skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nullable types in C#

"The predefined unary and binary operators and any user-defined operators that exist for value types may also be used by nullable types. These operators produce a null value if the operands are null; otherwise, the operator uses the contained value to calculate the result."

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2cf62fcy.aspx

They are useful to avoid repeated null checking.

This can be modeled as a Monad with a notion of "failure". In Haskell that would be the Maybe monad. You would have to "lift" the arithmetic functions into it and work with "Maybe Int" values instead of "Int" values.

An if we swapped the Maybe monad with the List (nondeterminism) monad, we could work with list of values and obtain a list of results for all possible combinations (instead of just one result or failure.)
Any word on when all functions will be UTF-8 safe?
Don't you need a bachelor's degree to begin a masters? So it'd be up to 6 years.
This is awesome, I'm having a lot of fun reactivating my assembler knowledge.

Also, I want to compliment you on the interface, my laptop broke yesterday and I'm doing this on a borrowed Acer A500 tablet without any serious problems.
You are entitled to your opinion and I do not entirely disagree. However, I do believe that the US should not be the only powerful nation that does not engage in foreign spying. That puts us at a disadvantage in today's world.

Other countries are spying on the US and the US is spying on other countries - that's the state of things right now. Let's not pretend the US is doing something other nations are not.
So what do you recommend they do? We can't all be programmers.
It's almost as if you only heard the end of the speech - and the parts of the speech you wanted to hear. Whether you think the proposed reforms are enough is up to you, but they certainly extend beyond "think about alternatives".
I encourage the people reading this to check out the spreadsheet† this is based on. When the author says:

Last year, not a single girl took the college-level coding test in 2 states

Actually looks like that's three states based on the data, but in those cases the total number of test takers was only 1 (Mississippi), 11 (Montana), and 0 (Wyoming).

Another interesting thing is that the percentage of female test takers varies pretty widely. I found it surprising that in Tennessee and Arkansas, close to 30% of test takers were women, which puts those states right near the top of the list for female participation rates.

†http://home.cc.gatech.edu/ice-gt/556
Smart Refrigerators Attack: Documenting the First Ever “Thingnet”
Obama orders curbs on NSA data use
I'm just taking a pot shot at Britain for this. Clearly, as this example shows, it's not just a British habit.
The /node/id style URLs are a pretty good giveaway, too.
I don't intend to single him out - I had the same concern when Bush was president, and one of the biggest and most selfish reason I have this opinion is because I don't want other countries to spy on my any more than I want my own to spy on me. I direct this criticism at my government, not the President. And I think this should apply to lots of things, not just surveillance.
It's obvious he's not really taking this seriously. These are empty promises with only one goal, and that's restoring the public's trust without hampering the NSA's abilities too much (if at all).

EDIT: After having very quickly skimmed the PPD, here's something interesting:

The collection of foreign private commercial information
or trade secrets is authorized only to protect the
national security of the United States or its partners
an
d allies. It is not an authorized foreign intelligence
or counterintelligence purpose to collect such
information to afford a competitive advantage to U.S.
companies and U.S. business sectors commercially.

Bascially what they're saying is that, in the name of security, we can do whatever the fuck we want. Good luck trying to stop an agency operating in total secrecy from abusing these powers.
> as the nation that developed the internet, the world expects us ....

is that true?
Facebook Backlash
First time you heard Obama say something?
Yep, "let's move the debate forward" is code for "shut up and move along, citizen"
It has the potential to be huge. You never know what's just under the surface until you look. The NatGeo special, "Ten Years On Mars"[1] made a point to include how when a bad tire on Spirit dug a trench in the soft crust, an unexpected surprise revealed itself.

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/episodes/ten-y...

Edit: Add pertinent link:

http://www.sciencebuzz.org/blog/accidental_tourist_bad_wheel...
You can write a blog post explaining why any repeatable, empirical hiring method is flawed. I'll repeat that: If you can produce a repeatable, empirical method of hiring, you can also demonstrate flaws in the results.

The only way to write about a process and not get shot down is to wave your hands very furiously while talking about things that can't be measured or repeatably selected like "attitude" or "fit." Things that sound good but upon inspection, cannot be quantified or turned into a repeatable process.

In the end, what you use are a bunch of heuristics that you hope have the right balance between minimizing false positives and false negatives, and you accept that fact that your system is going to miss out on some good people and from time to time hire the wrong person.
I always see the "everyone else uses it so I have to" argument when it comes to facebook. I don't use FB at all, and neither do my core group of friends. None of us have run into any issues with this. Want to hang out? Call, email, text. Want to have a get-together? You need to notify me way in advance anyway, and I'll add it to my own calendar.

The whole thing just seems to me that people LOVE facebook-stalking other people, and THAT is why they use it. So many people I work with check facebook for people before interviews or even just meeting a new person. It's creepy.

I don't care what someone puts on their facebook profile. I don't want to or need to know.
Unfortunately public protests are soon going to become illegal in Ukraine as the president have just signed a set of laws the basically turns the country into police state [1] [2]

[1] http://citizenjournal.info/?id=14710

[2] http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/op-ed/welcome-to-little-russ...
Speaker Identification for the whole World Service Archive
There are a whole host of exemptions from the tax, including:

"You were determined ineligible for Medicaid because your state didn’t expand eligibility for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act."

https://www.healthcare.gov/exemptions/
That would be a pointless and empty gesture, likely wouldn't help Snowden, and would only serve to make the bastards look less slimy.
Well, the underlying issue is quite real -- TrueCrypt's hidden volume capability is so well-known that it provides little to no practical benefit.

Look at it this way, if the US government could get Glenn Greenwald's laptop, which in this scenario is TrueCrypt-encrypted, do you think they would simply give it back to him and say, "I guess he didn't have anything after all" if the first password he gave them turned up nothing but pictures of his cat?

Of course, the goal of TrueCrypt may be to provide a small amount of extra security, which it does. As others have said, a regime that would torture you to death likely doesn't need your laptop anyway. But the point is reasonably valid that a hidden volume is only enormously valuable if no one thinks you might have it, which isn't the case with TrueCrypt anymore.
I'm well aware of that part of history, given that I am Polish, And my main issue is the narrative of the article: 'innocent grandma' vs. 'ignorant thug kids'. As they say, sons bear the sins of their father.

and really a downvote? Did anyone read between the lines of that post and not sense the propaganda?
Let me know how bespoke commerce apps work out for you financially.
He didn't conflate terrorism and cyber-attacks, he only said that we need the capability to stop these.

He certainly never implied that "NSA should keep hoarding their vulnerabilities into systems."

Are you arguing that the US should be the only large country without intelligence or counter-intelligence programs?
"When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt; I the Lord am your God." (Parasha Vayikra (Leviticus) 19:33-34)
Did you know the Patriot Act sunsets next year, 2015?

Let's hope that Snowden has drummed up enough opposition to prevent it from being extended again.
yes, let me quote something for you

> The collection of foreign private commercial information or trade secrets is authorized only to protect the
> national security of the United States or its partners and allies. It is not an authorized foreign intelligence
> or counterintelligence purpose to collect such information to afford a competitive advantage

can you tell me where the change is? The document reads more of a "hey trust me, we're really the good guys"

http://sina.is/2014sigint.mem_.ppd_.rel_.pdf

care to explain where the real change is?

EDIT: since i can't reply. it's all about thinking and discussing if dissemination and retention makes sense. and reducing people that have access to it. and we may put a special person in charge to take care of these things. but that doesn't mean at&t will suddenly stop feeding data into nsa data centers.
For diabetics, you are usually injecting insulin, which should be rotated around parts of the body (any fatty area) to avoid scar tissue build up.

In this case, however, I was talking about glucagon, which is only given in emergencies (to messed up to ingest sugar). Glucagon needles are much larger than insulin needles, and can be shot straight into the leg through jeans. The arm would work too, but might be more likely to leave soreness. The main thing is to administer it as quickly as possible.
What Is a Strange Loop and What Is It Like to Be One?
Are "foreign espionage" and "mass surveillance" the same thing? I am more willing to accept the former as unfortunately unavoidable than the latter.
I funded hoping for a couple. I imagine the centimetre accuracy will be hard yo achieve,but what sort of accuracy is required to calculate average speed over 200 m to within 2 km/h?

Suppose you smooth the input will it be sufficient or does 2 m accuracy mean that it oscillates so wildly within that circle that it's only worth it for positioning alone?
It seems you think all Monads are Maybe, or List?
That doesn't really answer why it's not a question of rights. Everyone else doing it is not really a valid argument that counters rights.
I guess that's Step 2. But I know that Step 3 is "Profit!"
While that's a nice sentiment in principle, it falls apart in fairly obvious ways. Do we enforce our laws on citizens of other nations? When other governments act in ways inconsistent with our constitution, do you think we should use our military to force them to do otherwise (as we have done with our own states)? Of course not.

Our government's first responsibility is to the security and liberties of its citizens and (legal[1]) residents. As much as possible, I'd want it to protect those in ways that also help the security and liberties of those in other parts of the world, but those are not equal obligations.

In any case, being spied on by a foreign country is considerably less bad than being spied on by your own. In the wet dreams of conspiracy theorists, our government spies on its citizens to discover their political views, and then imprisons those with views it doesn't like. There's no equivalent evil that France's government could pull off.

[1] In my view, "legal" shouldn't need to be there, but that's not very realistic.
If I worried about "likelihood of not finishing a project" before I started a project, I would never start. First step is to start, if you get there then you can worry about finished or unfinished - either way you will likely have learned something or created something which is more than the worried non-starter can say.
Here is the response that HN was going to have regardless of the contents of the speech (or any realistic proposal which might have occurred).

It's about wanting to be angry and see punishments more than achieving anything specific
They should learn skills that are desirable in the current economy. Not just programming, but also nursing, chemical engineering etc.
It's listed in the "Perk" image near the top, if you couldn't find it.

http://images.indiegogo.com/file_attachments/305393/files/20...
ulimit only assigns per-process limits though, not per-user. Afaict you need cgroups to limit users' total usage across processes.
This does not appear to implement a monadic computation. A monadic computation can examine intermediate steps of the computation and perform flow control decisions, i.e. in Haskell:

showFlowControl :: Person -> Maybe County
showFlowControl p = do
country <- personCountry p
case country of
USA -> do
state <- state country
county state
SomethingElse -> do
province <- province country
provCounty province
_ -> Nothing

(The implied data structure is a bit bizarre, but, bear with me.)

Unless I am misreading the code, this is the rather frequent misunderstanding that monads are just fancy chained method calls, which does not suffice to capture the monadic behavior. Note merely trying to stuff "if" statements into the calls won't be sufficient, because you must actually affect the chain that is called; either you call "state" or you call "providence" but you must decide that "in" the monadic computation, not in a mere method chaining.

Mere method chaining is not monadic. There is, I believe, no clever way to implement monadic computations in Javascript without nested functions; every layer of the monadic computation nests, and in most languages this can not be hidden in any practical way. This is one of the major reasons monadic computations are impractical in most languages.
Teach yourself out of business
With orbit and clock corrections delivered to the receiver in ~real time (such as Fugro's G2), you'll get <10cm (95%) on a standalone receiver.
I'm not sure exactly how its going to play out, but the move to limit bulk collection of phone data, keeping the data in the hands of the phone companies or an independent third party, and requiring a justification and approval from a court before the NSA can access the data sounds like a non trivial reform. This limits the NSA's ability to just suck up everyone's data and then determine a justification after the fact.
I don't feel like you read the article.

They state that this site required a Yale login, and Yale is quoted as saying "all the information on the website remains remains available to students on the Yale site" therefore making the information available to the same audience.

Also the article discusses Bluebook, it having been developed by students, acquired by Yale, and it being the tool which they found less than ideal to use. It even links to the very same article you link to when talking about it.
It will be extended, of course -- it's a cornerstone of our security establishment at this point. The more realistic thing is to hope for good amendments.
People are silly.
Here are some fun stats from crunching 184 million rows of NTIA and State Broadband data.

* There are 3,413 individual broadband providers in the US.

* There are 39.3 million Americans underserved (only one or zero wired providers)

* Fiber penetration isn't nearly as bad in some states as it is in others. (http://broadbandnow.com/fiber)

* Verizon wireless does indeed have the largest coverage in the US out of mobile phone providers (http://broadbandnow.com/mobile)

Let me know if anyone has questions about how we crunched, cleaned, or collected all of this data.

We're happy to share our experiences (and nightmares) of working with more than 50+ different governmental organization's data.

I can also pull my business partner the DB engineer in if there are more technical questions.
I think that this is a really cool project. But I think that the problem here is still fundamentally the same as the one faced by the nest.

The thesis of spark.io is "you can trust us with your data" not you have control of your data.

The spark is built on a cloud connected platform. even if you can see and control outputs from your board you still exist as part of their ecosystem. Which is basically the functional equivalent of using the dropbox api to build something instead of google drive.

I won't be excited about home automation until someone goes the way of an open protocol for these types of devices that doesn't require a centralized pass through.

Because if history has been any kind of teacher, it shows us that spark.io will probably get sucked up by google or somebody in the near future.
Precisely this.

In fact, measuring computer science education entirely through formal means is shortsighted in general, due to the nature of CS itself and how it's learned.

But especially the AP CS exam, which is essentially little more than a Java course ("The Perils of JavaSchools", indeed), is hardly indicative of anything.
You can dictate that a service is running, and it will ensure that the service is running. You can also set up more advanced HTML checks in at least some frameworks[1] to ensure that the contents are being served correctly.

[1] http://docs.ansible.com/get_url_module.html & http://docs.ansible.com/uri_module.html for ansible, I'm fairly certain you can build up something similar for puppet and chef, though I haven't done it myself.
That looks interesting for some use-cases, but I don't see a way to use it to assign limits to users, or to processes that aren't started as systemd services. What I have in mind is that I give someone ssh access, they run R or matlab or from the command line, but limited to 512mb (or 1Gb or whatever) of total memory.
Javascript is the bare tool, in order to build abstraction, you need science, i mean something like algorithmic way in rendering view with framework like React framwork, it makes sense because it makes all developer around it thinks in the same way. It's the right way to do all successful thing.
Just remember: if you want to fix that, you're a racist

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/12/stop-thinking-that-codi...

On a more serious note, here is a list of complaints about education in America:

1) Teachers are remarkably anti-math in culture. This has an obvious set of effects.

2) The radical decentralization of responsibility means that all districts get ripped off on everything they have to purchase.

3) The radical decentralization of responsibility combined with wealth segregation means that poor children get poorly educated.

4) People who are nominally progressive think that gentrification is terrible instead of our first chance in fifty years to get wealthy people to pay for the education of poor children. So we're going to waste it and kick all the poor people out to the exurbs instead.

5) School boards are the worst possible case for democracy. They are too local for newspapers to cover. No one understands what they do. They regularly make terrible decisions, and are unaccountable because no one knows about it. Sometimes it's Scopes monkey-trial nonsense, sometimes it's corruption, sometimes it's just being a money-sink.

6) Higher education is promoted in a miserably hypocritical manner. If you're sending student loan money home to keep the lights on you shouldn't be getting a history major, not if you don't know the next step. If you tell someone who is sending student loan money home to keep the lights on that they shouldn't worry about their major, you should go to a special hell, where they can't mail you your pension. The defense of this is usually absurd bullshit about the importance of broad liberal education, and romantic notions about the pursuit of knowledge. A remarkable demonstration of arrogance and privilege from people who make their living denouncing the arrogance of privilege. Encouraging people to spend years of their life and go five figures into debt so that you can feel good about aristocratic conceits from old europe is awful.

Anyway, the point is, K-12 education is systemically broken, and American education as a culture is opposed to a world in which the 'coming' geek gap was fixed.
There are only a few options I see for them

1) Give up and work for a shitty job, until it gets automated, then go homeless and hope the government keeps them alive

2) Learn new marketable skills and get a job. You're right, we can't all be programmers, but we can be nurses, car mechanics, accountants, pilots, welders, plumbers, farmers, etc.

3) Start a small business. Many successful small businesses are literally as stupid as "buy wholesale, sell retail". Many have very low barriers to entry, like making ice cream.
This criticism makes no sense; I don't know what you think monadic computations are, but it isn't what you think. I'd be more specific, but I honestly don't know what you're thinking.

The fact that the posted explanation is wrong doesn't help, I'm sure.
Call me old school but I don't see why we can't just keep compiling everything from source. If one package has a dependency on another, just check if the other package is built or refuse to build. What is driving this need for "modern package management" ?
In the long run, the engineers trained via outsourcing will become strong competitors, while USA have nothing to compete against then. USA can not have all the local graduates do architecture-design or marketing/project-management,that will doom the country soon or later.

Usually H1Bs' kids excel at school, and their parents pay tax on that.
For their poor relatives to immigrate 22+ years later(roughly 5 year for greencard, 5 year for citizenship, 12 years for relative immigration waiting period), it's a immigration policy issue, however it's still all legal, at least 10X better than those who came here illegally.

Keep jobs local is vital, outsourcing R&D is so short-sighted, with more STEMs, H1B will be irrelavant.
Don't have the transcript but to paraphrase the bit about NSA reform it was basically "We can set up a shell operation to do all the dirty work, we can't guarantee that it won't be even dirtier and less under congressional control, but we can definitely do that if you want us to"
There is a difference between targeting spying and collecting data indiscriminately just because it happens to be routed through a server within US jurisdiction.
I believe that Greenspun's article at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/12/12/why-do-people-... is very apropos.
Not sure why you were downvoted.

The hippies and love-children and down-with-the-man types of the 60s and 70s have been in power for the last quarter century.

They have shaped the world as they collectively see fit, and it's not that different from the one they protested against.
I've met Dan. Cool dude. He wrote that article a while back though. He's a geoliberatian (geo is for george, as in Georgist)
Look, I'm trying to understand what's happening and why. If you re-read what I wrote, I think you'll have a hard time finding any normative statements or any statements ascribing fault. I did use the term "dead end jobs" which is pejorative, but that's a term copied from the original article used as a reference not as a personal evaluation.

The only people I'm blaming for anything are the people writing these articles that leave out what I believe to be crucial and potentially explanatory information.

Any victim blaming you found into my comment was put there by you.

Another way of parsing the data, which is fully coherent with my prior point: society is making great progress, we're approaching the point where even our janitors are afforded the luxury of a college education.