skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
hundreds of millions

Huh? No nuclear plant incident has even come close to this level of impact; this number is at least four orders of magnitude too large, and quite possibly more.

someone who spent 35 years in the nuclear industry

I didn't say all his arguments weren't cogent, just the particular argument he made about "releasing radiation".

there's not enough fissible material to run nukes for more than a few decades

Sure there is, if you reprocess the spent fuel (spent fuel actually still has a fairly large fraction of fissile material in it) and/or run breeders (sure, you have to keep control of the nuclear material, but that's a lot cheaper than the alternative of making us all poor because we don't have enough energy).

I was surprised to see the Chinese that pessimistic about the time scale for thorium reactors; I haven't had time to dig into the details to see what the roadblock is. They're not the only ones working on those, either.

oil provides fuel for transport, while nuclear doesn't.

But oil provides fuel for other things besides transport as well. If it only had to provide fuel for transport, that would change things significantly.

(Also, battery technology is a lot better now than when Rickover made his speech; electric cars can now actually have decent range for things like commuting.)

Rickover actually addressed aspects of this in a 1956 speech

Yes, I've read it. One thing that struck me was that he came right out and said that energy == standard of living, which is true, but it's an inconvenient truth. Of course, he wasn't a politician.
Can Bitcoin Save the Postal Service?
Isn't the code to run here[1]?

[1]: http://jsperf.com/backbone-patch-22be8f9/2
Gameplan: Effectively advancing freedom and good governance
Better: Allow undo/history even if it's unserious.
If the function requires an integer, it is an error to pass a non-integer. Everywhere outside PHP, including in dynamic languages, this is not a hard decision
Are you asking for something like http://raphaeljs.com/
Neither were failsafe. Where failsafes existed, they were disabled.

What failsafes were deliberately disabled at Fukushima?

Yet. The externalities are brutal.

So are the externalities from coal mining and oil drilling. They just have a much more diffuse impact, so nobody complains. Per unit of energy delivered, nuclear has much less impact.
It works, but not well.

Case in point: It took 18 months for this user to be discovered.
Thought this was a great website with great content, reading this interesting article without annoying pagination (though the option was there if I had wanted it) at a comfortable font size.

Clicking through to the homepage, it turns out they also feature a call to censor Snowden: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/edward-snowde...

Never mind. This makes me doubt what I just read.
Fascinating! I had no clue.
A little tape and some nail polish will take care of most of that. Skip the tape if you don't plan to sell/undo it.
Materials From Carl Sagan's College Courses Now Available Online
Or it should be able to be lifted if their comments get enough upvotes from people that have showdead enabled.
I do but if you're a senior U of C student (as your profile says), I'm sure you've already been very well-served in this regard by your curriculum. :)
> releasing something that griefs developers

Maybe you only see (and/or notice) people talking about corner cases that still need addressing (like azakai's sibling comment about the mapping of arbitrary precision integers to JS's number type)? For the vast majority of code, AFAIK, dart2js has no issues and emits good JS code.

I don't develop with dart, but I know a handful of developers that use dart2js to release their dart code on the web and it works just fine for them. mraleph just released IRHydra2[1], which is all Dart from top to bottom via dart2js and works really well (despite using the apparently still-nascent Dart port of Polymer).

If you have specifics, by all means, talk about them, but "All I seem to hear is people complaining about it" seems like really shaky ground from which to make comments about griefing and alienating developers.

[1] http://mrale.ph/blog/2014/01/28/prerelease-irhydra2.html
Using LLVM From Within Rust
Wonder if an electric pole counts as a "facility."
> Programming is not really a young field.

Programming has been around for a century.

Law has been around for a couple millennia.

Do you have a different metric you'd prefer to use?

> Besides, laws ARE indeed becoming more complicated whereas programming languages don't.

Most newer versions of programming languages introduce new concepts. How is that not "becoming more complicated"?
Motorola’s ‘Mad Science’ Department Will Stay With Google
So for helicopters, I don't think you realize that they are shipped from China :). When I ordered helicopters, I read what others were saying and got spare battery and replacement parts, totally worth it and not too much.

Lately even those, 'China Post' packages arrive fairly quickly within 3-5 days which is amazing.
Talk about hiring the best people.
Or open it in porn mode.
Lolz. I really wish I could figure out a way to fit this comment into a #ShitHNSays tweet.
You realize that there's an ongoing crusade against diploma mills, right?
I've created and been maintaining an open source video chat platform for years. and it's peer-to-peer and html5.

Your Second Phone
https://yoursecondphone.co
So he can speak, just as long as he doesn't provide any verifiable credentials that might actually make him credible?

He can speak, and he can say how he knows what he's talking about--but when he took the job he was put on notice that doing so might jeopardize his employment. (He says so in the article.) He can speak, but he also has to be prepared to take the consequences of speaking.
Call before you go and tell them you are traveling.
I've read that article, and like most of the commentators I'd like the option for strict type hinting. It's a choice I make, it's not forced on me. Having strong type hints removes any doubt from the code. I know exactly what's being passed around and what it represents, and I can be comfortable in knowing what that means. I don't need the engine to do anything magic[1] in the background.

While the idea of "strong weak type hinting" is interesting, and would certainly be useful for some code (especially libraries), it's not what I want from type hinting. At least 70% of the bugs I encounter in the wild are due to unexpected types. SWTH doesn't fix that - if I pass in a string and it looks like a number, the function will blindly accept it. That's not a behavior I want, that's something I want caught before I even think about deploying.

I guess it depends on what you expect type hinting to provide you, but it looks like I'm not alone in wanting guaranteed safety (Facebook and Box seem to agree). Only strict typehinting fixes that.

But, if the community decides that SWTH is worth pursuing I'd like to choose a syntax structure that allows both to coexist. "foo(int $int)" can be strongly-typed, while "foo(~int $int)" can be strongly weakly typed.

[1]: http://www.php.net/manual/en/security.magicquotes.php

Edit: forgot link
http://www.reddit.com/r/theredpill maybe?

(I don't endorse the ideas discussed there.)
I've got 3/4ths of a film degree and 3/5ths of a biology degree. Where's the option for that?
The catch here is you read the fine print. Many employees don't, and even if they do they miss assignment of invention clauses, non competes, etc. I too have asked to strike our the invention clauses - in one case they said ok, then backtracked and "lost" the struck through portion when I quit, the other refused "what are you hiding/planning".

It stinks that it's 2014 and invention clauses and non competes are basically default boilerplate, even in jurisdictions where they're unenforceable.
> Always talk to an actual lawyer if you have serious concerns about this stuff. :-)

yeah, but lawyering-up isn't cheap either, so perhaps i can glean some general insight from hn :) :/ ?

but let's say you're working somewhere that uses some technology... like, i dunno, you're working at google or somewhere with a really broad scope and you want to make some sort of open-source contributions to or write something about one of the many things they've got a finger on like, well, pretty much anything from clojure to thermostats... how's it going to play out if you try to fork that apache-licensed project or sell a compendium of writings somewhere down the line?

i have worked at a multinational company before, but the scope of what they did was fairly limited in comparison to some of the larger companies, so i'd never heard of such -- apparently common -- agreements before. i'm guessing that most of companies wouldn't mind free-software-type contributions and these agreements amount to more of an nda than a, "we own all your programs while we're paying your salary," or is that naive?
>> This has been the default policy (inventions / work on your free time == the companies) at just about every job I've ever had in my career.

I second this. The companies I have worked in the past and current company (I think all come well within Fortune 50 list) all had exactly similar default policy. I too was surprised when I learnt that. But ALL of my past/current companies had a "discuss & establish exception" (via manager+legal coordinator if required) for my own work done (opensource or income-generating mobile app for eg:) during non work hours. The requirements were not very complex but they could be very broadly applicable since most of these big companies are in every field/domain of the software world. And the terms could be broadly summarized as "Thou shall not be given ownership of something that is going to be competetive or near-future business opportunity for the company" . Mostly your typical android/iphone app would get an easy approval. Opensource contributions (as long as non-competetive to existing company product) get easier-pass than income-generating (any thing involving money typically complicates things :) ) projects of the employee because the potential for conflict of interest is higher.

A lot of companies (like Rackspace or my current employer) are adopting opensource into the enterprise more and more and encouraging employees to contribute to opensource during work hours.
Decision-making for startups, the Swadharma way
Little Snitch doesn't show what username is attempting to connect and doesnt show if they got the password wrong or right.
It would be nice if you had an option, like

function foo(weak int $i)

for weak type hinting, and

function foo(int $i)

for strict. The arguments for weak type hinting make sense but sometimes you don't want any ambiguity.
Looks a lot different than the FB Gifts model to me. Seems like you'd be buying direct from the vendor. They can essentially be just a passive entity here enabling quick purchases, without getting their hands too dirty.
Automattic (WordPress) becomes corporate member of MariaDB Foundation
Can someone explain how she plotted the car's position? Did she manually reconstruct it based on the video and the information she derived from the helicopter's noise?
> For example, if you fit the wrong profile, they will not let you board even though they have little to no evidence of any wrongdoing.

It may not be exactly the same, but that's not too far from what happens in the US either (I would know - it happened to me).

The main difference between Israel and the US is that in Israel, the racial profiling is done openly.

That's not to say that people are happy with the racial profiling there either[0], but it's legal to do it explicitly.

[0] http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/arabs-say-they-endure-d...
Yeah, I looked at the code and the site trying to find the line between what's really open and what's proprietary. Could this app work without a Plivo account? What do the Plivo bits do that I can't do with plain old WebRTC?
G+ Circles was basically just a slicker implementation of LiveJournal friends groups, which have been around since before FaceBook.

LiveJournal really doesn't get the credit it deserves for doing so much of what we'd now call 'social media' - and learning how to do it reasonably well - before the bigger players moved in.

I suspect that it was bought by a non-US company plays a large part in the lack of recognition - outside of 'Soviet Russia' jokes, it doesn't really fit the dominant narrative to have an innovative company not be American.

(Even if all the innovation was actually driven by the American user base and development teams.)
i was just downloading the sublime package to read Dart and was surprised to see the number of downloads going up as time goes by..

https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/Dart

Not any serious metric of course.. but a good thing anyway..
measuring technology adoption is hard and tend to give us imprecise metrics :/
Are GCHQ workers in danger of becoming accessories to murder?
It's easy to think of edge cases where it's a problem though, and then you get into tricky political questions about how to regulate the content of speech. For example, imagine a disgruntled TSA employee pens an article excoriating Muslims and suggesting that they be forbidden to travel (Constitutional impediments to such a policy notwithstanding). This would be very problematic for reasons that I hope are obvious; but all speech were constitutionally protected how would you legally distinguish between that critical of the TSA and that critical of some other class of people without privileging one set of political opinions over another?

I'm no expert on the Constitutional law in this area - it just seems like a very obvious can of worms, of the sort that the courts prefer to punt on.

I don't believe a letter to the editor criticizing your employer could be considered an action taken pursuant to your duties.

I think you could easily say you took an oath to the United States as opposed to your immediate supervisor, although in cases where people have made such arguments courts often seem to take the position that one should exhaust one's administrative remedies first - ie make complaints through channels, escalate to appropriate Congressional committees if necessary, etc. etc. Given the purpose of the TSA, national security issues could also come into play but I have no idea how those shake out.
Why not talk to the admins about doing off hours monkey wrench testing? Find the hotspots that become overloaded the quickest, lag statistics etc.
Strangely, the article seems to omit this one detail that Kiev is the birth place of Rus (Русь) statehood. Russia, as ruled by the Rurik family begun there. Moscow only came to prominence because the Tatars/Mongols burned other great cities of the time.

This makes assertions of Russian conquest a lot less black and white. Even the languages diverged relatively recently. When you look at spelling of Russian pre-Soviets, same mix of Cyrillic and Latin letters can be seen.

This article presents the narrative from the Zapadentsi (Western Ukraine) view point, but does little to present the other side of the story.

It is an incredibly difficult and complex matter, and the opportunistic politicians and outright crooks are taking advantage of the strife of the population.
Israeli security is based heavily on explicit racial profiling that is illegal in the US[0]. Their model is also great if you happen to be white and Jewish, but not so great if you're Arab[1].

In any case, we don't need to speculate. The TSA has actually been trained by former security officers from El Al, which is how we ended up with things like the "Behavioral Detection Officers", who have been accused of relying on race as a primary indicator[2], instead of "microexpressions" (which are themselves a rather suspect idea to begin with).

Perhaps we could hire and train better officers (which would require paying them better wages), but that would be a rather unnecessary expense, given that the TSA itself has admitted that there is "no evidence of terrorist plots against aviation in the US"[3].

[0] That doesn't prevent it from being practiced in the US, but it's illegal.

[1] http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/arabs-say-they-endure-d...

[2] http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/11/15/aclu-calls-fo...

[3] http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/tsa-admits-...
On a somewhat related note:

Starting with version 2.0 the OpenGL spec requires the implementation of perlin noise functions noise{1,2,3,4}.

However there's no major OpenGL vendor that implements this. In most cases the noise functions just return 0.

http://www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/manglsl/xhtml/noise.xml
That is a (probably the most) difficult question. Intuitively, I would say, "Of course not". But when you learn more about the patent system and how it works, you understand the reasons why something like this may have gotten through. Let me lay it out.

1) Hindsight is a powerful effect. Once you've been shown something new, a person of skill may instantly deduce how it works. This does not necessarily mean it was obvious in retrospect.

2) This presents a significant problem for any system that purports to reward innovation. How do you objectively tell if anything was truly novel and non-obvious at the time it was invented? Any opinion on the quality of an invention is inherently subjective. [1]

3) As such, the way patent offices have historically decided this, is that novelty or non-obviousness is completely based on the delta with the prior art that came before it, where prior art := any published material with an identifiable date prior to your invention. [2] This is because, in true CYA style, when contended, you have an established historical record of documents proving your stance.

Novelty is easy: Anything that a single prior art reference doesn't cover is novel. Obviousness is the tricky part: all inventions are combinations of existing elements. But was that combination obvious? How's that for subjective!

The USPTO seems to have a rule of thumb that any claim that requires combining more than three+ references of prior art is probably non-obvious. That seems like a pretty low bar to clear (and you'd not be far off) but the catch is, those references could be anything that mentions anything resembling any element of the invention. Under this standard, it is my belief that truly innovative inventions like Diffie-Helman or RSA would not have been patentable [3].

4) And herein lies the rub: To be fair, you must be objective. But to be objective, you must abandon all measure of quality to the power of raw data. And as data scientists tell me, data often lies. All the data in the world (at that time) may not be enough to prove non-obvious the specific combination of elements that a patent claims.

Such as this patent. Really, who's going to document and publish at a venue with a proper date the fact that they developed something to skip audio files? Yes, to be fair, you must judge all patents by the same standards, so the patents in areas that have been most published about (because, you know, they are interesting research problems) are less likely to get through than those that cover some obscure, unimportant aspect hat nobody thought to document.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we have this situation

1. Imagine if Einstein was your patent clerk as opposed to the guy you interviewed week before last who failed Fizzbuzz.

2. This, of course, relies on good search, and IMO Google has been the biggest boon (or bane, depending on your perspective) to the patent system than most imagine.

3. Choosing primes and taking mods? Is that all?!
Weak typing isn't magic, it's just weak typing. Weak typing for a web language makes a lot of sense.

> At least 70% of the bugs I encounter in the wild are due to unexpected types. SWTH doesn't fix that - if I pass in a string and it looks like a number, the function will blindly accept it.

I'm trying to think of an example where that wouldn't be what you want, and I can't! All the input you get from users is going to strings, most input you get from databases is going to be strings, text files are going to be strings. And since casting in PHP is so permissive, forcing strict typing is like having no typing at all.

The fact that a scalar variable has a specific binary representation is an implementation detail and PHP mostly doesn't care. The fact that a number is represented by 8 bytes two's-complement or 5 bytes ASCII really shouldn't matter. PHP plays a bit too loose with those rules but SWTH would fix a lot of that. I don't why it's necessary to force the caller to provide the correct internal representation for a value when it can be converted to the right representation without data loss or confusion. The function still gets the value it expects.

The only amendment I would add to SWTH, as I said already, is having it cast to the hinted type before the function call. With that, I can't see what argument there really is against it.
My Friend, The Underhanded Traitor. A story of battleships.
I didn't think it was necessary to call her fat.
I think they just mess it up with the marketing of it.. but the technology per-se is very good.. and if you try to see it not as a contender to any other technology like javascript.. but just as another player out there to create programs.. there's nothing wrong with it..

People tended to be very sentimental about it.. because they see as a threat to javascript, as something that came to replace it.. and thats what was bad in the image that came out, when they were launching dart..

but if you leave this wrong image behind and look only to the technology achievement with it, what's not to like?
No, IP is just a strong interest of mine, but I did study (and may sometime, for kicks, decide to give) the patent bar exam.
My friend and I made almost exactly the same thing in Python about 2 years ago.

http://pinkyswears.herokuapp.com/

https://github.com/yuvadm/pinkyswear
> update: link added to post

Thank you so much for helping to spread the word. I really appreciate it!
Hmm, well, he wasn't convicted for just thinking about it -- he was convicted for thinking about it and taking concrete steps toward doing it, including buying guns. And I have to admit, based on this brief account, putting him back out on the street doesn't sound like a good idea -- sounds like he's more than a little likely to kill some people. But I don't know that I can agree that he's actually committed a crime yet.

Seems like exactly the kind of case that involuntary commitment to a mental institution should be available for.
adjunct transforms... too hard.

C:\TAD\Text\WEALTH.TXT

cannot demand payment of the bank till
he buys one. In ordinary and quiet times, he can find no difficulty in
getting one to buy at the market price, which generally corresponds with
the price at which he can sell the coin or bullion it entitles him to
take out of the bank.

It might be otherwise during a public calamity; an invasion, for
example, such as that of the French in 1672. The owners of bank money
being then all eager to draw it out of the bank, in order to have it in
their own keeping,

-----

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_adjoint
Their level of self-confidence.

Seriously. There is no difference. People who are selling themselves short and lack self-confidence will (to their detriment) refer to themselves as programmers / coders.

People who believe in themselves will refer to themselves as software engineers.
I think that's a bit low. I'm a seasoned programmer with no CS degree, but an advanced degree "in a related field", live and work in the Bay Area (not SF) and my salary is closer to the mid-$100's per year.

A Rails "developer" might be worth just $100k, but that's because there are so many hipster/naive fresh graduates in the area willing to work for (relative) peanuts on social web app fluff.