skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look, XP is fine to run as long as you keep it off the Internet. But running XP on a computer connected to the Internet now is analogous to refusing to vaccinate your kids. It makes life risky for both you and the people around you.

Not to mention the fact that you can't even begin to expect modern web sites to support your IE 5 or 6.

That's just not going to happen.
> Better yet, give it to many such someones in parallel,
because portfolio theory exists.

This is a bit of a controversial topic among many people I know--not settled by any means--but portfolio theory doesn't really say what you think it does here. In particular, portfolio theory suggests diversification because it reduces variance, generally at the cost of some (small) amount of return. _Since your utility from money is concave_, variance reduction improves expected utility.

Your utility from lives saved in the third world is (or should be), I think, linear. (Perhaps even convex, though that's a much more complicated argument.) While if I were a doctor, the 100th life I saved would seem a lot less interesting than the first, I don't think it has any less moral impact. Conclusion: variance reduction has little to no value, and if you think charity X is (in expected value) any measurable amount more efficient at $goal than Y, you should reallocate all donations from Y to X up to the limit of what X can efficiently spend.
Because undiscovered security holes in operating systems are so common, using any outdated OS quickly becomes like driving a Ford Pinto. Maybe you think your Pinto is "good enough", but taking it out on the road is dangerous to you and others.

The stigma of using an unpatched operating system doesn't come from anywhere irrational as some stigmas do. It is like the stigma of having poor hygiene. Pooping out in the open in your back yard has serious negative health repercussions. That is a much better analogy than the "classic car" one.
Graduate of analytic philosophy here (concentrating in philosophy of language), and my take away is a sloppy: "It's not a bug, it's a feature."

Sorry, but this is a completely shocking article to me. First in it's immediate dismissal of any formalism inherent in natural language, but also with the ease at which he dismisses the proposition without any real consideration.

If we learned anything from Chomsky, it's that the underlying grammar we are born with is both instinctual, and follows formal rules. To say differently is literally, demonstrably false. Irregular verbs, for example, aren't learned in the traditional sense, one must actually unlearn the formal rules. Any child that tells you she "swimmed" all afternoon is using a more formal version of English than you do.

The idea of a natural language programming language is flawed, but not by formalism. It's flawed by the evolutionary nature of natural languages. That is, the very people that he states "are no longer able to use their native tongue effectively," are probably using a new dialect that shares a common ancestor with his more "traditional" usage.

Many people in this thread are talking about the inability of plebes to express what they actually want. This is a fair point, but not a problem with language specifically. Communication tools would need to be employed by a computer in the same way as humans use them. E.g., a simple ambiguity checker could work wonders here, as it does between humans when someone you are talking to simply says, "What did you mean when you said you 'realized you forgot your phone at the train station'? Did you forget at the train station, or realize at the train station?".

What IS a problem, however, is Quine's indeterminacy of translation. That could pose serious hurdles that may be insurmountable, however, we still have effective communication between humans, so it's simple to see how this may only be a theoretical problem, rather than a formal one.

This subject should be under the purview of analytic philosophy and linguistics, not mathematics or computer science.
Inside Canadian cyber-security agency’s 'target the world' strategy
A lot.

Going with the Saturn V, since information about it is widely available: 4 hold-down clamps that put out 350 metric tons each. http://www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/SP-4204/ch13-4.html

Best tape I can find in 20 seconds of googling: "Super Strength II: super heavy duty tape with 400 lbs of tensile strength (meets OSHA 29 CFR Part 1926.502)" http://www.reefindustries.com/barricade-tape.php

That's nearly 2000 layers of tape for each hold-down clamp, or 8000 total. How many meters of tape that is depends on how much tape is needed per layer per clamp. Lets say two meters, so we're talking 16km of this heavy-duty tape. That super-heavy duty stuff comes in 300' rolls, so you would need 175 rolls of it to hold down a Saturn V right at launch.

That is just right at launch though, when the fuel inside the rocket is doing most of the "hold the rocket down" work. As the rocket burns more and more fuel, you will need more and more tape to hold it down. A smaller rocket like the F9 will require less tape.
I think both self-pacing and and scheduled courses have their own advantages. For a self-pacing course, it's more flexible to learn, but it might also be too flexible so that students cannot finish it. And the forums for those self-paced courses are just like a ghost town. On the other hands, a scheduled course with some due dates make all the students in the same rate of progress. It might have more interaction between students. It definitely helps if online students can have some interactions. Also, under the stress of the due dates, students might have more motivations to finish those assignments.

I used to sign up many courses online (Coursera, Udacity, eDX, Code School, Treehouse, etc ... ) but finish few of them. I'm now trying to hold some small study groups (3-5 people) and see whether we have higher probabilities to finish those courses or not. In my experience, social power is unlimited.

My second cents.
It's a first salvo. Coffman and Brooks both serve on HASC and on the HASC Oversight and Investigations subcommittee; Brooks is vice-chair of the House science committee's Space and Aeronautics subcommittee. Whatever NASA provides is going to be grist for investigations into SpaceX and possibly legislation crippling it (and potentially other small competitors) in favor of the big aerospace employers in the reps' districts.

In particular, this is probably an attempt to force NASA into selecting Boeing's CST-100 as the agency's new orbital vehicle. Boeing's option certainly has fewer operational "anomalies" than SpaceX's Dragon, because it hasn't even made it to orbit yet -- but don't expect politically-motivated Congressmen to admit that Boeing is a higher risk than a proven, if upstart, solution.
This is also a solved problem (largely) around trans issues specifically.

I suggest reading http://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender for more context.

In particular, you should refer to Chelsea as she would want -- with her current name and her expressed gender pronoun preference (e.g., use 'her' where you use 'his' above). Also, "gender association" is not a common formulation.

In terms of capturing the nuance of acts prior to public transitioning, the above link has some suggestions:

Avoid pronoun confusion when examining the stories and backgrounds of transgender people prior to their transition.
Ideally a story will not use pronouns associated with a person's birth sex when referring to the person's life prior to transition. Try to write transgender people's stories from the present day, instead of narrating them from some point in the past, thus avoiding confusion and potentially disrespectful use of incorrect pronouns.
>which is that the legislation that forced Uber to employ a loophole is a bad thing

Forced? That's quite the spin. Another way to look at it is "legislation that Uber didn't like so chose to ignore."
He meant 20%.
I think the generally correct way to do it is to send all previous documents to the memory hole for correction, so we will know that the woman Chelsea Manning released information regarding our war with Eastasia.

Edit: spoken tongue-in-cheek of course, but I've run into this before where names were updated some places but not others... for a while I thought the Synthesis OS kernel must have been written by a pair of people because I kept seeing references to Henry and Alexia based on which paper I was reading
Yes, in programming, the goal is to communicate clearly to an indifferent interpreter. In legal worlds, the goal is to express the intention while excluding the maximum number of outsiders.

Why else does every coding language provide plain-language comments, but legal documents do not?

In technology, the machine is a stand-in for a human relationship - the cell phone app keeps track of restaurant ratings so people don't have to keep asking one another. The code is a part of the system of distributing the power in the form of information.

In the legal world, the intently obscure language is the means of hoarding and securing the power.

W/r/t to legal systems collapsing, they're protected by guns and myths. The baillifs and police believe Columbus was a hero and they kill to uphold his dream. The incentive to power is enough to entice enough new scholars each year to sustain the illusion.

So to respond to the poster above, the pains of the programmer and legal system are no more similar than the programmer and the chef. Each attempts to communicate a procedure, but the legal system has an entirely different and less noble set of requirements.
Since I got involved with Sage years ago, I've always liked William Stein's candid way of describing the project's activities. If the project failed to meet a stated objective, Stein would say, "We failed". No public-relations rhetoric, no glossing over, just the facts.

The basic issue for Sage is that it's gotten too large and complex, and too Linux-platform-dependent, to be a simple install on the majority of student machines. And with each new release, it's become larger and less accessible to many end users, most of whom run Windows on a limited-capacity PC.

Early on, someone created an installation package that ran Sage in a drop-in virtual machine that ran under Windows, but that approach quickly unraveled as Sage became larger and too much of a burden for a small system. This means that, at present, unless a person is willing to dual-boot Linux or run Linux alone, they can't run Sage locally.

Sage on a server has problems of its own -- which server, where, at what cost? But on the positive side, even when running on a single system, Sage behaves like a server-side application, so little needs to be changed for this strategy.

I hope this turns out to make Sage more popular and accessible -- IMHO it's a great mathematical tool, and the project's open-source philosophy only increases my respect.

My Sage tutorial: http://arachnoid.com/sage
I can also confirm that the Khan Academy model works, at least for younger children.
Legal documents are just as referential as programs are - their function calls are simply defined in a natural way, i.e. "Except for S6.6, S8.2, and S10.2, the test samples are stabilized at test room temperature prior to testing.", or "The following terms of service and end user license agreement (“EULA”) constitute an agreement between you and Rovio Entertainment Ltd, and its affiliates (“Rovio”). ".

You mention that such references are limited in nature, but laws are rarely as limited in their references as EULAs are. Plus, there's a whole layer of context which exists outside the written document - the exact legal definition of words.

I just don't think that a "prudent" guess will be enough, especially as you start distributing such programs to machines or situations where the context is different.
I think I'd throw more money at those initiatives where they grow meat in labs. Factory farming is a horror, and cattle do tremendous amounts of damage to land all over the world.

Veganism is part of a solution to end animal abuse, but it's currently too hard of a cultural adjustment for people. We need a better, commercially viable solution.
"But the comparison isn't valid unless old cars suddenly and without warning blew up as you drove them along the road"

It happens.
Why didn't he just drive you to the nearest ATM so you could get out cash? Surely there would be one within a 1 or 2 mins driving distance. I have a different perspective on this as I'm pretty certain cab drivers here don't accept card. Everybody pays in cash. It's easier and faster and if you don't have any on you you ask the drive to stop at an ATM on the way to your destination.
common, all RBI wants is the service provider to settle money in India if paid by Indian customer to an Indian Customer. What uber is doing is using a different gateway to take money and different country bank to settle the same.

Also the requirement of 2 factor authentication is there for all CNP (Card not present) transaction, you need to understand that the number of fraud which is detected due to international transaction is rising and it becomes very difficult for individuals to process the chargeback. I was victim of card theft used to do international transaction on some random site.

I like this decision, and Uber can use a card reader on the device like Square in India or Pre paid wallet.
This is one of my favorites sites to catch up on design trends and the code behind it. Take a look read some, code some, I'm sure you'll get used to how things are working in a couple of days.
http://tympanus.net/codrops/
I think the analogy is a bad one, but I can't say your reasoning is 100% solid. Most of us certainly want our cars to have A/C, radios, and the like. A more modern comparison would be that more than a few folks enjoy their cars having entertainment for the kids, rear cameras (coming soon on all models in the U.S.), etc.
The memo is two pages long, and the request for un-redacted information is present on the second page.

byerley is right though -- I don't see anything asking for an investigation or some other show-stopper.
Wow, this is great!

I mean, I stopped playing AD&D about five years ago after our party had shrunk to just two players, then our DM got married, ... Anyway, back then, this would have been awesome!!! It was always a struggle to find good background music...
> The companies are working together to ensure that the Docker Engine runs as a first-class citizen on developer workstations using VMware Fusion, data center servers with VMware vSphere, and vCloud Air, VMware’s public cloud.

How about VMware Workstation?
I saw the title and thought, "Oh good, someone else who thinks like Dijkstra!" Oh well. :-)

I feel like the halting problem and Godel's theorem imply programmers will never be out of a job, and the best we can do is build out more and more solutions for specific use-cases, like Wordpress and Shopify. I don't think there will ever be a general-purpose AI that can write computer programs. At least not in my lifetime or my children's.

And btw, has anyone else felt that the Halting Problem and Godel's theorem are two sides of the same coin? Is there any formal connection between them? I feel like they are not "independent" (in the sense that Euclid's 5th postulate is independent).
Yeah, what the US really need is a proportional voting system where x% of the federal/national votes means x% (+/- rounding error) of the parliamentary seats, with no voting districts or any other excuses. So what's needed is to convince the ruling classes that switching to such a system is worth potentially ruining their and their friends' careers. Luckily, this is not my problem, but it is pretty frustrating to hear Americans discuss politics.
I am afraid I don't understand your point.
Every time I read legal language that comes across as highly imprecise or ambiguous, my default assumption is that someone powerful wanted it written that way, to allow them some sort of loophole.
Getting on for a century ago this 'problem' was solved:

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

TL;DR - use a theodolite with measurement poles at each end and in the middle. No iphones, laser pens or bowling balls needed. Sometimes it comes down to having the right tools for the job.
That has already been done. It's called ITAR: http://fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/itar/p121.htm#C-IV
Except it makes pretty big (and I'd say wrong) assumption, that kids want to learn.
We’re seeing a conflict in software. It is still evolving in its structure and architecture. In fact, visible changes are necessary to drive new sales.

On the other hand, users of that software are happy with the mature functionality it provides. There’s nothing important the average office workers needs for their daily work in Windows 7 that’s not present in XP. Most companies would be perfectly happy to stay with XP if it were still maintained. You wouldn’t see so many holdouts otherwise.

Adobe has switched to a subscription model, Creative Cloud, for its Creative Suite. You can still buy the software, but the subscription costs less. The people in Redmond would be smart to consider that business model. It would maintain revenue, in fact make it more regular. By eliminating the feature treadmill, it will allow them to slow-feed gradual changes to the users.
Microsoft Surface 2's price slash: Great deal or a waste of your money?
I don't really understand supporting Chelsea Manning, or equating her plight with Snowden's.

Snowden had a purpose and a plan, and executed it while attempting to keep people from getting hurt. Chelsea Manning lashed out at an army that didn't support her and put her in the wrong position. The military may have mistreated her, but they're still not the same thing.
Haha, the first thing I thought was that this was Dijkstra.

UTexas + "Foolishness" => Dijkstra.
FaaS (Feedback as a service) for startups
As I am building ClipPod, I have noticed that it's incredibly hard to collect people's feedback and thoughts on what they think about your product - Why they did not sign up, why they discarded it within a minute of use, were they looking for a feature but couldn't find etc.

So I am offering FaaS (Feedback as a service) for free to startups. I will spend about 30 minutes on your app, use it inside out and send you my thoughts and feedback on the following areas:

1. User interface, user experience 2. Bugs and problems I faced 3. Possible competitors that I am aware of 4. Features I would like to see in future 5. Technical optimizations to make your site faster. 6. Anything else, you would specifically like me to review.

I will be taking up 1 startup every week on first come first served basis. All you need to do is send me a link to your app. Do not explain me anything about your app or product in the email - I would like to review your site just like any other visitor would do.

Send me an email on gauravgupta123@gmail.com with a link to start things off. Just include [FaaS] in the subject line.
Indeed it does -- about 1% of car wrecks involve a fire. But not a spontaneous explosion -- well, not usually.

At the accident scene, an obviously distraught survivor of the flaming wreck said, "I'll get you hackers! You can run, but you can't hide!" :)
So, they are not programming. The ones that build the backend do it, and put a natural input interface as a frontend.
How did he find out that the message was sent?
Build a Node API Client: Queries, Caching and Authentication
"It's a bit less shitty" really doesn't help your argument all that much. I'd still rather not live there.
For some reason Reddit's official policy is that submitting your own web pages is verboten, and over time that's been transmuted into a moral stance.
No one drives cars with leaded fuel for their daily commute. Some technologies fall by the way side as the better ones replace them. Security and compatibility reasons are incentive enough to keep your OS up to date. No one is complaining that they can't use DOS 5.0 anymore, it just seems to be Windows XP and will probably be Windows 7. Some of the fault lies with microsoft for selling old licenses so long and for bungling Vista's and Windows 8 releases. But for XP users there is absolutely no reason to not be running Windows 7. Its a proven operating system that's been out for 5 years. If you want to stick with XP, like the leaded-fuel driving car owner recognize that support will be vanishing because you are using something that is well behind the times and you are burden on developers.
I opened a ticket if you are so inclined. The problem defined is that there isn't a clear method for getting this running in a quick webpage hackup way. It's JavaScript, so it should just 'work' when I cut and paste, as long as I'm including a min file somewhere.

There appear to be a good number of dependencies in the terra.js file, which isn't explained on the page. I see something called lowdash and seedrandom in there, both of which I have never seen before and have no clue how to install. I simply want to cut and paste the examples as they are shown and get something working. I don't want to run a bunch of build processes for installing a bunch of third party libraries on my machine when all I want is to include it on a single page in my project!

Anyway, it looks really cool. Wish I could use it.
which is again, a very american-centric way of looking at things.
Affiliated with Georgia Tech, Udacity offers online master computer science degree. They've mentioned that the graduated certificate would be same as those onsite students'. If that works well, I think more and more university will offers degrees via Moocs
80% of Small Businesses Fail in 18 Months?
It's the developers of agents like Siri and Cortana, not the users, who need formal language.

Anyway I don't think we're disagreeing with each other: there is always going to be a place for formal languages, they won't ever go away and be "replaced" with natural language interfaces, it's just that Jane Random will be more than happy to speak some gibberish to her computer and let the machine figure things out.
One could also use the bowling ball to answer the level vs straight question. Ignoring such nuisances as friction, on a straight floor, a ball let loose would roll towards the center of the hall, and oscillate around it.

In practice, it may be possible to somewhat reliably measure a difference in deceleration rolling the ball towards an end of the hall vs towards its center.

And of course, if one also has a scale, the weight of the ball can be used to see whether the floor is level.
julee04, how to get by paywall?
Self-pacing or very loose pacing also much makes any sort of discussion board or peer to peer interactions pretty much useless. Discussion boards have pretty horrible S/N ratios and other problems under the best of circumstances but with self-pacing you almost might as well not have them.

And then, as you say, for a lot of topics it's then worth asking exactly what function the MOOC is serving that isn't served equally well or better in many cases than an appropriate book.
If that's your criteria for a good first language, then I'd say shell script. You already need to know a subset of the shell and its commands anyway, to be able to use the computer in the first place. So from there, learning the programming-language aspects of it is a natural progression.