skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am being completely serious with this question - how is caring about "race diversity" not racist? It always strikes me as such - if you care about race diversity that means you perceive race as having a meaning, while in reality it doesn't have any. Am I the only person with such an opinion?
This seems like useless optimization that has a high probability of biting you in the ass later on.

Using the standard UUID generation facilities in your OS of choice there's zero chance you get something wrong and screw yourself.

UUIDs are great because we can pretty much guarantee global uniqueness. Acquire a company, decide to integrate with someone, need to merge a database, etc? No problem, zero chance of record collisions no matter what happens in the future. (It also means zero chance of accidentally interpreting record #58274 as type A when you meant type C).

Furthermore, a 1 in 1 million chance of collision is far too frequent for my liking, but even if it were acceptable what happens when your service/product becomes far more popular than you imagined and you blow through your initial estimates?
UUIDs have the advantage that they are well-understood and widely supported. If you really need to shave a few bytes here and there, developing your own coding scheme is useful. But for the most part, I don't see the win.

Locality is definitely important, but I must be missing something -- if lookup by date, machine ID etc is required, why not create indices on those fields? Why rely on coincidental locality?
And yet, Google led the round.
Hey, we include Redmine[1] in our Library, as well as a Ruby Stack[2] that gives you everything you need to run Rails apps on Google Cloud Platform :).

[1] https://bitnami.com/stack/redmine
[2] https://bitnami.com/stack/ruby
Federal Election Commission quietly pushing Internet censorship legislation
You can still sort the pie charts by percentage and keep the same colors. This would aid in understanding the differences between the US and Amazon workforces which I believe is the point of using the two pie charts.
Could you get more information on this?
It's been reported that it "exploded in mid-air", and two parachutes were deployed, so the cause probably was not the wing-feathering system.
It's 1 in a million chance of any collision across the entire dataset, not 1 in a million records that will have a collision. This is why the article mentions the birthday paradox -- it's taking the chance of a collision between two particular values (and knowing the bits of randomness is enough to give you this) and calculating the chance that there's any collision at all.
What this weeks events show us is that space travel is hard. Really hard.

Most systems operate in extreme conditions, sometimes bordering on the improbable. Thousands, sometimes millions of horsepower in an engine smaller than a car, cryogenic liquids at -200 degrees celsius cooling a nozzle that is 3000 degrees celsius 5 millimeters away, heatshields designed to absorb obscene amounts of heat, the list just goes on and on.

Most people don't realize how hard this is. The physics, the engineering, the design.

Yet we have made great strides, especially over the last few years, and Virgin Galactic is a part of this. There is a new era of cheap spaceflight on the horizon, driven forward by fearless men and women that want to go to space no matter what the cost.

This is commendable, and is what drives the human race forward. Without these fearless men we wouldn't have gone to the moon. We wouldn't have explored the depths of the ocean. We wouldn't have flown the skies.

Today it appears we lost one of these fearless men, but he now rests in peace assured that others will take his place, that he was not alone in his longing to drive mankind forwards into the unknown, that his dreams live on to inspire others.

We have conquered the skies, and we will move on. Eventually we will conquer space and make it accessible to all mankind. A fearless man has given his life to allow us to some day leave the cradle that is mother Earth.

His ultimate sacrifice won't be in vain.
You have to wonder what their diversity looks like when you factor in salary. HQ versus Fulfillment centers.
> There are people who still have trouble finding work in the status quo. Examples might be engineers who:

> don’t look good on paper but are actually very good

I think (hope?) I fall into this category. She talks about five on-site interviews being the usual limit for a single job search. After twelve years I have only ever had five, and it isn't for lack of trying.

Actually I think my interview performance history is pretty good. I have had about twelve phone/live screens, of which I passed nine, resulting in five on-site interviews.[1] Those on-sites yielded three offers, of which I accepted two. The problem is, the response rate to my resume submissions is horrid. Even when I have an "in" at the company. I heard too many times while switching between programs at my first employer something to the effect of, "We would have never hired you by looking at your resume, but I'm glad we did." I have other, similar statements concerning underestimation of what I am capable of.

Maybe what I need is more of a marketing specialist than an agent, but I have always imagined that to be the primary job of an agent. I really need someone to help me figure out how to present myself better. I would actually pay for that service; I guess, as she says in the post, there are not enough of me to support a business. Is that something that could be combined with a conventional recruiting operation, though?

[1] Two on-sites I declined, one on-site didn't happen because the company decided not to hire for the position[2], and the third on-site never materialized because the company just stopped talking to me.

[2] Or so they said. Maybe they switched me from "pass" to "fail" after telling me I passed.
No, don't worry, Stephen Colbert agrees with you. By not seeing race, he is by definition the least racist.
Shame this didn't work out. It would have been interesting I think.
I would ideally like health care to be subsidized. But if you want an insurance based model, then you have to accept the realities of how insurance works. What you describe is against the entire point of insurance.
One Dead as Virgin Galactic Spaceship Crashes
People have biases. Making sure your hiring[1] decisions are not subject to those biases are one way to avoid racist behaviours. It also helps an organisation to avoid institutional racism.

Being polite: this is entry level stuff. A quick web search would have turned up some useful resources to answer your question.

[1] and other
Also, GPS has become a generic term, just like aspirin. There are quite a few alternative systems that provide the same functionality (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Oth...). Most aren't global, but the Russian one is, and the Chinese and EU ones are planned to be one.

Many phones can use GLONASS, the Russian system, so, for example, the 'GPS' in your iPhone or Lumia may not always be using the GPS system to compute your location.
Well, you're entitled to your opinion. I learned to program in HyperTalk as a kid and loved it. I still miss it. AppleScript, on the other hand, I can't stand. I think the difference is that HyperTalk can be considered a DSL for the HyperCard environment and I think it succeeded there.
That's what people said about cannabis not even 5 years ago.
Interesting. Quoting a review http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/early-computi...:

"Markoff's book covers the years 1960 to 1975 and the area south of San Francisco around Stanford University that would later come to be known as Silicon Valley. I arrived in Palo Alto in 1980, after the period described in the book, but got to know most of the people Markoff depicts. I can report that if anything, he underplays the degree to which they behaved in ways that would today be considered outrageous and radical, and what I saw was said to have been mild compared with what had come before. [...]

And yes, there were drugs and naked people in the rooms where some of the code that now drives your e-mail around the globe was first set down."
British Museum now lets you 3D print its artifacts using Sketchfab
(http://gasstationwithoutpumps.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/pe...)
Shows that < 20% of CS & Engineering Degrees go to females in the US

Google employs 30% females (http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html)
Facebook employs 31% (http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/06/building-a-more-diverse-...)
Amazon employs 37% (http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=tb_surl_diversity/?node=10080092...)
LinkedIn employs 39% (http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/06/12/linkedins-workforce-dive...)

Obviously these companies need to hire employees to do non-engineering tasks and in an effort to seem "diverse"
They likely hire only females for these jobs. It would make sense that the company had 20%/80% doing actual engineering work as there is no reason females cannot do just as good a job with the same experience. That means that half the females hired at these companies are doing non-engineering work which pays lower. This would account for the pay gap. When people ask for further diversity at these companies and equal pay what they are asking is to give an unfair advantage to the less qualified.

I am aware this is an unpopular opinion but I felt I needed to post it as I saw someone else posted it and then took it down after being harassed.
re: #2, that's why god invented derivatives. contrary to popular belief, you CAN write derivatives on your private stock options - the derivatives will just also be worth nothing if the engineer leaves early / company folds / etc. and they will be a tax nightmare even if you take early exercise and handle everything correctly. i'd LOVE to see someone pull this off successfully though.
Apparently we're removing them. Personally I prefer the downvote and ridicule strategy myself. Makes it known that this sort of thing exists (many of us aren't exposed to it regularly or at all) but is not acceptable. Deletion just hides it.
What about this?
http://www.amazonfulfillmentcareers.com/
Intelligence Bombs: Dropping WikiReaders from Planes
I completely agree goshx! This article was actually from a few months ago, I've since relaunched Kobra and it's doing well! Almost 700 users, over 5000 files collaborated on and my initial launch sale netted me $2100:

https://mattkremer.com/how-i-made-2033-in-4-days-while-valid...
What do you find confusing? Stated differently, what questions do you have about the platform that you find do not have straightforward answers, or for which straightforward answers were difficult to find?

(note: I work on Compute Engine, so my question is more than idle curiosity :)
Just a younger electorate. Probably next decade.
The biggest problem with destructive move in C++ (and one I personally think is unfixable, but I'm happy to be proved wrong), is that in most cases algorithms must be sure to recreate any variable they are not responsible for, as it will be destroyed later. There isn't any way of checking if some memory has already been destroyed, and adding any kind of flag just gets us back to the same position really. In particular I tried writing an exception safe std::sort (so make sure when std::sort exits all variables are reconsructed again), and it is an extremely difficult undertaking.

In general I find the lack of destructive move isn't a serious problem -- designing variables so their 'default state' is very cheap to construct isn't usually a major cost.
My wife had a similar issue, except the other way around. She got paid a bit more than another person (male) who graduated at the same time and had the same amount of experience. When I inquired I was told it was because she was a better negotiator and negotiated a higher salary.

Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% for income equality opportunity. That is, on average, the same experience, education and job pay the same for both sexes, sexual orientations, races, religious and so on.

But taking a single case and making a cause of it is difficult, since it is just a single case.
"And if a public API is not thread-safe for some reason (like the usual compromises made in software development), then state this fact in BOLD CAPITAL LETTERS."

I prefer to use the `Unsafe` prefix for this, to make it abundantly clear without looking at the call. E.g., `updateUnsafe`.

I also use the `Unsafe` suffix when defining an HTML template rendering method that does not do escaping.
They just switched to a new liquid powered engine because their hybrid engine was not powerful enough. This was the first powered test flight with their new engine, and given the information so far it sounds like it exploded in-flight. Very, very, tragic.

edit: I'm wrong. They simply switched to a new type of fuel for their hybrid engine.
Apple and Google released similar figures, so of course there will be pressure on Amazon to do this also.
Yes it is, but you can learn it piecemeal. Using HTML only, you can add text, images, and hyperlinks to do your "choose your own adventure" example. Now that it works, want to make it look cooler? OK, here is how to use CSS. Want to add some animations and other advanced dynamic interaction? Here are some simple JavaScript functions.
When you put a lot of time and effort into adding code in all the right places to provide for functional, helpful debugging, tearing it all out afterwards is just going to make you add it back in again when debugging something else down the road.

Even if you tear it out, it's way more work to try to pull it all back out, line by line, and re-implement it than to comment it out and leave the actual debugging statements in #ifdef blocks that the pre-processor will pull out anyway.
There is a bit of possible misunderstanding/misinformation here: there is a difference between a primary key and a rowid. The reason that I point out this distinction is that rows are stored on disk by rowid, meaning that an insert will still usually insert to the end. On the flip side, yes, the index will have this problem, but the index shouldnt be very large relative to the table meaning that it shouldnt be as expensive as the OP is thinking. Note: often the database will optimize and use the auto increment primary key as the rowid, but it wont for a uuid primary key.
If you want sequential IDs with no chance of collisions, read up on "flake" IDs

* https://blog.twitter.com/2010/announcing-snowflake

* http://engineering.custommade.com/simpleflake-distributed-id...

* http://boundary.com/blog/2012/01/12/flake-a-decentralized-k-...

* https://github.com/mumrah/flake-java
Let's try this from another angle:

1) Do you believe racism exists?

2) Do you believe we should do anything about it?

3) What would you do about it? (Hint: "Nothing", is the wrong answer)
Twitter came up with a different scheme called Snowflake (https://github.com/twitter/snowflake).
How much does your fusion plant weigh?
Fibonacci Expectation and Variance
People, even allegedly technical ones, get amazingly confused.
Awesome! Let us know feedback once you've had a chance to take it for a spin!
Virgin Galactic Spaceship in catastrophic explosion and crash
The vast majority of music has what's known as a meter, which is a cyclical pattern. Just like we can think of time in terms of a neverending stream of occurrences, or choose to think in terms of a 7-day week, we simplify the understanding of musical events by counting in a regularly repeating meter.

This song's meter is in 4/4, which means you count 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4, etc. along with the very pulse you feel. Tap your foot. Count "1" when he says the word "Come [with me]". You'll find that they clap every time you say 1 and 3.

What he does is the equivalent of cutting out, say, Sunday from one week of the calendar, and so their regularly repeating clap now falls on a different day than it was falling on before. Does that help?
Yes, looking at the twitter feed, multiple sources state that it blew up. This means that either the tank (which takes up the whole rear half of the vehicle) failed catastrophically (unlikely; CF-wrapped tanks tend to develop hairline cracks which slowly leak out) OR the engine exploded.

What's interesting is that the SS2 engine fuel was swapped out very recently for a new thermoplastic polyamide solid fuel for better performace. Maybe this new fuel was not tested as well as it should have been?
I would never store a UUID as a string for exactly that reason. Either a binary or a native UUID datatype. Any developer IMHO who stores a UUID as a string is suspect.
Sort – Is It Really a Blocking Iterator?
> I've never seen anyone dig through VCS history to gain a better understanding of code.

git bisect, git log, and git blame are all indispensable tools. To counter your anecdote, I use them all the time and see others do so.

There's really no reason to leave dead imports in a file.
Well that sucks, this post is completely delisted from the front page. How'd that happen?
Very cool product. The Techcrunch article did not really do the concept justice. The team has a really deep understanding of statistics and how turning those numbers into actual product/market feedback.
Hungary already has a separate telecommunication tax paid after every minute of phone calls and every sent message (SMS or MMS). The telco providers (T-Mobile, Telenor and Vodafon are the three major players here) were supposed to pay this from their own profit without making the customers pay for it, but that is of course not how the market works. The current proposed internet tax would be based on the amount of data transfer.
I have to say that you can see similar dynamics in Mandatory Palestine. After the British troops left there was a civil war between the Jews and Arabs. Jews got their own state and the Arab residents there didn't. But the sheer number of people who are now considered Palestinian makes it difficult for any one nation to solve the refugee problem unilaterally. They are pretty much kept stateless by most countries in that area, for generations.

The British also helped establish the Saudi and Hashemite kingdoms etc. The Syrian King Faisal (someone I think was a really progressive guy) was also installed by the British in Iraq. And all of this happened after the fall of the Ottoman empire.

In that part of the world where religion is very strong, it's interesting to see that democracy always leads to a theocratic government (except in Indonesia where it's so far successfully been separated) and thus the constant struggle against violence, threats to usurp power and human rights oppression.
good point. One commentator on the official facebook note writes:

"You've just proven that Tor hidden services are broken. If you can brute force a key for facebookcorewwwi.onion, then you can brute force a key for any other existing hidden service and intercept their traffic."
Perceiving race as having a meaning is not more racist than perceiving sex to have a meaning is sexist.
For better and for worse, race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation and many other parameters play important parts in people's lives. Completely ignoring these would likely be detrimental, even if it was possible. We are not all the same, and it's a good thing.

See wikipedia for arguments for and against "color blindness" -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness_(race)_in_the_...
static wick failure, minor fuel leak, big bang.

That said, I really have no clue about how these things work. That's just one scenario I could see leading to a midair explosion.
This Month in Data Science – October Edition
While Anti-semitism rises, US Christians support of Israel rises as well
Codes of conduct in the Node.js community
This is absolutely right. I suspect some people do this because Twitter went out of their way to get 64-bit ids[0] -- but Twitter did this in large part because they made the mistake of baking that bit-length into the protocol back when they were tiny, and since they don't control all clients, it's very difficult to change.

For comparison, here's an eager.io URL:

https://eager.io/app/ZYBle8qUhKFJ

And here's an equivalent with UUID in base-64:

https://eager.io/app/b8tRS7h4TJ2Vt43Dp85v2A

It's a rare application for which those differences matter. (NB: I don't know anything about eager.io... it might be important for them!)

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/2010/announcing-snowflake
I used to think the same but with IM, you have to find out the right account and add it (someone might prefer their personal gmail over corporate or whatever) ... but with this, everything is right there. completely replaced any need for im for me.
The engine has been the bane of SS2. The original rubber/N2O design was problematic enough that Virgin switched from rubber to a plastic. Apparently this was the first powered flight to use the new fuel.

While the design lacks complicated turbopumps and cryogenic fuels, it does have one drawback: the N2O is contained in a pressure vessel. If that tank is damaged while still full (or close to), bad things can happen.
I hate being impressed by or happy with Facebook.
I think you're overlooking the fact that Virgin Galactic isn't a national priority, it's a commercial venture. And it'll probably take years of testing to convince many people to take their flight, assuming they want to spend the money.

The ability of the United States to send people to space ended because of the last shuttle accident. So, yes, people dying did affect our national resolve. I think if you do the math, flying in the space shuttle was more dangerous. There were only 135 flights? We lost $3.5 billion of hardware and 14 lives in 2 accidents.
So Bitnami is essentially packaging open source applications, deploying them in one-click onto a 3rd party cloud host (Google or AWS it looks like), and then charging people by the month for doing this?

Sounds great for people who just want to set something up quickly, but am I missing some other point? I would rather put in a few hours to get something setup myself, create an AMI (Or equivalent on another provider), and then I wouldn't be getting charged monthly.

I'm probably not the target audience here though.
Nintendo's Next Product May Look Something Like This
Automated Non-Content Word List Generation Using HLDA
That's a fair point. Being able to differentiate complex directives from attributes greatly helps separate the concerns visually.
I hope the pilots are safe.
> This is commendable, and is what drives the human race forward. Without these fearless men we wouldn't have gone to the moon. We wouldn't have explored the depths of the ocean. We wouldn't have flown the skies.

That's one way of looking at the matter. Another is that without this untrammelled technological evolution (I hesitate to use the word "progress") we wouldn't be living through the greatest mass extinction event of the last few of million years. A lot of this effort could go instead into finding a better cohabitation between humans and the other species with whom we supposedly share the planet.
I don't think counting how many of each they have in each bucket is the right answer, regardless.
> Top-level engineers should be spending their time implementing hard new projects, not maintaining old ones.

Maintaining old but widely used code is a hard project.
In #2 are the "lucrative opportunities" for consulting on a multi-month/year contract or were you referring to the equity/benefits/stability of being a salaried employee?
Test pilots? In the 21st century?

I find it absolutely reckless and inexcusable to require live humans riding on a prototype rocket when you have all the processing power needed to automate/remote manage the vehicle literally in your pocket.

EDIT: To those downvoting, you should really check that all current spaceplanes have the capability to fly and land autonomously--Boeing X-37, Dream Chaser, even Buran was fully autonomous and that was 25 years ago. There is simply no excuse for Virgin for being sloppy.