skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author talks about the death of gatekeepers, but in a few ways I think that some people with platforms to speak are not entirely blameless for the way things went after the gatekeeper disappeared. People with a platform did, and continue to, set the temperature of conversations that take place in general.

This might not be the greatest example to build my point on, but in the article he mentions the lack of respect given to professors so lets roll with that. Lets say gatekeepers still existed, there are plenty of professional bloviators with platforms that have been shitty on academics in general for as long as I can remember. If you don't know what I mean, Colbert has done some good bits on the popular "east coast ivory tower elitist eggheads" dismissal; the university system is a wellspring of education, but it is not tailored 100% towards being a employee-creator or doing all of an industry's heavy lifting for them, so they get trashed on. Is it any surprise that if students have a "get in, fuck this guy just pass his tests for a diploma, get out" attitude towards higher ed?

As I said, not the greatest jumping off point, but basically my point being that if you want the unwashed masses to act like X, then at a minimum you have to get the people with a platform to act like X.

edit/side note: OFC this is a small point w/r/t the article, not everything there. And this article itself is probably touching on a larger trend less about experts in specific and more about our culture's widespread individual narcissism.
People should keep an eye on the middle east. I think it's a part of the world that's going to explode with innovation. There's a ton of money and western influence there, and the people running the show are very business/entrepreneurial-minded, like the Sheikhs leading the development of the UAE. And the markets there are significantly less saturated than they are here in the US.
You might want to read this paper by Matthias Felleisen,
Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt, Shriram Krishnamurthi who provide interesting points about SICP as well as HTDP as an introductory course in programming:
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/jfp2004-fffk.pdf
Prosthetic Hand Controlled By His Own Muscles
I believe you that #30 < #5. Partly because if you ever hit #5 the total amount of time you spent on front page is greater.

I'm really curious about the jump from #30 -> #31 though.

a) what's the total drop in activity?
b) how much has this changed in the past year?
c) is there a 'better' cutoff to choose?
I'm not convinced they are strictly going to keep the file syncing business any more than Amazon has kept to only selling books. Drew has bigger things in mind besides just making the existing product more enterprise-friendly. He used to write poker bots during college after all, and wasn't Dropbox business number 2?
It used to be that the major corporations did basic research. The actual R in R&D. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC come to mind.

Today, few if any companies do that. They focus on D and assimilate products and IP wherein the research was done elsewhere and which fits their specific market needs in the near term.

I think that is a loss.

So I am quite encouraged to see a company that is really exploring with basic research: Self-driving cars, medical contact lenses, augmented reality, and lots more that I am sure have not seen the light of day yet.

Once in a while, they will get something right, like ChromeCast. And in the mean time, they provide me kindling for innovative optimism.
> petition for Google

Don't you mean a PR on the Chromium project?
The Best Of Dates, The Worst Of Dates
Assuming you trust your hosting company (maybe that's another discussion?) I don't think it's possible to leak memory contents VPS-to-VPS but I could be wrong.

In any case, if I had a pile of Bitcoin (unfortunately I do not) I wouldn't put it all in one wallet on one server. From what I've heard, paper wallets are the safest.

That said, maybe "zero out" your wallet before switching VPS providers, changing plans, etc.

This is from 2012 but probably still relevant as we saw with the recent Digital Ocean outrage. http://www.contextis.com/research/blog/dirty-disks-raise-new...

"It is worth noting that the data was not live, in that it was not due to sharing of disk contents between running instances of virtual servers. It is understood that the data is due to disk and swap data not being zeroed after use."
Nice! You are correct of course, I did mis-understand your question. I suspect the minimax answer is Java. My reasoning for that is that enterprise shops both consume and turn over a lot of Java programmers, this is in part to consulting gigs with Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, or IBM.

Thanks for the clear response and your excellent example. It is interesting to see what it optimizes for. I don't doubt you could stay employed "forever" at $45,000/year Java shop code monkey jobs for example. My personal conjecture is that Tech is not a 'connected graph' in the sense that not all nodes are reachable from any node, and not all paths can be traveled in both directions.

The example I am most familiar with is 'CEO taint' which is folks who get to a certain level, and then become CEOs of their own startup, where they reach a certain level of qualified success. Then, in a quest for finding their next engagement they are un-hirable because 'former CEO' isn't something you higher in to be a coder, and maybe not manager. Their only accessible nodes are 'new startup' or 'appointment as CEO to startup' or 'consultant'. If you can't get funding for a startup, and you don't have enough street cred as a 'consultant', its a really sticky place to be. The other common one I've seen is people who 'grew up' in a company, started right out of college and put in 10, 15, or 20 years, and then left as UberDistinguishedPrinciple Engineer/Scientist but were unable to find anyone who would hire them at a level and salary they could easily accept. But I'm wondering how much of that transition resistance is simply pride/wages related.
What was done was certain parties made a one-sided announcement that ConsoleKit was deprecated without any discussion regarding the people who used it. Where was the call for new maintainers? Where was the call to see if the project still was viable? Re-reading the "discussion" thread still feels to all the world like a decision was made, regardless of the merits of keeping the project alive, because Lennart et al wanted to move everyone kicking and screaming to their new toy.

Furthermore, where is the GDM documentation on what it produces/consumes regarding dbus? Where's the API spec. I can find that it does use org.gnome.DisplayManager as its root, but what more from there? I have the feeling that few people are willing to help out here because Gnome feels about as transparent as a brick regarding these decisions.
Gox uses a special 3FA where it takes 6+weeks to get anything out of that exchange. See 144 page bitcointalk thread 'Mtgox delays [gathering]'.
> In terms of straight, steady jobs: Java and .NET, and go to the Midwest.

Huh, that's a good point. Some of my peers from college went to work in Arkansas for Tyson. I also recall other companies from that area (J. B. Hunt and Walmart come to mind) were having recruitment drives some years back.

There are many big organizations one doesn't normally associate with technology that do have large-ish IT departments and tons of programmers on staff, although knowing C/C++ is usually helpful as well.

Other things that are typically overlooked are strong DBA or sysadmin skills. It helps to have provable knowledge of the full stack regardless of where you're going.
The new rMBP have a different keyboard weakness -- the power switch is right above the Delete key, and has no protection against accidental presses.
Obligatory response that not everyone has time or training to examine code for problems. Google is a trusted source.
Weirdest Interview Questions Hiring Managers Ask
"Does it matter if the sum of all integers is -1/12?"

Yes. Yes, it does matter, because the series 1 + 2 + 3 + ... diverges. It's that simple.
But social scientists know that. The astrophysicist, and the plumber, have many hard rules, and because of this, there are many situations where their training will force them to shout "No! Stop!" at something you're doing.

Social scientists, by-and-large, don't have very many hard rules... and so they don't often shout "No! Stop!"

They are aware, far more than the members of the hard sciences (who are used to most things they deal with being either hard rules, or debunked nonsense), exactly how vaguely-implied or well-proven each of their theorems are; how controversial or universal each stance is. And because of this, when a social scientist is tapped on practical matters of public policy, they will more than anything be hedging, not strengthening, the prior stances held by the policy-makers, by reminding them of all the things we can't assume and aren't sure will work.

(On the other hand, when social scientists are tapped by journalists, or when they write twee little NYT bestsellers, the result is more an exposure of the scientist's personal position in debates internal to the academic sphere. This has nothing to do with what a social scientist would give you if you paid them to do social science for you.)

The most useful thing a person with training in the social sciences can tell you, of which the general population isn't aware, is what you should be less sure of. No matter where a social scientist falls in matters of their own field's debates, they'll know which things are debated, and therefore can shout "No! Stop!" when you're about to base a policy decision on, for example, "the proven effect of Keynsian stimulus." (This is closely related, I think, to being trained in impossibility results. It takes you a computer scientist to tell you that, no, your new database can't be C, A, and P.)
i think theres a safe threshold someone can use as a rule, before things get too much complicated..

first: know how to use gyp and ninja build tools
then.. you can embed: base, crypto, net and ipc..

Anything more than that, things start to get more complicated.. for instance: if you want to use the 'ui'.. then you have to embed 'cc' and 'gpu'.. and to work right.. you will need the browser process + the gpu process.. and will have to create a custom-renderer, or adapt the renderer process to yourself.. so now you will realize you are doomed!

The other Chrome components past the ones i've pointed out, will need to use the IPC and multiprocess logic from chrome.. so that part should only be used in very specific scenarios..

Edit: i think the 'cc' module, the chrome compositor, also has some sort of autonomy from the multiprocess IPC core.. so could also be used with: base, crypto, net and ipc
Well should there not have been an air gap between the internet facing systems and the core network that runs the pos.

Best practice would have the POS systems on a separate air gaped network to the main Target intranet as well.
> the proximate reason is that "not loons" conspiracy theorists told him we were holding Evil League of Evil meetings there.

The post you replied to made it pretty clear that those are to be considered loons. Conflating legitimate concerns and crazyness is exactly what needs to stop.
Not sure how useful meta discussion are regarding HN, but...

Have you tried some of the alternative interfaces? I hardly ever browse by the default front page any more. Try hckr news [0]. You can see at a glance the most popular posts of the day, and filtering by top 50% gives a good overview of the posts that could be on the front page modulo the time they were posted, what they are competing against, whether they quickly gained votes or not, etc.

Regarding diving up HN, I would love to see HN/programming, HN/business, HN/general, etc., but I would hate to see it get carved up too much. I like Lobsters [1] tagging system, and perhaps that would be a better fit for HN. Keep the front page general, but allow us to filter by interest. For instance, the compsci tag on Lobsters filters back to 11 days, and there are some interesting posts in that archive. Really eases the pain of thinking you'll miss something great by not checking HN for a couple days. You can easily dive into the past posts on hckr news as well, but you have to filter a lot more general stuff when doing so.

[0] http://hckrnews.com/

[1] https://lobste.rs/

Edit: I forgot to get my most relevant point across. I'm not sure increasing the front page would be all that helpful. We would still have people talking about good posts getting knocked off the front page no matter what size it is, and making it too large just means few will venture to the depths where some good posts land.
so why don't they charge me 10..20¢ per article, with an option for $x (or $xx if they publish a lot) unlimited monthly subscription, should I like them. Seems like 10-20 times more profitable, yet a rounding error.
Yes, I am more describing "the average" but there are people doing what you describe in several occasions.

" They feel and act much more as a part of Silicon Valley than the economy and local culture their parents and non-tech friends share."

True
I believe you are speaking past my point. The total size, in number of people employed, does not directly relate to capability. The US government can do with 10 people, what previously required 100 or 1,000 people in the recent past. Total control of the population is no longer required to obtain total surveillance. So, the difference now is how it no longer requires a "large" government to do it.
Interactive licence differentiator
The author of the article feels like he is the victim of resentment at the hands of his students (references to "intellectual valet" and so forth). I don't think students are necessarily in the wrong -- most are probably in college to get a job, and they're right to resent the stranglehold that universities have on social prestige and career respectability. They end up taking it out on the professors, because, well, they're stuck in class listening to The Expert for hours a day because of this or that degree requirement.

I think the fact that American students have to pay a lot of money to be somewhere they don't really want to be exacerbates this. Plus, it produces a sort of customer mentality, where you're paying for service and "the customer is always right". Things aren't perfect here either, but Danish university students tend not to have the same weird adversarial relationship with higher education. I would guess the fact that they don't pay anything, but in fact get paid to attend, helps a bit. In a sense they're employees rather than customers (albeit at a junior apprenticeship level of employment), and the state, which wants an educated populace, is the customer.
I still don't know what a monad is, but I agree with the "pure" functional programming crowd that this kind of boiler plate generation is expletive retarded.

If your language isn't Lisp and cannot make macros to sub in the variable bits in an otherwise redundant template pattern, you might have some other options, though.

For those of us condemned to industrial, "enterprise" languages, you might try using a DSL or (build-time!) code generator, rather than cluttering up your source code with editor generated crap.
A Month of Surveillance by GPS Is up to 6,875 Times Cheaper Than Using People
Obama’s restrictions on NSA surveillance rely on narrow definition of ‘spying’
Rails In Motion: An Extended Video Tutorial
All the people I've seen who spout nonsense about ZOG are white nationalists or part of some other extremist group.

White supremacists, Illuminati buffs and then the legitimate political conspiracy researchers are three very separate leagues of their own, despite all being under the collective classification as "conspiracy theorists".

Much in the same way radical feminists, postmodern feminists and legitimate women's rights/feminist activists are three different leagues, despite all being unified under feminism.
It is always day somewhere (see this visually specifically to github: http://aasen.in/github_globe/). Best do the work when YOUR A-Team is available, awake, and alert.

I doubt there is a time when they wouldn't have disrupted a significant part of their userbase. Even if you assume a specific place has the majority of users (San Fransisco, Germany, whatever) developers tend to work odd hours anyway.
I've seen some of them, always happy to learn about alternatives. Personally I like the HN interface though, which is why I'm proposing something that otherwise preserves it.

The issue for me with the alternative interfaces is that they seem to discourage voting / propagating points back to HN. I might be wrong about this but I've never fully understood how they all work.
> the idea you could possibly write a lot of it

Presumably it’s one of those things where if you find yourself writing a lot of code, you really ought to question what you’re doing?

> Your code ends up super dense, with non-trivial stuff easily fitting on just a few screens, so you can keep track of what's going on.

I have found it really difficult to convince people that the latter follows from the former—that denser notations actually make code easier to grasp, as long as you know the notation. The farthest I’ve gotten is: “Look, in a language that rhymes with Slava, you often have to write an enormous amount of code in order to accomplish anything and keep it maintainable, right? Well, there are languages even better about that than the ones you use.”

You may be interested in concatenative programming, a cousin of tacit programming. Factor (http://factorcode.org/) is a good dynamic language with a great environment and helpful (though quiet) community in #concatenative on Freenode. I am working—alas, very slowly—on a statically typed concatenative language and hope that it will one day help take these ideas to the mainstream. :)
Tyyp - Government controlled networking protocol
If you have some kind of email list, please add me "pj at pjbrunet.com"
Glad I'm not the only one where thats the first thing that came to mind haha!

Tossed into photoshop and just put all versions over each other w/ darken layer...

http://imgur.com/5H25seb

Looks like zoparlek@thiessen.org but theres a few characters that look a bit iffy.
How We Got Users To Give Feedback Via Email
Thanks, these articles are excellent. In particular, the first that explains ML syntax in terms that I can relate to other languages before you launch into the concepts is great.

Almost every Haskell intro I've read tries to explain concepts in Haskell's syntax. If the reader is unfamiliar with both, this is baffling.
My point exactly. This forum has already reached its conclusion. Anything other outcome would be unacceptable.
More than that, Thinkpads are a culture.
Took a stab at it. Partially readable: http://i.imgur.com/L4isK03.png

Edit: Got the above by combining emails censored in the top part of the first screenshot. You can definitely reveal the full email if you incorporate the other screenshots.
6+ months, actually. Still waiting on one transfer.
Something REALLY has to pique my interest for me to get into the flow state and once I'm there I have a go at it like no one will; and once I'm out of that state, its really hard to go back into it unless something picks me back up. What I discovered is:

1) Break down your project into bits that excite you all the way through and imagine being excited while you're planning it. Have someone else be there with you with to plan this with you while you do it - helps with the planning. This chunking of the project itself is the battle. You beat this and you've conquered most of the problem.

2) Work on two - three manageable projects at the same time. This usually has worked for me my entire life. Alternate between them. When you get bored with one, pick the other one up and plan all of them out so you have interesting bits chunked out throughout.

3) Always work with high-energy individuals who would keep the energy up throughout the project. When you feel tired or bored, they will find a way to pick you back up again.

4) Always find projects that YOU can find some value in YOUR life.
Gosh, it seems like politicians are clones. :)

We've been seeing a frightening trend toward impenetrable, multi-thousand page bills pushed through Congress whose length is so intimidating and the time schedule so short that almost no one reads them. Then, once passed, everyone (including those who voted for it) get up in arms about the evils of special interests or how they simply didn't know some really bad part was in the very bill they passed. It's absurd. Hell, it'd almost make for good comedy if it didn't have real consequences.

There's a quote attributed to Mark Twain that goes something to the effect (in regards to US politics) "We have the best politicians money can buy."

I can only hope that it's bad behavior we haven't exported to Europe since I suspect it's the nature of the beast (special interest, lobbyists, you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours). But I wouldn't be surprised if corrupt politicians in other countries looked at what we're doing here and decided to one-up us. ;)

Joking aside, though, there's something terribly, terribly wrong when it costs nearly a billion USD to run a successful campaign for president...

If I keep up with this line of thought, I'm liable to feel depressed! :D
Valve Engineer Builds a Cookie Perfection Machine
"WireOver uses what we believe are the most appropriate, safe, up-to-date, peer-reviewed crypto primitives, implementations, and parameters [...] Fingerprint Algorithm: MD5"

I fear this page was written with a straight face :(
Idea had this back in 2001.
Awful that what? I didn't even make it to the end of your c
Show HN: Follow my jouney to launching my own bootstrapped product
Looking at internet threads engaging in amateur sociology is a decent demonstration of why sociological expertise is an actual field of expertise. It's not my field, but I've at least read a 101-level methodology textbook, which I think would improve the state of things considerably if even that level of knowledge were more widespread. Doesn't require a degree, but does require a willingness to learn, whereas I think many people with an anti-expertise viewpoint are more interested in rationalizing why they shouldn't have to learn it (the "only engineering expertise is expertise" view is one variant).
In "The Black Swan" he does talk about the importance of experts' error rate, but the larger point is that only fields which do not rely on prediction of the future, or "do not move" as he phrases it, can have true experts. Medicine, hard science, games, accounting, agricultural stuff.
I'm going to note that even if Go added some kind of parametric polymorphism at this point, it still wouldn't have the same advantages as parametric polymorphism in Haskell and related languages. In Go, you can branch on types at runtime, so in a hypothetical generic Go, you could write something which appears to only ever return its argument, but does something special if the argument is of a particular type:

func<T> id(t T) T {
switch t := T.(type) {
case int: return t + 1;
default: return t;
}
}

The ability to examine on types at runtime can enable some interesting programs, but it also means that you don't get guarantees like you do in languages like Haskell. An example of this biting someone in practice is this blog post[1], where the author reasoned that because a library function expected an io.Reader, all it would do is use the Read method as exposed by Reader. In reality, though, the function was able to branch on the type and determine whether it also exposed a Close method, and called that if it could. That kind of feature destroys the useful static guarantees provided by parametric polymorphism in other languages like ML or Haskell.

[1]: http://how-bazaar.blogspot.co.nz/2013/07/stunned-by-go.html
Do both parties need the professional license? What if I want my clients to be able to send me their documents.