skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There was a time when 'writing' was a specialist activity best left to professionals. Imagine if that never changed?

Writing = thoughts put on paper. When writing was a "specialist" activity it was due mostly to technical difficulties rather than people needing a whole new breed of skills. The anatomist analogy is a good one. But if we extend it to IT, it doesn't mean everybody should be able to program. Rather, everybody should know basic computer operation and how to use the most popular programs.
FT was quick to compare Piketty to Reinhart-Rogoff. Felt like a hit piece.
It's a bit of a worrying precedent. The test case was fairly trivial with a £270 fine for users calling a company that was about to plow their road “fucking shitheads.” But establish the law and you risk having folks like the Koch brothers sue you for $1m because someone on your site has called them or one of their organisations dishonest or some such.
From what I understand, it should actually be better for the battery life, as it has a lower base clock

http://ark.intel.com/compare/76308,75114
Thomas Piketty's exhaustive inequality data turns out to be flawed
What earlier implementations? The initial import of /bin/kill into the NetBSD source-tree accepted signal names and that was 21 years and 2 months ago. Same with FreeBSD and their commit message even implies that signal names were allowed in the original 4.4BSD-Lite source.

WRT shorter: Magic numbers don't just suck in programming.
Local subreddits seem to be pretty good.
Starquakes: maybe we can be a little frightened (2009)
Yes that's very possible. But I do know for a fact that Chinese working at security companies in China are already afraid to visit the USA.

Anyone working for Huawei in security visiting a hacker conference is going to have troubles getting a visa, even before this. I think this announcement is just for show.
Some newspapers want idiotic comments and actually moderate the more rational voices, because train wrecks attract viewers.
After reading a few shell scripts in Fira Mono, I find the serif on the lowercase "r" very distracting compared to Inconsolata. The lowercase "i" too, even though it looks very similar to Inconsolata's lowercase "i".

Also, for some reason I find the dot in the number "0" to be more distracting than using a slash to distinguish it from an uppercase "O".
I think it's safe to say that modern Web commenting utterly dwarfs the entire history of Usenet posting, making the latter pretty much irrelevant except as a historical note.

Look at the article's definition of trolling. They use "troll" as a codeword for "asshole". Real trolling is an art. You put some bait on a hook and see who bites.
Maybe I'm missing an important detail about the lifecycle of arctic ice, but...

If the arctic ice contains plastic particles...

And the particles are man made...

And man has only been making small plastic particles for roughly 100 years...

That would mean that the arctic ice was, at some point in the recent 100 years, ordinary sea water polluted with small plastic particles.

If this ice... was sea water in the recent past, then it must be superficial ice.

If superficial arctic ice is young enough to contain plastics, and is now melting, then this marks the return of sea water from as recent as 50-100 years ago...

If melting polar ice, polluted with plastics, is a new and disturbing event, then...

Does this mean that this is the first time polar ice of that age is melting?

If 50-100-year-old polar ice is only melting just now, for the first time, then, in terms of rising sea levels, does this mean that sea levels have, thus far, only risen to their state as they existed at the end of the 19th century?

Or, is it that the arctic polar ice cap completely melts every summer and refreezes every winter?

If so, then won't a similar amount of plastic be recaptured when the arctic polar ice cap refreezes? Or are we now fretting at the idea that the arctic polar ice cap will fail to refreeze?

And doesn't that mean that 2 years ago, and 10 years ago, the polar ice cap was capturing just as many plastic particles when it refroze?

And if this plastic-bound ice has also melted during the past few summers, didn't it redistibute its captured plastics back into the ocean?

If the arctic ice cap is (or was) trapping large quantities of man-made plastics, then the sea ice doesn't seem to be the real story here.

The real story seems to be the horrendous amount of plastics in the ocean. The arctic polar ice cap, on the other, hand seems to be an unfortunate additional detail.
It's unclear if the graph is adjusted for inflation. If you consider currency inflation since 1987, and that graph hasn't adjusted for it, diamond prices may have gone down significantly.
What do you mean by transition into another career? Using your programming experience in a tangential field? Getting into management?
What is not mentioned in this story is the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme that started in 2003. This was as a result of concern about 'conflict diamonds'.

Essentially, if you bought through De Beers then you had a 'conflict free' diamond, with a diamond from anyone else then you were taking your chances. Although the KPCS had noble intentions it also was a means of controlling the market.

Maybe that is why we had concern about 'conflict diamonds' in the first place - De Beers needed a new way of controlling the market and it ties in with a lot of the narrative presented here.
I really wish GitHub would show me all diffs with `-w` by default, with a switch to turn it off...
How do you install stuff like this? I've never touched Haskell, I tried "cabal install wordpass", but it seems it doesn't exist.
Who is working in the office and not sitting in front of a computer for hours these days?
There's also a language barrier -- a lot of engineers in Chinese companies aren't as fluent in English as would be necessary to have a good or productive time at DEF CON, so it would have to be more senior/management type people.
Here's another question some will surely find irritating: why would you take your laptop and work phone on "vacation"?
By no means. I believe that having GDP per worker be 4x median wage is socially and politically dangerous, and results in persistent high unemployment because of lack of demand.

The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. Capital needs a return, but we've seen current levels of wealth inequality in the past and it means bad things for the average person.

Edit: Another way of stating my position is that I'm against extreme income inequality. That does not mean that I am in favour of perfect income equality.
I made something similar [0] but based on Diceware [1] and a book you pass on to the app. It generates passphrases by using words from the book.

[0] https://github.com/pjaspers/frasier

[1] http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html
And when this discussion is up - You guys that use Co-Lo in US, East cost, New York area and around there - Who do you use?
Is there anyone special you should look at?
One ( flawed )way to look to general fossil fuels is that they basically replaced ... slavery/peonage/unfree-peasant-try. That may not have been the only way, but it was in (low-resolution, crummy, more-or-less) fact what happened.

And spend the oil capex on what, exactly? Alts? If someone had a really good story on alts, they'd be trying to be the Emperor of alts, not just sitting there. Margins in oil stuff aren't good and it's got a lot of flywheel in skills, infrastructure and distribution. Spend a weekend driving around on the Eagle Ford shale some time.

Oil equipment uses solar panels because it's used close to off the grid. It's not like they don't know about it.
17 videos from wroc_love.rb 2014
This is why the coming AI overlords will not need to kill anyone. They will just be really convincing instead.
>>You should have used one of the many professions that currently involve no coding at all as an example.

Okay, I'll bite.

My dad is an ophthalmologist in Turkey. He runs his own private practice. When he opened the clinic in the early 90s, he quickly realized that keeping track of patient records in paper format was not efficient. So he taught himself Microsoft Access (which came out in 1992!) and wrote his own patient record management software, which greatly increased his productivity and therefore income/leisure time.

Fast-forward to 2011. I was organizing an international conference and needed to send out some email blasts. The problem was, all the email addresses I needed were on a several hundred page PDF document with no clear format. So I had a choice: I could spend days manually copy-pasting and cleaning stuff up, or I could try to automate it. I ended up writing a Ruby script that grabbed the embedded text and pattern-matched email addresses and spat them out onto a text file. Still not perfect (my regex was rudimentary) but it got the job done a lot faster. Learning basic Ruby took me several hours, and I ran into some (silly) issues [1], but that's still better than the several days I would have spent doing the task manually.

You may be thinking, "well, we have specialists for that sort of thing today." Sure. But just like there are many rural areas in the US where it doesn't make economic sense for ISPs to lay out fiber, there are many personal tasks and errands where it doesn't make sense for professional developers to write software for. So there is a lot to be said for the need for individual empowerment through programming.

[1]http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6566884/rubys-file-open-g...
Perhaps our discomfort with the Chinese[1] has more to do with defending our secrets (business, political, military, infrastructure etc) than our delicate sensibilities, though I hear where you're coming from.

Still, wouldn't you say it's in the US's interests (and Canada's, for that matter) to try to marginally disrupt the flow of tips of the hacking trade to the Chinese, in spite of the despicable aftertaste?

[1] http://www.projecthoneypot.org/statistics.php
Bluetooth Data Points
Gasoline 15 years ago was way under expected price based only on the estimates of inflation. It goes up, it goes down. There've been times Cushing, Ok was full and gas was way up.
Yes, but teaching them protocols and network infrastructure? I can't think of a worse way to get them excited.

That being said, I think Quick Sort is a lousy sorting algorithm for teaching. Mergesort and Treesort are much better.
Google barges
I've instantly fallen in love with (the mono version of) this font. One thing that is a bit unfortunate though is it seems to have some odd line-height/descender thing going on.

In Sublime Text 2/3 I can fix this easily with:

"line_padding_top": 0,
"line_padding_bottom": -2

But in iTerm2 all you get is a basic 'vertical character spacing' setting, and the best I could do looks like this:

http://ryanfunduk.com/img/scrn/bfada15f2d749c70afcfa94fd0aed...
Uupvoted because of the deep insight about the greatest marketing campaign ever.
> Last I checked they still haven't given an explanation for that.

They gave an explanation right in the article you linked to.
The Wirecutter: the best technology to buy based on research and testing
I don't know, I'm using a 12" Thinkpad X and I feel like I could bear if the screen would be a tad smaller, so I was excited about a prospect of a 10.6" tablet/laptop. I guess, I'll wait and see: Surrface Pro 3's are not going anywhere, not sure about the older models. Unlike Thinkpads, I'm afraid Microsoft made not very many of these. Sorry for the accessories though: the innovative things like Freedomcase just started to appear for the old form factor. http://www.freedomcase.com/
That specific articulation of value is also a recent development:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard#The_object_val...
> DuckDuckGo ended up greatly impeding my ability to work, because its results were so bad (for me, and my specific search topics).

You might want to try DuckDuckGoog that lets you use DuckDuckGo for bang queries and Google for everything else, so you get the best of both worlds.

http://www.duckduckgoog.com/browser
Strange animals may have their own distinct nervous system
Is Work Your Happy Place?
Or even if for cultural reasons the secondary market remains relatively unimportant, you'd expect prices to fall in the primary by quite a bit. Must say I'm surprised that it hasn't happened already. So far no defections seems like a reasonable guess, though I Googled for 10 seconds and couldn't find any further discussion of that guess.
House Committee Puts NSA on Notice Over Encryption Standards
> Although the KPCS had noble intentions it also was a means of controlling the market.

De Beers used the film Blood Diamond with DiCaprio as a positive marketing tool (they bought advertising with it -- 'De Beers presents...'). It popularized the notion of 'conflict diamonds' and then they calm the fears of their customers with the certification mechanism. More importantly, it creates legal opening for countries to ban the trade in non-certified diamonds.
> As a part of the cutthroat competition, Microsoft decided to revise the SSL 2 protocol with some additions of their own, and specified a protocol called "PCT" that was derived from SSL 2. It was only supported in IE and IIS.

These motherfuckers...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
Programming = putting thoughts into computers in executable form.

I think all people should learn how to make computer do their bidding at a rate more than one click at a time.
Change your eBay password right now
NAZI'S AT TOP
and the Google Shuttle is an illustration of what a CS education is good for
A completely arbitrary value that only requires a critical mass of women to being valuing some other arbitrary gauge of status as a surrogate. Consider how in the last few years owning Apple products has become its own perverse symbol of status, because Apple played an extremely effective rebranding campaign.
Anything, really (well, aside from areas requiring additional formal education and/or expensive in time and/or money credentials; this not a path to becoming a doctor, lawyer, scientist, etc.). There's very basic "work skills" that any job requires, e.g. showing up; the object here is to get a "real", career type of job before, say, a couple of years have passed unemployed, after which I've read its very very hard to get such a job.

I would also imagine it's easier to transition to something else desirable from a programming job compared to retail (which isn't doing well anyway), food service, etc., jobs which many of us are mentally/temperamentally unsuited.

When I read/skimmed it, What Color is Your Parachute?(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Color_is_Your_Parachute%3...) spent a lot of ink on this. And as has been noted by many, most Americans change careers several times, it's definitely not out of the ordinary.
Shell company name Buy&Large reference to Wall-E?
Does it include equity?
Look at the chart for non-major interest in upper-level CS classes at Harvard: operating systems has no interest; "data science" is surging. Andrew Ng's machine learning class has more than twice the enrollment of computer architecture or software engineering (which is a particularly pathological case, since by definition, nobody else can teach Andrew Ng's class).

This is not general-interest demand. Students are hopping on the bandwagon, and picking the classes that sound like they're the shortest path to a high-paying job. About the only thing colleges can do right now is offer more of the hot classes via lecturers, and wait for the crash. Universities don't hire (lifetime) tenured faculty based on short-term enrollment surges.
"also have been known to use their intelligence agencies to steal information from other countries to help their domestic industries."

Yes, that does appear to happen. And, based on my server logs at least, I'm going to say suspicion of China doing this seems reasonable.

However, as bad as using intelligence agencies to benefit private corporations may be, the US could be accused of using it's military paid for by public funds and actually killing large numbers of people to benefit private industries. Not saying the US isn't right. But, until its behavior improves on the international stage, its hard not to roll ones eyes in disgust.
Plenty of software engineers make this as well. (you must include equity which is often not reported in surveys)
SSD middleware breakthrough gives up to 300% speed boost
"In some ways the new FT criticisms may not matter much, although I think not in a way which is reassuring for Piketty." - haha

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/wha...
Yes it melts, yes it refreezes. But more is melting each summer, and less is refreezing each winter. That's why there's excitement about opening of the northwest passage - shipping and oil drilling in the arctic that wasn't previously possible.

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/05/Figure3.png

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/08/climate-chang...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/opening-of-northwe...
Early in my career in software I was making
six times what a high end, new Camaro cost.
That might be $300 K now.
You have to understand that FT is a conservative news organization. If you think about their primary audience (wealthy businesspeople), it was no surprise that they tried to take a shit on Piketty's work.
Genetic Manipulation: The First 50,000 Years
Another instance of MakerBot trying to patent things they didn't invent
why are we not sending all greedy autocratic leaders of world to a space station for a three months vacation?
Amount of old ice in Arctic, 1987-2013:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-BbPBg3vj8
Nursing Job Website Comes Up With a Disruptive Business Model for Career Sites
WorldNursingJobs.com is a game-changing global jobs listing resource specializing in the nursing industry.
You should neither learn coding nor computer science unless it is to become your profession or hobby. This is almost the equivalent of suggesting that everybody should learn to do a heart surgery, fly a plane or design a sky scraper just because it may come in handy some day. I am of course aware that some knowledge around computers is much more likely to help you out in some situation than being able to do a heart surgery but that is unimportant - important is the complexity of the thing suggested to learn. There is just no way you can learn anything interesting within an amount of time that is so short that it makes sense to suggest that everybody should just do it - not for doing heart surgeries, not for flying planes, not for designing sky scrapers, not for doing computer science, not for programming. And even if you could learn something interesting in say 100 hours, the equivalent of a dance course of two times two hours per week for six months, neither computer sciences nor programming would be a good suggestion. What people really encounter and ask there friends working in IT to fix are typical system and network administration problems - malware, crashes, network issues, (un)installing software, driver problems, configuration problems and so on.
Nor is the median outcome of someone entering finance to be a VP at Goldman. But bottom 50% programmers can still take well-paying jobs with good hours.
Exactly. I'm still deeply surprised that the overwhelming response to the original FT piece wasn't basically "Biased people are biased."
> I wish it'd tempt more designers to bring their knowledge and experience to bear on the script, given the opportunity to make critical contributions.

I wonder if non-Korean type designers are hesitant to work on Hangul fonts because they're illiterate in Korean. I could imagine that it would be hard to have good intuitions about readability and appearance for a writing scheme one doesn't understand.
Conferences are better for that than college, all things considered, and the networking is better too.
Yes, you're missing an important detail about the lifecycle of arctic ice.

Multi-year ice is about 6 years old. There's no 100 year old ice there. Every year it gets slushed, reaches a minimum around September and builds up again. The minima are dropping, btw. Both in extent as in volume.
A slightly long winded way of addressing this dead-horse of an issue, so that even clueless managers and leaderless dimwits can understand why this idiotic concern keeps cropping p all the time:

When you look at the history of technology, it is always removing humans out of the system that leads to higher productivity - machines taking over in agriculture, assembly line + robotics, automation in textiles etc..

About the only thing not done yet is to replace humans in programming itself - maybe it can take a similar path as it was done in language translation; use statistical techniques on huge corpus of human-written code snippets (tagged via domain areas), and spit out solutions even if it is only approximate upto a certain confidence interval. The remaining details can be filled in by humans (and you may not need many of them). Of couse IDEs' do this somewhat with auto-code generation at a very minimalist sense right now.

Maybe it needs to be combined with self-correcting programs that evolves and adapts to new conditions. Yeah all vague but we may be moving in this direction - hardware itself is getting more 'soft', so the graying of the boundaries between h/w and s/w is possibly another direction we are heading towards, and may converge with the AI driven model.

Till that happens, it is the managements job to motivate humans as it is done for ages - with carrots and sticks. As you see with apes, sometimes we all have to groom each other, eat the lice, kiss here and there, rub the genitals and be co-operative.

You can also try to be 'inspiring' (most humans are suckers for hero-worship, and prone to worship false idols), and generally with a more intelligent bunch, it is more effective by 'leading by example'. You want your team to work hard, prove that you can be with them in the trenches, and do the same.
The sample on the page looks pretty horrific in terms of kerning.

I'm not very fussy about fonts. Am I the only one seeing this? Does the sample fairly represent actual use?
And, with little real positive effect, these types of actions can appear aggressive, petty, unreasonable and produce negative sentiment.

Personally I don't see the need for the bellicose rhetoric emanating from Washington lately. I would think it wiser to at least appear friendly and co-operative whenever possible while warning in private up until it's time to take real measures. Then take those for real. Don't indict 5 guys you are never going to get, then make a big show of suspending conference visas. It appears paranoid and weak in my opinion. But maybe that's why I am not a policy maker.
Make sure you do background checks (references + backchannel).
I wonder if 3 vulnerabilities in 3 days means this device has exceptionally bad firmware compared to other similar devices or is just suddenly getting a lot of attention from skilled hackers.

Guessing by how frail software on these types of devices (routers, access points, home automation stuff, DSL modems, cable boxes, consumer NAS enclosures, etc etc) often feels, I fear it's the latter.
It's not great. The "Me" in "Medium" in that PNG is most egregious. I'm not sure whether it's a problem with the font or if their designer was messing around with letter spacing in Photoshop.
> in a sense that he is talking about a seeded pnrg

That little "p" makes all the difference. The post I was replying to was asking about the precise definition of "random", not "pseudorandom".

As you allude to, any real randomness in such a scheme needs to come in the form of a seed.