skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think this would have been nearly as much of an issue if the reporters had been up front about how much had been given to them. Pick a metric - documents/files/pages/slides/whatever, and stick to it. As it played out, it went from Snowden saying "I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed" in his interview last June, to Greenwald saying the total count was 9-10k in July, then 15-20k in August, then the NY Times saying that the Guardian gave them 50k Snowden docs in September [1].

I'm curious why they won't give a definitive number - I'm assuming that they're trying to avoid accusations that he just scraped as much as he could and took it out of the country without properly evaluating the documents.

[1] http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/edward-snowdens-inc...
> unless I missed something about light table and they are creating a new language.

http://www.lighttable.com/2014/03/27/toward-a-better-program...

The short version is yes, we are making a new language. The kind of workflow I discussed in the OP was the original goal for Light Table and it turns out that it can't just be hacked onto existing languages.
I was talking about writers.
I'm not sure the situation is a net negative. Not being able to censor at all would lead to more noise, and if a comment is valuable then after all other users may still upvote the comment again, so it's not the case that good-faith disagreement is generally discouraged.

With "social problem" I meant something else, namely the fact that there are trolls and low quality comments etc. I don't think those can be eradicated by a technical solution, because once you have a high quality community there is an incentive for people to take part in it even at the cost of having to defeat countermeasures.

What is this "technical fix" you allude to? Eliminating downvotes sounds like a non-starter to me. You could limit the people who can cast them, but that lowers their effectiveness because the probability that a bad comment is downvoted would plummet.
So you "uncovered" that third parties were offering incentives to donate for her medical care but somehow a campaign that is explicitly against your TOS continues?? http://www.gofundme.com/613loo
Jerri Ellsworth doesn't sound like a fan of Valve's structure based on her time there.

http://www.wired.com/2013/07/wireduk-valve-jeri-ellsworth/

A lot of the time employee handbooks preach one thing, but reality is often quite different. Another good example of this is "Netflix's Culture" slides. They are often lauded as cutting edge ways of thinking about company culture, but are actually a load of bull that no one at Netflix really adheres to, and the benefits touted do not even apply to all employees.
> Anon the intern needs to be able to open up Programmingâ„¢ and click 'New Web Form'

are adequate for people who usually don't program, and extremely inadequate
for people who usually do.

Let's change the example to "Start Web Server" instead.

I think the best solution for this is the way Go does it. It takes the best of both worlds.

http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)

That's one line to start a web server on port 8080. It's as easy as pressing a 'Start Web Server' button, yet it scales to dl.google.com.

The problem is when you press 'Start Web Server' or 'New Web Form' and it generates 300+ lines of boilerplate code that you now have to look at, maintain, and waste your attention on. Advanced users don't want that, and novice users aren't happy about it either.

Instead, take high level things and make them available via high level APIs, that are also extensible and flexible to allow tweaking of what you want [1], if/when you need to.

[1] https://github.com/golang/gddo/pull/143#issuecomment-3194318...
You can do a lot of static analysis of dynamic languages. Check what PyLint/PyFlakes does for example

It's probably not the dynamic language that is the problem, but its constructs.
I'm not complaining about my job. Just saying that what the author describes doesn't reflect the reality he seems to suggest.

I'd probably code for free if it didn't mean I would eventually starve.
Good on you! You were lucky to the point of creating something that you got the rich to back you and lucky that people used your product.

For the unlucky their is the patent system in which can be used to get ones fair share!
Google ventures use algorithms to help with investment decisions in they don't call it a board director, but its essentially the same thing.
There's already an infinity of emotions which you can express with the comment box. I don't think another flavor without a different mechanism adds anything to the dynamics of commenting, which is what this article is discussing.
When you decentralise something, you tend to take away moderation and curation, which keep the general quality of offerings above a certain bar. I'd be curious what the author of this project suggests in this regard, or what measures he has put in place to mitigate the degradation of quality that can come from not having any kind of moderation or curation.
You have quite a few muddled definitions that you trip yourself over in your post. First you say that you're an engineer, which means you're an "applied scientist". Then afterwards you go on to claim that computer scientists aren't really "engineers" by your definition. Then further down you go on and say that they're instead "specialists". Sounds like you just had to find another word other than "Engineer" there, so you picked specialist.

Then again... You mention that the job of an "engineer" is to "develop a solution". Well, that's pretty much what a software developer or software engineer would do. They're all grey, and it sounds like you're not quite sure of your own definitions. I can't tell if you're just confused about what all these terms mean to you, or you're just hurriedly trying to justify your own internal view of superiority over "non-engineers" because you're a "mechanical engineer" and don't like being on the same plane as them.

All in all, I should probably disclose that I've had this argument a few times with "engineers" in the physical sciences. They all had a vested interest in protecting the term engineer because if they didn't, it would devalue their worth and the degree they hold. And the government-body given "accreditation" that they lord over people for higher pay.
Awesome if it is a troll. More people should do it.

It appears this is an actual company though and they filled in Florida not East Texas?
This appears to be from 2011. Must not have panned out. I noticed that they were concentrating on running apps and didn't get into phone capabilities such as dialing, receiving calls, etc. Likely would need dual sims...
I also find it helpful "to know if someone has experience with what they are saying." Where we disagree is whether "Source: XYZ" is allegation or fact.
Thanks for the pointer, interesting, especially the use of a large-horizontal layout (with mini-map!).

However, I don't see 'like' and 'wrong' as opposites, nor as particularly useful categories.

The vagueness of 'like' has done wonders for Facebook, where it may be the right choice, but in more purposeful discussions, it conflates all sorts of different signals. Do you like it because it adds to the joint project of the conversation? Or just because you agree? Or because a statement contains flattering lies?

Similarly, 'wrong' obscures: wrong for mutually-uplifting progress in the conversation? Wrong on the facts? 'Wrong' also implies a negative judgment – an error that must be corrected – so there's still censure/sting.

In comparison, 'agree'/'disagree' (as an axis) makes clear that what is being applied is a more subjective, contingent evaluation. Mere agreement need not amplify (uprank) a comment, nor need mere disagreement squelch (downrank/fade) a comment.

A separate axis, for 'laudable'/'problematic', is how norms of behavior could be expressed – and these votes may affect placement/visibility. Ideally, the 'down' aspect of these ticks would be rarely used, because of the negative-spirals that punishment can cause. (It might even be the one kind of vote that requires extra gestures to cast.)

Not also that a 'disagree' and a 'laudable' should both be castable on the same contribution. (We could call that 'the Voltaire Vote': I disagree with what you say but defend your right (and manner) of saying it.)

Such contributions are, in my worldview, the most valuable. I can find endless validation of my existing biases/beliefs with preferred sources and carefully-crafted Google searches. Open discussion is for finding challenging new insights – things you might disagree with initially, or forever, but are still valuable.
Got it, thanks to your and tootie's replies.
I do believe her section of Valve was probably shut down based on the success of Oculus, at the time this article was posted on HN this did not seem obvious to most people. I'm sure it was a difficult decision for everyone involved.
Breaking backwards compatibility doesn't necessarily mean bad initial design. One of the main breaks of compatibility in python 3 was making strings unicode by default. The world changes, why wouldn't a language change to meet that need?

Honestly I think a lot more languages (cough, Java, cough, cough) would benefit from breaking backward compatibility (occasionally, like every 10-15 years) rather than force it to maintain cruft that no longer makes sense to keep.
It was interesting to hear how impenetrable the code for OpenSSL was even for experienced studs like the OpenBSD team that have handled openssh.

OpenSSL has been dragging around EBSDIC support that the killed off. 90% of people under 50 will never even have heard of it, and 99.9% of people would agree that support should have been dropped ages ago, once explained.

DOS support is another Bob mentioned.

DOS support for a program that all about TCP/IP. Y, for anyone that had to live through it DOS with a bunch of drives and HIMEM crap would get ping, telnet and a couple other TCP/IP programs.

Possibly somebody even wrote http server for DOS after it was already dead for 10 years.
* The goal is not for Anon to learn to program, it's to build lunch_app.

If anon wants to build software then learning how to should not be optional. The obvious alternative is to buy software, just as we buy most other things (cars, books, bread, etc).
I am sure there are many alternatives to the many proverbs of Go. Kensaku Segoe might be the source of many of them according to the wiki page for Go_Proverbs. Aside from that, I really like Thomas Edisons' quote on failure;

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” - Thomas A. Edison
A $40K salary in Alabama might very well give you a higher standard of living than $80K in NYC or Silicon Valley, where housing and other necessities are very expensive (and income taxes are probably higher).
Couldn't a partial explanation for this be that those in higher paying jobs (i.e engineering) are more likely to take their children to specialists to be diagnosed?
Disagreed. You can easily go for a full career without ever doing any low level programming.
TO;DH?
It's a very short article. I wasn't able to figure out whether the "higher risk" might just be higher rates of diagnosis. Tech worker parents are probably more affluent than the average and can afford better healthcare. This might also be why parents in finance and health occupations have even higher "risk."
"Fathers who worked in engineering were two times as likely to have a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Those who worked in finance were four times more likely and those who worked in health care occupations were six times more likely to have a child on the autism spectrum."
What common ancestor? You risk going so far back your suggestion is meaningless
I'm guessing "Too old, didn't hire?"
I use lighttable as my standard ide and enjoy using it... so it is already finished for some definitions of "finished".

(Sure, there's always room for more polish...)
Also, if anyone wants to contribute to helping Eden Alexander you can read about what she's had to go through and why she needs help here:

https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/eden-alexander-emergency...
Didn't spot that, will take a look, thanks!
This may be an unpopular opinion (certainly contrary to what the majority of publications on the web would have one believe) but I wouldn't consider Javascript a beginner's programming language.

C was hard for some kids to grasp in my high school class, but I didn't struggle with it, and it certainly taught me rigor and attention to detail. Ruby (on and off Rails) helped me build things without getting bogged down in syntax; the LOC-to-output ratio was quite gratifying. Only later did I progress to writing non-trivial Javascript.

While it's an incredibly powerful language (when I hear people describe the "enlightenment" of developing in Lisp, I'm often reminded of JS), it has a lot of warts that, as you rightly stated, can throw beginners for a loop. I imagine that if I had encountered the example you described above at the beginning of my career, I would have decided that Javascript is for the birds and resolved to just write C/C++ for the rest of my life.
I think Ruby hit its peak at the same time as people were deciding what language to write Puppet, Chef, Vagrant, Jekyll, and Github in, but it's more a coincidence than something inherent in the language that led to those choices.

Salt and Ansible, successors to Puppet and Chef, are written in Python. The author of Vagrant is writing his new tools in Go. The buzz and constant churn of new shiny things that I saw in the Ruby community a few years ago seems to have moved more to the node.js community these days.
Add a webpage as an reminder event in Google Calendar/iCal/Outlook directly
What If U.S. Cities Just Stopped Participating in the War on Drugs?
"I have filed a bug" sure sounds like a brush-off to me, especially when combined with the tone of the rest of the reply (which basically reads "Not our problem" -- while it might not be Google's own defect, it's definitely a problem for Google, and one that requires mediation).
Hopefully someone innocent wouldn't aim a handgun at a police officer.
This story is getting old: 7 postings in the last week:

https://hn.algolia.io/#!/story/past_week/prefix/0/game%20of%...
it looks like is the other way around, i don't get it.
We can certainly derive a "law" analog to Moore's law about exoplanet resolving power, but I suspect it will be a much less reliable predictor than Moore's law.
Always fun, next up doing a SYSGEN on RSX-11M :-) I'm impressed that the RKO5 worked. The filters on those things would often decay into dust.
I feel that after removing all unnecessary words from the essay, the rest 10 would be make something either trivial or arguable.
>Why janitors...

Because of supply and demand. Both of which can shift.

>Why are writers valued as they are?

Because everyone wants to read what their friend reads. It's a network effect even if not of the same strength as for social networks. So some make it really really big. Most make very little.
"WePay discovered tweets from others retweeted by Eden Alexander offering adult material in exchange for donations. This is in direct violation of our terms of service"

Which part of the TOS did she violate?
I disagree. Millions upon millions of people organize their photos just fine using existing tools every day. It's largely a solved problem. Is it inefficient? Maybe. Is it clunky? Possibly. But your average person does not have a problem with organizing photos.

You'll have to do a little better than say "it's not solved" to prove your point to me. Not that you need to prove anything to me. As I said, I'm just thinking out loud.
The way to do it is to combine manually-selected articles and auto generated (dynamically based on things like topic, date, time of day, popularity, visitor's locale, visitor's behaviour, visitor's preferences, commercial promotions, segment etc etc).
Would love to go to a museum with a chronological tour of computing.
>I would have to see stronger evidence to rule out that an adapted giant biped cannot reach 15 feet.

I didn't say an adapted biped can't reach 15 feet, but a modern human with a pituitary tumor cannot. Which is what the OP suggested. There are too many health problems associated with 9' giants of Wadlow's type for bronze age medicine to overcome, much less 12' or 15' giants.

>You don't know that. Even in antiquity, with Iron Age medical care, men commonly lived to 100 years, with the absolute limit, as placed by the Etruscans, at 110 years

I'm not talking about the lifespan of a normal human who happens not to develop any terminal illnesses, I'm talking about the lifespan of a giant with a pituitary tumor. At the extremes they have too many medical problems to live anywhere near a normal lifespan. Wadlow could barely walk, he couldn't feel his legs so he constantly developed blisters (this is what eventually killed him by the way), and like all extreme giants he had heart problems because his heart was enlarged and couldn't handle his pumping blood throughout his enormous frame.

Keep in mind these are the problems with a 9' giant. Now imagine the medical problems of a 12' giant. He would be a third taller and probably at least 2 times heavier. There is no way someone like that is going to survive in the bronze age, unless he is either of a subspecies that is adapted to growing that tall, or conditions were somehow different.
When you show someone a mathematical formula using standard infix notation, and then want them to write a program to implement it, it's immensely helpful if the syntax of the language is close to the mathematical notation. Infix operators are a huge boon to readability for beginning programmers, especially those with some science/math background.

This is the subject of some extended discussion in the new PEP proposing a Python infix operator for matrix multiplication. http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0465/
Get an internship at a company you think you will like to work at, something with 10-15 people I think is ideal. If you can't find one yet make some small projects help some friends or build something at a hacker space and try again.
> Visual Basic was phenomenally successful as an end-user programming tool.

Was? So what happenened, where did it go, why isn't it still filing the role you are aiming at?

Another example, held in somewhat better regard by programmers, of a phenomenally successful tool that let end-users build working programs, is Hypercard. Which definitely isn't around anymore.

Looking at the prior art of tools that have succeeded at letting end-users build programs is probably a good bet. What they did right, what they did wrong, why they don't exist anymore even though they were succesful, if they don't exist anymore.
Pick the WORST task. Always.
Audience recording of the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnBbhXBDmwU
Some have suggested all ammo sold should be traceable to the buyer. If that's a good idea, perhaps we could start with the much-smaller task tracking all ammo issued to law enforcement. (A chemical-tagging mechanism like SelectDNA could help identify kill-shots even when the bullet passes through the victim or is otherwise unrecoverable.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SelectaDNA
The software used to create this is MagicPoint. The link in the slides is wrong, currently the website is http://member.wide.ad.jp/wg/mgp/
Upvoted for using PDO.
There is also so much one can do with a static language.

Dynamic languages are preferred by those who don't want the conservative verbose static type system to get in the way of writing code. You can design a static type system that is less verbose (e.g. via more inference), but then it can become more conservative (H&M's inability to deal very well with semi-unification in the form of subtyping and assignment). That is the "hump."

Smarter "more magical" compilers are a nice idea in theory, but hard to realize in practice. There are even limits to the kind of analysis we can do dynamically, but they are a bit less constrained then what we can do statically.
R3 – High-performance URL router library in C
> For the average user, Hands Free permits easy browsing while eating or multitasking,

How can you eat and utter voice commands at the same time?
Eventually, drones will be able to follow and even shoot the suspect. Don't worry, other specialized "judge & jury" drones flying in close formation will ensure due-process is rapidly followed.

Simply because it's a great story on some related issues, I'll again recommend Neal Stephenson's "Jipi and the Paranoid Chip":

http://www.vanemden.com/books/neals/jipi.html
It's a shame there's not even a tiny bit of JS in the pages. Being able to press right or down to advance would be nice. Though I like how lightweight it all this.

I suspect the software is old and the link hasn't been updated in its source.
Exactly...engineers & finance I could maybe see doing the semi autism thing, but when the article claim docs have a even higher rate...no way. Docs are patient facing..there is no way that flies under the radar. There has to be some other factor interfering (like your theory).
It would only be a partial explanation, though, since the mother's career by itself doesn't appear to have the same relationship.
Articles like this one annoy me, because it's easy to diagnose big problems -- here, watch me do it: "Why should compilers choke if you forget a semicolon? If they can diagnose a syntax error, can't they also fix it? Can't functions be smarter about seeing when they're used improperly and tell you while you're writing the code instead of when you're running it? Why can't the code be understandable to anyone who knows English?"

What's hard -- and often impossible -- is fixing those big problems, because a lot of times they're genuinely intractable; and when they're not, they're often so difficult that they might as well be.

So just sitting around and complaining about them sounds insightful, but it doesn't really get anything done. And yeah, I know that they're allegedly working on "fixes" for these issues, but based on the track record so far (LightTable promised all sorts of revolutionary views of what an IDE could be; it's delivered... not a whole lot of revolution), I don't have any faith that Aurora is going to amount to much either.

And I don't want to be too negative, because sometimes a previously-intractable problem turns out to now be tractable, and it takes someone who was willing to question long-accepted pain to find that out. So I'd be pleasantly surprised if this project delivered something that had even as much effect as the development of, say, git or xunit. But I'm not holding my breath.
For WePay it's not about risk, it's about being compliant with the rules laid down by the bank they use. The banks don't want to be involved with payment processors who process adult-related transactions, and if companies like WePay don't play ball with the banks rules then the banks walk away and WePay has to close.

There are probably situations where a company like WePay has to take the stance of better safe than sorry and not piss off the bank, because if the bank gets pissed and walks then bye-bye WePay.

So when WePay sees the owner retweets the tweets encouraging violating the TOS, they can't risk losing their relationship with the bank that processes their payments. On the one hand they might alienate some customers or put someone in an unfortunate situation, on the other hand their business collapses because they can no longer process any payments. Shutting down some accounts like this one is sad, but for payment processors it's their only real choice.
I like the term 'coder'. It essentializes what I do, it does not diminish it. In my view making software is a craft, closer akin to woodworking (or painting!) than engineering.

In my non-screen tiem I try to make beautiful things out of wood. The "correct" term in that community for what I strive to be is "cabinetmaker". I am not offended when people call me a carpenter. Their understanding of "carpenter" is a bridge from their mindspace to mind.