skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Who wants to place bets on when country development metrics include "population % who know how to code" ... ? "

Oh, an example of how CS people overestimate their importance, how funny.

Dentists, doctors don't need to know how to code.

Teachers don't need to know how to code. Maybe it's better that they do (some of them, still). The same with other professions.

Humanity survived up to the 1980/70s without computers being widespread. Their problems were mostly solved without it.

Literacy is something different, you can read a hundred year old English without many issues. It's much more universal than the code being used today.

People should learn how to cook for example, before learning how to code.
U.S. may act to keep Chinese hackers out of Defcon
A great example of the difference between academic knowledge and real world experience.
Before people start preaching 'coding is the new reading/writing', let's get to high school CS requirements first (like any other common science/math class).

Also, I think there's a sweet spot between a full-on academic CS degree and a level of software proficiency to make someone useful on the job. Whether it be data analytics or basic web development, you don't NEED to know the ins and outs of automata theory or compilers to be a 'coder' with hands-on skills.
At least here in the US, psychiatry is a specialization of medicine, and a psychiatrist is an MD, while psychology isn't a specialization of anything, and its practitioners' credentials vary widely. The disciplines don't really have much inherent overlap; nobody goes to a psychologist for a prescription, which they can't provide anyway, and nobody really goes to a psychiatrist for "talk therapy", which they mostly prefer to leave to the psychologists whose primary realm it is.
Springpad is Shutting Down on June 25th
Interesting that fusion is dismissed so quickly - the Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor is probably the most common DIY nuclear reactor. (It is of course a net energy sink.)
Government gag orders violate free speech, tech giants contend
The cognitive dissonance is somewhat disturbing to witness. People decry patent trolls while simultaneously supporting patents. Everyone agrees that excluding others from building a fire because you "own" the process of building a fire would be ridiculous - yet will turn around and apply that same logic to defend patents and copyright.
New Service that Collects URL Share Counts and allows Subscriptions
As we discuss this, can HN get away from using Verdana? The site looks less than pleasing when viewing from a FOSS Linux install; to get the HN official look, I must install ttf third party stuff.
> Also they were always within 15 miles or so of some kind of civilization. So I'm with the professor: there was no danger of not getting out, as long as nobody just sat down and stopped moving.

I think you are underestimating how difficult it can be to travel in terrain with a deep snowpack, downed trees, and no clear trail markers. It sounds like their gps batteries were on their last bars, so gps was not a given for their entire trek out.

Deep snow can make a 100-yard stretch take an hour. They said that every downed tree took the group 10 minutes. That sounds like an exagerration while reading comfortably in front of a computer, but having been there myself that's a realistic statement.

I took a summer trek on a less-traveled spur trail in the White Mountains one summer. There were downed trees every 20-50 feet for a couple miles. I was working at a camp the whole summer, so I was on trails every day and in quite good shape for traveling quickly. Even so, that was a long day! 15 miles in harsh winter conditions can easily mean a very real danger of not getting out.

I also spent several hours crossing a small, open basin in the Colorado Rockies one spring. The snow was waist-deep, with a crust that wouldn't quite support my weight, and heavy snow underneath. Every step was a significant effort. That stretch would have taken 10 minutes in the summer, and 3 minutes on skis with better snow. Traveling in the mountains in winter is entirely different than it is in the summer.
That's random in maths, we're not talking maths here. In the real world, random is a value that's hard to predict. For example a dice throw has a high quality of random in normal circumstances.

A low quality random source would depend on some variables that make it easier to predict the next random number (perhaps just statistically). The worst quality random source would be pseudo-random numbers, where the value of each next random number directly follows from the previous value and perhaps some secret second value.

It might be distributed like a true random number, but eventually the secret could be guessed and the numbers would become predictable.
Two reasons come to mind, one historical and one practical:

First, the pingback implementation in WordPress was one of the more common vectors of WordPress' endless parade of security vulnerabilities. I remember years ago it was common practice to disable pingbacks (or even rip out the code) as a security precaution.

Second, pingbacks direct readers away from the site. This is good for readers and the online community as a whole, but bad for online publications which want to use comments as an "engagement" tool.
Garbage bags are a very good suggestions (unscented puncture resistant). I would also add a lighter, sterno can, and swiss army knife. Never know when you need to cut something. All very low weight and all useful when things are going crapy in winter weather.
I didn't realize I had problems with anxiety. I just thought it was insomnia, fear of death, normal over thinking stuff, recurring existential crisis.

I got my cortisol levels tested a few times. It was all out of whack. I did some stuff to calibrate it.

Now I'm ridiculously relaxed, easy going, more able to let go of bad thoughts, cheerful, etc.

I have no idea how or why this worked. But I like it.
Link to the lobsterman story mentioned in the article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/magazine/a-speck-in-the-se...

Terrific read and I think it may have been posted here.
> A society of part-time coders would do nothing but produce a lot of badly-written toy programs. What's the point?

Maybe you are embarassed by the content of github, but many of us feel it is changing the word for the better.

An Excel jockey writing macros -> better spreadsheets.

A writer who can analyze and restructure their story, wihout laboriously poring and cutting and pasting -> better stories.

There was a time when 'writing' was a specialist activity best left to professionals. Imagine if that never changed?

We don't need everyone to be an anatomist, but certainly we should all know enough about our own bodies to feed and exercise them properly. I hope we never live in a world where we only eat what The Nutritionist hands to us, and we only move our bodies in the way The Physiologist instructs us.
I'm curious if anyone has a similar resource for EmberJS. My client is currently pushing it and a resource similar to this would be quite helpful.
You don't need to be a hacker to download an android app that disables the sound illegally, or remove the speakers.

> Even the most freedom-loving libertarians among us generally concede that your freedom doesn't extend to harming others.

Do you really consider being able to take photos silently "harming others"?

Why don't we just make cameras on cell phones illegal? After all, your freedom to have a camera "doesn't extend to harming others."

The reason your argument is bullshit is that most people (including libertarians) don't support punishing people before they're proven guilty of a crime. You can certainly punish upskirt-shot-takers, if you want, but don't preemptively mix up literally every innocent person with a smartphone.

>no one can really stop you from modding a device, anyway

But they can and have made it illegal, so if I do modify my device in the way I like they can throw me in prison.

>thinking about what a minor inconvenience it is to hear the camera sound, so that people's privacy can be protected.

This is a completely false dichotomy. The camera sound is not protecting people's privacy to any significant degree. It has the much more significant effect of inconveniencing a huge number of people.

You also haven't addressed the fact that this sets up the precedent for the government controlling people's technology.
That's a very good article. highly secure practices need to become pervasive, or surveillance will forever remain pervasive.

One big problem, though, is that governments are buying zero-days. Why tolerate that, and the people making zero-days? They should be treated like bioterrorists making enhanced ebola virus.
> but as your app grows it scales better.

Proof? I have yet to see a large Angular app aside from DoubleClick in the wild. Can't say the same for BB/Ember.

> but then you're stuck with Backbone or Ember models.

So, have you ever actually used either of those? You can piecemeal out Backbone, and Ember Data is completely optional.
Programmer salaries aren't outrageous. Most peoples' real incomes have declined substantially, making programmer salaries look high. US GDP is $15.68 trillion (2012), with 146 million people employed (April 2014). That's $107,000 per worker. US median wage is around $27,000.

Programmers are one of the few occupations that have managed to retain bargaining power.

Compare the lifestyle (e.g. house, vehicle, ability to have a single income household with kids without getting into massive debt) a programmer in the Bay Area can buy right now compared to the lifestyle a plumber could buy forty years ago. The plumber of 1974 comes out ahead.

The only reason everyone hasn't noticed this huge decline is because the inflation numbers are rubbish and everyone has been kept distracted by wedge issues and wars.
How to get started with contributing to Open Source projects
Have you had your cortisol levels tested?
In 1982 Time's "Person" of the year was the The Computer ( http://content.time.com/time/interactive/0,31813,1681791,00....) and I can remember a MIT CS professor, I think it was Michael Dertouzos, bemoaning how this would further skew enrollment. (Note also that at that time most of the department's majors were on an EE track.)

Computers were red hot in a way I'm not sure even the dot.com boom reached, and that boom and bust cycle was perhaps longer.
I'm curious if there's any research supporting the claim that requiring real names increases the quality of comments.

In my anecdotal experience, most sites that require real names (or Facebook logins) tend to have just a handful of comments, most of them banal. With Facebook comments in particular, there's no sense of community -- just disconnected statements.

And some of the most hideous, abusive remarks I've seen online have been under someone's real name and next to a picture of their face. At this point, the image of a nice-looking older person cuddling their grandkid next to a racist all-caps rant has become so commonplace that it no longer shocks me.
> import random, re

You'll want to replace random with a cryptographically secure RNG.
"The good news is that they always knew where they were..."

Actually, they mentioned that they lost the blazes so at some points could not find the trail.

"So I'm with the professor: there was no danger of not getting out..."

When I read it I thought the biggest danger was that he had wet (and then frozen) feet. That is worth stopping to fix. Not a full blown shelter but a large enough fire to warm and dry everyone involved. (And thaw water bottles - dehydration was also noted)
http://discuss.emberjs.com/t/what-were-the-most-useful-resou...

Unfortunately, it's not in the convenient form of a blogpost. You may have to slog through some informative discussion.
> It sucks that a conventional programming career generally ends at age 35-40,

That's an illusion, created by two factors:

* Many people choose to leave the "coder" job as they age, and mentally it's a difficult field to enter if you never coded befo reage 35.

* The explosion of the size industry means that the number of young novices dwarfs the number of older veterans. You can see this now, as the young novices of the 2000s bust are still in demand when they are now veterans.
EBay, You Disappointed Us Badly
> And in some cases something meant to be a string is winding up unquoted, and being interpreted as something else on load?

In this particular case, a timestamp with "UTC" in it should not be interpreted as a timestamp, and older versions of psych would interpret it as a timestamp even though the spec says it's not valid.

> Okay, yeah, tldr, we can stick with: YAML's data/processing model ends up being way too complex making it's behavior hard to predict and hard to maintain consistent between parsers/versions.

Absolutely. If we eliminated implicit strings, it would make life lots easier. OTOH, you could just use JSON. :-D
IBM Watson has designed a BBC sauce
Solar Roadways: The future of our Roads | Driveline.in
The Great Stink – London 1858
>The only way this legally registered pseudonym can be revealed is in legal action against a comment on conviction.

So they would convict you before they knew who you actually were? Awesome. No need to defend myself, I guess!

How about instead, we respect the concept of free speech, and allow people to say whatever ridiculous shit they want without threatening to imprison them if they say something that makes us uncomfortable.

> That way people can have the right to anonymity so long as they stay within the law.

What does that even mean? If the system is designed with the express purpose of allowing the law to punish you for something you said, it's not anonymous.
I never thought of handling SIGSEGV. What would you use it for?
Love the "have a beer while the students use Coursera" approach. As a student this would be amazing.
How about Ukraine?
Don’t follow your dreams: A commencement speech for the mediocre
Someone a thousand years ago would have dictated to his scribe the following:

"Having everyone knowing how to read and write is the opposite of specialisation. It's inefficient and pointless. If a certain profession needs a document, it's much more efficient for specialist scribes to consult with domain experts, write that document, and sell it into the industry. Having every (for example) doctor being able to read and write adds negligible value, and I would argue the opportunity cost is awful. If my doctor has a choice to become a very mediocre writer or a better doctor, I would hope they choose the latter.

A society of part-time readers and writers would do nothing but produce a lot of badly-written texts. What's the point?"

The comparison with literacy is incredibly apt. Even though very few of us moderns are professional writers, we all benefit by knowing the basic abstractions of letters and words. In the future, everyone will benefit from knowing basics of computation. Probably in ways we can't imagine now, just as an ancient Egyptian scribe could not have conceived of "commoners" writing YouTube comments or texting "whatup u?" to a friend.
Compared to the median income for most of the US ($40-$50k/year), $90k for a new grad is pretty high.
I live in southeast Alaska. I've been mostly inactive the last few years because I had a kid, but I was pretty active for about ten years. I'm getting back into it as my kid grows up. Rescue work has been one of the most interesting and rewarding things I've ever done.
Not only that, but if you push a pre-existing repo to github, you'd lose all information about actual authorship.
Why would I want to use my phone, and public network latency, to do what windows already offers built in.

Is it really that much better dictation? Or is it one of those I'm lucky I speak the 'way' that windows is expecting.
It's actually mostly done.

To connect to your database, simply run:

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(:adapter => 'sqlite3', :database => 'db/development.db')

Or, if you'd like to store your database config in a YAML file:

database_configurations = YAML::load(File.open('./db/config.yml'))

development_configuration = database_configurations['development']

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(development_configuration)

To use the Active Record rake tasks, use this gem: https://github.com/rosenfeld/active_record_migrations. It also provides a rake task for generating migrations.

It would be great if that gem weren't needed - I think that's where the big opportunity for improvement is.
It generally isn't. Similarly, a blog post announcing a new feature of a product generally isn't, either. Of course there are many exceptions, such as if there's something especially significant or fascinating in the release.

Since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717737 already had some attention (if not discussion), we'll treat the current post as a dupe.
We said exactly the same things about Flash not so many years ago, including the pretentious dismissal of anyone who would dare not support the technology we wanted to use. Before that (and to some extent even now) it was operating systems: what kind of hippie doesn't run Windows, after all? It's pretty easy to justify technical decisions by pigeonholing anyone not using our same platform as The Kind Of People who we don't want giving us money anyway.

There are quite a few comments here complaining about the gaudy unusable interface produced by "modern JavaScript-based techniques", which in this case appear to provide virtually nothing that static HTML and CSS can't do. The dev team was lazy and wanted to show off, and screw anyone who doesn't think running gobs of arbitrary code should be a necessity for buying a ticket.

And for what it's worth my non-developer artist girlfriend has been using noscript for longer than I have. I'll let her know what modern devs think of her, though I don't think she's heard of wget.
Computer science curricula 2013 released
Is there any update on the outcome of last years SoC projects?
So you've not heard of, or do not believe, the claims of rampant age discrimination?

I have my own telling experience there, based on being able to hide my age in my resume and my looks, and doing the former in the middle of a job search as well as subsequent ones.
Could you describe a practical attack against this password generator based on how it actually works?

Specifically what information you would need to be in possession of in order to exploit it, and then a description of how you would - again, in practice - exploit that, inside a practical timeframe. Thanks.
I don't see any reason to ever limit passwords to less than 100 characters.
Plain and simple: State capitalism runs the risk of cronyism, corruption, regulatory capture, etc. Singapore is a good example of state capitalism with relatively low levels of all of these.
This needs some context. DSP-W215 is a remote controlled power switch with WiFi.
Two things wrong with what you're saying:

He might have used the phrase "Please think for a minute" (...) "you will get to realize that", but right next to that he gave concrete examples of tons of Google services we use everyday. That's evidence of their multitude, variety and importance. Plus, it's not like his text ended there -- he argued his position in other parts of his post too.

Second, it's not like "just think and you will realize how right I am" is any kind of brain jiu-jitsu. It's just a manner of speaking -- I've never seen anyone win an argument on an forum discussion using that.

>It's not that there isn't evidence of Google being less-than savory - I would argue there is - but I'd research that argument first, not just appeal for emotional sympathies.

Probably reading too much (including intent) in an innocent and not very interesting turn of phrase.
Do you think someone with an account of say 10 karma points and 2 comments on a month old account is equally likely to receive help, ceteris paribus?
OK, so the zip file has 32 OTF files in a subfolder - awesome.
But how does one install the .glyph files in the parent folder on, say, OS X?

I tried installing just the OTF files, but the extra glyphs are apparently not embedded in them and are inaccessible from (eg) Adobe Illustrator.

I can't find out how to embed the .glyphs (FiraSans_140521.glyphs and FiraSansItalic_140521.glyphs) into the OTF?
But Google isn't the only one to provide that service either, so no one should be reliant on it. http://www.ahmedatia.com.nyud.net/Blog/IamBackWithoutGoogle.... and http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=url%3ahttp%3a%2f%2fwww.ahme... work too.
> The only reason everyone hasn't noticed this huge decline is because the inflation numbers are rubbish

and a large part is that progress has raised productivity and the standard of living quite a bit, but the top x% have captured the profits from that progress.
A Server With Docker, Part 4: Git Hosting And Static Content
To your point - I recently read an account of the infamous Andean airplane crash (cannibalism, etc)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Andes_flight_disaster

Three men struck out to find help for the group after they realized that they were not going to be rescued. They hiked for 3 days to get to the top of the closest peak. From that vantage they realized it was a much longer trip and they did not have supplies enough for 3 men. They sent one guy back. It took him roughly an hour (on a makeshift sled) to backtrack what it took them 3 days to climb.

"On the third day of the trek, Parrado reached the top of the mountain before the other two. Stretched before him as far as the eye could see were more mountains. In fact, he had just climbed one of the mountains (as high as 4,650 metres (15,260 ft)) which forms the border between Argentina and Chile, meaning that they were still tens of kilometres from the green valleys of Chile. After spying a small "Y" in the distance, he gauged that a way out of the mountains must lie beyond, and refused to give up hope. Knowing that the hike would take more energy than they had originally planned for, Parrado and Canessa sent Vizintín back to the crash site, as they were rapidly running out of rations. Since the return was entirely downhill, it only took him one hour to get back to the fuselage using a makeshift sled."
"Rails" is both an ecosystems of projects and one individual project. You might not be able to contribute to the Ruby on Rails software library, but there are hundreds or thousands of third party apps & libraries built around Rails. If you contribute to them (or create your own one, or find something that is abandoned, etc..) you will be contributing to the "Rails ecosystem".
A simple explanation is that "randomness" here is related to (logarithm of) the minimum average time [1] you would take to guess the password correctly (H=sum(pi * log(1/pi)). Since the random number generator supposedly gives an uniform distribution over a set of words, this simplifies to H=n(1/n log(n))=log(n).

[1] Your average time is at least t* =1/2 * 2^H, so log( t* )>H-1.
I'm not familiar with python's non-secure PRNG implementation. Usually it involves the fact that A)these PRNGs have small entropy pools, so you can check the entire state space quickly and B)they have non-uniform outputs, so you can do probabilistic attacks.
A writer who can analyze and restructure their story, wihout laboriously poring and cutting and pasting -> better stories.

How is this related to knowing how to code?
I explained why comparing coding to literacy in my post is a false equivalence. It's nice to see that you completely ignored that part.