skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> An Oxford comma is not a flip switch in an author's voice, it's a decision made in the moment to maintain the flow of the idea.

This is simply a run-on, not a use of an Oxford comma as I understand it. And these bother me a lot.

"An oxford comma is not a flip switch in an author's voice"

is a grammatically complete sentence. So is

"it's a decision made in the moment to maintain the flow of the idea."

Separate them by a strong punctuation mark. If you want the rhythm of a comma, separate them by a semi-colon in preference to a stop. Semi-colons are made for this.
The law is clear that information that is relevant is fine. Thus, a friend asking for dating advice is entitled to the relevant information about whether J is a rapist or not.

EDIT: also, the state is not muzzling; the courts are. Even the UK has separation between the legislature and the courts.
The problem with biological attacks is that the agent can be designed for years, then spread quickly and the process to stop it after it has been spread is hard; the virus/bacteria has to be found, analysed and then some specific solution/treatment must be found/designed. In days or weeks.

That is why I selected biological methods as an example. There will of course probably be many other areas where it might be easier to make an attack than to defend against one.

My point was -- this discussion will almost certainly get more intense, because of more extreme threats. [In some areas, the technological development will make it harder for the attackers, in others it will be much easier. And attackers choose how they attack.]

Edit: Clarity.
Sad, but true statements. These are some extras that I recruited for:

Call Center Analysts, Recruiters, Sales, Medicare Claims Processors.

It's not just requirements either. When I was a Mental Health Assistant I automatically got $1/hr more than non-degree holders.
> There's lot's of places that don't have FIOS now, but those folks also didn't have DSL in the late 1990's.

That's not true at all! Most people who had cable and/or DSL in the late 1990s/early 2000s don't have FIOS today!

> The average U.S. connection, according to Akamai, is 10 mbps. That's a huge increase over what it was even 10 years ago.

Yes, Comcast has spent lots of money in expanding access to new regions, since that's the only way they can acquire new customers. They don't care about customer retention (their customers have no other choices), so they don't need to do much (if anything) to improve service to existing customers. The stagnation you're talking about has already happened.

> Not everyone has so many choices, but I think the folks that don't have many choices today had even fewer choices back in the day.

In almost all of the towns near where I grew up, the choices available today are a strict subset of the choices available in the 2000s, except at massively increased prices[0].

> Heavy regulation of the sort that's appropriate for a power company is not appropriate for an industry where we expect private companies to invest billions a year in keeping up with new technologies.

All that says is that the exact mandates of the regulation would need to differ, which I would agree is true. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't be regulated as a utility at all.

As I said before, the stagnation you're talking about has already happened.

[0] Again, I'm not counting LTE as an option, because that's not viable as a primary means to access the Internet in 2014, and is unlikely to be so anytime soon.
really like how you implemented the try it out/demo on your landing page.
Monarch butterfly decline linked to spread of GM crops
If the store owner has to choose between using the data to make more profit or to enhance customer value, he'll likely choose the first option. You're not supposed to find the cheapest product easily, but that which provides the best profit ratio for the store owner. So, store layout will change in a way to manipulate your buying decision and you will not even notice the reason for the gradual change.
Your criticism of addendums to standard is warranted, except the standards we use are continuously upgraded. This week's news? HTTP/1.1. How about IPv6? HTML5? CSS3? Every time something new needs to be added, we must ask ourselves if it's worth it to start from scratch.

About security, your opinion is that the private network should be considered insecure for HVAC control. IMO someone changing the setpoint of your air conditioned is the least of your worries if someone gets in your network. But you might be right, perhaps there's a need for yet another level of security. If that's the case, then we can evaluate if we can use what's in the standard, or if we need something brand new.

These flaws (believe it or not)(...)

You can keep your snarky comments, thank you very much. A year ago I was the only one on the BACnet mailing list saying BACnet should get its shit together or a giant like Google or Apple would come and eat its lunch. I know these are flaws. I also know there are ways to patch them. The question is whether it's worth starting from scratch. You know how many Apple's engineers asked info on the BACnet mailing list? Oh right, NONE.

This smells a lot like young software developers looking at a complex software thinking they can do better... only to realize later that heck, some of these complexities were there for a reason.

Some other times, it might be 'cleaner' to start anew, but the shear effort to shift an entire industry ins't worth it. Make no mistake, it's an entire industry, and a huge one!

--

Again, were I Apple, I'd

- Refuse to use any BACnet device that didn't provide a minimum level of security, because it could lead to bad PR.

- Refuse to use any BACnet device that didn't operate on top of TCP at a minimum (because using TCP allows me to use (say) TLS).

- Refuse to use any BACnet device that wouldn't support both IPv4 and IPv6.

- Have to work with all the BACnet stakeholders.

- Have to make all of my software backwards compatible.

- Have to find some way of agreeing with all the stakeholders to market their Apple-compatible devices in such a way that Apple customers won't have to spend days poring over spec sheets to find out which BACnet devices are compatible with the Apple software.

--

In other words, make your own walled garden where you can do what you want. That's pretty much the history of Apple, unfortunately. Sad days for those yearning for more open protocols.

BACnet is just a protocol, and a complex, bloated one - if it's flawed such that to fix it we must change it drastically, it's probably easier to just replace it.

MAYBE, but I've yet to see Apple (or anyone else) opening a discussion with the HVAC industry asking what's going on, what are the needs, etc.

What I do see, is a company on the brink of disregarding a standard in 3 of the biggest standard organizations, just 'because'.
How mistakes can save lives: one man’s mission to revolutionise the NHS
Toastio – The Next Generation of Wmail
Doesn't change the fact that you are always free to go to a cheaper college, or avoid it altogether. Even the college is free to set its own prices. I don't agree that the notion of a "free"-er market would fix this.
But the device is still visible on wifi even if it does not connect. Some phones tend will try to connect to known networks pro-actively and will leak the SSID of those networks.
I don't have multitouch (completely unaware whether the hardware supports it, not terribly interested), but I have bluetooth, wifi, and tremendous battery life that all worked out of the box on my System76 laptop.
Linux 3.15 Released
Several people in this thread are claiming that punctuation is used to convey information about how to pronounce the sentence.

You're saying (and I tend to agree with you) that written punctuation is about meaning, and not about where a speaker would pause to take a breath.

Can these two be kludged into a unified meaning? "Write better so that your written words sound good when spoken"?
I think the graphics stack is a sore point on most or all platforms that have to support multiple GPUs from multiple vendors, at least the stuff in between userland GL calls and the bare metal.

In an ideal world it would be obvious where to draw the line between the GPU- and vendor-independent bits and the common code shared by everyone, but not only is that very hard to do, it can change drastically over the years. Couple that with the fact that platform vendors have to maintain these imperfect interfaces for many years regardless, and that vendors can have their own abstraction layers in between the top layer of their driver code and the bare metal of all their GPUs, and you have a perfect storm of too many layers getting in the way and imperfectly defined interfaces to many of those layers, which necessitates occasional layering violations at every level of the stack if you want to avoid some pathological performance bottlenecks for some GPUs.

At best you end up with a bunch of ugly, imperfect, but generally functional software that more or less gets the job done at an acceptable level of performance.

I would imagine that the situation with Linux just adds yet more issues to that bag of hurt. GPU vendors don't always want to help out, and are likely to withhold valuable technical information that they don't want to be public. The whole process of defining how many layers there are, what functionality exists at what layer, and what interfaces are used between the layers is almost by definition (for GPU driver models at least) a bunch of questions for which there are no good answers, which is also a perfect storm for Open Source development. Any solution anyone comes up with is always going to have some caveats and gotchas, which for open, egalitarian development models means endless arguments and bikeshedding in which everyone involved is correct in pointing out the weaknesses of the system as designed, but there are no alternatives that anyone can point to that don't have similar problems in someone else's eyes.

For example, back in the '90s, for right or wrong I was very optimistic about GGI solving a lot of graphics problems for Linux, and that was limited to the 2D stuff (I can't imagine how controversial it would've been had it included 3D as well):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Graphics_Interface

It didn't pan out that way, but so much energy was burned by so many people arguing about it over so many years. :( I don't have authoritative knowledge of the whole thing, so maybe the doubters were correct, but at the time it felt like a bunch of people shooting down an imperfect solution while offering no solution at all.

EDIT: TL;DR designing a graphics stack that ultimately goes down to the metal is a set of very hard problems, many of which have no perfect answers. This, coupled with secretive vendors and the level of specialized knowledge required to even contribute to stuff like this, makes it an even harder problem in the Open Source world. Not an insurmountable obstacle, but a really hard set of problems nonetheless, for both technical and human reasons.
Object.defineProperty allows to overload get/set for a single key at a time.

Harmony proxies catch everything, and really overload the getter/setter mechanism.
As in poor analytical thinking non-technical? Edit: I just re-read my previous post and your response and I realize that I left out my masters degree (and bachelors) were in computer science. I'm guessing you inferred from the English and history tests that I am non-technical. My fault for leaving out the subject of my degrees.

I don't know. I've generally been one of the top engineers on every dev team I've been on, was the first engineering hire of one startup and am the director of engineering for the current one.

Is classify myself as an above average engineer. Not a superstar, but solid and I get things done and done well.

I basically see no correlation between my SAT score and my ability and success. It's hard for me to look at only the SAT scores of others and say much of anything about them.
Calling All Conservatarian Coders: Rand Paul Has a Gig For You
> However, you can already hack them in and there are multiple js projects that let you compile ES6 down to ES5, proxies included.

Of course, but will it still be as fast? For example we can trivially turn a Python expression "a + b" into a Javascript expression "a + b" to get a great speed benefit. It may even give correct results in benchmarks, but in general it breaks the semantics and therefore any frameworks which rely on it.

FYI in Python "a + b" is equivalent to "a.__add__(b)", and hence the correct Javascript would look more like "a.__add__(b)", but this requires a property lookup and a function call so a lot of the speed gains may be lost (although some benefits may be regained by JITting).

Considering that the parent pointed out how small this project's codebase is, it does give legitimate concern about how many rules there are for mapping Python's semantics to Javascript's. For example, the ShedSkin project has been around for years and gets very impressive benchmark results since it compiles Python to C++; however, it tries to map Python classes directly to C++ classes, which breaks the semantics immensely.
>I disagree. It simply means that raw follower count is no longer a usable metric to determine credibility.

But that is still a PD-type social cost: everyone loses from the fact that you have one less measurement channel than you could have.
True, but mostly besides the point? I mean, not only can you not freely substitute debit cards or paper checks for wire transfers, but also you potentially cannot even access funds in some savings account, say, through any of those, plus there obviously are many more services that banks provide that have nothing to do with payment, but which are affected by the same problem. Read some bad news and want to sell some stocks before the price plummets? Not today, you have been locked out for security reasons!
Yes, but the "bounce message" comes to the sender from their own mail system, saying "could not deliver".

This is important, because the receiving system doesn't have a guaranteed way of reaching the sender - modern spam typically fakes the "From:" and <return-path> fields - so well-run systems nowadays never try to do so for fear of generating what's referred to as email backscatter spam.
I'm saying that punctuation has already solved this problem with the semi-colon. If you have two sentences where the second follows the other so closely that there is barely a breath in between, use a semi-colon rather than a stop. You convey both meaning and flow at the same time, and you keep the grammaticasters happy.
Why would the pyramid scheme implode? Does the college loan industry pose a systemic risk like the banks did? If students fail to become middle class from being forced to pay off debts for stupid crap, someone is still getting paid.
The Supreme Court has long ago abandoned any interest in protecting the rights defined by the Constitution.
hapi.js, a rich framework for building applications and services
An n-dimensional shape can always be cut by n cuts into pieces of strictly smaller diameter. E.g. if you cut a circle in half you get two semicircles of the same diameter as the original circle, but with two cuts you can make three pieces which are all smaller than the original circle. If you cut a sphere with two cuts, you'll always end up with a piece at least as wide as the original sphere (e.g. if you slice it into quarters like an orange, each segment still has the original diameter). It seems intuitively obvious that this is true not just for spheres but for any shape. And indeed it is... up to something like n=7, possibly more. But in e.g. n=2000 the "theorem" is massively, massively false.
Looks pretty cool! I'd suggest improving performance - been waiting +5 minutes for my castle to be created.
Yes.

This article makes the ridiculous error of totally ignoring the fact that trivial access to loans and overall exuberance around college creates NO downward pressure on prices. So long as people are willing to pay almost anything and have access to the money to do so, prices will continue to rise. In my opinion, the "spiral" is largely the fault of excess government subsidization and price insensitivity. College is sold as a magic ticket into the upper class, and most people simply will never question this assumption.

Ending the flood of government money will force people to actually question the value of education and, as many people are priced out of the market, will hopefully lead to a rise in more efficient means of education like apprenticeships and cc.

That said, the article MASSIVELY distorts the extent of the spiral because it focuses on sticker price and not on net price. Evidently, the author doesn't realize that sticker prices are so high because colleges price discriminate. Very few people pay anything close to the listed price for college. For public colleges, the average net price is one third of the list price. For privates, the percentage is higher, but that's just because wealthy people are overrepresented at private colleges. Even then, the average net price isn't even close to the list price.

For example, I attend an "elite" private school. Although the sticker price at most of these schools is between $60,000 and $70,000 a year, massive grants are given to students that mitigate most if not all of the cost. I come from a family with slightly above-average income (but still decidedly middle class) and get a $50,000 grant from my school. I have a friend who is also middle class who is being given a full ride.

So, although this article makes a few fair points, it ignores the root of the problem and fundamentally misinterprets the data.
Hey! We flatten mountains in West Virginia too!
I'm thinking about the golden age of PHP. Lower amount of typing, and typing weak enough that whatever junk you type ends up in something actually displayed. The no-compilation part also lowers the barrier to entry and makes deployment easier. Also features the fantastic ability to break your production code by debugging it on the server!
Packaging a Python Library
Google and Facebook would also be protected by the Fourth, were it actually respected.
MH370: crowdfunding campaign to raise money to reward potential 'whistleblower'
There are many places in this world that have both high speed internet and sunshine (and beaches and tall drinks with umbrellas.). Many of these places are in different time zones from the rest of your team, leaving one able to sit on said beach (or bob around a short way out from it on a surfboard) for a few hours each day while your co-workers are either asleep or home for the night.

It's a solved problem.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/focus-fusion-empowerthewo...
>Without an oxford comma, a four letter list sounds like "This...that...c and d do that!"

It sounds more like: bit, bat, bot and bet do that to my ears. E.g the list flows in a continuous motion, and the "and" just denotes the last item ("and finally"), something like x:xs in Haskell but in reverse! "this, that, c : d do that"

>which in turn sounds like naming two things, then making a completely different sentence about the final two things.

This sounds like a projection, not from the sound of the phrase, but from your a priori idea about what the oxford comma would do there (e.g that it would evenly split the items of the list).
Yep, trying to fix that at the moment.
If only they thought of that a few years ago [1]
http://blog.erratasec.com/2013/01/i-conceal-my-identity-same...

I hope all the people with IOS8 won't be charged with wire fraud.
> It’s no secret that Airbnb’s housing stock is partially composed of listings that are technically forbidden by a landlord, co-op board, or city ordinance

This sounds like you tubes early days - ignore the copies of DVDs and music videos until have enough scale not tomworry anymore.

But ... That's not a proper strategy is it? And is there a class action means of preventing it? If a landlord sues Airbnb can they be forced to stop renting beds they have not legal right to?

Just catching up on the Airbnb story
I'm pretty sure the post you're replying to isn't talking about an iOS app, so IOKit doesn't have anything to do with it. They're saying that a store could install their own cell antenna to listen to nearby cell phones, record unique identifiers, and track customers that way. Apple is anonymizing MAC addresses to stop a similar form of tracking, but it won't work if there are other radio signals they can't anonymize.

Apologies if you knew that and I'm just not understanding your point.
if I recall correctly, Apple's Bluetooth BLE UUID is also randomized while in broadcasting mode.
To clarify the headline: the article doesn't suggest that this is a direct consequence of the GM crops themselves, but rather than the adoption of herbicide-resistant GM crops has led to much higher use of herbicides, killing non-GM plants such as milkweed that would previously have also lived in the fields and which are important to the Monarch's reproduction.
I'd be curious to get a summary of what Swift has that is not a mix of traditional OO and ML-family features.
I understand punctuation fine, and I think the author is wrong. While commas in general are not governed by hard rules, the "Oxford comma" is an extremely specific use of the comma: to separate the listing of 3 or more equal items. There's nothing artistic about it; it's exactly the sort of situation that simply needs to be consistent to be readable.

No offense to the author, who might be reading this, but it's possible to be too proud of your writing history and cleverness. Many people have had English teachers they loved, and any good writer has had a moment where they realized, or were told, to throw out the rules.

It's essential to note that these moments always come in high school or college or later, when kids already have more than a decade of writing instruction under their belts. No one tells a second-grader to throw out all the rules.

Because you're not actually supposed to throw them out. It's just a teaching technique to break through bad writing habits.
The object is between the camera and the plane?
> but the government has little reason to want me in jail

It has plenty of reason to want dissidents in jail which you may care about for various reasons both practical and ideological. Though I think jail is outmoded: with (near) total surveillance there are more effective deterrents.

I do think you are right about the lack of emphasis on corporate surveillance.
Is there a specific reason why you chose meteor vs other node frameworks? All I've heard is its not production ready yet - dunno if your performance issues have anything to do with it tho.
The increased use of chemicals is one of the strongest arguments against GMO, along with the power it grants to GMO suppliers.
They charge a 20% commission fee for everything sold.
"Total tuition" and "tuition charged to student" are two different numbers in this formulation.

"tuition charged to student" has jumped ~9k on top of inflation to compensate for a ~9k decrease in per student state funding.

As to why students don't switch to cheaper universities? Because when it comes time to find that first job academic reputation and professional network matter at least as much and often way way more than having a particular degree.
I don't think it's possible right now for us to predict how the world would change if there were no mosquitos. I expect they play some important role that we don't yet understand. Bees come to mind
The author conveniently dismisses sentences that contradict his premise as "contrived." That's not addressing anything, it's just employing the No True Scotsman trick.
another scroll junk.
I have my monitor positioned vertical, so 1920 vertical pixels and no scroll bars, ...next pages content not accessible, stack forever at page one!