skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a scary fact: Once humanity figures out how to reach and colonize our nearest star system, assuming it takes us 1,000 years each time we colonize the next closest star systems, it would only take 25 million years to colonize the entire galaxy. 25 million years is nothing. So why isn't the entire galaxy teeming with intelligent life? Our universe has been around for 13 billion years - plenty of time for this to have taken place.

The most likely answer (and one we don't want to admit to ourselves) is that intelligent species have a certain lifetime limit. Most species die off within 3 million years.

An alternative answer would be that advanced intelligence figures out a way to delve into mind or other dimensions, rather than outwards into physical space.
And by the end I was thinking, "wow, only groped once a month? That's ... well, probably the most positive thing on this list!" Jesus.

No matter how many time I read things like this (or hear about it from personal friends), I'm always stunned the next time. And one thing in particular bothers me, besides the obvious: I'm not aware of any of the guys /I/ know acting this way. But statistically, I know they must. (I'm not limiting the sample to people I'm close friends with, so it's not the magical aura of civilizing power that I exude that makes those around me acting like decent human beings.) That leaves only the possibility that when it happens, I simply don't notice. Yikes.
> because of clueless/incompetent sysadmins is a huge mistake

I think clueless is a little strong. We've just gotten to a time where the usual connection between network administrators and users is pretty loose. You don't actually know who is running that coffee shop wifi, so you can't ask for your applications to be unblocked.
Context: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/26/yesallwome...
A Public Shaming of E-Commerce site Durated
Etkili Backlink Paketleri
Classic racism.

Is rap really more misogynistic than rock? Or is it perceived as such for obvious reasons.
No. It will not inevitably be used like that. It may through short-sighted and wrong-headed thinking be used like that. I quite definitely is not intended to be used like that. Let's judge things on their intent, rather than hypothetical ways they can be abused.

This sort of thing is designed to prevent one-size-fits-all schedules, while still managing to report and analyse the effectiveness of the material. Without analytics and metrics we have just been guessing, so technologies like active textbooks are going to give an amazing amount of insight into the best way to design courses to benefit the maximum number of students. We no longer have to worry about the smartest kids getting ahead of the class and becoming bored and disruptive, because their textbooks will download extra material designed to be of interest and use to them, for which they will receive additional credit. And so on...
yup. I think this is the reason so much eCommerce software is Java (& I'm sure there is a bunch of C# but that's not my thing). Java moves like a glacier but damn is it ever stable, and for those who wish to be "cutting edge" there is everything-under-the-sun on the JVM -- Clojure, Scala, Jython, JRuby, slimmer-by-the-minute Java APIs. And the community is just working their lil buns off trying to modernize this stuff while maintaining interop / backwards compatibility.

I think the flack Java gets is for not modernizing fast enough, but I think in a way that makes you stop and smell the roses (the roses being many years' worth of badass JVM features and massive flexibility/reliability in software development).

But Ruby & Python (I am an ex-Ruby guy) take this cutting edge thing wayyy too far & end up with a community of people who can't trust them anymore cuz they all had their damn feet shot off. Sometimes I see the rates for Ruby guys & wonder if they're high cuz its so productive or just cuz its very niche & the stack is shite. On principal, it's hard for me to imagine going back down that road after experiencing the JVM (plus, I'd like to get away from web one day...).

EDIT: Funny thing I just realized actually -- all the Ruby rates I've seen tend to be exactly on par with a lot of FUBAR niche near-extinct Java technologies. The only people I've seen do better than both these camps are down & dirty Linux/Oracle/Java guys. Maybe my view is skewed but I always feel like the rock-solid langs will live on & eventually "modernize" (though lets be real, modernize is kindof a BS term for slim API & lots of MVC tutorials). These other techs are at the mercy of market trends.
white man is back
Agreed. This is mostly marketing drivel.

True story from this weekend: I have been setting up some Cisco branded devices. 'Hidden costs' were mentioned in the presentation... I found plenty with Cisco's stuff: the fact that their reams of documentation are almost designed not to get you moving, the fact that they insist on using RS232 console cables in this era of zero RS232 port availability, the fact that they constantly software-license features that complicate getting anything done, the fact that they want you to use some kind of ridiculous Java interface (that won't run on most versions of the JRE, on most platforms), the fact that their systems take minutes to tens of minutes to reboot despite being built for purpose... I'm sure I could go on. I've wasted hundreds of hours on Cisco kit in the last 20 years, and quite frankly I'm happy to avoid it whenever possible.

Huawei is kicking ass, Cisco is bullshitting everyone in this presentation as far as legally possible.
If it was just the annotations I'd be surprised, but this is just another incident by Mahbod that has caused RapGenius bad press. It was the last straw.
The only stories I've ever seen about Rap Genius have been ones which would make me never want to use their service.
> Medicare
stepping away from the context for a moment, the writing is also fucking terrible and overwrought. it reads like a cross between ignatius reilly and sephiroth
A 2048 AI with no hard-coded knowledge about good game play.
whats a good and performant mysql library for python 3 to use? or did you use postgres for all those projects?
The US has the highest per-capita health care expenditure in the OECD, by a substantial margin, despite being the only OECD country which does not provide universal health care.

Why on earth would we think that private sector hospitals work any better?
I guess I'm just saying that I think that most people won't find this sort of automation actually useful. Nerds will love it for the sheer nerdey pleasure of controlling every aspect of their world from a touchscreen, but I'm skeptical that it will go beyond that.

Most people won't want to monitor their lighting, HVAC, sound, video, pool/spa, landscaping fountains/lights, etc.
Why does git fast-forward merges by default
I hear this about relational databases too. Still to see an example though.
Yes, it is more misogynistic than rock.
I can appreciate RG's leadership having the self-awareness to see the need to make an Adult Decision in this case, but I think it's probably a mistake for them to continue hosting the Rodgers diary.

Contrary to Moghadam's comments, the diary is not particularly well-written. It's long, repetitive, weirdly detailed (the author recounts meals eaten years ago), and studded with evidence of psychopathy.

RG's style of annotation works extremely well for some kinds of writing --- song lyrics, The Great Gatsby, TS Eliot poems. What I think those things have in common is that they're hospitable to "riffing" and cross-linking; for instance, the lyrics to the ICP song where they come out of the closet as religious are totally incongruous until RG annotations inform you that they're reprised lyrics from previous ICP songs.

But riffing on Rodgers diary doesn't serve the same purpose, at least so close to the event. It is instead a minefield; almost anything you can say risks diminishing the tragedy, or misapprehending how the mind of a deeply mentally ill person functions, or, god help us, using the output of that mind as a platform on which to build suggestions on changing our culture.

There may be some point at which RG annotations will add value to this terribly sad artifact of Elliot Rodgers, but it probably won't be in 2014.
This is often overlooked as the single biggest failing of SPDY... its a protocol designed to work well for Google, which operates completely differently from every other web property.

Google in-houses everything so a single fast multiplexed connection to a single server makes sense. Every other website has external content, ads, like buttons, etc. and you end up having to spin up 30-40 independent SPDY connections, eliminating all benefit.
Here's why I think firewall punching is stupid and should not be supported.

IP addresses are logical numbers used to communicate with a host. In order to make it easier for humans to know what host to communicate with, DNS records were created to be able to easily communicate with a particular host.

In addition to figuring out what host we want to communicate with we need a way to specify what application we want to use. So service names were created and assigned to a static list of application port numbers. Two of these application service names are "http" and "https", which each provide a different application protocol.

We've built so many things that depend on these two application protocols that developers have finally outgrown what the protocols are capable of. But to get support for a new protocol is "hard". You have to do three things to successfully roll out a new application protocol:

1. Write a server for it and make people want to use it, 2. Write a client for it and get users to want to use it, 3. Get network administrators to open up their firewalls to support it.

Sadly, many developers are playing a cat-and-mouse game with network administrators. They want their applications to be used by anyone, anywhere, automatically. So they employ tricks to get their content past network administrators, like re-using the same application service names used by protocols which are ubiquitously supported throughout worldwide networks.

But this just creates an arms race with network admins. For example, mandating strong encryption to use a service means a network admin traditionally can't restrict what kind of applications work over it. So in order to fight their users subverting their approved applications policies, more and more organizations are doing SSL inspection by injecting CA certs into their employees' computers to block unauthorized applications.

Fighting network admins is a losing game, and does not benefit the users of your applications, or the developers. Instead of hiding more features and overlaying protocols, it would be more productive to create protocols that use their own service names and provide their own functionality and let users demand it be supported by the network admins. This is how all popular application services have been adopted over the years and provides the best quality of service to everyone involved.
Or I suppose you could get your own copy of Lessness and randomize it. http://www.samuel-beckett.net/lessness.html
Yeah $15 for the electronics. $20 to $100 for the battery depending on how good your hardware/software is. Probably a cast aluminum case, and then some way to get the antenna out. Plus the whole thing has to be rugged enough to survive the injection molding process which is no joke.

Worse is that even if the ENTIRE lo-jack is built into a single monolithic chip (which will take millions to engineer) you still have to power the thing. The transistors might be getting exponentially cheaper but the batteries aren't. And you need quite a bit of batteries to make this happen.

If you can get a fix to a warehouse you're OK but once the pallets go into an intermodal shipping container and stacked, you're SOL. Shipping container bottoms are made out of wood, not steel so sitting up on a truck they can still get signals. But once they're stacked you're in a world of hurt. Sure the containers might pop back onto the grid once they get unstacked but that might happen once they're out of the country, potentially to countries where you don't have subsidiaries who can go get them back.

So you have two fixed costs: batteries and data/cellular. You have to buy these and you have to pay for them on an ongoing basis. I think what would end up happening is that your battery and data (and plastic recycling and lo-jack refurbishing) costs will end up eating whatever profits you might manage to eke out such that it's not that great of a business to be in.
Exactly. Programming is about exploiting the machine you are on.

Write-once run-everywhere is great for corporate shops, but leads to the crucifixion of creativity and the abandoning of experimentation. I'd much rather have diversity in programming environments than the monopoly of Javascript.
Where does zenbowman mention race? His comment had nothing to do with it. Your assumption that rappers are all of one race and that it is perceived as misoginistic 'for obvious reasons' on other hand scream racist.
Python 3 simply suffers from a very serious image problem that was caused by the objectively terrible launch of the first couple of versions.
I completely agree. Since the release of Python 3, I've attempted to get familiar with Python and I always have this dilemma.

Which version do I learn first?

On a first, ignorant, glance learning Python 3 makes sense because it's the way of the future. Although, the more you learn, you slowly figure out that they're not that different; but, they're communities and supporting libraries are in two separate camps. It's like there's a cold war mentality of people who can't or won't port/migrate to 3 and the Python 3 crowd that looks upon the former with disgust and disdain. There's clearly a huge divide and it's uncomfortable and confusing for new folks to learn and get involved.

Now we're about 6 years since the first Python 3 release and I've never gotten involved with Python beyond a few days of tinkering. I've moved on, and based on my experience, people who are newcomers to programming are walking right by without a second thought. This coupled with the developers that are jumping ship, isn't good news for Python. They need a course change, and they need to make it quickly.

Just my $0.02.
"Brief Introduction to Neural Networks" – easy 250p e-book with lots of drawings
Sad but the brain tumour could still be the reason for his behaviour.

We don't know nearly enough about the brain to argue that the removal must restore the previous personality.
Popular rock could be crude (on a level with "Baby Got Back" or whatever), but it was rarely degrading in the way that a whole lot of rap is.

I don't think that's an inherent quality of the genre, though. But it is a fact of many of the popular artists.
I really don't think this has anything to do with racism. There are rappers from every race probably.

Rap is misogynistic, no doubt. Sure it has some positive sides to it (protest) but most rap today is not about that.
So do I (in some cases even stuck on Python 2.4) [RHEL 5]. But at the same time (re: Python 2.6) I never really thought "oh I really need the latest 3.4 or my project will fail". It doesn't offer dramatic speed improvement, concurrency, some nice built-in web framework or anything.

I would take 3.4 if someone else spent the time testing and validating my code against but I just don't have the time to invest because I just don't see an upside to it at the moment.
I wish more girls would tell their male friends about indicents like these. Reading about it on a blog does help, but hearing stories from people close to me (several of them) was very enlightening. It's easy to dismiss people on the internet as a group of vocal outliers.
"Soccer players should kick toward their weaker side more frequently than their stronger side."

I thought this was an interesting result, so I took a look at the source. It turns out it is a toy problem where the goalie always stops the penelty kick if she guesses right and the kicker always makes the goal if kicking to one side, and misses with some probability when kicking to the other.

This is clearly a toy problem that you can't draw any sort of real world soccer advice from.
> Looking at these, it's clear why native is beating the web right now in mobile.

Another point: Extreme amounts of money (commercial interests) are pushing closed ecosystems.
Medicare for example.
wow. surreal ...
Registry hack enables continued updates for Windows XP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misogyny_in_hip_hop_culture

Topic has its own wikipedia entry...with 71 footnotes.

Edit: Sample

Misogyny is prevalent in hip hop culture.[38] Overt misogyny in rap music emerged in the late 1980s, and has since then been a feature of the music of numerous hip hop artists.[2] A survey of adolescents showed that 66% of black girls and 57% of black boys believe that rap music videos portray black women in "bad and offensive ways".[39] Gangsta rap, the most commercially successful subgenre of hip hop,[40] has been particularly criticized and associated with misogyny.[7][41]

Even if this subject was "simply debatable", there is at least a prima-facie case that it should not be disissed out of hand. Nor in such a careless manner.
"It's long, repetitive, weirdly detailed (the author recounts meals eaten years ago), and studded with evidence of psychopathy."

That's exactly why it should be studied.
> they will never move on to python3

Sure they'll move on to python3, in the same way they moved on to C++, Scala, and VHDL.

Perhaps they will never abandon Python 2, like they haven't abandoned Cobol and Fortran. However, that doesn't mean they won't move on to Python 3.
It's strange to me that people still held the view that soldiers fight for their countrymen's freedom. It's not like Vietnam or Iraq were on their way to invade America in any foreseeable future.

Wars are fought for profit of the few, lives of soldiers are just part of the expense, which they try to minimize through propaganda and false promise of future care.
Okay, I think the grandparent post was a little off-base trying to lay blame at rap music, but I think he's talking about the pure surface-level content of the lyrics.

I mean, the rock music scene has problems with treatment of women - both in the fandom and the bands themselves - and if you start going back to the heydey of rock music you find utterly horrifying actions, but if you're talking about pure lyrical content? It's hard to say that any genre comes close to the proliferation of mysogyny in mainstream hip-hop.
How to Style Parisian Chic
yeah, absolutely
I believe it is subverted anger and perceived injustice that causes these types of riots. I don't think people think "hey, I can get some free stuff", but I do think they have the "man, this pisses me off" in mind when they leave for the gathering.

Look at the Watts riots in the 60's. I think everyone, at this vantage point in time, believes that was caused by the deplorable conditions there and the state of civil rights for blacks, and not because people wanted stuff for free.

The 2007 financial crisis had far ranging effects, and some of them take a while to percolate down and cause problems. My city is next door to a poorer one, and the first thing I thought of was, eventually, the crime in my neighborhood would go up. It took 3 years, but it happened.
I'm not suggesting it not be studied.
If an AI can speak it can tell humans why it did what it did. But it's impossible to look through it's brain and see for yourself. To see if it's telling to truth or exaggerating or rationalizing.
If you genuinely want to help, I suggest porting launchpadlib to Python3: https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpadlib/+bug/1060734

This is affecting other parts of Ubuntu, as we don't always install python2 anymore after porting all the default apps to python3. The lack of python3 launchpadlib means apport (the automatic bug reporting tool) doesn't work on some installations.

edit: porting launchpadlib requires first porting lazr.restfulclient, which might be genuinely challenging: https://bugs.launchpad.net/lazr.restfulclient/+bug/1000801
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in Talks to Buy NBA Clippers
If Amazon is the only firm, it will bear all the costs if fewer good books come out in the future.

What are you saying? That media always tends towards higher quality, especially after consolidation?

Therefore, it has an incentive to create an ecosystem that maximizes it's long term profit.

There's no reason why this would preclude vast oceans of swill produced by isolated independent artists, from which a few mega-hits arise from time to time. (App Stores?)

For example, think about fishing. If there are lots of fishing boats they will tend to overfish.

The problem here, is that in this discussion it seems that fish correspond to authors. I don't think that's correct. Authors of a given "species" aren't a partially fungible resource that is "killed" when utilized. (Unless the authorial landscape turns into a vast ocean of swill from which a few megahit one-hit wonders sometimes arise.)

Please cite just one historical example where a media monopoly increased the quality of authorship in its domain.
No, not really. Saying rap is misogynistic is an overgeneralization. It really depends on the subgenre which rap has many of. In the case of misogyny, it's primarily contained within the small gangsta rap subgenre, which has almost completely died out.
This is precisely what I would consider a minor improvement.
Twitter Has Quietly Learned To Censor And Ban Its Users When Governments Ask
Nobody loves glorifying a murderous rampage quite like CNN et al.
No more so than any news site.
> Why are you spreading lies?

Why are you assuming the worst possible intent on my part, instead of asking what I meant?

I meant the distros have Python 3 available, not that they make it the default that /usr/bin/python points to. Ubuntu has had Python 3 available for quite a number of releases; I run 12.04 which has Python 3.2 (and I've had it installed since I installed Ubuntu). According to the release notes[1], Ubuntu 14.04 makes Python 3.4 available, and work is ongoing to make it the default Python for Ubuntu. They also advise porting to Python 3.

It looks like CentOS makes Python 3.2 available, but I can't be sure from their online documentation.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TrustyTahr/ReleaseNotes
People laugh at the extreme detail the military uses to specify such item. I spent six years in USAF and I've groaned at some of it. But we damn sure never had this happen under SAC. And we were building nukes. Details matter.