skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't these guys realize that even out in the real world there are large numbers of programmers who aren't computer scientists. They have code running in production as we sit here and debate the merits of teaching children what will become an essential skill in the future. I work with people who will never need to recall from memory how to write a quicksort yet they've been collecting paychecks as developers for years. I can never understand the backlash against teaching people something. Aren't we all for abstraction and encapsulation? You don't hear doctors complaining that people are learning how to eat healthy but not learning how all their internal organs work.
Nigeria uses law and whip to 'sanitize' gays
I am not saying that it doesn't use something that efectively is a probability calculation anywhere in the system, but that that isn't the main or the most important "engine".

I agree with your comment on "first learning thousands of other concepts". But that is a ton of (hierarchical) concepts that have to bo stored somehow and isn't then the storage/retrieval itself maybe more cruicial to the whole function than any special algo we just haven't figured out yet? (I mention this in my "wild" speculation on "models") :)
The importance of co-founder due diligence
Here's a statement in English from the zoo in question ⌘ http://www.zoo.dk/BesogZoo/Nyhedsarkiv/2014/Februar/Why%20Co...
It's not that hard. For me at least, since as a Visual Studio user I'm definitely a fit answer for your question. For C++ for example I tried XCode, KDevelop, NetBeans, Eclipse just to name some. None of those are bad, some are even good, and at some points maybe even better than VS, but none offers the complete integrated development environment VS gives me. And if I'd had to guess: I'm not alone.
You should try it some time, the advantages become obvious. You can verify your SQL just by re-running a single sql script. You can use a simple script to auto-generate the functions in your app to access the stored procedures, including ensuring everything is type safe. You can update your logic without having to update your app. And there's literally no downside. I can't understand why anyone would want to keep their SQL in their app, it is horrible compared to keeping it in the DB.
It's true! A certain company has a trading platform that, when run, will wait until the markets open, do some setup stuff around the open, trade for one day, then do nothing forever. Some script comes by to kill -9 everything later in the night so it can be born anew.
You tend to hear high frequency traders refer to the code that makes pricing and trading decisions as a system, or signal, or model, or (very occasionally) algo (all refer to slightly different things) but I have never heard them refer to the code that makes trading decisions as a bot or algobot.

Source: I used to work in high frequency trading.
I am not sure if I intuitively know it or do we have to consciously compute / infer it? (the coin/card example).

I guess I have some aprox feeling, but it's highly susceptible to being skewed.
The table you link to shows Xbox 360 and PS3 with ~80mi each. There around 37mi units not accounted for in the Australia, Canada, Japan, US and Europe. Are you assuming the same trend holds for Latin America then? How does that translate to 'every other market'?

In Brazil, Xbox has sold more than PS3 according to the local game industry association. And with the PS4 prices being 2x that of Xbox One, some are predicting Sony will be too late when it finally can make PS4 cheaper. The same happened with PS2 (people could only get them bringing from Japan) and it essentially boostrapped Xbox here. It's happening again.
the gif of the rover driving is fantastic
Yeah... If people could stop linking to junk food news that'd be great...
BRCK – mobile Internet hotspot designed for Africa
You say you can trade around the clock by trading around the globe. But a position in New York can't exactly be liquidated in Tokyo. You can hedge for an approximation, but then you have cost of carry. Most markets are also completely closed on Sunday. It's not obvious to your parent why this should be. And don't even mention the half-day for stocks in the US around Thanksgiving, which is just silly.
Vitamin C keeps cancer at bay, US research suggests
http://science.howstuffworks.com/fingerprinting4.htm

Fingerprint matching is automatically done by computers. The FBI has 1/6th of the American population in its database. Prints found in the wild aren't whole, the are usually partial prints. They ran the partials, found 20 people who it could be from that database with whatever degree of probability, probably very small. This of course was misused, but it wasn't the science was wrong so to speak rather the humans utilizing it were wrong and acting without good judgement and ethics.
Let's add to that anything with the word "square" or phrased as an adverb "-ly"
It's a perfectly fine word: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=drone%2C+drone....
I'll make one effort in good faith to answer your questions, though I expect you're not interested in hearing the answer.

There is a class of programs where manual control over memory layout is important. For example, if you're writing an OS, as Mozilla is, you need this control to talk to hardware. It is also important in some domains where performance is important (e.g. games and big data.) Rust is the only language (outside of research) that offers control over memory layout while also providing memory safety. That is, no access to uninitialized memory, etc. This clearly eliminates a huge class of bugs relative to C/C++, the only language with substantial usage in this space.

Race conditions (data races) are considered important enough by the Go developers that they have a tool to detect them: http://blog.golang.org/race-detector In Rust these error cannot happen as programs containing data races cannot compile.

Then there is the usual modern type system stuff of eliminating nulls and so on.
“Satsujinken and Katsujinken,” by Dane S. Harden
Well, I'm sorry to disagree with you but Drepper is right. In C and C++ identifiers starting with an underscore are reserved for the implementation. Standard library implementors deal with extremely ugly code full of underscores everywhere to avoid this sort of problems.

Accepting that patch is sending the wrong message. First, it would say that if your project is big/important enough, you can do whatever you want. Second, it would say that they are willing to fix these issues, which I think is even worse.

So IMO, he took the right decision for every project using libc, which is to reject your patch, and to tell you to fix your code.

If you decide to write non-standard conforming code, then you deserve what you get (probably ABI breakage).
There might be a negligibly low number of matches with a limit of 3.
This again? While well intentioned, there are good engineering, economic, and environmental reasons why it wouldn't work. The plastic is not simply at the surface, there are huge waves in the ocean making this impossible, anything which can capture the plastic will kill plankton (in some regions, the mass of plastic is 6x that of living creatures), and there's little market for this sort of plastic.
That doesn't ring true for me. I'd say CompSci is to programming as CivEng is to construction.
if you are an ignorant, unethical person in the US maybe, but not if you live in Yemen or Pakistan. its such a perfect illustration of how blind people can be.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-drone-strikes-stirrin...
Show HN: My Year Printed (Instagram Poster Service)
The problem is someone is always going to get important information and act on it first in a market. A tax wouldn't stop that, it would just make small transactions more expensive (for both parties.) I don't know if this is a real problem or how to fix it but this article is entirely useless.
But then there's the producers who would otherwise be selling their produce too cheaply.
I certainly agree with your conclusion that there's a pretty low probability to be "inconvenienced by the FBI", especially compared with other, pretty real, dangers of our everyday life.

Nevertheless, taking this case as an example, it must be concluded that the FBI would have "inconvenienced" one less citizen if they had applied Occam's razor on some of the evidence, or had not ignored some proof that had ruled out that particular suspect.

Would they constantly do this, their false-positive rate might even be lower(!), they might not have wasted resources on a pointless investigation against this person... But, yes, a further "Uber-Terrorist" which indeed is able to plant false evidence to cast doubt on his guilt might elude them.

What I don't agree with you at all is calling HN user girvo a "fucking dubass", so please leave this community, we'll not miss you.
If I were to port systemd to non-linux I wouldn't fork it. I would re-implement its interfaces (which are fairly stable and well-documented).
Not a good example. The neighbors are likely familiar with the dog, and the neighbor, but not with the stray.

Consider that most people care much more if a close friend dies than if some stranger on the other side of the world dies.
I'm not sure if you're involved with the website, but it's unusable on Android.

Silly modal popups - just say no

http://imgur.com/3JkwyT1
I agree with poster about the general idea (every programmer should stay in touch with development. However, I have a distinct impression that he likes to stay at the very edge of technology advances:

> I was writing web applications when I first heard of Ajax (a few months after the term was coined) and I started using it; again I wound up teaching my teammates about the new thing first. Sadly it scared the architecture team who thought I had bought some new technology without approval and wondered if it was supported. None of them had heard of it (since they didn't pay much attention) and when I told them it was just Javascript they were only barely mollified.

I can imagine being an architect and having a programmer like that, bringing up every hip thing he encounters, just because it is cool and new... Probably not even considering all of the ramifications. Yeah, sure, AJAX is here to stay (as we know now), but how many "perspective" technologies are now long dead?

I like staying a bit further behing the edge. I follow the direction of technology but I use it only when it is proven and supported well enough. Well, usually. :)
There are large numbers of practicing (mechanical, electrical, etc.) engineers who aren't physicists. But you have to be up on your physics in order to work as an engineer.
"Given the examples I've seen so far, I'd consider any species that stays within 50% of it's previous numbers over 2 generations stable"

Most plants are vary stable as in within 5% over time as they tend to be vary resource limited, so they kill off competitors. Infact most species's say within 5% outside of environmental changes dispite boom and bust times simply because the planet is large enough that area A may go though a boom, while area B, C, and D is in bust period. EX: Deer.
Mika Okkola New Head of AppCampus
Flappy Bird Taken Down From Developer Website With No Reason Given
It's clearly still a work in progress and incomplete. Wait, I'm sure it'll be extended.
That theory test is still all about operations and basic maintenance. They don't cover fundamental engineering points like crumple zones, valve timing algorithms, or the metallurgy of the engine components.
This is literally the most surreal chain of comments I have ever read on HN. The word drone is not 'reserved' for anything and the rest of your attempted call to action is just bizzare.
why do you need PG for this?
Yes you can do it. Your server will be your home computer and that's it.
The very first Google search result on Russian passports in the province of South Ossetia: http://www.loc.gov/law/help/russian-georgia-war.php

We can argue on details endlessly and it's against my intention. The case is complicated indeed.

To keep it simple: Russia has been "operating" in this region for a long time and it's intention has always been to control Caucasus. It still continues such politics.
> We have FBI field agents, men and women who are so overly patriotic that it clouds their rational judgement, men and women who are not trained to think rationally about data and who probably have only a high school understanding of statistics (if that), who are given access to massive amounts of data.

Really though?

> The FBI’s Portland field office, however, used that fingerprint match to begin digging into Mayfield’s background. Certain details of the attorney’s life convinced the agents that they had their man. Mayfield had converted to Islam after meeting his wife, an Egyptian. He had represented one of the Portland Seven, a group of men who tried to travel to Afghanistan to fight for al Qaeda and the Taliban against U.S. and coalition forces in a child custody case. He also worshipped at the same mosque as the militants.

I can't help but think I would have fallen for the same conclusion.
Yes but all the while, beware the Peter Principle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
Right, so when our population follows in the footsteps of Japan and Korea, we can just stop paying the benefit/kill all the old people/enslave all the young people.
> If you owe 0.0001% of Amazon, you have the right to 0.0001% of all future profit they make.

That totally makes sense for stocks that pay dividends, but how do you claim your 0.0001% of profits for stocks that don't?
You are not quite correct. Identifiers starting with underscore are reserved only if the second character is an underscore or capital letter. For example, _hello is valid for applications to use, while _Hello and __hello are not.
UPDATE: I went for medication again and decreased the dosage from 30 mg to 20 mg and I feel the possibility of my life turning around. I am more productive. Thanks for the advice.
All the people who work in finance I've spoken to have imputed to me that the industry is on the cutting edge, that they will and are able to go to any lengths to execute trades faster, and that they earn their bumper salaries by being the most talented technologists out there. They tell me stories of FPGAs and how they certainly couldn't use garbage collected languages and about people cutting holes in walls to shave valuable feet off cables.

Now, I'm sure that in the absence of any need to they haven't done the work to achieve 24-hour operation, but I didn't get the impression it would be beyond the abilities of the entire industry.

Do you think the people I've talked to misrepresented the industry, and it's not as advanced and competent as they made out?
Yeah, it's pretty high up there.
I didn't know there was a block of "firefox people", or that everyone developing for firefox was a member and shared the opinions they have.

Where's their mailing list/forum?
First, the NYSE gets way more government support and oversite than The Atlantic.

Second, copyright enforcement and free speech have defined limitations for the betterment of society.
Towards the ultimate media box.
I think this is related to the question about which programming language to use for teaching. For me the MIT switch from Scheme along with SICP to Python is a shift from teaching CS to teaching how to code, for the better and the worse.
Are you serious or are you just trying to write the most caricatural HN comment? Besides, I doubt this is targeted (pun intended) at people living in remote areas of Yemen or Pakistan that are typically the target of military drones.
A clone is already up at ponzi.tk
I've been similarly unable to download my archive as well :(
In ISO C (7.1.3):
All identifiers that begin with an underscore are always reserved for use as identifiers with file scope in both the ordinary and tag name spaces.

In ISO C++ (17.4.3.2.1):
Each name that begins with an underscore is reserved to the implementation for use as a name in the global namespace.

In both (7.1.3 / 17.4.3.2.1):
Each name that contains a double underscore (_ _) or begins with an underscore followed by an uppercase letter (2.11) is reserved to the implementation for any use.

The rule of thumb is never give a name that start with an underscore (simple, right?).

That goes for C and C++. In C++ people think that they are a bit safer because of namespaces, but I've seen it create problems when someone writes an using directive in a header file (dont do this). It will work on their project but break yours. And finding which header is causing this is a nightmare in small-medium sized projects. In big projects it deserves to get someone fired.

Note: if you really want/need to break this rule, choose a name that will not conflict with anything! E.g. in Boost file guards have a randomly generated character sequence appended at their end. They are not doing anything "illegal", but is a policy they have just to be sure.
I don't think that there's some huge government official conspiracy spanning thousands of people orchestrating this to control the "sheeple".

Have you ever heard of Edward Bernays? It's not a conspiracy; it's in the public domain.

If you want to find out more, The Century of the Self [1,2] is a very accessible introduction.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

[2] http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-century-of-the-self/
Where did they dig up history? Where did they find details of his past? The FISA warrant was granted after the string of fairly notable coincidences. And was for ongoing active surveillance - not data mining his past.

Of course I don't know why I'm bothering at this point - remotely seeming like you disagree with the HN groupthink on surveillance topics is just a magnet for downvotes and not discussion.
It also took me a couple seconds to understand what the parent was saying.

He's saying that, if the concern is with inbreeding, why not neuter it [as you would a cat]. Which, to me, isn't a bad question.
"The only reason Mayfield is a free man today is that the Spanish police repeatedly told the FBI that the print recovered from the bag of detonators didn’t match Mayfield’s fingerprints. The FBI, however, continued to stand by its lab’s findings until Spanish authorities conclusively matched the print to the real culprit"

Even if you are hardline nut and totally support the surveillance state it has to be frightening alarming that they were so dead set on harassing this one guy that they would have let the real culprit go free had the Spanish police not called them on their BS.
This is simply a (somewhat inaccurate) attempt at re-interpreting semour papert's advice that learning to program should serve as a medium/conduit of ideas but doesn't have intrinsic value, in and of itself, outside of the ideas applied and diacovered. If he was aware of papert it would've helped to see an attribution.
> It is rhetorical, because in front a judge, you would have to have actual evidence.

And the anti-terror system is constructed to specifically avoid the process of a suspect appearing in front of a judge and being innocent until proven guilty. See, for instance, Guantanamo bay.
And Google isn't?

Seriously. They drop products faster than Paris Hilton changes her hair color. They are involved in multi million settlements due to throwing their users privacy rights under a bus. Do you really want a browser from a company that is only interested in violating your privacy for a few extra dollars? Why put MS in the same league as Halliburton but give a free pass to Google?

But kudos to Firefox thou, I don't use it normally, but form what I read and little I used, they actually care about the user.
Depends on what component of compsci you are talking about. I worked with several profs that have never worked on large software projects. They spent their lives constructing proofs and the closest thing to programming they would do with any frequency is update their webpage.

Software engineering is to programming as civil engineering is to construction. Software engineering is just a small slice of computer science.
In my observation, engineers tend to forget their math and physics pretty quickly after getting out of school. Many are proud of it. Most of the work of an entry level engineer is CAD, troubleshooting, and bureaucracy.
This argument seems to apply equivalently to VAT/sales tax, which in my mind makes it weak.
(Consumers are already taxed on their income etc)

There's no reason to believe total taxes collected will decrease. If actors still benefit from HFT post-taxation, they will still trade, and pay the tax.
I can't find any official announcement of it, but it looks like there are now official HVM AMIs available with the release of 7.4: https://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/AmazonEC2Image/Wheezy
As a counterpoint, read SICP. It's timeless. NOTHING that book says about programming has changed since the eighties. The foundations on which programming and engineering are built do not change quickly.
If you believe that the only role of schools is to teach useful skills, then you are correct.

But I believe that the role of an educator is more than that. School should teach our kids to see the world for its beauty and to understand how it works. Practicality of subject material should not be a factor in what we teach our kids.

There's a reason why we should teach Shakespeare, proofs in math, music history, kickball and beauty in algorithms.

Teaching our kids useful skills is important, but as a Teacher, I believe it's more important to instill in them the eyes and tools to see and appreciate the world around them.
It will also harm people who have mutual funds in their 401(k) plans via higher fees.
Would love to see some more great Russian novels (Dostoevsky, anyone?) in the list instead of many US centric books currently there.
Why should CS be treated differently than other sciences?

The physics courses in high school are not civil engineering courses, the chemistry courses are not cooking classes, etc.

Or do you think those should be changed too?
The implementation doesn't have to be an asshole. The policy is now that glibc will use the subset __glibc_. The problem is where there are multiple contexts of what is "the" implementation. In my case it was cross compiling NetBSD. Just because it is pedantically correct behaviour does not mean it cannot be changed to pedantically correct beahviour whats nicer for everyone.
> Honestly, have you never in you life watched a single episode of a police procedural TV show? Even an episode of Cops?

Haha, c'mon. Your supporting evidence is Law & Order?

When there are judges being sent to prison because they themselves were found sending boys to private prisons for money, do you expect people to have confidence in the justice system? Yes, fabulous, the judges were eventually caught. But in the meantime their corruption inflicted serious harm on all involved.

I'm pretty sure you're trolling. I need to believe you are.
The central idea - ROT13 ... gung rirel uhzna guebhtu gvzr vf gur fnzr fbhy orvat er-vapneangrq ... /ROT13 is also explored in parts of Transcendent, by Stephen Baxter, in which immortal far future beings ROT13 zhfg cercner sbe gurve vzzbegnyvgl ol rkcrevrapvat rirel yvsrgvzr bs rirel uhzna gung unf rire yvirq orsber gurz. /ROT13. It is also mentioned in The Thought Gang by Tibor Fisher as a possible metaphysics.
Why would you say Iran fails the first condition, i.e. that they aren't "a rational enemy"? They seem pretty rational to me. I can't be sure about North Korea, but for all the crazy news about them, they probably would behave like a rational enemy as well.
HST doesn't sound that useful, but the article didn't really say much or show that they're cheaters.
> I can't help but think I would have fallen for the same conclusion.

That's because confirmation bias is a human and common thing. Scientists have various tools to avoid fooling themselves like FBI did and like you and many of us would do.
No. There is pro-government press and they restrict such news willingly. But there are slew of other media quite open about this.