skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How much of the funding of Intel/Amd/ARM, who probably built the cpu you're using to access this side, came from the government? How much of the funding of this site itself, and of other sites you may use on a daily basis such as Google and Facebook, came from the government? How much of the funding for the GPU that's rendering this site came from the government? How are you not benefiting from all these things?

Long term profit has no space in models of a _perfectly competitive_ market, a theoretical concept used in the exploration of various economic ideas. The "free"ness of a market doesn't necessarily imply anything about the potential for profit within that market.
that game just stole 2hrs of my life.
The real error was committed by whoever required this to work on IE7 in the first place (or whichever customer hasn't updated their browsers in, what, seven years now?).
I think a lot of people try to take a "one mental model fits all" approach to visual programming: and coding in general.

Sheet music, source code, mathematical equations, graphs, etc. are examples of tools we use make it easier to form mental models.

> It would take a while to learn to efficiently read and style visual code just like it does with text based code.

This is why domain specific VPLs work so well: because they allow people work within a mental model they are already familiar with.
Granted, about twenty years passed before anyone had an array of >2^31 elements in Java and noticed this bug in binary search:

http://googleresearch.blogspot.ca/2006/06/extra-extra-read-a...

If people are using abstract data types and/or built-ins, in practice, presumably they can use a fixed int type for O(1) runtime and just update the data type every 20 years or so.

On that note, has anyone actually created a 2^128 element array yet? I suspect such an array would be too large to represent in the memory of all the world's computers at the moment.
>Their success is on the backs of people who do the real work.

Oh really? And when was the last time you attempted to do what these people do? Easy to judge sitting from an armchair, isn't it?

While you're at it, why don't you stop using any of the products that these people create? And stop using any of the products created by people using their products? Why don't you stop patronising for instance any business that uses Microsoft or Oracle software? Let's see how much choice that leaves you.

>They are also on the backs of the American people who contribute significant amount of money through government sponsorship.

The American government decided to use public resources to fund research without attempting to monopolise the application of results. If you don't like the fact that people have created successful businesses and products with this, you should blame the government, not the people who took risks and brought the applications to market. You don't get to hold out your hand and ask for something back when you gave it away for free in the first place.

>I will judge them sharply for profiting so handsomely from public investment.

Perhaps you should be judged too. After all, aren't you this very moment enjoying the internet? Isn't your enjoyment of it, its enrichment of your life (even potentially your dependence on it for your economic niche) a profit of your own? And how much have you decided to donate to the government as compensation for this profit from your use of the fruits of public research funding?

>Profit has no space in "real" free markets.

I suggest you educate yourself in basic economics before making such stupid claims.
>Profit has no space in "real" free markets.

What kind of drivel is that? If you create a product/service which nobody else can duplicate and the demand for it is there, you are going to make a profit. That's exactly how a "real" free market functions.
I'm sure most people are as tired of this issue as it sounds the author is. I finished the article and couldn't help feeling some sense of dread. Knowing full well what should be the most controversial and opinionated comment will likely become the most upvoted. Again the author will have to re-evaluate if she wants to continue reading HN and if she decides to leave, our community bias will continue to grow. This is one of the toughest issues that our industry faces. Their doesn't seem to be a clear answer and because of that it seems to be shunned. There's just so much momentum to overcome behind the culture of our species, add on to the fact that we can really only agree that it's "broken" with lots of opinions on how to improve it.

I don't have an answer and I'm not even going to try to offer one because I honestly feel like I'm still far too entrenched in my own biases to really offer something viable. My only wish is that more people would realize the same and be less prone to slandering someone because they tried to help.
Not true. I'm not a big shot but I've turned them down. Had two rejections from them in the past .. don't want to waste my time.
At some point those people will go into retirement and die.

I never said this is a fast process, ok? Stuff like that takes generations.
Cellulose, rock wool, and fiberglass all come to mind. Jeans would be cellulose.
How is it guaranteed, exactly? At what government office can I turn it in for...something that isn't more paper?

Essentially, the argument usually reduces to "because you can pay your taxes with it and not go to jail" which is a neat trick, because the amount due for those taxes is at the government's discretion, as well as the amount of dollars in existence.

Dont-throwme-in-jail-coin (USD) has a value, but lets not pretend it is more reified than an additional direct payment use case for governmental extortion. What's the difference if you can trade a given currency for USD with one more step and achieve your tax-paying ends?
> The tech we use today is based on government investment that the private industry coudn't stomach.

Wasn't that, in at least part, the reason why government felt the investment was worth making? To fund (expensive) basic research that can then be taken to drive and create enterprise?
What about contributing to writing docs instead? yes i'm serious. When it comes to writing documentation for opensource projects, suddenly,there is no developper available. Yet documentation is central to any opensource project.

Maybe I should launch a "Please write help us write docs" plateform.
You should probably resubmit this without the paywall. It is frontpage worthy, but if I've learned anything, HN does not like paywalls at all. :P

This link works
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230402010...
Did they leave the foam exposed when they were done? That's not really a good plan.

They don't prepare the ground first? Isn't the house going to sink during the first heavy rain?
man, brings back memories from the os9 days
if you were standing at the event horizon the pull on your feet would be several billion times the pull on your head.

This is true for a black hole with mass a few times the mass of the Sun, the sort we expect to be formed by the gravitational collapse of stars. However, a much larger black hole would have much less tidal gravity at the horizon. Some of the supermassive black holes that are believed to be at the centers of quasars would have less tidal gravity at their horizon than you feel on the surface of the Earth.

The confounding factor is that if you're falling into a black hole the acceleration can get your velocity to nearly light speed

Velocity is relative. You will be moving at the speed of light relative to observers who are "hovering" just outside the hole's horizon; but other people falling into the hole just ahead of or behind you could have much smaller velocities relative to you, even well after you cross the horizon (depending on how close they were to you to start with).

and at that velocity your perception of time slows, to the point of nearly stopping

Your perception of time would be normal; you would notice nothing unusual in the behavior of clocks you carried with you, even well after you fell inside the horizon (assuming the tidal gravity was bearable--see above).

Also, "time" as you're using it here is relative; there is no absolute notion of "perception of time".

while people watching you fall in might see a burst of xrays as your physical being converted into energy, "you" might perceive nothing at all

They would only see this if it happened outside the horizon, which it might if the hole's tidal gravity was large enough outside the horizon. But in this case, while it would be true that you would perceive nothing at all, that would simply be because you would be turned into x-rays and destroyed; it would have nothing to do with any change in your "perception of time" due to relativity (see above).

Once you reach the horizon, even if you emit x-rays, nobody outside the hole will ever see them, since light emitted at or inside the horizon can never get back out. But your "perception of time" will continue just fine, assuming again that tidal gravity is bearable (see above).

Most theories do not currently postulate a 'far side' of a black hole

By "far side" do you mean a region inside the event horizon? If so, you are wrong; our current theories most certainly do predict (not postulate, it's not an assumption, it's derived as a theorem) that there is spacetime inside the horizons of black holes.

In theory its really just a point where the numbers go out of whack because the equations have a divide by zero error there.

This is only true in a particular system of coordinates; it is not true as a statement about the actual physics. That is, there is no actual problem with spacetime at the horizon; all physical quantities are perfectly finite there. The "divide by zero error" is a purely mathematical problem with one coordinate chart, which can be fixed simply by using different coordinates.
The poor neglected gifted child
I'd say bug fixes, tiny typo fixes, documentation additions, unit test additions, performance enhancements, and relatively minor features are all good candidates. The actual scope of any set of changes that will be quickly accepted can vary wildly depending upon how well defined the project is and what group of individuals is maintaining it. I'd say the defining characteristics would just be easy to read the diff and understand how things are exactly altered and that the benefits are proportional to the risk and time for integration. An adequately written documentation addition for instance would be a easy to check for consistency and structure in one pass and the benefit is generally obvious after reading the diff. Large changes for a first commit can be reasonable, but some extra time has to be expected with some discussion on those changesets.
The ultimate sign of a piece of shit with no social comprehension is a programmer who uses the not equal relational operator in conversation. Human lives are not as simple as the PHP you write at your day job, dude.

Then you turn it into some sort of fucked up meritocracy thing. She wrote No Code therefore her opinions are invalid! I've got more bitcoins than her too!!
I read the whole article thanks. It was stupid and judgemental - eg criticising rich people for only supporting research into rich white people disease - woops, never mind Bill Gates!

"Balance of funding" is a cute euphemism though for "let's punish rich people for exercising their free choice, steal more of their money and give it to bureaucrats and congressmen in the White House to squabble over and divert into kickbacks for districts and lobbyists." Because everyone knows the government's track record of wise use of funds is so fantastic.
I haven't seen any explanation of the statement that the plane's location was thought to be within one of two "corridors" in completely different places -- a northern one extending to Kazakhstan and a southern one extending into the southern Indian Ocean. Is this indeterminacy expected? Is it the result of some sort of geometrical symmetry? I imagine someone here knows?
So what makes a candidate "Googley" or not?
I wonder if the 39" makes you crane your neck too much. It's a lot of pixels, but a lot of physical space and movement required as well.

The Dell 28" 4k monitor (http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&c...) seems like a better option to me. Has anyone tried one out?
R is “for statistical computing and graphics”¹.

1) http://www.r-project.org/
>"When is the last time you heard of a system administrator writing down problems on a whiteboard as opposed to asking a colleague or Googling the answer?"

Once you move beyond roles which are effectively operations, maintenance or been-done implementation to anything that can be called engineering you'll start to face problems for which there are no canned answers.

>"It's not the 70's any more, people rarely solve problems on whiteboards and paper."

This has nothing to do with era, it's a matter of scope and scale. When you have problem that is big / complex enough that it can't be reasonably solved by a single person a whiteboard is invaluable in laying things out and thinking them through.

>"They solve them on the computer, sometimes through knowledge and their skill-set and other times through luck and Googling."

Where do you think all that helpful information on Google, or anywhere else actually originates? When the folks at Google were in the process of engineering GFS do you think they just Googled "chunk replica placement" and hoped to luck into a StackOverflow post on HDFS from 10 years in the future?
A full day interview loop is standard procedure at most large tech companies you would have heard of.
> My guess is we are still at the very beginning of the full stack movement

It's all been tried before. In the 1940's, the US courts even had to stop movie studios from owning the cinema chains, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pict....

When some technology further up the stack tries to strong-arm control of technology lower down the stack and unilaterally change it for their own sole benefit, it can cause great dissatifaction with other users of the more fundamental technology.
Public money got Stanley Kubrick super wealthy apparently :)

http://realitysandwich.com/23226/kubrick_apollo/
Forced into existence because Bell was a monopoly.
According to classical general relativity (i.e., without taking any quantum effects into account), if you fall inside the hole's event horizon, you will at some point get torn apart and destroyed by tidal gravity. (If the hole is small enough, that could happen even before you reach the horizon). Eventually even the atoms and subatomic particles that you were composed of will be destroyed in the singularity inside the hole.

When you include quantum effects, we don't have a good theory at this point to predict what happens; it depends on how the "black hole information paradox" is finally resolved. However, in terms of what will happen to you in practical terms, not much changes from the above: you will still most likely get torn apart by either tidal gravity or some kind of quantum "firewall". The details of what happens after that won't make much difference to you in practical terms.
"The average techie is a male who has spent a lot more time interacting with his computer than he has interacting with women. He does not understand women, he fears women, and what he fears, he hates"

I think this is unhelpful pop-psychology babble. The average techie is no different than the average human. Average humans with spouses/partners, siblings, friends and bills to pay, just like you. They have hangups, insecurities and personalities no different than your own. These myths about how they interact with computers, fear or hate women is nothing more than often repeated nonsense from people that haven't spent much time in the real world meeting and interacting with real people.
This has long been my dream job and I have alerts setup for when they're interviewing - but I don't feel I'll ever be smart enough or well rounded for this specific job. I left university a couple years ago and have been working in my first job (an ISP NOC) for about a year, but I just can't see myself ever getting to the skill level required for an SRE. That and I have crippling anxiety when it comes to interviews.

Ah well...
Working for me now on iOS.
It's been fixed for iPhone :-) apparently. At least it works for me, now.
There are a couple of potential concerns of national security which explain Malaysian officials being cagey about the radar "blip" which (presumably) turned out to be MH370:

1. The exact locations and ranges of military radar capabilities is considered secret, if other countries knew their exact locations/abilities it would make an attack easier. This would make them reluctant to say where they picked it up/lost it on radar as it could reveal the range of the radar.

2. If the radar blip wasn't MH370, what was it? It could have been a drone from any number of countries, or a spy plane flying over, or any number of potentially embarrassing possibilities that a military commander would have trouble admitting had gone mostly unnoticed for 72 hours.
Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix streaming are basically about available TV shows, which is sad. There are movies, especially lots of B movies, which I do watch now and then. I'll keep the Amazon account around because we use enough shipping, Netflix is becoming less useful over time.
The job apparently was not
'reliability engineering'.

In an auto analogy, Google
was trying to hire narrowly
experienced, self-taught
auto mechanics and not
mechanical engineers.
The dead forests you mentioned may have became massive coal beds via the "charcoal route"; i.e. a global firestorm may have incinerated essentially the entire biosphere.

The global debris layer created by the end-Cretaceous
impact at Chicxulub contained enough soot to indicate
that the entire terrestrial biosphere had burned.

Source:

K-Pg extinction: Reevaluation of the heat-fire hypothesis;
Robertson, Lewis, Sheehan & Toon, 2013;
Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jgrg.20018/abstra...
In the future, you can reduce your diatribe to what you actually believe "patriarchal misogynist assholes" and that will help everyone out. Your supporters as well as those who would disagree with you.
But why go through that? Google is just another place to work. If I got rejected from a job at HoneyWell or G&E I wouldn't be thinking to myself well in one more year I can try again. I'd be thinking about the next place to apply and never go back.

The guy was obviously qualified for the job and they still rejected him because he got nervous. He had done well except for one and they said no. I guess if you have so many people interviewing where you have some that did better it makes sense, but it's silly and personally I don't plan at working at companies that interview this way.

Google isn't special. They're just a well known consumer brand, and all that marketing is what's got into people's brains. Coke is just sugar water, it doesn't make you cool. It just puts fructose corn syrup into your stomach. You wanna be the person that has to obey Larry Page's whims and integrate Google+ into more places users don't want it?
So you confirm that you are one of these angry HN readers? :) I don't see how you could have found yourself angry by my comment, other than being angry already... :) Cheers then.
Which dialect of Lisp are you studying? Common Lisp?
>which is more about super-insulating a nearly airtight envelope

That last part is the problem. Insulation is a huge part in any passive home, but heating the air means keeping things airtight. Which means terrible air quality and living conditions.
> The problem in the tech industry is that there are a lot of misogynist assholes who are put into positions of power and encourage that behavior in their businesses.

It's really, really weird that I keep reading this. Are you sure you want to single out tech industry as having a lot of assholes? Because, I'm a person who's come to the tech industry after being in various different industries over the years -- particularly, I've worked alongside a lot of mechanical engineering folk, sales folk, and construction folk. And let me tell you, far and away the tech industry folk have been the least misogynistic I have ever had to deal with. I can't even tell you the kind of things my fellow engineers used to tell me, how they depicted their relationships with women (invariably viewing them as just sex objects, etc.).

I'm not really sure why there isn't much public and vocal outrage about problems in those industries. I totally don't understand it.
I'm glad to see a lot of people sticking up for her here in the comments but an equal number of these comments disgust me.

Take a look at the gender disparity in the top 10 tech companies. Most of them are about 80% male. It's not that women don't want to work in tech, it's that society as a whole including the entire tech community is entrenched in a neo-good ol boys only mindset centered around a false meritocracy. Fuck the techies and fuck silicon valley. I grew up romanticizing the industry and in my adult life I've found it to be the ultimate disappointment.
My god, my god... What have you done.
Excelent remake. The rings appear different from the game isn't it?
The cause of man's suffering is: "this belongs to me" (Anthony De Mello)

Science and knowledge belongs to everybody and to no one, regardless of where you are from. Nationalism was pretty fancy and efficient a long time ago, if I see myself as more "American" or "French", than "human", humanity is screwed.
Actually there is a way that objects orbiting other objects can shed angular momentum: emit gravitational waves. We've observed this with binary pulsar systems; it's expected that it would also be taking place with objects orbiting the black hole at the center of our galaxy. This is one of those "long timescale" effects in most cases, but for objects close enough to the black hole at the center of our galaxy its time scale might not actually be longer than the lifetime of some of those objects. (That would only be true pretty close to the hole, though.)
One of my valuable skills according to a previous employer was my "google fu" - or my ability to condense any problem into something searchable and come out with a working solution.

This covered everything from design patterns to failing SSD's to static init order problems in C++ to arm assembly instructions...

Sadly every interview I've been in usually involves being a human compiler and key/value store for algorithms rather than being a human problem solver.
I haven't, but I just read some of the reviews on that link and it does not sound good.
You make a better, albeit inadvertent, point. We'd be better off without usernames posted.

Why should we care if you think a user is a troll? Or say they are.. If they have content to add, what makes them so bad?
> The game allows a new tile to spawn even if you move in a direction in which no tiles move.

Additionally, if you attempt to move in a direction in which no tile move while the board is full, the game ends, even if there is another, valid move that's possible.