skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do know a police officer multi-millionaire.

And another that is a co-founder of a company he is doing on the side and seems to be finding some success. There are very few intellectual property clauses in their contract and it is a job that they can leave at the station door when they go home in terms of creative energy.

Those two are admittedly outliers but when I was running events I had to (well, it was strongly suggested by the police themselves) hire off-duty police officers for $80/hour for security. Not to mention overtime which is fairly common.

In short, yes they risk their lives, but these folks have more opportunity to pad their bottom line than you seem to imagine.
In theory, yes. In practice I do not think we are doing nearly the job of ensuring quality protectors that the situation demands.

Follow the link to read about a recent case of abuse by the SFPD. Notably, they beat up and put into solitary confinement a person who they acerbically associated with "wannabe billionaires"

https://medium.com/human-parts/9f53ef6a1c10

I am for supporting police with a good wage, but there are astonishing increases in police militarization and abuses of power. There should be a real balancing force, like with other professionals. One that works.
Eric Rescorla does a good job of describing the security architecture and concerns around webrtc here:

http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-rtcweb-security-arch-09....

and

http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-rtcweb-security-06.txt
There are some contradictions here. For example the author the following statement about encapsulation violations being permitted, but not followed as best practice:

"JavaScript does not enforce private state, but it’s easy to write well-encapsulated programs: simply avoid having one object directly manipulate another object’s properties. Forty years after Smalltalk was invented, this is a well-understood principle."

However, the author doesn't seem to really understand this as he makes the case that access to private state and behavior of a "superclass" violates encapsulation:

"In JavaScript (and other languages in the same family), classes and subclasses share access to the object’s private properties. It is not possible to change an implementation detail for Account without carefully checking every single subclass and the code depending on those subclasses to see if our internal, “private” change will break them."

Well, yes they do allow access, but that doesn't mean you have to use it! This is considered bad practice when extending any class in other languages that I'm familiar with (C++, Ruby). Please take some of your own advice.

I do agree that hierarchies do not fit the real world as well the contrived examples from my first OOP classes and they should be used with extreme caution. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water, however.
>The main sources of energy in the United States are still oil, coal, and natural gases.

This is a problem that cries out for math.

On average, the CO2 intensity of US electricity is 690 g/kWh. This makes the Model S the CO2 equivalent of a car getting 37 mpg. This is a lot higher than comparable cars.

Of course CO2 isn't the only pollutant. It would also emit 0.43 g/mi of NOx (blowing the limit by nine times), 0.011 g/mi of NMOG (1/7th the limit), 0.015 g/mi of PM10 (the limit is 0.01 g/mi), and 0.13 g/mi of CO (a miniscule 1/27th of the limit). So it's a mixed bag.

Caveat: I used the average US energy mix, but electricity production is highly regional. Here's a map Tesla made regarding pollution from electricity: http://www.teslamotors.com/goelectric#electricity Some states also let you choose where your power comes from, and of course rooftop solar is currently available (unlike rooftop oil wells).

Sources: http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/refs.html https://www.dieselnet.com/standards/us/ld_ca.php http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy07osti/38617.pdf
JavaScript is a dramatically OO language. It's just not the OO you're used to.

Everything* in JS other than numbers, strings, and booleans are objects. Functions are objects.

See http://www.objectplayground.com for details. (Temporarily down due to server problems, but hopefully back up soon.)

*Not really everything. Not objects: undefined, null, number, string, boolean. Objects: object, array, regexp, function, everything else.
How am I conflating them when I specifically say you can get isa without inheritance?
The "harder" part actually refers to working harder than you have to to get something done, not the overall level of effort.

You could do things manually and inefficiently, i.e. the "harder" way, or you could do it "smarter" and save hours of your time to work on other tasks, thus accomplishing more in the same amount of time or less.
(2006) The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me)
Somebody remove /print/ in the url.
Why Computer Science Should Be a High School Graduation Requirement
I have the book and have read some of it years ago. I can't remember if the OS-tasks were an isolated process or just a thread in shared memory.

My first comment would be for a kernel built up using threads in shared memory communicating with signals and mailboxes.
Sometimes the best thing to do is to just take a leap and grab the next vine--vines that are too close won't take you very far.
Doesn't the salary reflect what the people of San Francisco believe their work to be worth?
Unfortunately, I don't have enough time or knowledge to track down and understand all the references in this article. So I need another way of establishing the author's credibility.

What are Andrew Kim's qualifications (his web site doesn't list any)? Why should I believe him more than Lustig, who is an endocrinologist who has treated and studied a lot of obese patients?
I had a law professor who told our class, "If a police officer throws me on the ground and tells me to eat dirt. I get on the ground and eat dirt." Point being that it doesn't matter if the law is on your side at that moment or not, that is not the time to argue. Take it up in court later.
It's both functional and object oriented. Also, see Scala for good combination of functional and OO.
If you were to urinate straight into off the shelf bleach, bad things would happen. For maximum drama, let the urine age for a few days to build up ammonia levels.

http://www.chemaxx.com/explosion16b.htm
That's kind of the point of the article: If it's easy to get it wrong in CoffeeScript, i.e. CoffeeScript has its own bad parts, then you're better off just learning to deal with the bad parts in JavaScript directly.
>> I've observed, on several occasions, at multiple companies, senior managers talking openly about deliberately instilling "a sense of constant urgency" into the team.

Holy crap, that's a terrible thing to do. But if senior management thinks like that, it would explain some stupid stuff I've seen in various companies...
What is the market rate for police officers? Where is the police officer market?
Okay I reread this and I don't know how I missed the second section. I assume you didn't add that later. Sorry I am jet-lagged. Revising comment.
Pharma is a special case. Can we separate IP into pharma and -other- and deal with them separately?

Pharma "development" might be done by academics who get bought out by big pharma after their discovery, or it might be done originally by big pharma. Should pharma IP be protected so they can inflate prices to pad the bank accounts of the inventors even though they were operating in academia at the time of invention?

Pharma costs involve (a) cost to discover a drug, (b) cost to do drug trials, including all bureaucratic red tape in getting the drug approved, and (c) advertising and marketing (both to prospective patients and to the medical establishment). From what I've read, advertising costs exceed R&D. Surely, IP monopoly pricing should not be able to pass along arbitrary marketing costs.

Some drugs are prescribed for serious health problems, some drugs are prescribed and taken on a more voluntary basis, and there's a gray area in between. Should IP owners be able to set arbitrary profit margins for drugs for more serious health problems? Who decides what's serious?

The incentives for much of the pharma industry are all wrong: they market to doctors and potential end-users, even though end users are rarely capable of evaluating drugs, and even though doctors are influenced by marketing directed at them. This isn't so much a cost issue (other than advertising costs, above) but rather a public health issue. Some drugs might not be in the public's interest at all, even while being recommended by doctors, and paid for at inflated prices by patients and insurance companies.

There are so many complications, I'm in favor of dealing with pharma IP separately.
You could actually do some research if you wanted to and realize the truth of the statement, I'll give you the couch potato version, watch 'Shark Tank' or 'Dragon's Den' and rank all of the engagements where the question of a patent came up. Or you could do as I have done and participate in on M&A discussions for over a decade as part of the due diligence team and compare outcomes when patents exist and when they don't. Or you could approach the question using some basic reasoning, if the BigCorp is spending millions a year to develop a patent portfolio, how much of that value would carry over into the acquisition of SmallCorp with or without patents? Zero? Non-zero? How much non-zero? Can that number be deduced?

You don't have to believe some random guy commenting on Hackernews here, but you do have to actually think about it and test your assumptions.
when you need statistical models and a tool for querying beyond the ken of an average sql dba
Well, then they should get a pay raise. It's about time anyways. You can easily make $150k a year as a private contractor.
Hacking the 3DS
If all the other Bay Area police departments offer similar compensation and benefits, as seems to be the case, SF will have a hard time finding new recruits at lower pay. So it's impossible to tell if it is a demand or supply issue. The first thing you would want to look at is the number of applicants.

This is very similar to the issue with CEO compensation - high pay at competitors just encourages even higher pay with little to contain it. I wonder if they use the same consultants to justify ever increasing pay and benefits.
THis has been a long time (ancient) lesson of groups such as the Masons and the Mayans (fraternal orders)....

One important lesson is to physically write down your intentions, but never to speak of them to another. Speaking them spends your will and releases your actual intent from being held internally and motivating you to create that goal into reality.

But you need to read these goals again daily. Build your will power to manifesting them.
I disagree with this. This implies that you always view your first language through rose colored glasses. I don't think this is the case. Anectodally, I learned C first and still use it to this day, but I can certainly tell you where its flaws are and when I would and would not use it.

Yes, a beginner might not see the flaws of Javascript up front, but given enough time to become an expert, they certainly will.
I think "enables them to live in the community in which they serve" is a key point that doesn't apply to military personnel in the same way.
You labeled the responses wrong. The one you labeled "Correct" should have been labeled "Would be nice to see but totally unreasonable to expect"; the one you labeled "Incorrect" should have been labeled "Abrupt but to be expected from a cop who has more important things to think about than pandering to the ego of a bystander".
It's not that simple if you go beyond surface impressions and common usage. There are in fact many ways to do the same thing in Java and Python, some better than others. Both languages have escape hatches that can be used to extend the language; it just requires more effort.

Reflection and annotation processors in Java are very powerful tools; see Guice, Dagger, and AutoValue. Creating something like JQuery is awkward in Java, but it can be done; see GQuery. Java 8 will make functional and callback-heavy DSL's a whole lot easier to build.

Python may look like a strict language but it's not. You can redefine just about anything except the core syntax. If you want to make your head spin look into metaclass programming.

Haskell is a weird one; statically typed, but extremely expressive. It's very easy for Haskell programmers to define their own obscure notations and like when reading mathematics, you must understand the definition of every symbol or you're lost.

One interesting dimension is the attitude towards modifying other people's libraries. In Java, it's easy to build something that nobody else can change unless they fork the library and modify the source or mess with the bytecode. But if you build your own, you can do what you want. In more dynamic languages, you can load someone else's library and muck with it at runtime.
Cola, Nutella, Mentos and... a condom?
It was in the original. No prob. I misread all the time too, without jet lag as an excuse even. 😊
There's a range listed because (I can't speak for SF specifically, but I have police friends in other Bay Area cities) different skill sets get you a different starting pay. For example, if you have a college degree and speak Spanish, your starting salary will bump up from 80k. If you are part of a K9 unit, your starting salary will bump up from 80k.
I've come to learn that "natural" is a marketing weasel word that adds nothing of value to describing a product.
Going from CoffeeScript to Python (bundled together with going from Node.js to Python) is painful. So many things that CoffeeScript has learned over Python - of all of them, "everything is an expression" rule.
Sure, there's some overlap between assault, rape, and robbery. But the underlying point is sound. What makes a city dangerous includes one's overall chance of being victimized, not just the chance of being murdered. And if you look at those other categories you'll find the US is not leading the pack.
(1) The California budget crisis was as much political gridlock as anything else and appears to be currently resolved. Certain people used it as a an opportunity to attack public services and public sector unions.

(2) These particular salaries (SF police department) are financed out of local revenues and have nothing to do with the state budget anyway.

(3) The cost of living in SF is sky high as we all know, good for them for paying appropriately if they want to get the best people.
Yeah it might be better to standardize on a common language (I would probably choose Lua) for building the tasks, both for the reason you cite and to make it easier to share and reuse shared functionality. But it would just be a convention -- You could still build it in any language or integrate it with anything without having Lua forced on you.
The point is it doesn't pass static verification. It doesn't compile. It's a rather silly thing for the author to argue imho.
There is absolutely massive supply trying to get these high paying jobs. You can look at the number of applicants. Acceptance rates resemble those from Ivy league schools. I know because when I found out, I wanted to be a fire fighter. But then I realized that it's kinda like the mafia. You have to know someone on the inside to get in.
Cake3: DSL for building Makefiles in Haskell
You need to understand that doing anything an officer might class as "Disobeying a Lawful Order" can get you killed.

This bit, written by an individual with Aspergers, explaims the situation more clearly -- and why the awful nature of it isn't going anywhere.
http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/316176.html

If you don't feel like reading it, this line will substitute somewhat:
> "[...] If you don't think he should have given that order, you can file a complaint later, but you can't complain to Internal Affairs if you're dead."

(The reason why it is necessary -- and yes, this is arguable, but this is not new -- follows not long after that sentence.)
Please note that I wasn't the person who you replied to before. In fact, part of what I do professionally involves UI work, so clearly I don't regard UI design as merely work for amateurs. On the other hand, I also find that 90% of the skill in building a good UI has very little to do with knowing how to make dialog boxes and toolbars appear. The functionality behind those UI elements, how that functionality is organised, and presenting everything as clearly and ideally as simply as possible is often far more important, IMHO.
I've posted this else-thread, but, basically: your assumption is incorrect.

http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/316176.html
Reminds me of the lyrics of LCD Soundsystem's great song "On Repeat":

"Don't tell nobody what you really want because they could /
tell everybody else what you really want then you're f####d /
so act like it's for yourself or it's all yours and they go and /
tell everybody else that you're really great. we are just people"

Sorry if this is a little off-topic, but it's a great song and i think the lyric's focus on the social results expands upon the article's thesis a bit.

song link: http://youtu.be/Lh3Kqh_EW2A?t=3m18s
Migrating GOV.UK to new infrastructure and nobody noticed
People with no qualms to include prospective bribes and extortion money in their calculations could accept lower wages. Free market at its best.
it made him more likely to be mildly beaten up, arrested, and thrown in jail.

What caused that wasn't his calling 911, it was his failing to go away when the cop told him to.

calling 911 has a bigger potential downside than he had previously fully considered

No, continuing to pester cops when they've told you to go away has a bigger potential downside than he had previously fully considered. By blaming it all on his calling 911, he's not only giving bad advice to others, he's failing to properly adjust his own behavior.

Calling lyft, uber, or any other cab-type service probably would have worked fine in this scenario too.

And if that was the option the injured person had chosen, that would be fine. But she asked him to call 911. If he had called Lyft instead, that would have been a huge mistake.

Perhaps what we need is to find or set up some sort of emergency number that just brings EMTs but doesn't also bring cops

That would be nice, but I suspect it would end up being misused enough (EMTs being called to a scene that should have had cops summoned as well) that it would end up working the same as the 911 we have now.
At the same time, $30k buys you more in MI.
My problem with CoffeeScript has always been the syntax vs. semantics issue. CoffeeScript saw a big opportunity to improve JavaScript semantics and help programmers more easily avoid the JavaScript minefield ("var" and "===" for example), but in doing so decided "while we're at it, let's overhaul the general syntax too".

Gratuitously changing "function" to "->" for no reason other than removing characters seems to introduce more brand new idiosyncrasies than it's worth. If the goal were to improve JavaScript as a language by smoothing over a few of the gotchas, which of course would require a few syntax updates, then I think it would be immensely valuable. (Think SCSS instead of the original "Sass".) But it seems as if the authors were more troubled that JavaScript didn't write like Ruby, so they made a new language that happens to compile to JavaScript. And now I have two languages to choose from, each with pros and cons and their own gotchas, adding more complexity to my decisions when I was hoping for simplification.
With a distributed storage system you should be able to read said terabyte file using far more disk heads.

It would also be easier to engineer it so the terabyte file was entirely in RAM by distributing it across multiple machines (although single machines with TB ram capacity are no doubt continuing to become more common)

Sure, store it on a single tape or disk and distributing the computation won't help. You need distributed storage to properly leverage distributed computation for otherwise I/O bound processes.
Is that why the suits kept him in the dark and sent him to talk to zuckerberg one week before the acquisition under false pretenses?
Facebook has a grand plan to bring Internet to everyone. And it involves drones
I was an early adopter and I actually saw quite a few non-techies in my circles want invites right away, because it was seen as the next Gmail.

Except it delivered none of the "wow!" that Gmail did. It was slow, didn't really seem to have an immediate purpose (where as when Gmail came out, most people I knew had hit some sorta inbox-size limit before and knew that pain point)

and so on.
ASICs catching up with Scrypt, and why this could be the end of new altcoins
ChequingAccount.prototype.process = function (cheque) {
this.setBalance(this.getBalance() - cheque.amount());
return this;
}

...
There's quite a few.. super fast networks, network based elb (i assume cause it scales up smoothly and instantly), persistent volumes that can be attached to multiple machines at the same time (read only).. etc.
Problem is the overtime and pensions.

Salary is in the ballpark.
The only way to exclude FPGAs from mining a cryptocurrency is to create a problem that requires the average FPGA to completely (not partially) self-reconfigure faster than the average FPGA's configuration time in order to be competitive.
Either that or somehow create a problem that requires more LUTs and logic cells than an FPGA is capable of supplying. But then you could just make multiple FPGAs work together. So you'd need some kind of latency based problem to make it difficult for multiple FPGAs to work together.

Has anybody tried looking at making GPUs do what they are designed for? Namely sorting and rasterizing triangles. If a cryptocurrency was made to use a very large number of triangles as the problem, perhaps GPUs would be the most efficient device to solve it with.
Data science apprenticeship: update
Not sure if you are being sarcastic, but the group Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos have clearly indicated this was their business philosophy. I have to agree that it sounds odd when it comes to something with the cost structure of hosted services, but at a certain scale, it makes sense.
The question is: do you need to be someone with the size/capabilities of Google to compete in this market, or there are many companies that can make that "commodity" ?

Because if the answer is the first one, this looks like a good place to be in.
What's New in Ubuntu since 2010?
I know it seems lazy, but it's not. I've been an absolute lover of Ubuntu and gnu/linux for a lot of years. But then I switched to OSX.

Now, I am wondering how much and what way are Ubuntu and other open source OSes improved in the last 3 years?
Demonoid is back online after almost 2 years downtime
exactly. a business built around the oculus product would, by definition not some vague promises, be precluded from canibalizing it for profit. they might let it languish or fail, but the worst we would be left with is an unpolished turd. by artificially propping up the product and guaranteeing capital for market penetration you guarantee facebook will make their money back. no. matter. what. they. have. to. do. then we're stuck with a turd with market penetration
Because Facebook is a headless chicken driven by data. All they do is throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. They're just a glorified slot machine for ad impressions that preys on people's insecurities and need for social validation.
I fear that would be hard to implement, but what you describe already happens informally to some extent: if people see an innocuous comment faded out, they sometimes upvote it to put it back in black. I like this and hope we can get the community to practice it more.