skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> PGP is fucking complicated, annoying, and non-user-friendly to use as a computer literate individual that codes for a living.

I really don't think it is. Yes, it took me two days or so of reading stuff and chaining commands when I was using mutt. Enigmail is literally point and click. You follow a wizard with three screens or so to set up and all you need to learn after that is how to do the whole web of trust thing. It takes about as much time as it takes to learn Word's stupid track changes mode.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see it even easier to use, but it's in a state where it's pretty much useable without being a hacker.

> Shouting "GOVERNMENT SCARY" at them isn't going to work.

Not only government scary. People don't understand that snooping e-mail isn't done only by the government, it's also done e.g. by, and for the benefit of, media agencies. The combination of Gmail and Google's bubble alone is enough to limit everyday choices for them, like purchasing things, learning about controversial matters and planning a holiday. Even in the post-Snowden world, most people don't understand that there is a huge audience for personal data besides the NSA, and it has an impact on everyday life beyond scary slogans like surveillance state.

> On top of all this, you're pushing encryption as a philosophical measure rather than a practical one.

The same can be said of many things that otherwise look idealistic. People are also pushing for widely-available education, or research in fundamental topics like particle phsyics, for what look like "philosophical" reasons rather than practical ones. The gap between "philosophical" and "practical" seems to be one of volume: it's "philosophical" when few enough people understand why it's practically necessary. It's a trait of perception, not an inherent trait of the object, which is why I think it's a matter of education. 30 years ago there seemed to be very little practical value in PCs, too, and anyone pushing for widely available computer use was, at the time, as much philosophical as I am about this today :-).

Edit: not that I am denying the gap that exists between implementing purely philosophical principles and implementing purely philosophical principles in a practical way. Linux is, in many ways, less "free" in terms of philosophy than GNU Hurd is. I'll gladly buy a gallon of beer for anyone reading and replying to this post from a computer that runs GNU Hurd.
Which is way less secure. Caller id is spoofable, your ss# is known by hundreds of people.
I did too. Couldn't figure out why that was even in there. It seemed so ludicrously out of place but so intentional.
This is absolutely a fair comment, coders but not software engineers, and is the same problem that's permeated bioinformatics for the last decade or so. (As an aside, it's fun hearing grand claims about data science revolutionising medicine in 10 years [0], when the same claims were made about bioinformatics 10 years ago.)

[0] https://twitter.com/HanChenNZ/status/473825783874859008
Yes, they are called...slices. There is no library implementation in Java, but it is completely implementable...

Perhaps Go slices are native and they can eliminate one extra bounds check? Or that you don't have to implement a custom slice class for N primitive/value types (though Java doesn't support value types yet)? Since the code is easily templated, you could just use SugarJ or some other macro system for Java. Or that you don't have to implement a custom slice class for N primitive/value types (though Java doesn't support value types yet)? Since the code is easily templated, you could just use SugarJ or some other macro system for Java.

You definitely lost the conversation context, or this is some kind of debating maneuver? The point is that the memory overhead for the degree of functionality offered by slices in Go is quite small by design. Yes, you can implement it in Java, but various kinds of overhead (not just memory, btw) in Go are small by design. Then comparative implementation details are discussed to provide context for programmers who may not concentrate on language implementation.

You're also kind of barking up the wrong tree. Go is not really meant to replace Java. It's really meant to "replace" C, or more accurately bridge a gap a bit higher-level than C and lower level than "High Level Languages," particularly where concurrency is of key importance. In the contexts where it seems to try and replace Java or C++, it's really that a locus of language implementation tradeoffs wasn't immediately identified and languages with slightly too many features were used to fill the gap.

C#-style generics fix these problem, of course...meaning you can have your slice of cake and eat it also.

No one is arguing that C# style generics don't fix this, or that certain things are less pretty without them, or that other languages can or don't do certain things more elegantly. In particular, yes, I know C# is very underrated. Camp Smalltalk attendees knew about the cool things about the Common Language Runtime about a year and a half before the public. (One camper declared that it basically meant "Smalltalk had won.") We hear you and believe you and you are right. Validated? Now please stop repeating yourself. That's simply not the key "point" which was made by the post and is not being understood in these threads. That point is not being made nor even being addressed by you.

Take it from an old Smalltalker: doing cool stuff yields 100X more benefit than comparing languages and tooting your own horn. Goes even more for objecting to others tooting theirs.

EDIT: When I say "no one would say that," I really mean, "no one reasonable would say that." As you and I well know, this precludes many programmers while they are in a holy language-war discussion.
Apparently something useful is being produced, lots of research papers.

http://www.psfc.mit.edu/research/alcator/pubs/index.htm

There is a sunk cost effect where it must cost a billion to build another, but only a couple million to keep it running, so once you throw it out, you better be sure you'll never find it useful again because another experiment would have a capital cost of about a century of labor/maintenance cost. Something that big and cool would seem quite capable of generating enough "stuff" to be worthwhile.
In every case where you have to decide between two options and both have advantages and disadvantages you should go with the popular one. In the case of the Oxford comma this means following what most of the world (including the publishing world) does and avoid it. The grammar of many languages forbids the Oxford comma, so there's no reason to keep this controversy going on with no real purpose.
Name me one field of human endeavor that is not impacted by the fact that groups of humans need a process to decide which things to allocate resources to. Name me one field of human endeavor which is not impacted by the fact that this process is operated by humans and therefore occasionally exhibits pettiness, favoritism, dysfunction and short-sightedness.

Name me one field of human endeavor without politics.
Funny. Not a great sentence. By the time you reach the end, you've forgotten where you were. The aside, consisting of two sentences with a conjunction, is too long. I suspect the conjunction is the problem.
Jank is basically jerky scrolling. This is normally caused by too much happening handling scroll events.
Fear in slow motion
List of Latin phrases
We're are working on the noncompete thing:
https://malegislature.gov/Bills/188/House/H1715/History
Linux has worked very well on the business-class thinkpad machines for more than 15 years. Look for the T or X series, for example. These days you need to avoid machines with nVidia graphics.

A T-series thinkpad with intel graphics will just work out of the box on any linux distribution.
Eh, they can say what they want, but ElementaryOS is never going to be appealing to a large subset of us if you only make it available as an OS.

Arch gives me rolling releases and the latest and greatest of all my software. I'm not giving that up just for some NIH apps.
> Remove the phone answer/end keys from the bottom row, and it basically is the front of the iPhone

That's not how designs work. A design is violated if you copy multiple elements, giving an overall impression that is substantially similar. If I copy just the buttons from a dress, or just the cut, or just the colour - no infringement. If I copy all of them, then I have infringed.
If one talks about why Go is fast, and then compares techniques against other languages ANYWAYS, what the heck is the reader supposed to think?

That a short discussion of language feature implementation techniques is provided as a point of comparison with regards to different types of overheads?

In an academic paper, this would be torpedoed right away

Well, since I read "this" in the context of this sentence as an assertion imagined by you and unsupported by facts, then yes, you are obviously right. That would be torpedoed. Note that it's not a product of who you thought it was.
According to the article, this was an issue of MIT's reactor being a waste of money compared to the other reactors the administration backed and continued to increase funding for.
It's explain at the link in the first para [1]. It's the catchy way of talking about screwing with site layout and scroll performance when manipulating the DOM with onscroll events. It became a thing to look for after Google's 2013 IO and dev conferences focused and removing jank from the web and Android - both in user facing (speed up DOM manipulation) and in code (prevent jank to begin with).

1: http://jankfree.org/

2: See videos on jankfree
The standard response is AMD, but both their open source drivers and proprietary drivers are very bad. It's not performance, it's stability. AMD Linux drivers crash on all sorts of things. Having an accelerated desktop can do it.

I had a 7770 for a year before I switched to Nvidia. Better all around.

Still AMD do sponsor open source driver development, I'm told, so it's up to how much you're willing to sacrifice for this.
All the more reason we need proportional representation and the ability to overrule Congress via referendum.

The appearance of voter approval needs to be replaced with actual voter approval.
1. The point is not that they can. The point is that they believe they can.

2. Historically, there was always a place to hide to carry out nefarious activities. In the digital surveillance state, that space is shrinking.

(Modern humans 200K years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens)
The infinite-scroll demo was pretty janky for me: Chrome 35.0.1916.114 on a Macbook Air.

Scrolled down to the bottom, and then got thrown around the page a bit before settling. Not a fun experience (and I've seen infinite scroll done right).
10 Minutes to Doom: Security Patches
Not so. There, you unambiguously have a list. If you have a list with a comma in an item, you separate list items with semicolons. So if Ayn Rand was the mother, then it would be "To my mother, Ayn Rand; Jimmy; Bobbie and Sue." The original is difficult because, if "Ayn Rand" is actually subordinated and not a list item, then you don't have a place to put a list separator at all.
> So writing to the main thread from a parallel context crashes the thread

Well... er, that's a bit of a vague sentence :-)

> but what about interrupting a parallel thread from the main thread and send data to it?

That is the most UNIX-ey signal-ly thing I've ever heard :-) That's sort of what's wrong with signals on UNIX, a paradigm that's useful at the process level when you have one thread of execution, but falls apart in a multithreading world.

The correct approach is to use a mechanism like IOCP: https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed-the-...

That slide depicts how the kernel pushes completion packets onto an I/O completion port, such that they can be processed by waiting threads, but that's just one example. Anything can push a completion packet to an IOCP -- in fact, that's exactly how you'd get your parallel worker threads to gracefully shutdown: have the main thread enqueue a "shutdown please" completion packet (via PostQueuedCompletionStatus()), which you'd detect in your parallel threads.

> Also, what would PyParallel look like if it has to support all these NIX systems?

The GIL-sidestepping techniques via Py_PXCTX are conceptually platform independent -- they'll work fine on any POSIX platform (although things like interlocked lists that I get for free on Windows and OS X will need to be re-implemented on other platforms).

The intrinsic pairing between asynchronous I/O and parallelism (that is, automatically and efficiently handling work in an I/O-driven system on all hardware cores) needs kernel-level support: https://speakerdeck.com/trent/parallelism-and-concurrency-wi...

Linux and BSD are the odd ones out here. AIX copied the IOCP API verbatim soon after NT 4.0 came out (I suspect they recognized a good thing when they saw it!), Solaris implemented something very close with event ports (except for the kernel being cognizant of event port concurrency, which is a key piece), and OS X got Grand Central Dispatch, which is a wildly different API (and a bit nicer, to be honest), but semantically equivalent to IOCP+threadpools on Windows.

There are two outcomes re: Linux/BSD/POSIX support.

1. They implement the same kernel-level primitives for async I/O and synchronization supported by Windows/OSX, which PyParallel would be able to use directly.

2. They don't, so the PyParallel-backend is implemented via existing primitives (epoll/kqueue etc).

I'm of the opinion that the Windows kernel-level primitives are fundamentally superior at the architectural level compared to the existing facilities provided by Linux/BSD/POSIX, evidenced by: a) better performance on identical hardware, b) less code required to achieve the desired effect, and c) much cleaner code versus the alternative.
This reminds me the book: Eats(,) Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
Most of the time, you can use the Oxford comma, the non-Oxford comma or any other kind of comma, and it just doesn't make any difference.

But sometimes you need it. Here's an example:

"There are two hard problems in Computer Science: naming things, cache expiration, and off-by-one errors."

Take out the comma and you ruin the joke - at least to my ears:

"There are two hard problems in Computer Science: naming things, cache expiration and off-by-one errors."
The Peregrine looks to be the most promising platform for this kind of input. The only limitation I've seen is you need the finger dexterity of a guitar player to quickly and accurately type that way. Then again, the only other solution I've seen is the four button spiffchorder[0] and a trackball in the other hand. I don't like those only because you can't do anything else with your hands while you're using them.

[0] http://chorder.cs.vassar.edu/spiffchorder/forside
Greenhouse Browser Extension – In-Context Finance Data for US Politicians
I think this may have been the "post" in reference:

http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/category/personal/cancer/
Reflection, Retention, and Juxtapositions of July
Seems intuitive, though interesting to see some actual data. I'd love to know how much the author's "real followers" increased after the artificial boost.

This reminds my of Gary Becker's paper[1] which notes "demand by a typical consumer is positively related to quantities demanded by other consumers" as an explanation of why restaurants don't raise prices when demand is higher than supply (e.g, maintaining inertia for a 'hot' restaurant). In this context, it would appear the more popular someone appears, if only superficially, the more popular he is likely to become.

[1] http://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/PLSC541_Fall06/Becker%20J...
Tools down and eat lunch outside in the sunshine.
From a SEO standpoint, it makes sense (and the author's post is very insightful and well done)...but...I would have to ask what the end goal is? If you are an interesting person, people follow you because you are interesting. If not, you've got a bunch of fake followers and people who follow you because they think you are important or have a good retweet reach. You become like many mainstream celebrities - famous for no good reason.

I've found Twitter to be a far more valuable experience when rather than try to accumulate followers, you follow people with similar interests and interact with them. I always follow people who follow me as a courtesy (unless they are a bot), even if it makes my followers/following ratio "look bad." The majority of the time, these followers are actually interesting to read because even if they don't make cool stuff, they retweet about people who do and I learn about many projects I would not have otherwise. When you interact with your followers, you multiply your reach by a whole new magnitude because they will often retweet to their followers (if maximizing reach is one of your goals).

Also, as a side/bonus note, one "hidden" feature of Twitter is that it has built in analytics (I say "hidden" because its not immediately obvious where to find it):
http://analytics.twitter.com/
Or have homeowner associations own the last mile. Give them he ability to switch their entire local network from provider to provider to get better service and/or lower prices.

That sort of model could be used for all sorts of utilities.

Collective ownership is not a bad thing when its very, very local. Especially when individuals have a direct, immediate say in who's acting on their behalf.
The crux of the article was presented near the top:

"on social media it is easy to mistake popularity for credibility"

I wouldn't say this is limited to social media. This flaw is present in search engines as well, which is why link farms work (and search engines are in a constant, futile battle against them). In politics, it's why astroturfing works and why the more you spend on saturation advertising, the better your chances are. It's really a flaw in human nature--to confuse popularity for credibility.

I'm convinced that anything out there, online or off, with a ranking system that relies on popularity (counts of links, likes, eyeballs, votes, etc.) is ripe for disruption. What's the alternative way to separate genuine credibility from fake (purchased) credibility? Figure it out and you'll be a billionaire.
Here's a great old Slashdot post with lots of info about what they're doing there:

http://beta.slashdot.org/story/167399

I'm not sure exactly when it was published, since their new Beta thing hides dates older than 2y ago, but it's great for showing why the MIT project, and all of the other fusion projects, deserve to get a lot more money than they're getting now.
Your brain can only generate so much pseudorandom visual imagery per second; an effect that you can exploit to control how much and whether you're lucid dreaming. For example, if you fly up while looking down eventually you'll overwhelm your ability to generate a detailed geography and wake up. Or at least, that's how I manipulate my LD state.
I agree, moderation is going to be a real issue for us—particularly as usage starts to increase. My fear with assigning moderation status to the poster, though, is in it being so hinged to one individual. As such, if he/she leaves, the channel stops growing.

We're looking at channels less like a session and more like a set of hashtagged posts on Twitter. In that setting, anyone can tag a tweet; similarly, anyone can post in a channel on Chapp. As such, we allow for the discussion to continue to grow, and potentially shift in nature over time.

This could be the wrong approach, and there certainly are a number of complications that come with it. That said, we like the idea that each channel could grow into a community of sorts. Additionally, we think this approach lends itself to building stores of (indexed) content that could be useful—perhaps akin to a long-standing forum.
I appreciate you citing Latour. I agree his works have much to offer to science, technology and society. Slightly OT, but if you’re interested in a more critical take on some (recent) papers by Latour, I can recommend this review by Joel Wainwright.

http://geography.osu.edu/faculty/jwainwright/publications/Wa...
I think you are correct. Even with a hacked account, it's very difficult to move the money into another account without leaving a trail. Either the money will have a hold for days or the transaction can be reversed.

There are also consequences, steal money and you'll probably go to jail. Hack somebodies email, law enforcement probably won't do anything unless it's a high profile case.

Compare to BitCoin. Irreversible anonymous transactions. Far better security and coins are constantly getting stolen. I really don't think BitCoin will succeed since computer security in general is still kinda amateur hour.
> Linux has worked very well on the business-class thinkpad machines for more than 15 years.

What does "worked very well" mean? That's an unhelpful subjective statement. How does the battery life compare? Can you get the full 10 hours of thinkpad battery life time running Linux if not what percentage? Do the Bluedriver work out of the box? Does it wake up from sleep and connect to wifi correctly? I don't think they've worked "very well" at all, but if you have some objective facts or experience please share, I would appreciate it because a Linux desktop that actually works would be awesome.
Is there an original version of this video where we can double check his claims?
"The starting point for understanding why you procrastinate is to treat yourself with enough respect to assume that behind your inactivity lies an excellent, if not immediately apparent reason. And this reason is to be found in an altogether different attitude or trait inside yourself that precipitated your procrastinating reaction...

What is [it] a reaction to? What is the unknown factor that provokes such a highly visible and aggravating response? The nature of the invisible stimulus can be partly deduced from the extremely emotional and hostile nature of the reaction. For however much you may want to see it as a kind of passive paralysis, procrastination ... is a very aggressive act: it is a pushing away, a rejection.

Tragically, this stubborn rebellion by the unconscious usually triggers even more severe and desperate measures from you, its hapless guardian, to impose a strict regimen of work: total isolation, twelve-hour days, endless changes of locale and paraphanelia. But it is all for nothing. Attempts to be ruthless with yourself in order to 'overcome procrastination' must always lead directly back to the hated condition itself, thereby engendering stalemate. Under these highly sensitized conditions even a reasonable order, as long as it is an order, will be rejected. The sense of failure and frustration increases exponentially as the vicious circle clicks back into gear.

People who accuse themselves of procrastination are not procrastinators. They are accusers. Far from being lazy, they are driven by such extremes of self-distrust and compulsive overcontrol that they throttle the spontaneous contact with self that all creative activity requires." -- Victoria Nelson, "Writer's Block"
In a good number of English dialects [w] and [hw] have collapsed together.
The interesting thing is that the whole purpose of buying followers is then to push oneself up over the constant "noise" of the social-network plattform.
I read it as "rhythm AND pattern", e.g a more excited voice. A nice notion