skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally while I thought that while Aaron Swartz was guilty of something, the charges DAs were pressing for were disgustingly and flagrantly incommensurate, and I was distressed at the abuse of government power.

I didn't really follow the Jeremy Hammond case, can't speak to it.

I don't really have a problem with penalties for computing crimes, but I firmly believe that the punishment should be commensurate with the crime.

The commonality with NSA and with Swartz is that you have heavy-handed authority figures flagrantly abusing their power with impunity. That's the part that I take issue with. Swartz was headed for a prison term and life as a felon for downloading a lot of documents he technically had legal access to (the issue was with the way he downloaded them). I don't think he didn't break any rules, but what he engaged in was in all respects a victimless crime. The NSA has abused its power in ways that are mind-boggling, lying to the Congress and continuing with illegal programs after being told to stop, abusing the privacy of the public in ways that have ramifications of such a scale that are hard to even sorted out, but nobody is seeing any justice for things that look like serious crimes. Nobody is even being charged with anything.

Comparing computing crimes of individuals vs. the government hacking citizen's computers and violating basic civil liberties is that the government engaging in the same act is doing something far more dangerous, harmful, and abusive, and the punishments should be far more severe, since the dangers from that abuse are far, far more serious, but instead they are non-existent.
Create a game in JavaScript with kiwi.js
It's on PG's list of ambitious startup ideas.
http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
This comes down to two key issues in sales: the obvious one is ABC. Always be closing. And if your sales people aren't closing deals then you get rid of them. The second is ABCD. Always be collecting data [1]. You need to collect data on sales constantly to evaluate productivity and have input into the process. It's simple if you follow those two steps.

[1] http://www.idealcandidate.com/always-be-collecting-data-the-...
IMHO, strumming patterns are something that you (as a beginner) need to experiment with to see what sounds just right. Eventually you end up not thinking about it anymore.
I believe a civilian has portscanned the whole Internet before via the same thing: http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/paper.html

I don't get all the fuss about portscanning is either - anything connected to the Internet will be subjected to packets sent to it because the Internet is public; if you don't want others, government or otherwise, to know that there's a machine present at an IP, then it should be your responsibility to configure it so it doesn't reply.
Node Benchmarks
The inherent reason is that -1 is the most common error return code in C based APIs. The problem is not naively handling an error case, it's not handling an error case. Using a different value might avoid calling killall -1, but the program would still be incorrect.

This is the same sort of argument as strlcat vs strncat, and people can't agree on that one.
Yes. Observer in my post above specifically refers to a sentient being; observer in quantum computing specifically does not. However given the context, the two are (very) roughly similar. One could (again, very roughly) think of the universe as a giant quantum computer solving for the variables that lead to sentience. The observers are inside the system in that case, but it's the same idea: create every possible state and select for the solution that solves the problem.

Only an analogy, of course.
Air Traffic Controller Proposes to Girlfriend in the Air     AVGEEKERY.com
He argues that time is constant, that natural laws vary within time and space, and that this leads to mean our existence cannot be calculated or precisely described by a set of mathematical expressions because the constants we would use to describe the future are not constant, but rather another set of variables.

I can't see how this makes the future any less knowable[1]. It just adds more state.

___

[1] Obviously, we can't predict the future as we haven't the resources or the current state of everything. Naturalism just states that were we to have them, we could predict the future.
How did you arrive at the conclusion that a set of interfaces is a JavaEE API?

Above and beyond the fact that in section 2.2 of the JSR it plainly states: "This JSR is targeted for Java SE 6 or higher and Java EE 7 or higher platforms."
There is some contention [weasel words] about what is the better way to refer to people with disabilities/diabled persons. Here are two perspectives:

People-first: http://www.asha.org/publications/journals/submissions/person... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language

Identity-first: http://www.xojane.com/issues/i-am-not-a-person-with-a-disabi... and http://cheshirekit.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/the-social-model...
or you can simply keep pressing 'esc' a few times once the initial page is loaded.
I'm going to answer for C++, since as far as I know it's the only major language with exceptions and RAII. Correct me if I'm misunderstanding your post.

> It's not easy to guarantee that you deallocate on destructors exactly the resources that were allocated at the constructor when both of them can stop their execution at any time.

I disagree; let's take this one case at time to keep it simple:

1. Destructors: within C++, if you're in a destructor, the object was fully constructed, and thus you know the exact set of resources requiring destruction. It is idiomatic C++ that a destructor should not throw; I'll discuss why below.

2. Constructors: these certainly can throw at any moment, as resource acquisition is often fraught with failures. That said, idiomatic C++ provides mechanisms (RAII, such as std::unique_ptr) to manage the partially constructed set of resources in a constructor, such that if something goes wrong, they will be automatically released by virtue of the variable going out of scope. Once you have the resource acquisition completed, you transfer ownership of the objects to the object you're constructing, which is practically guaranteed to be exception-free, since it's usually just moving a pointer under the hood.

> Finally clauses are technically enough

I don't really think you can both stand by the fact that destructors can throw at any moment and that finally clauses are enough, without making what amounts to an apples to oranges comparison. Take, for example, this function, where we assume releasing a resource can fail:

Foo() {
SomeResource resource;
// Assume the destruction of a SomeResource can fail.
// Other actions take place, some of which may raise/throw.
}

In this example, if the other actions throw an exception that causes Foo to itself abort, then SomeResource resource must be destructed. If we're assuming that destructor can also throw, we've now got two exceptions, and how do you handle two exceptions? (It's language dependent. Some discard an exception, some chain them, some, like C++, just terminate.)

If we translate this to using some sort of "finally" construct, say in a garbage collected language:

def foo():
resource = aquire_some_resource()
try:
# other actions that may raise/throw.
finally:
resource.release() # but we're assuming this can also raise/throw.

You still have the same problem at the resource.release(): up to two exceptions can occur at a given point in the program, and you then need to know what your language does in that situation.

The general gist of this is that if the "release" of some generic resource can fail, then you have to make harder decisions about what happens during a stack unwind due to some other error because now you have two errors. Do you ignore it? Log it? (can you log it?)

If releasing a resource cannot fail, destructors (and finally clauses in languages lacking RAII-style resource management) cannot fail.
California High-Speed Rail: 10 Readers with 10 Views
I think it can be even more invisible..
www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkmkGFHTjRg
Why camp if you don't like sleeping in a tent?

[edit: the rhetorical point I was trying to make was not about tents!]
It's unclear if you are poking fun, but one of the major features of Eclipse (and ejc, by extension) is the "compile on save", so there is no compilation step while working in your IDE (unless, of course, you desired one).

If that is a goal of the sjavac project, then the ability to compile in parallel the different branches of the dependency tree for a set of classes would make for a major upgrade in user experience.
Control is controlled by a need to control: Control controls control. At least according to Burroughs.
C programming 101.
There's lots of information coming out of China that as the standard of living has significantly increased, the days of cheap factory labor are over (or rather, it's spreading out to more countries rather than being super concentrated in China). There's also considerable evidence that China's housing bubble has burst along with this economic shift. But the bizarre nature of China's housing market has hidden this effect for a while.

However, getting reliable statistics out of China on these matters is notoriously difficult. So some economic analysts have even resorted to hanging around coal piles and seeing if they're growing or shrinking and trying to correlate and infer larger macroeconomic notions from that.

So a reduction in coal usage, could be a leading indicator of trouble elsewhere in the markets. It won't show up in most of the rest of the market immediately as inventory still exists to sell.

Note: China has a robust, mixed, coal reduction energy plan, with a huge emphasis on replacement via nuclear. Last I read it was on the order of 350GW of nuclear in the long-term plans. Which is huge. So this could just be that, but the percentage of existing non-coal energy infrastructure is very small, not statistically significant yet compared to the 800+GW of coal power China is producing.

Again though, it's very hard to get reliable statistics for just about anything in China. It's getting better, but it's very difficult to analyze the country when local administrators just make up numbers to look good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CQLAhNlbfQ
Perhaps everybody can rank these 3 from least offensive to most offensive: "Shit happens", "It happens", "Sin happens". They all mean the same but they each say vastly different things about the speaker.
Although they still can give skin cancer, there aren't enough UV photons in sunlight to produce a worthwhile amount of power. Highly doubtful anyone serious would try to make this work with UV.

Infrared, on the other hand, has some power production capability (though visible contains a much better resource). Even though we may only be looking at 0.3V (high wavelengths have low voltages), we might be getting a few amps with a square foot of this material.

Makes a lot more sense than other PV-related window technologies. They're going to have to figure out how to cool the concentrator cells lest they cause adjacent construction materials to catch fire with how hot they run. (I^2R losses mean that these high current cells will be dumping a lot of heat per watt generated).
> The commonality with NSA and with Swartz is that you have heavy-handed authority figures flagrantly abusing their power with impunity.

Read csandreasen's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8205642

Whatever else NSA's been doing, it hasn't been "with impunity", it's been in coordination with allied intelligence agencies (including the German BND that was spying on Turkey, Kerry, and Clinton...), and as Snowden's own leaks demonstrate, a ton of oversight within and without NSA, the intelligence community, and the Executive branch itself.

Likewise with Swartz, it's not the prosecutors' fault that the evidence of what Swartz did was sufficient to cause a grand jury to indict on charges that could easily lead to a 1-2 year sentence (as admitted even by Jennifer Granick, no friend to the DOJ here).

> I don't think he didn't break any rules, but what he engaged in was in all respects a victimless crime.

Mapping the Internet is a victimless crime too. Hell, even hijacking computers to aid in proxying those port scans is a victimless crime. Spammers running botnets on Aunt Edna's Windows 98 box is a victimless crime, so I hope you have something better than that.

> Comparing computing crimes of individuals vs. the government hacking citizen's computers and violating basic civil liberties

Did you read the linked article? NSA isn't hacking citizen's computers, except maybe for citizens in non-Five Eyes countries. Likewise NSA wasn't the one who lied to Congress, but then I can't expect people to keep the agencies that most risk their civil liberties straight now can I? :)

And the tradeoff with "far more severe punishments" even for civil servants trying to stay within the law, is naturally "far less severe restrictions" on operation of those civil servants.

If the deal is "you can do whatever is right and proper, but screw up and you go to Leavenworth" then I'd argue that the civil liberties impact would be much more of a net negative. Putting restraints and oversight and restrictive policy and all the rest is much safer IMHO, but the tradeoff there is that when government agencies make a good-faith effort to stay within those restrictions (as even the Snowden leaks have indicated with regard to NSA) that you wouldn't expect heads to roll even if a court later disagrees.
A 5-Step Framework to Starting a Startup
> ... you can run Sandstorm locally today. It should work just fine, except that it will be harder to share your things with other users.

True, that's why it would be nice to design a P2P system into Sandstorm.

On the technical front, the Java run-time is actually pretty well designed and has a solid sand-boxing model too. If only it were fully open-source and wasn't guarded with over-zealous lawyers.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/experience/weekend/my-weekend-... People are weird.

In this case, it's more a matter of "look what I can do with my money".

On a much smaller scale, I do the same thing by paying my two employees a little above market rate, and then brag about it on the internet, so there's that :)
"...Step in himself as vice president of sales and devote the necessary time."

If you are a founder and your company is struggling to bring in revenue/sales it doesn't matter if you call yourself VP of sales or CEO of the world, your job is to make sure sales come in.

I've been in business for 5 years, been profitable for 2. Every single day is devoted to sales. I have a VP of sales and his job is dedicated to sales 60 hours a week. That still isn't enough.

No one is going to manage your company's sales funnel the way a founder does.

This is b2b sales, which is a totally different world than b2c sales. Business owners are very hard to reach, convince, and keep on the phone. In my experience the best people to hire for this job are the people that have a record of bringing in revenue in your niche. Your reps have to beleive in your product. This NYT article is not going to help their confidence. He is really going to need to go in there and make a huge Glen Gary speech to his sales people to get some blood pumping through their veins.
For status and bragging rights. I flew to Monaco to shop on Monday, and by Wednesday I was "camping" at Burning Man, being all counter-cultural and stuff.

This kind of reminds me about the case of a rich Chinese woman who took a helicopter ride to Mount Everest.
If Burning Man was permanent, I feel like it would become a desert version of the "Raft" from Snow Crash. It's close enough for people from SV to jet in and out without too much fuss, but with enough counter culture vibe to attract all the hippies and hanger ons to give it flavor.
Meh. Not all programmers are on a UNIX system. Not all programmers are even on UNIX || Window.XX.

But even if there was only UNIX... the entire point of a well designed system is to allow users of the system to reason about it on a high level, not a domain-expert level or even domain-intermediate level. As programmers we reason about code without worrying too much about gate layout on silicon. As non-system programmers we should likewise not need to worry about shoddy OS design.
Burning Man can be done on the cheap (somewhat) if you're able to camp in a tent, or sleep in your car, or share a shelter with friends. Also, ticket discounts are available ahead of time for low income people, and grants are available ahead of time for artists who create projects.

Here's a good writeup of some of the artists' projects this year:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/30/burning-man-2014-ar...
I've only been to Burning Man once but based on my limited experience, you can have whatever experience you're looking to have there. It's different for every attendee. Some go for drugs, some for yoga, some for music, some for the art (which was incredible and completely exceeded my expectations), some for the community, and some for many more varied reasons.

If you want your Burning Man experience free of techies, models, celebs, and billionaires — I assure you it won't be a hard feat to accomplish. There are myriad subcultures within the culture of Burning Man.
That's very much not what quantum computing is about, sorry.

It does not do exponential parallelism by trying many things at once. What it does do is create exponentially many paths, while some of which interfere with one another destructively. When you observe the system, then, some paths will have probability zero even though they have non-zero complex amplitudes associated with it.

Scott Aaronson's "Limits of Quantum Computers" to the rescue: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/The_Limits_of_Quantum_Com...
I'm not familiar with the studies you refer to (and you don't explicitly refer to them so I can't check them) but just thought I'd note that core 'strength' could mean either muscular development or neural development of the control of those muscles.
Nothing is immune to the eternal september.
AFAICT, in my limited experience with irods and reading through the dat docs. Is that irods is mainly a data distribution mechanism. Whereas dat here seems to be the a generic ETL framework (data extraction and munging).
I love the outdoors. I love peace and quiet. I love hiking and seeing the stars outside the city. All of that is great.

I hate tent-camping. My wife and I own a little camper and we haul that thing all over the place. I don't see the problem with it.

That said something about a $2 million dollar campsite at burning man seems very wrong to me. There's a time and a place to throw money around, but Burning Man definitely isn't it. It's an established culture and a closely held idea of how the world should work. If you don't want to actually participate in Burning Man, why even go?
It reminds me of Wired magazine -- it went from a good alternative business/tech mag (along the lines of Whole Earth Review) to straight-up business porn. There are a lot of things that seem to follow the pattern, where something cool and non-mainstream gets watered-down and diminished by becoming popular, so I don't think you can't really blame the rich guys.

It's also not a totally fair comment because I haven't read Wired in years.
Yes, yes it can. That's why it's always:

fork() or die "Cannot fork: $!";
site looks indexed to me -

site:trestup.com
Second Virtual Visit to the MIT Media Lab
It's considered very impolite to close 1 or 2 without re-opening/duping it to /dev/null.
nice - thanks for all of this
The variant of this I ran into was significantly less destructive.

recursively_find_everything_in_current_directory() crashed due to a stack overflow when SetCurrentDirectory failed due to a single corrupt NTFS directory.
The editor in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlisp did work directly on list structure instead of on top of a character-string editor. (I never studied it carefully since at least at first it worked through a tty interface and that's pretty inherently a pain, like Unix ed.) I think I read somewhere that Deutsch's PDP-1 Lisp pioneered that editing model, though I may be completely misremembering.
That's fine. That would need to be one of the "bona fide occupational qualifications" contained in the job description for the job you're trying to hire for.

For those jobs where the nature of the disability itself prevents someone from being able to accomplish those BFOQs then no accomodation is necessary, nor would you have to hire someone to fill that job. But I was referring to the hiring interview process itself, where it's completely possible to imagine that some assistance would be necessary even though, if hired, the autistic person would be able to complete their job requirements with only reasonable accomodations.

Likewise you don't need to provide unreasonable/super costly accomodations. But you can't just ignore ADA either.
yea man that is no good. most bosses would kill to know that their staff goes home and learns on their own. run, fast, and far.
Maybe, but some things are still in springtime right now.
Dammit that really needs to be available on Netflix instant. I love that movie (don't worry I feel the appropriate amount of guilt in saying that).
> Increasingly, I've seen it being used as a pejorative against software developers (as this profession does indeed require extreme dedication), usually by the types of people who have zero ambition of their own. Most likely as self-validation that their apathy is normal, and it's others who have the problem.

I see this on almost a weekly basis. It is really disheartening and almost infuriating. I feel like this outlook only serves to reduce diversity by alienating anyone who would rather spend their time building things than "shooting the shit" with other people for the majority of their days. It also seems like it might be a relatively new phenomenon? Maybe in the future the masses will be more accepting of different approaches to social interaction (or lack thereof) and living life in general.

> I think this really does a disservice to the people who are genuinely suffering from an actual disorder. And it also pushes people toward the lighter end of the spectrum to play up how autism is really just a different mindset and not a disorder at all.

> Let's leave the "disorder" label for people who really are disabled in a significant, life-impairing way.

Very well said!
Maybe there are millions of other fecund universes where their big bangs did fail for lack of enough mass or enough energy to move fast enough or too fast to form atomic bonds.

So just like life in our galaxy may be a one in million chance, our universe it itself may be a one in a million chance.
I guess the only answer is if you think there are more bad cops in the USA than good you have just been believing too much of the echo chamber.

Sounds like the phrase "everyone hates the cops until they need one" applies.
> And that often means everything from a meal to saliva.

I think he means salvia
Credit card idiocy: Turns out that authorization codes aren't really checked
exactly what I was going to say. they don't realize a lot of devs pay their rent via bounties. not to mention a lot of these security bounties leave their product/app vulnerable to getting rooted.

blog about it, I'll share it to my 5000 followers of CEO's, VCs, and developers :).
At this rate, in another 10 years, it'll become George Bluth's "Sweat & Squeeze".

But, let's not say this is any surprise. It's the trajectory of nearly everything that is initially super-cool/elite. It gets to the rich elite who aren't cool, then it gets mass produced & mass-marketed, then it gets uncool.
>> Your HTML just looks like (html (head ...) (body (h1 ...))) or whatever; no "language box for HTML" needed.

In your example, the language composition is smooth because there's only one language there: Lisp. HTML has capitulated.