses not closing them, but logically seeing how expressions link together. Even if you can click on an end paren and see the expression it closes off (as you can in most IDEs) it would be easier just to not have the extra parentheses there in the first place, so as to avoid the confusion.

It's really hard for me to even tell what you're trying to write for the second part -- in Python or Lisp.
Peter Thiel loves asking this question to startups. What's funny is that writer Sarah Lacy posed it to him once (and uses it regularly at Pando Monthly events), and his answer was apparently, "That's a really hard question to answer."

http://pando.com/2012/04/19/peter-thiels-pointed-questions-t...
> Everyone likes to pretend that the ability to draw is some sort of mystical power bestowed upon artists while they were still in the womb. HN in particular should understand how silly this is, because non-technical people generally think the same thing about programming and general computer skills.

I used quotation marks around "naturally" because I don't believe that my abilities are completely determined by genetics. I think "nurture" may have just as profound an effect on my lack of drawing ability, namely the fact that I was never interested in drawing when I was younger (when I suspect my brain was naturally more inclined to learning such things). And I do believe the same thing about programming: I doubt that a completely computer- and math-illiterate person in their mid twenties would likely find it easy to learn programming.

> Learning to draw is largely the same experience for everyone.

I highly doubt that. It's one thing to say that anyone could eventually learn a skill like drawing, but an entirely different thing to say that everyone has very similar experiences learning to draw.

> If you don't think that this process is worth the effort, then you don't really want to be able to draw, as you originally claimed.

That's a silly semantic argument about what I meant. Wanting to be able to draw has nothing to do with being willing to do whatever it takes to be able to draw.
I wouldn't say Firefox is slow, but the UI still has weird latency issues that I don't see in Chrome.

For the record, I use both Chrome and Firefox, heavily. The Chrome UI is very rarely laggy. The Firefox UI is often laggy. It's maddening, and I wish Mozilla would fix it.
4. That a law can have an exception. For example, a friend has no front license plate on his sports car. But because a previous magistrate ruled that it was fine, all future fix-it tickets are automatically thrown out on grounds of precedent. (IANAL.)
These same tired arguments were being made back in 2005, and given the utter lack of any sort of critical analysis backing them I predict they'll be just as wrong now as they were back then.
In a community where skepticism is valued there will exist the lazy quota who will look at popular opinion, assume the antithesis must be true and in turn, begin looking for supporting 'facts'. Don't be so surprised. :P
People do care what power is. The problem is the media/leaders do not seem to want to engage the public in a dialogue about the dimensions of the Snowden leaks.
Do you really believe all that? That, given equal amounts of practice, everyone has equivalent drawing potential? That learning drawing at a young age is orders of magnitude more effective than trying to learn as an adult?
I wrote a Chrome extension called GfyFetcher that adds a context menu item for fetching gifs with Gfycat: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gfyfetcher/logiomo...

Source here: https://github.com/engstrom/GfyFetcher
Of course, the reason that language was introduced into the standard was primarily to mitigate this sort of attack.
The difference between Germany and China is quite stark - Germany is a country perpetually at risk, with few geographical barriers to shelter behind. Germany must worry whenever Russia and France are allied, and be terrified when a rival controls Poland.

China, on the other hand, has considerable strategic depth behind defensible borders. A hostile power controlling the Korean peninsula is their greatest worry.
Internode are amazing in every aspect and everyone I've switched to them continue to use them and continue to thank me to this day. The customer service is second to none: http://xkcd.com/806/

IIRC they were bought out by Adam internet. They were also among the first (the first?) to introduce naked DSL, which you still can't get here in the UK apparently.

http://on.net
You may want to look at the "Hackbright Academy" which runs a quarterly engineering fellowship in San Francisco. This is a 12-week accelerated software development program designed to help women become awesome programmers - See more at: http://www.hackbrightacademy.com/

I also recommend reading the following two sites: http://gracehopper.org/ and
http://www.girlswhocode.com/
The throw-away society
Imagine that the KGB informs Putin that Edward Snowden is holed up in Moscow airport. What would Putin ask.

Probably, "What information does he have that we could use?".

What would you as a KGB leader say to Putin. Probably "Well he stole a huge amount of sensitive information from the NSA but he apparently hid it all on the Internet and gave copies to several other people. But he doesn't have it with him."

And then what would Putin say? Perhaps "If he has already passed on this information, then could he do anything else other than what he has already done?"

I suppose the KGB leader would say "No, other than to hide away so that they can't hold a big show trial hoping to cover up the real story."

"Good says Putin. We will give him refugee status if he promises not to do anything else to further harm the USA. After all, it will take time for all the information to filter out to the media. We will hide him so that the media has to focus on the facts.

And then Putin adds, "Do you think he discovered anything that we don't know already?"

And the KGB leader replies "We have known of this lax security for years. Our team of sleeper agents set up many channels of information for us years ago, so we think this only means that the world will learn what we already know."
Without investors expecting a 10x return in a couple years, risky growth hacking tactics to sustain exponential growth aren't necessary.
Do you have any evidence to back up your broad-brushed claims?

And who are these "feminist activist" strawmen(straw-women?) you have set up?
Fork This Sound
Tell em to Build something. Best form of learning. Practice makes perfect. Theory will be used along the way.
And IIRC their development was DARPA-esque? Didn't the Germans put out a standing order to arms makers for a better siege gun?

Most of what I know of WWI I learned from Guns of August :)
It would seem that browsers could implement the exact same algo using native code and achieve far better performance.

This raises the question: why aren't browsers already using this or something superior?
Why push something that your daughter isn't interested in? Technology is your interest, not hers. Get her some books by Dawkins. Turn her on to Earnst Mayer. Check some Stephen J. Gould out of the public library for her. Take her to Manhatten to see the Guggenheim and the Frick and MOMA and the Metropolitan. Let her become the healthy person she wants to be. Let her own her life.
> Therefore, could somebody please explain why we would give the government, which has shown itself to be terribly incompetent with technology issues, the ability to enforce net neutrality?

I think the key is the false assumption that this is how the origins and advancement of political authority works. This net neutrality issue is much easier to explain with a model of political authority that treats it as something the ruling class takes by force.

Social contract theory was just the best thing Enlightenment thinkers could come up with to settle the cognitive dissonance they experienced upon realizing that the existence of governments was a plain violation of their new ideas about natural rights.
but at the loss of any other social network upstart that wants in on it

Who do you think is footing the bill for those Facebook-only plans? Covering the costs of all internet use sounds like an unsustainable business strategy.

Are 'social network upstarts' losing out on users in the USA because people don't want (or can't afford) to pay for a data plan? How is this any different?
If you host your stuff offshore, the NSA actually has an easier time as far as bureaucracy goes in attempting to hack into it.
Do they factor in the fact that battery capacity diminishes with each discharge/charge cycle?
I tell them to apply to a developer bootcamp. Schools like this are popping up everywhere because there really are people who are willing (and eager) to hire the students once they graduate. I'm currently attending (and about to graduate from) a developer bootcamp in Austin TX, and I can absolutely recommend this route. Yes, it's impossible to learn everything in such a short amount of time, and attending a bootcamp may not be for everyone, but if one is serious about learning to code, it's a pretty efficient way to learn a new skill.
I am a male who started programming in my early teens on large computers at a major tech university along with other boys who were passionate about programming computers (and working on bicycles, in garages, etc.). We tried to get girls interested but they were not interested in programming computers, they had other interests which is alright.
You do not need computer science course to start programming. What you need is a passion and what is very helpful is the assistance of someone who can help you with your questions.

75% of the graduates with PhDs in psychology are women and the fields of fashion and ballet/dance are dominated by women by you never hear calls for more males to enter these fields.

IMHO, computer programming, like medicine are fields that one should not enter unless they have a passion for the field.

Autism research Simon Baron-Cohen speaks of the differences between male and female brains. Boys are 8 times more likely to be autistic than girls. Autism (and the related Aspergers) and very good at systemitizing but bad at empathisizing. Females are more likely to be empathizers than males. Of course there is overlap and some women are better at sytemitizing than some men and some men are better at empathizing than some women, but that 8:1 difference in Autism in boys over girls probably is an indication of the imbalance of boys over girls who are passionate about programming computers.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing%E2%80%93systemizing...

These are three on-line tests from Baron-Cohen that help determine your EQ and SQ (empathizing quotient and systemitizing quotient).

http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/faces/eyestest.aspx

http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/empathyquotient/empathyquoti...

http://glennrowe.net/baroncohen/systemizingquotient/systemiz...
Also the computer lab was pure anarchy without supervision: the only rules were don't get the teacher in trouble, don't make 'em look bad and don't kill each other. Somehow, no one got caught hacking into the Pentagon or AT&T.
I honestly think this will continue. I've seen startups, and Fortune 5, Fortune 500 doing this. I believe a majority of the development function will continue to be outsourced. I read CIO magazine regularly, and I see the development process continue to be outsourced. In addition, India, Russia, China, Thailand are becoming good development alternatives. The first round of outsourcing in the early 00's didn't go so well. However, the economics of the situation, and the increasing skill set lead me to believe it will continue. I am sure this comment will be flamed, but it's the truth IMHO. (Note: I have a CompSci degree, done a few tech startups as CTO, so don't shoot the messenger).
I'm interested in this as I have never heard of developer bootcamps. What was your experience like? How does it differ from a CS curriculum?
Thanks, but you may have missed my point.

They have known of my profession their whole lives. I talk to them about what I do all the time. And they are under a great deal of peer pressure at school to go into science the same way that I did.

Parents and friends are the most influential people for teens, yet they have no interest. And I don't think it is proper parenting for me to push them into something they have no interest in.