skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Beautifully written and optimistic, but I would like to advise caution. There is only one currency in existence: Power.

Historically, power has been proportional to a willing population. Technology allows power to be decoupled from population, allowing a very tiny minority to exert massive global power. This is the real danger, whether it takes the form of government, corporation, elites or cults.

As power asymmetry becomes more and more pronounced due to technology, the average person becomes far more prone to subjugation. This is the reality we face. This enemy is far more challenging to fight than any historical precedent.

Only time will elucidate our fates.
man speaks truth
> Could you perhaps identify a single important task that we'd want to do in space that can't effectively be done by machines?

I certainly can -- appeal to voters. If space programs didn't have to appeal to voters to get funded, we could do away with manned programs entirely, and good riddance. It's said that an equivalent unmanned program costs just 10% of a manned one.

-- former NASA engineer.
I've wondered the same, but in the reverse direction: by the time I started programming, I had read—not kidding—thousands of papers on computer science, and read hundreds of books.

I just had no interest in coding. (Or math for that matter, though ironically, I also read math books.)

Anyway, I've always wondered if I'm a better or worse CTO for having taken that route. I do know I code much less than my peers, even though (it seems to me) I get much better results with far less coding effort.
The funniest is Madonna stole the beat of "Justify my love" from My Bloody Valentine,an indie rock band. They sued Madonna and won.
Since we're on the topic of unpopular-but-true, I'll go ahead and post another: It's not about whether we can program so much as what we can accomplish by learning to program while we're young. You and I may make fine and capable employees, but some want more than that. It takes more than just ambition: it takes positioning and luck. I hope it won't be too controversial to say that younger people can take more risks due to the fact that they're young. Therefore they will take advantage of the lion's share of the luck.

In other words, if we were willing to sacrifice our dependents to take more shots at the type of success which attracts people to YC, then we'd be in the same position as someone who was young. But we aren't willing, so we're not in that position.
success should be correlated with hard work? why?
Well, now we're in agreement on something humans can do better than machines in space.
> There is absolutely nothing a human can do in space that a machine can't do better, except die.

I can think of two things.

The first is a bit morbid, but consider what happens if some country ever decides to weaponize space. Being able to have people up there who can use the weapons available to them and exercise their independent judgement even in the face of an earth-to-space communication failure is important. It's the same doctrine that's behind ballistic missile submarines equipped with nuclear warheads.

The second is less morbid-- the colonization of other planets. This is necessary to protect the human species from an extinction event. Maybe even one that resulted from the aforementioned submarines. Naturally in order to colonize other planets we need to study the effects of space on humans. In order to do that we need to send them into space.

All of that said, I also believe most of our current missions can be done much more cost effectively by changing them to unmanned missions. But you can't take your eye of the long game, which just like the rest of history, is manned and involves militarization and colonization.
We could easily halve the money held by people in the united states, and not affect the wealth of 95% of individuals. And frankly, a lot of the "wealth" in our society is in moving money, and trying to convince people to buy stuff that they don't really need and does not benefit their quality of life significantly.

Not that I think a collapse is particularly likely, but even if one happens, it is very plausible that it won't really be that bad.
ssh + tmux attach/detach does the trick for a surprising amount of developer jobs.
'Dumb Starbucks' mystery: Who's behind the faux coffee front in Los Feliz?
Bubble Bath Babes was a unlicensed NES game that had nearly the same image in their game: http://cdn-i.dmdentertainment.com/funpages/cms_content/17206...
Here, it's within 20% of the performance. Definitely not n vs 2n http://jsperf.com/oh-look-branches
That's trivially easy in most cities, on foot or bike, because we're talking about 12 square miles of city.

Add in reasonable public transportation between places, and we're talking more like within 5-10 miles.

I simply don't believe that there's an area anywhere around an urban center where you can't find all of that within ~75-300 square miles, as most urban areas simply aren't that big.
> I don't think the best way forward is to throw out years of feminist research.

That sentence gave me a nice smile. feminist research is poor at best, non-existent at worse.

Take affirmative action in education. Give me a single study that shows that it a) produce long-term professionals, b) is better than the base line, and c) if it has any of the negative and well documented long term effects inherent of single-sex education.

There are plenty of feminist research that shows there exist an gender imbalance in STEM, and most studies gives one or other kind of theory around the why. The theories are however rarely if ever tested. The "years of feminist research" has not gotten to that part yet, and won't until we demand more from researchers than summery of latest census data.
I figured as much, but please add an additional demo part to your website, something like 10 interlinking Lorem ipsum pages. Be sure to also add a few images on some pages (but not on others).

I had already viewed a couple pages (to read what it is about) before I started looking for a demo, and by then I wasn't sure if it was my browser caching or your script that made the pages load snappy.

Maybe also provide a 10-page Lorem ipsum "before" example, clearly marked that it does not use your library, to demonstrate the difference. I can't really tell if maybe your server is just really fast.
>Then at age 10-11 some foundation for underprivileged kids gifted me my own computer with free unlimited dialup and a separate phone line.

Nowadays we'd just give a scholarship to a rich PoC female.
> And single. And white. And male. And a programmer.

Ok, asshole childless person is at least mildly related to the topic at hand, but the rest of these just seem like irrelevant ad hominems.

>Now do the world a favor, and shut up. Forever.

Why do I get the feeling your tumblr is full of equally venomous "go kill yourself"s?
I get mine from amazon for about $.50/each. Once I found a bunch on clearance at kroger's, and then I had $.10/cup coffee for about half a year.
Wearing a nice suit != being obsessed with popularity, beauty, and fashion.
>But the thing about pretty girls is that they often find it is more immediately profitable to be pretty than to be bright.

100% agree with you. I also think a lot of the difference in the gender ratio can be attributed to the fact that women simply have far more options.
Probabilistic (randomized) algorithms before “modern” computer science appeared
Worked fine for me with Chrome 31 on Linux.
Oakland hackathon tries to broaden Silicon Valley’s recruitment pipeline
This seems weird to me.

If I go to, say, the twitter homepage, I will find an authentication page, and yet most content on twitter is obviously intended to be public.
> yes, but the question is, do you need university to tell you that?

Of course not, anyone can tell you that. But knowing who told you what you know, sometimes helps a third party evaluate your statements of knowledge :-)
SequenceL language takes the pain out of multicore coding
I think I agree with you on some level. In a classic professional context, I too would deem a naked girl picture highly inappropriate and unwelcoming to women. However, an agency's website can be a somewhat informal place. Depending on your audience, mildly inappropriate stuff is useful to show that you are different and not for everyone. If you look at the website as a whole it seems to make sense here. I think this is more an emanation of a vintage geekish culture than some "bro culture".

I guess I'm just very tired of people always getting on their high horse when something might be offensive to somebody. Some things are worth being indignant about, but most of the time it's just not worth it and diluting your point.

It's the kind of thing that makes me defend things I'm against just because I dislike exagerated self-righteousness.
Because Scala has a very different (I would say completely opposite) philosophy than Java. In a paper outlining Java philosophy[1], the very first thing James Gosling has to say about the language is this: "It was not an academic research project studying programming languages: Doing language research was actively an antigoal."

When describing the design of language, again, the very first thing Gosling says is, "Java is a blue collar language. It's not PhD thesis material but a language for a job. Java feels very familiar to many different programmers because I had a very strong tendency to prefer things that had been used a lot over things that just sounded like a good idea."

So: no research, no PhD, only proven stuff and nothing new. Regardless of your opinion of Scala (I don't like it), I think it's not controversial to say that Scala is on the exact opposite side of the spectrum.

[1]: http://dfjug.org/thefeelofjava.pdf
Secret Message In An Econ Textbook, Finally Decoded
Can you clarify your comment? I don't understand how those four types could be avoided with reified generics.
Derp, thanks to both for the correction.
Looks like a good vocabulary trainer for pre-literate students! I plan to use it with my 4 year old daughter (I'm a native Spanish speaker but my wife is Australian and we live in Australia, so her English is way ahead of her Spanish).

One piece of advice. For gendered languages like Spanish (I'm native) and German (which is the one I tried, as it's the one I'm trying to improve), you need to learn the gender of nouns, so you should ad the article before each noun ("die Sonne, der Mond"). Otherwise you get vices from the beginning.

Ah, and also for the pre-literate to literate transition, you could maybe add a pronounciation-to-written-words game.

Great illustrations and interface, well done!
"We just took over the former Zynga offices in Dallas"
@jwr: Sorry for the delayed reply, was down with a fever.
(Posted the info below in a separate comment, in case anyone stumbles across the thread later).
1. http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/qualcomm/dragonboard-devel...
Intrinsyc is one of two partners who offers "Dragonboards" with the latest (so far, that will change soon) SoCs (APQ8064 and contemporaries). AFAIK, these boards can be ordered in any quantity from 1 to 100s, so they should be a good start for a development kit. Intrinsyc offers a Linux distribution for the 8074 SoM. Not too sure about the maturity of Linux support, but I am expecting updates in the near future, and will post them here.
For those who need to eventually build their own boards using Qualcomm SoCs, Intrinsyc's FAQ here should be useful: http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/qualcomm/dragonboard-faq.a...
2. Inforce computing also offers a cute board with the APQ8064. http://www.inforcecomputing.com/product/qualcomm.html

Not sure if these offer the level of detail/support that folks here are looking for, but they seem like a good start.
I use an LG gPad and a Perixx folding keyboard. Together they are about as small and light as a paper notebook. I wish Drive applications worked better offline, but I can tether if needed.

I only need to schlep the laptop if I need to code at the customer site.

Tablets really are all that 90% of your users need. If they actually got good tablets, they could step out of their cubicles and communicate with other humans.
It’s a heuristic for identifying in-group people that makes no sense and to me seems highly destructive.

I suspect this heuristic started out as a way for the outcast, socially unwelcome hackers to finally find a group to which they could belong, an activity that didn't judge them for their intellect or their appearance.

I further suspect that some of the pushback against lifting this heuristic comes from those same people, who feel that they will lose the only thing that gave them a reason to feel good about themselves in the face of total rejection by their peers. It would be just as tragic to force these people out of programming as it is tragic to prevent others from coming into programming.
Almost all daemons have a command line or config file option to skip "daemonizing" so that the parent can watch the PID correctly. For the few that don't, you can fix them, hack them (e.g. LD_PRELOAD wrappers to shutdown their bogus double-forking), seccomp-ptrace them, or simply wrap them with a legacy-style monitor that reads the pid file and forwards signals it receives to the real pid (this last option of course doesn't fix the race conditions inherent in such usage).
I was thinking about stuff like the research cited here:

http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/papers/genderbias.html

(I can't find the actual project I was thinking off, but this seems to be a good enough example of what I don't consider to be "poor at best, non-existent at worse".)
An analogue bandpass filter could be used. Passing a square wave through such a filter will remove much of the power present at inaudible frequencies. Unfortunately, they also require bulky inductors/capacitors.
Scheme is a small language as well, and it is worlds better for teach abstract concepts.

I've heard this claim many, many times, but for me, I find Scheme (and Haskell, for that matter) impossible to work with. I love what Scheme and Haskell do in theory, but in practice, I find them unusable for those things.

With Scheme and Haskell, I find I'm always trying to figure out how I should make the compiler happy, vs. taking an abstract concept that I understand well and just implementing it, which is something I find easy to do with C.

But I also suck at math, and my assumption is that for people who don't suck at math, Haskell and Scheme and all the others are probably easier, and that makes sense to me.
A few years ago I'd a much more humble experience with virality.

I'd decided to hack off a quirky part of a project I was working on into a jQuery plugin and make a landing page for people to play with it.

Nobody went to it. For months. Like not one person. It's still online today, although I've obviously broken the plugin at some point [1].

Months later my jaw hit the floor when I woke up to an inbox full of emails about this thing. The page had had thousands upon thousands of hits. Not from Belfast, but from NY and SF. It had been featured on a ton of blogs, discussions etc, all in the 6 hours or so I'd been asleep. Traffic had peaked, but it kept coming.

A friend we hadn't seen in a while called into our little co-working space to tell me "that thing you put on Hacker News" had been on the front page for hours. I'd never even heard of HN at this point!

There was no rhyme nor reason to any of this. The page had been available for months. All I can surmise is that something lit the touchpaper that started a chain reaction. And that I've a lot to learn about how virality works and what makes it function.

It makes me wonder did he really engage in some grey market stuff to push Flappy Bird a little. I kind of wonder why he would fork out for something like that when the precedent would indicate he wasn't onto a winner with this game.

In retrospect we know he had a great game, the potential for serious chain-reaction style virality was there, maybe the spark that lit the touch-paper was something innocuous that no-one would ever guess?

[1]: http://opensource.rotify.com/wormhole/
On a Nexus 5 doing the first doesn't change anything for me; it's just less accurate (I did so, then opened up Google Maps to double check).

But you're going to have to define what you mean by "Google code", because ostensibly all of Android is "Google code". Doing what I outlined above will stop it from going through any form of sensor fusion. If you want to remove Google's service software then just create a build without Play Services on it, it's that simple. AOSP boots, on the Nexus devices at least, without it, so it's easy to do and gets you exactly what you want.

So really I guess I'm saying: What else do you want? Remove Play Services, the Google Apps, etc, using an AOSP based build and you get a Google free phone.
Is a Gmail Embargo extreme?
PRNG would be fine if you could ensure that there's no leakage or reversible information.
Who could stand to listen to audio from those crappy speakers, let alone at such a saturated loudness on said crappy speakers?
It's still just too much boilerplate to define and use immutable types. Named parameters would help a lot. Something like Scala's case classes would help even more, and along with them, some kind of pattern matching.
A word of warning: looks like you're using the original ("'original'"?) copyrighted assets from Flappy Bird. Legally speaking, you can't distribute those and your Github repo could be served a DMCA takedown at any time. Consider finding CC replacements.
A word of warning: looks like you're using the original ("'original'"?) copyrighted assets from Flappy Bird. Legally speaking, you can't distribute those and your Github repo can be served a DMCA takedown at any time. Consider finding CC replacements.
Functionality is not being moved out of the kernel and into userspace. It's being moved out of legacy freedesktop.org components (hald, ConsoleKit, PolicyKit, etc.) and into PID 1. Where should it be moved to? /dev/null.
You're making a common fallacy when talking about artistic genres... "Bad rap exists, therefore rap is bad." I probably don't need to explain why this is misguided.

Also: Rap is not poetry. It borrows elements from poetry, but it also borrows elements from public speaking, sports, preaching, and good old-fashioned conversation. Amongst other stuff. It's a different thing. It's its own thing! Rap!

Why am I having to explain this to people on Hacker News?
Well put.

This article also ignores the fact that Computer Science is essentially an esoteric branch of applied mathematics with a little bit of philosophy thrown in for good measure, and any attempt to teach younger kids these concepts will mostly fall flat on its face before we radically improve the quality of our STEM education, particularly mathematics. Until we do so, Computer Science will remain the domain of those with a natural affinity for it.
Because then you'd only have Stream<T>; IntStream would be just Stream<int>. The problem with reified generics is that they bake a particular type system into the runtime. While once a desired feature, I don't think the wide JVM community wants that any more.
It absolutely does. That feeling of abnormality is one of the things that helped push me into tech--I wasn't normal, so I went to a place where I hid my non-normalness in a way I never could (so thought my 15-year-old self) from real people.

Great end result for me, but painful at the time. I'm looking forward to the day when tech isn't something girls like me get punted into by accident.
So you were basically teaching C? How does C++ come into this discussion at all?

How do you teach a basic data structure course in Python?

Pascal seems like a much better choice for data structures than C or C++. Or you can use Scala and teach functional data structures if you're adventurous ...
Hey! Author here - it is a bit creepy, I suppose! Sorry about that. I might need to tweak the theme :)
I question whether you even read, or worse, understood what Hedges was getting at with this piece. Hedges is essentially saying we should become Marxist, but here you are saying that maybe we can redeem ourselves and survive on the 'knife edge'. Hedges addresses this by quoting Emma Goldman about half-way through. Capitalism can't be fixed with a few patches here and there, it must be abolished and trying to appear moderate makes you no different than the crew members of Pequod who played into Ahab's mania.

The assumption here is that moderation is what has prevented the course of Pequod (and decaying civilizations) from correcting their course. You question what happens when we throw Ahab overboard while ignoring the fact that each passing minute and hour you let Ahab run free, your security and well-being are threatened. Why fuss over what happens when you toss Ahab over when Ahab poses a nearly immediate threat to your well-being? That's just more of the moderation that silently rationalizes Ahab's actions.

Hedges brought up a number of revolutionary thinkers from all walks of the revolutionary left, yet proposed we follow no single system. The subtext being that we need to move away from capitalism, and generally need to move to the left. Whether that's straight up Marxism or more moderate forms of radical schools of thought are secondary or even tertiary. The point is we need to change the course of the ship immediately, or we'll just repeat history for the thousandth time.
I've never understood why Java programmers dislike type erasure. In my mind, runtime type inspection is a bad idea for a supposedly statically typed language. It just seems like people are complaining that they can't do something they probably shouldn't be. If there's something you can't do without it then that means Java is poorly designed, not that type erasure is a bad idea.
Google Goggles has a high-contrast mode for taking pictures of documents. Works great for sketches on paper and for taking pictures of whiteboards. I could never get those digitizing notebooks to work for me.
let's say we listen to our inner doubts, we mutiny and throw Ahab overboard, we are still on a whaler in the middle of the ocean. Now what?

We know what happens next, because it's already been tried. What happens when you mutiny and throw Ahab overboard: the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror; the Soviet Union; the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Revolution doesn't work because you can't fight destruction with destruction, and that's what revolution is: destruction.
I like this, good idea.
For some strange reason posting this content makes my post instantly marked as [dead]. It must have triggered some kind of spam detector. I hacked around it by first posting a comment containing the word "test", and then editing the content in it.

(1) If you are looking for ideas for websites try http://firespotting.com/

(2) I'd like street musicians to sell me their music on a usb stick. They currently sell their music on CDs, but going into the future laptops won't have CD players, if they haven't been stripped of them already. My laptop doesn't have one, and I bought 8 CDs already I have no means of playing or transferring into my laptop.

You could build a website that lets musicians upload their music and ships them back copies of the music on usb sticks.

(3) I would like a website that would let me pay people to read my blog posts before I post them and give me feedback.

(Posting on HackerNews isn't ideal for this.)

(4) I would like a website that lets me pay to get people to use what I build and give me feedback.

(5) I would like a website that lets me host a simple blog for $1/month.

(6) Make a website that sells jewelry. Besides being a project that can attract school friends to help you, you can make money at little cost selling jewelry.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/27/origami-owl_n_43507...
Typically when a product shows up all over Vine like Flappy Bird did, at least some of them were paid for. Any evidence of this?