skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree :-) But I suspect the (correct) distinction you made between the two different motivations for criticism are irrelevant to Hacker School because criticism of any kind is seen as an impediment because some groups find criticism intimidating, and a primary goal of Hacker School is inclusivity and diversity. That is why the conclusion of the essay was to stop being so critical rather than be more judicious about what you criticize. I totally agree with them that there is too much worthless criticism, but what works for them can't be a universal prescription. But maybe I'm reading to much into it.
NimbleVR was doing a successfull kickstarter (now cancelled) for a 3D camera, a mix between a Leap Motion and Structure Sensor: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nimblevr/nimble-sense-b...

So with this acquisition, we can hope for a 3D camera built-in the headset (or at least an official add-on for it).
I was watching "Feeding Frenzy: The Food Industry, Marketing & the Creation of a Health Crisis" on LinkTV last night and they talked about how obesity is rising in 3-6 year olds. The point being that children in that age group are no less active today than in the past, so something else is causing obesity, type II diabetes and other problems.

The most likely culprit is processed food, where nutrients are not used in their natural form, but instead converted into something else. So using corn to make high fructose corn syrup, soy and cottonseed to make oil, or feeding animal protein to herbivores are a few examples of where the food supply is getting contaminated. For example, cottonseed oil is not only a relatively unhealthy oil, but it also contains one of the highest concentration of pesticides (because cotton was not traditionally a food crop).

Not to mention that plastics contain hormone-like chemicals like BPA, they use preservatives in things like canned food that don’t need them, and add animal byproducts like pork lard to foods like refried beans that don’t need them. So our immune systems are getting bombarded by substances we either have no evolutionary history with or simply don’t need to be eating in the quantities that we are. So that inhibits aspects of our immune systems and metabolism (triggering autoimmune disorders like allergies, asthma, arthritis and metabolic syndrome).

I could literally go on forever about this, so the gist of it is “it’s the food supply, stupid”. Yes, being more active helps a great deal, but without proper nutrition we’re looking at a modern form of the wasting diseases similar to the ones they used to get in the 1800s before they understood vitamins and minerals, except it’s masked by obesity. I think if we didn’t have the social stigmas around laziness and the political monkeying of the farm and retail lobbies, we would have recognized obesity as an epidemic the way we did with polio and done something about it decades ago. Nothing short of going back to the foods we ate before about 1980 is going to work for the vast majority of the population. And that’s going to start with campaigns to inform people about what’s in their food and reform the way we design cities so that food centers are near where people live.

TL;DR: They found medical evidence that the western diet disrupts metabolism via pathways other than caloric intake. Now let’s do something about it.
> the category of irregular verbs in English will surely shrink over time

I just don't think that's true.

English, like all other languages, is in an unbroken line of continuous speech from the first group of humans to use speech at all. (Or if you don't follow the theory of a single origin of language, an origin set of language users.) Where you place the borders between what you call "English" or "Middle English" or "unnamed branch of Old High Saxon spoken by a particularly small group of villages" is fuzzy, but nobody ever decided "What I was speaking 10 minutes ago was Language A but starting now this is called Language B and they're totally different in every way".

So we've been developing English for a very long time. If "little used verbs become regularized over time, but new verbs formed [are] never formed as irregular verbs", then why do we have still have irregular verbs at all? Why wouldn't they have been wiped out thousands of years ago?

In the most obvious cases, English hasn't changed at a uniform rate. It's experienced gradual splits, mergings, conquerings, being alternatingly a vulgar and prestige dialect, immigration, emmigration, wars, trade explosions, and regular old influence of other languages nearby.

The claim you're quoting seems to be that if a language is left to its own devices that it will gradually approach regularity. I definitely disagree that point, and there are somewhat well-understood methods for these changes it occur even in an isolated language (for instance, vowel shifts that affect some words more than others, after which words that used to follow the same rule no longer do). But let's set that aside. Even if we ignore the normal linguistic processes that can increase irregularity in an isolated language, what makes us think that the "artificial" events like wars or interactions with other languages will decrease? Why would those things stop?
There is no shortage of small communities across America that have not had a gun crime in decades. Zero stays zero, even when you make it per-capita.

Whether or not this is a fair comparison is another matter.
It's a great question, but I can't answer it because I declined the offer. ;) My impression of the office was that it was being run like a fiefdom, and not a fiefdom I wanted to join - the IQ test was one of several things that gave me that idea. He seemed to have a lot of smart people in the office, but I can't imagine who was talking to the customers. (And if it was anyone I met, including the owner, then I can't imagine how they kept any customers..)
Sigh.

The word "duty" as used in the case is a term of art in tort law. It doesn't just mean you have a generic obligation to do your job, as it does in common parlance, but it means you can be legally liable for someone's damages in a tort lawsuit.

If programmers had a "duty" to do their jobs, most software companies would have been sued out of existence. Software companies would get sued over every bug that caused people to lose time or money, and would be liable not just for the purchase price of the software, but if they were found to be negligent in writing-in that bug, would be liable for the actual damage suffered.
1 officially those people dont exist, they are REDACTED contractors

2 is would really hurt their $80mil backed retirement plans in Florida , Im sure of that ...
Actually, they're not images. They're MathML markup.

http://www.w3.org/Math/
Nice, I have been holding off on using rethinkdb for my web apps until there was a nice odm, i'll certainly give it a look although I must admit that postgres has been pretty great for us.
Several eye witnesses say that he was not selling cigarettes when he was arrested. The cops suspected him because of his previous history of selling cigarettes.
The official announcement is now available, if you want to consider changing the link again.

http://blogs.microsoft.com/firehose/2014/12/11/now-you-can-e...
"Essay writing" is a nice habit to help with this. Sometimes, my brain is too small to store the extent of a conversation, so I pull up a text editor, and write comments there, respond to them, and so on.
I had ever experienced once, and pay isn't so much, I keep staying there for 3 years, it is because I think I still have much to learn there.
In fact, if I understand the rules of baseball, it's only players whose balls fail to fly out who, themselves, fly out!
Checked out your app. Like the tone that’s created when the comments are funny and entertaining. Those will bring me back.
Your expectations of journalists must be very high to be surprised by this sort of thing...

Look at the reporting of any breaking news, especially emergency situations: the talking heads will repeat any rumor or scrap of news like it's truth, just to keep eyeballs glued to their station/site/Twitter/etc. And afterwards there is no accountability whatsoever.

I agree with you that it's not the right thing to do.
That's probably why the grandparent of your comment mentions how impressive she is first, before going on to mention her physical attractiveness.
http://imgur.com/gallery/QSyWdcy

Sorry for laughing. I'm really amazed that every single Simpsons reference has an imgur link already made. But you're right--that guy needs canned.
Those vehicles may be mine-resistant, but perhaps your police department is buying them primarily because they are bullet-resistant?

Clearly, arresting a suspected drug dealer is far more dangerous in the US than in the UK - and widespread gun ownership is a reasonable explanation for that diference.
> Microsoft wanted to handle some of the software development but when Ford asked Microsoft to sign off on some legal agreement asking MS to take any and all responsibility for things like inadvertently deploying an air bag, they backed off. ... Think about the not so long ago Toyota problem where they tried to blame floor mats for gas peddles getting stuck.

Are you saying that the navigation and entertainment system in Ford vehicles is not isolated from the critical safety systems? If that's the case I hardly think sluggish interaction is the biggest problem.
How was your feeling about the C codebase compared to Ada? Did one feel more comprehensible or reliable than the other?
John Oliver on Gun Control (just a huge brag for Australia)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOKWcH1zBl2kfnCwyyZWk...
Frappe: Using clang to visualize large codebases [pdf]
The scalar case is not so bad; typically the filter is taught using the vector-input/vector-state case, which is more complex.

I can't make heads or tails of the assembler listing either. The specific thing I would look for in the assembler code is the division operation which is required to find the Kalman gain. I don't see it.

But, the anecdote about the Kalman filters use in this setting is well-known. (E.g., search for "Apollo" in http://ieeecss.org/CSM/library/2010/june10/11-HistoricalPers...)

The amazing thing from my point of view is not the implementation. It is rather that the theory, which was quite novel at the time, was only understood and published in 1960/61. To have it used in a flight system, and indeed a manned flight system, only 8 years later is really incredible.
The Machine as art and craft and the art and craft of the machine
Presumably, new irregular verbs used to appear, but no longer do. Groups of speakers are less isolated, we have a standardized written language, and demarcations between languages are clearer.
> with the speed and reliability of fedex

Ha.
Amazon's store absolutely is allowed. Users just have to go to Amazon's website to download and install it for themselves. Considering that using Amazon's store means trusting not only Amazon and the store app, but every app installed via their store (almost certainly including some Google has never seen), this is an entirely reasonable requirement.
Aside from the work on probabilistic inference, there is also many papers on "probabilistic databases" in the last 10 years (Chris did his PhD on that topic). That work has looked at SQL-style query processing over "uncertain"/"probabilistic" data.

These were some of the major projects: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~suciu/project-mystiq.html, http://maybms.sourceforge.net/, http://infolab.stanford.edu/trio/, http://www.cs.umd.edu/~amol/PrDB/, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1376686.
Elixir is inspired by Erlang/OTP and Ruby and the runtime is Erlang BEAM/HiPE. :-)
Even with that qualification that is still crap logic. There are lots of guns in America, but the number of Americans who own guns are at all-time lows. The "number of guns in America" figure is deceptive because of all of the people who own dozens to hundreds of guns.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/04/a-minority-o...

Arresting somebody who owns one or two guns is really not inherently safer than arresting somebody who owns a few crates of guns, so the number of guns in the country is irrelevant. The number of gun owners is relevant.

The apparent upward trend in police militarization and the number of Americans that own guns simply do not correlate. The Economist's unfamiliarity with American culture (particularly American gun culture) explains how they could make this mistake.
Fair call. To clear that up I would count urbanised centres of a similar population size and density would be a reasonable basis of comparison. I imagine England would have a large number of small communities with zero gun crime as well.
thats printing plus taxing..and over doing the printing part? why not print as much as one would ordinarily tax? saves the trouble of employing 100s of 1000s of people to do the tax paperwork.. and inflation is in effect a wealth tax anyway...
As a college student, is Ada still worth learning for (Canadian) development jobs in critical systems? I'd like to think it would give me an edge coming out of school, but I keep reading that new applications are being written in C/C++.

Edit: In fact, I interned at an avionics company and they're slowly trying to entirely switch to model-based development, using certified software that generates the code for you.
> The ten commonest verbs in English...

Until reading that, and subsequently confirming accepted usage, I never would have used commonest as the superlative of common.
I was on a flight last yr on a small Beechcraft 1900D and I saw the captain filming the (night) landing on his iPhone. Maybe the co-pilot was doing the landing. Still.
It is Smalltalk bolted onto C. Instead of garbage collection one uses reference counting.

While it does have exceptions, they don't unwind the stack as do C++ exceptions. They are commonly used only for fatal errors; I use C++ exceptions for all kinds of things that aren't really errors.

In C++, one calls a member function by dereferencing a pointer to that function from a table of such pointers.

In Objective-C, one calls a "method" by "sending it a message". That message is a small snippet of text. To dispatch to the actual function that implements the method, the Objective-C runtime (libobjc.dylib on OS X and iOS) must match the name of the method that one has targeted, to the name of the method whose implementation is actually just a regular C function.

Of course that would be very slow, but the Mach-O executable format is optimized for this case. Linux ELF and Windows COFF are not. So while in principle one can use Objective-C on Linux and Windows, the same code will run slower than on an equivalent Mac OS X box or iDevice.

Your code can send messages to methods that are not defined at compile time. If you actually call them you will terminate, but you can provide the implementation later.

I think Java can do that as well, but C and C++ do not have first-class language support for such a thing.

It's most-commonly used for Mac OS X Cocoa and iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) Cocoa Touch GUI applications, but one can use it for GNUStep on *NIX as well as Cocotron on Windows.
Is anyone else frightened the increasing efficiency of capitalism?
Since when does user-experience depend on best fulfilling my consumer desires?
Shouldn't I try to soften this impulse?
There is _some_ reporting, but it's very incomplete.

Google link to WSJ article:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=newss...
Many countries enforce these things more reasonably including the UK where I live where you are unlikely to get your car towed after being late doing up your seat belt and we have about half the road deaths per mile. I'm not convinced it's infantile to complain about it.
I don't know much about databases and which way to best do things but in the past 6 months I have been building lots of things in flask and do it's a problem I'm increasingly becoming acquainted with.

I wonder:
-is it useful to not have a defined data structure? I would k it makes it slightly more verbose when you are trying to update elements to have to refer to the key value pair rather than just the foot notation style
-does this mean that you don't need to redefine a data structure/model if you add additional elements?
-apart from what looks looks an elegant syntactical structure for data queries, are there any specific advantages to this approach?

Thanks for your help in increasing my understanding
Java at Amazon, Google, Twitter etc. is generally less pedantic and more focused. I have been a Java developer since 1997 and the only time I've seen the type of pedantry you are talking about is at non-technology companies where the most important metric is how cheap a developer is, not how much value they can add.
I just looked up this project Domenic_S mentioned. It says why it does what it does right in the first line of the README:

> This project uses Opal to transcompile Asciidoctor—a modern implementation of AsciiDoc—from Ruby to JavaScript to produce asciidoctor.js, bringing AsciiDoc to the browser!

The whole point is to not rewrite it in JavaScript but to piggyback on the original Ruby implementation and just compile it to JavaScript so it can run in a browser.
> Presumably, new irregular verbs used to appear, but no longer do

Why not? Have now we invented all of the words we need, but hadn't yet invented "seen" or "got" in 1200 AD? Then why would it stop now, instead of in 1200 AD?

> we have a standardized written language

But we've had written language for much longer than English has been around
I would like to remind everyone that the US gun ownership rate is not the cause of US gun crime.

A key assertion of this article is that guncrime is high because guns are common, and thus police have a somewhat justified reason to shoot first to defend themselves.

I would like to remind everyone that ownership of a military assault rifle is mandatory for 2/3rds of all men between 20 and 34 in Switzerland, and the rifle must be kept at home, by law. Once their service is complete, they may elect to keep their weapon.

This results in one of the highest gun ownership rates in the world. Despite this, gun crime in Switzerland is almost the lowest in the world.

US gun crime and police aggression is the result of unhealthy gun culture and an unhealthy attitude towards mental health, not ownership rates.

One of the unhealthy aspects is that the population fears the police will shoot them, so they prepare to defend against the police. The police respond by preparing to preemptively defend themselves, and the cycle escalates until someone thinks it is reasonable to give US police forces mine-proof trucks.
>Content shifting is a legal thing to do

Small point, but it actually depends on the country's laws. In New Zealand, it's illegal to do that. It's even illegal to rip a CD you own. It's stupid and would never be enforecd, but it is the law.
I am not local exactly but would be happy to talk and at least share some experiences. We are a small firm that does this work and are in The US, Florida and Colorado mainly.

We don't outsource anything but have taken over a ton of projects that started offshore.

Prices are obviously more expensive here in the US but they don't have to be excessive. If you want to chat my contact details are in my profile. If nothing else I can share our experiences so you can compare notes around.
No I am well aware of what critical thinking is and I still stand by that I find it overrated. That does not mean it's not important it is but it's getting way more credit than it deserves.

As I said another place this extends into corporate world where it's actually seen as providing value if you are able to point out problems with what others are suggesting.

Critical thinking has it's place but it's unfortunately often mistaken for creation and there comes a point where it's useless.
>So basically their thinking was that getting hacked was just the cost of doing business. Of course, they are now discovering that the cost of a really serious hack is much higher than they thought it was.

The HN hive mind victim blaming at it's best.

If you bother to read the proper statement it's specifically about one 'hypothetical' database getting breached.

"The cost to harden the legacy database against a possible intrusion could come to $10 million, he says. The cost to notify customers in case of a breach might be $1 million. With those figures, says Spaltro, “it’s a valid business decision to accept the risk” of a security breach. “I will not invest $10 million to avoid a possible $1 million loss,” he suggests."

And it's a fair statement. You can spend ever spare dollar on IT security and still not be 100% secure, just poor with a crippling system that grinds productivity to a halt. You can see this with the auditor living in gaga land asking employees have passwords with "random letters, numbers and symbols"

It is about risk analysis as he had the courage to say out loud and it is what everyone in real world IT security knows.
Laser Weapon Demonstration Aboard USS Ponce
Both female and male computer scientists need good female role models, and for the same reasons. In my own life I've been very fortunate to have been influenced by my mother (who taught me to program at an early age), by a grade school computing teacher (who also encouraged me to learn programming), and by my wife (a professional software engineer, among other things). I like to think that my wife's professional career has given my kids some similar perspective - even if only to change their unconscious assumptions about what women can do (which is everything, since my wife has been a writer, a software engineer, a business analyst, and a small business owner - and that's just what she's done professionally). Women needs to believe that they're capable of everything, and men need to believe that women are capable of everything, too. The same goes for men about men, and women about men. Feminism isn't about replacing patriarchy with matriarchy. It's about egalitarianism for all genders. That's all I meant.
It's (supposedly) pronunciation changes that cause irregular words, right? You start with a regular rule, pronunciation of all words change so that the rule no longer works, all the uncommon words quickly regularize on a new rule, and what's left is irregular.

It's been a while since my last linguistics class, but that seems like the natural result of words retaining their pronunciation roughly according to how often they're used. That sounds like a continuous process we should expect to slow as pronunciation change slows (due to recorded media), but not necessarily to stop at some cut-off point.
Perks Don't Work
After watching a few episodes of "Air Crash Investigations", this is very disturbing. That show reveals that a significant number of serious air disasters include mention in the final ATSB report that distracted pilots were a contributing factor in warning signs being ignored or incorrect actions being taken.
Is this real? If so, great work.
I'd argue that any HN member (or even any 1/2 tech savvy consumer) isn't exactly their target market
This is a fair point. In a similar vein there is also BayesDB http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/bayesdb/
Generally speaking, "calling someone out" is being a debbie-downer and/or cynical asshat. If you're calling someone out, then by definition you are not voicing a disagreement with a particular perspective, you are attacking an individual.

Whenever I disagree with someone, I try really hard to come across as "the thing that you are saying is wrong" instead of "you are wrong". The former is a statement about a belief, the latter is a statement about a person. It's human nature to have a reflexive, defensive reaction to someone if you think they're attacking you rather than something you said.
They would let you drive home in the UK without a valid license? I am disbelieving.
> It has enabled me to write extremely powerful programs that no one I know can understand.

I'd argue that makes it one of the least useful documents you've ever read :)