skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Like there's some sort of platonic form of "good" code that everything must aspire to

There is:

1) Code that is covered by tests

2) DRY code

3) Loosely coupled code

4) Code that fails fast

5) Code that doesn't reinvent the wheel

Most technical debt I've seen violates one of the above principles. It is crystal fucking clear when you are paying it off and the benefits to paying it off are pretty obvious to those working on the code base.

It is impossible to avoid violating them completely, but low technical debt means small and rare violations, whereas high technical debt means large and extremely common violations.

>What I've actually seen in practice is that "technical debt" mostly means "things I wouldn't have written that way." It has very little to do with the code and more to do with the philosophical leanings of the commenter.

In practice I find that most people know terrible code when they see it, but if given the chance to rewrite from scratch most will end up digging themselves into the same hole.

Bad coders will not realize that they are doing it. Good coders can also end up doing it simply for expediency.

I find that the best way of paying off the technical debt is simply to work my way through fixing things 1-5, roughly in that order. It is a slow and largely thankless process.
Yea, but luckily the reader view doesnt do that, as soon as possible ill switch into that.
Yeah, there's this narrative about programmers being born, not made. I have come to believe it is mostly false.

First of all, when I was in my early 20s, I loved a lot of things. Writing, music, graphic design. For a time, I defined myself as someone who used to program. When the internet happened, I just dropped back into it. If I had been born in different decades, I most certainly would have done different things.

Secondly, I know a number of people in SF who decided to jump on the programming bandwagon since 2011 or so, in the hope that they could remain employable in an increasingly topsy-turvy economic environment. And... they aren't bad. Not great, but not terrible either. A friend of mine who couldn't write a line of code two years ago cracks jokes about D3.js today. Some of them were women who might have had STEM-ready brains, but were scared off from science by the usual sexism in childhood. But others, as far as I can tell, were pretty average and don't have a great aptitude for it. They just learned it, by learning it.

My feeling is that, in North America, they just forgot how to teach computer science for a few decades. There's an effect some people have found (anecdotally) that computer science starts to skew male when, in a given country, home computers become widely available as gaming machines. So it seems to me, CS departments relied on amateur geeks (usually male) who already knew how to program to be the top students in the class, and explained away the high failure rate (and a very skewed gender ratio) because computer science is just so hard.
If they bailed out the banks but not the car companies, the treasury would have profited 24.5 billion.

If they bailed out the banks and the car companies and the car companies earned money, the treasury would have profited much more.

But then, the treasury didn't do the bailout to profit. They did it to short-circuit a potential Great Depression. From that standpoint, it was a success at any price.
On the other hand, I type at least 10x faster than I write. If people learned to only take notes on as much as they would write otherwise, it seems you'd get the best of both worlds -- faster note-taking which would allow time for deeper processing.

But really, the deeper problem is taking notes at all. Honestly, in what world is it efficient for a lecturer to recite, and all the students take notes? Students should be able to pay attention without being distracted, and a designated note-taker should be taking everything down, getting the professor to correct any mistakes, and then e-mailing everyone afterwards. Note-taking is an anachronism that deserves to die.
If you are really worried, use layer 3 or layer 2 security (say with IPSec) to secure NTP communications.

Yes, there is a bit of a bootstrapping problem, but you can address that with a bootstrapped handshake that sets a clock baseline.

Alternatively, you could just hardwire a radio receiver (like say... a GPS receiver).
Wow, the Interact was my first computer as well!

Recently I found that someone had uploaded a bunch of tape images of the machine to archive.org:
http://ia601600.us.archive.org/zipview.php?zip=/16/items/Int...

This caused me to spend a couple days writing a simple emulator under OS/X (mostly as an experiment since I'd never tried to write a graphical app on that platform) and got it to the "DEPRESS L TO LOAD TAPE" stage. (I luckily had kept the ROM chips when my mom pitched the computer, I was unable to save it all) Unfortunately things more complicated like Microsoft Basic crashed pretty quickly so there's probably still something a little buggy about my 8080A or other hardware emulation.

I've also got a reasonable sized collection of cassette tapes, both of interact branded software and of programs my dad wrote in BASIC and Forth. It shouldn't be too hard to extract the data from these but a converter will have to be written (the Interact's cassette interface was unique) It's clearly just pulse-width modulated though. I just need to find the right stack of tools that will convert a .wav to a cleaned-up set of pulse width timings, or write one myself. Audio/DSP is another category of programming I've never done.

Unfortunately I haven't touched this stuff in about a year since I've been too busy with other stuff. I probably need a good chunk of uninterrupted time to make much more progress -- the last time I tried I spent a few hours staring at instruction traces from BASIC trying to find out why it was failing and got nowhere. Maybe over the summer I'll have a chance to look at it again.

I will leave you with some screenshots for your nostalgia though. These are taken directly from the emulated RAM. The band on the right would actually wouldn't be shown since it's in the horizontal refresh interval -- that's why they appear off-center and sometimes with garbage on the side:
http://www.bodyfour.com/interact/snapshot.png
http://www.bodyfour.com/interact/basic.png
http://www.bodyfour.com/interact/basic2.png
What's the next step after a security alert is delivered (i.e. does it go to a person first? does it get written down somewhere? are these bells constantly ringing?)? I promise I'm not a bad guy :)
If only all bailouts went like this...
Another bit I find interesting

>At the time communications with the ntp team showed they had little interest in removing unused functionality from the ntp.org code, or any help with our form of source code audit.

Am I the only one who enjoys removing unused code? My favorite commits are the ones with negative net lines. This might be a liberal usage of the word "unused" though...
"... necessary tools such as if-/else-statements and loops"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Array_programming
Maybe I wasn't clear, but I was thinking one would manipulate the delta specifically to cause the machine to adjust its clock.
Unless you think computers are suddenly going to vanish forever or will achieve absolute sentience and hyperintelligence in under a few centuries, I'm not quite sure how I could be wrong.
If you're interested in this kind of stuff, be sure to check the author's (Michael Steil) blog: http://www.pagetable.com/ - he has written all kinds of juicy blog posts about low level programming.
StraightAsia
I agree. In recent times we have been training young adults to behave like kids. That behavior sticks and you are left with a dysfunctional adult.
Some ideas for the future:

Add support for the Firehose XML output format:

https://github.com/fedora-static-analysis/firehose

Checks for features that are specific to one shell (bashisms etc) when used with POSIX #!/bin/sh.

Checks for features that aren't implemented in the desired shell (for running on busybox sh for example).

Check for the various issues listed here:

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls
Waartaa: Free and better alternative to irccloud
What are you using for Perl and JavaScript?
"... That heroic origin story resonates with white-collar nerds who feel their spark of creativity getting dimmer while they screw around in IT or at a lab bench. ..."

Only in it for the money? Or made their money doing useless things?
A professor I worked with absolutely hated the acronym STEM. Each letter of it was very different from each other. It also brought with it an over simplification of education and the issues around it. It does make for a handy political acronym though..
Does that profit takes into account inflation and stuff? Because if not the outcome could be somewhat different. However, even if they broke even, the potential negative effects that the bailout prevented are huge.
Ubuntu has ntpd.
I'm of the impression that proper southern cornbread is the version without sugar (as well as cooked in a preheated cast iron skillet that goes back into the oven), whereas northern cornbread has sugar. (Wikipedia mostly agrees, at least on the sugar front).

This caused me problems when I tried to make cornbread on my own for the first time after moving north for college. It wasn't as good as I remembered from home until I realized I had to take out the sugar.
"When Congress created TARP, it authorized up to $700 billion for the programs. That authority was later reduced to $475 billion. To date, a total of $426.3 billion has been disbursed under TARP. As of November 30, 2014, cumulative collections under TARP, together with Treasury’s additional proceeds from the sale of non-TARP shares of AIG6, have exceeded total disbursements by $14.0 billion7. Treasury estimates that the combined overall cost of TARP will be approximately $37.5 billion. These estimates assume that the budget for TARP housing programs will be disbursed in full and do not include Treasury’s additional proceeds from its non-TARP AIG shares."

http://www.treasury.gov/initiatives/financial-stability/repo...

Reading the press release is nice, but it does help to actually read the report to Congress.
Dr Sonny White updates on space warping and emdrive experimental work
Here is James Grime's (Enigma and Alan Turing expert/fanboy) comments on The Imitation Game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCSp1RZLhkg
http://aperiodical.com/2014/11/an-alan-turing-expert-answers...
This is amazing... I hope it works. I've wanted something like this for testing on device.
Please redesign the last.fm. Anyone..
>The FBI said North Korea did it. Doesn't that automatically remove it from the conspiracy theory category?

Any theory about how it was done is automatically a conspiracy theory because it WAS a conspiracy. Using it as a pejorative in this context is stupid.

>I don't know what more authoritative source we can go to to decide

Most of the OPSEC community - who don't have a motive to lie to get more goodies out of Congress and whose story actually adds up.

My point was that if you examine the motives of all the parties involved, the FBI's story stinks as much as the CIA's did when they started screaming yellowcake. They have every reason to lie and the North Koreans have no reason to lie.
There's more than a little academic and operations management research on the topic.

I hope a search on terms like "background noise open offices" would prove useful for reference hunting.

Here's an item:

Performance, fatigue and stress in open-plan offices: The effects of noise and restoration on hearing impaired and normal hearing individuals

By Helena Jahncke, Niklas Halin

Noise and Health
(2012, Volume 14, Issue 60, Page : 260-272)

(via Archive.org - I couldn't load the article directly at the moment)

https://web.archive.org/web/20130605080737/http://www.noisea...

Also:

Open-plan offices are making workers sick, say Australian scientists

news.com.au (Jan 13, 2009)

http://www.news.com.au/open-plan-offices-make-you-sick/story...

Citing research published in Asia-Pacific Journal of Health Management. By Dr. Vinesh Oommen

Money quote: "The problem is that employers are always looking for ways to cut costs, and using open-plan designs can save 20 per cent on construction."
I think the misunderstanding is that Ally Financial is "part of the auto industry". Yes, really.

So here's where the numbers come from :

1) +15.3 billion : auto industry + financial industry

which is 0.06% per year, for 3.5% over 6 years

2) -9.2 billion : auto industry

3) +1.3 billion : Ally Financial

Therefore:

4) (inferred) -10.5 billion : auto industry - Ally Financial

5) (inferred) +24.5 billion : financial industry TARP

First caveat. Given the risk on the troubled assets, this is a pathetically bad return over 6 years. These were the worst of the worst, something everybody else would have demanded something like 13-14% interest per year for in 2008.

Second caveat, we all know why the finance industry came out ahead (not necessarily a good publication in this link, just the first reasonable link on Google for this subject) :

http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/greg-weldon/stock...

So really, the full story is, $426 billion TARP + $3 Trillion in loans to banks was sufficient to convince the banks to pay $450 billion to the US government. They have not, of course, paid back the 3 trillion, nor are they capable of doing so.

Third caveat, a lot of that $3 trillion has gone into stock buybacks, effectively giving the money to investors in S&P 500 companies (especially financials). The idea is that the S&P should continue to increase in value, despite the money flow having stopped (mostly). History teaches though, that when this happens, a more common result is a stock market crash. That doesn't happen until loans aren't free anymore though (currently the FED says rate hike will happen around June).

Frankly if you're in a startup, make sure to have a job at Google, Yahoo or Amazon or some large player by the time the rate hikes happen.
We need new industries to come up. New industries which tend to hire lots of scientists come from big government spending initiatives. The ramp up in research during ww2, moon race, etc. Plenty of industries came from that.

We need to push into space further, attack cancer, deal with antibiotic resistance, dig into groundbreaking physics, etc. R and D is only 3% of US government budget.
A domain expert or becoming one is what makes a startup profitable.

What is an expert: Someone or something recognized as such by other recognized experts and trusted by a significant number of those who are not.

What is a domain: A limited area of human knowledge small enough that it can fit in one person's memory but wide enough that when applied it solves multiple useful problems.

How do I become a domain expert: By doing. First learning. Then making. Finally advancing. Unless of course you are creating a new domain which skips to step 3.

Am I an expert at something I take for granted: No. Most US adults know how to drive and do it semi-(un?)consciously. They are not expert drivers.
To get a criminal conviction, you have to show requisite intent beyond a reasonable doubt. The basis of the HSBC indictment was failure to classify Mexican operations as "high risk" and follow the higher standard for suspicious activity reporting. Maybe negligence, but big leap from there to knowledge or intent. There was some evidence that some people in Mexico may have known, in the abstract, that there as laundering going on. But what was missing was evidence that anyone in the US had actual knowledge of specific illegal transactions. That's what they did have in this case.

I read the indictment in HSBC. They didn't have the kind of spam dunk evidence they would've needed to get convictions in that case. They did here.
Can someone from the Racket community share how this book compares to Realm of Racket?
At the cost of creating moral hazard, the full impact of which has yet to be seen.
SCSS is a CSS extension/preprocessor, a very specific subset of "Web design tool / framework trends".

Main competitor for SCSS at this specific niche is LESS, followed by Stylus.

SASS/SCSS and LESS are pretty much equivalent - I'm biased toward SCSS.
And how is medical information any different from financial information? Financial information can be used to do exactly everything you said about leaked medical records, yet no one worries if their bank/identity has been compromised.
>Extortion and blackmail from state actors is precisely the thing the U.S. government is supposed to protect U.S. persons and corporations from, so a U.S. admission that North Korea has managed to "reach out and touch Sony Pictures" is bad news for the U.S. government, not good news.

The relevant actor in this case is not the whole US government acting on its own agenda, but departments of the federal government acting on theirs.

I already explained why it's great news for them - precisely because it engenders the same reaction that you just had. Good enough that they'd invent it even if it weren't true (just like yellowcake).
There is an additional attribute that goes a long way in staying an expert in a changing world - humility or acknowledging that you do not or cannot know the future. PG hints at this when he says.. "...admit you have no idea what the right direction is, and try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of change...". It is also paraphrased quite well in the maxim of "Stay hungry, stay foolish" popularized by Jobs.

But humility that stems from ignorance is at odds with popular expectations of an expert. The problem is what worked in the past may not work in the future. Being sensitive to changes in the world around you, requires you to momentarily stop being an expert and look at the world from the eyes of a novice or beginner. This is not only hard but sometimes impossible to do because of how we change as we acquire new knowledge. [2]

So the trick is to be somewhat schizophrenic - being able to simultaneously view the world as an expert with the fresh thinking of a beginner or a novice.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8754334
Side note, the author @shurcool is a friend. He is probably the most passionate guy about go.

You can read more about go tools here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-nuts/g7O_o0yI...
>millenials know first-hand how crippling debt

When I tell people their first financial goal should be to eliminate their debt, I get crazy looks. Especially if they are older or are too young to understand college and other debt burdens.
In some cases, yes.

Some simulations want to have the same sequence of numbers. Seems like a fundamental design misunderstanding in nethack, however.
How Zoe Quinn and Margaret Pless Tried Getting Mike Cernovich Killed
Well, you just blew my mind with that last link. I'll have to give that recipe a try as well, I'm pretty sure it'll be worth it. Thanks!
> it's very hard to become an expert in something and have the value of that expertise remain valuable.

That may be true in programming, but that's not the only field. Much of my mechanical engineering knowledge dates from the 19th century and earlier and is still valuable. Even my FEA knowledge (which relates heavily to programming) is still good. Practically all my undergraduate knowledge is still valuable, let alone my Master's and PhD knowledge.

It's quite clear that you're approaching this strictly from a single viewpoint. If you really want to think, you need to broaden your view.

Even in programming there's still things that change at a slower pace. Sure there's a lot of things changing in regards to the web, but areas such as numerical methods change more slowly.
If we're going to think about the bailout like an investment (like the article seems to do), even more important than inflation is comparing this return to other potential returns.

According to the article, the USG put $426B in and made $15.3B. That's a 3.5% return on that money over 5+ years. As an investment, that seems terrible. If the USG had just bought an S&P500 index fund on Oct 3, 2008, they would have made something like +70% (Source: Yahoo Finance). Again, this is just looking at TARP like an investment by the government.
I work with a 62 year old that puts me and everyone around him to shame. He is very productive in the company, readily picks up new technologies, is an open source contributor, and also manages to bike to work. Age doesn't have to equal stagnation.
My stupid cartoon about this affair:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/scardine/random-writings/m...
One can censor and propagandize in a decentralized network, though, and it does happen.
Look up "two wrongs don't make a right" some time.
ProgLang Design with Evidence
I do think Facebook has a lot of pull. Many people get their news through their Facebook feed (an awful idea) - at least many people that I know. And it's the largest place where you can discuss things with close friends and family in mass. Other places on the internet allow mass broadcast - for information dispersal content not only matters but also source/reputation.
>If you act like a mad man (in terms of diplomacy)

In terms of diplomacy this is simply how they are presented by the western media to a largely credulous western audience.

If they were truly as irrational as they are presented the North Korean government would have stopped existing decades ago. Mad men are not good at self preservation.

Never mind being able to develop heavy industry, nukes and a minor space program all while under sanctions.
Cybersecurity Infrastructure Engineer Atlanta, GA
Responsible for information technology security devices in a 24 X 7 X 365 environment. The infrastructure engineer is responsible for monitoring, configuration changes, accounts, and software updates for client IT security devices. The infrastructure engineer must be able to analyze, troubleshoot, and remediate issues with various IT security devices.

Qualifications:
U.S. Citizenship.
Ability to maintain an active clearance.
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline, or the equivalent combination of education, professional training, or work experience.
DOD 8570 Compliance, or the ability to quickly obtain the security certifications: Security+ or CEH.
Minimum of three (3) years network operations experience.
Experience in the following technologies: Firewalls, Data Loss Prevention, VPN, Intrusion Detection/Prevention, Network Scanning and Compliance, Network Access control, and Advanced Persistent Threat Prevention.
Experience in performing infrastructure support at an enterprise level.
Experience in IT security device management.
Ability to demonstrate strong knowledge of computer security concepts.
Demonstrated ability to document processes and procedures.

CCSE or CCSA
Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP).
Network Operations Center (NOC) experience.
Security Operations Center (SOC) experience.

Send Qualifications to cboyce@icfi.com or apply online at ICFI.com

ICF is an equal opportunity employer that values diversity at all levels. (EEO/AA – Minorities/Females/Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities)
Can you say more here?
Acoustical consultants are well trained in the optimization of the open office environment--there's even an ASTM standard. Over the last several years that scheme has been challenged in favor of the architect selling the owner on the industrial look (whether for aesthetic or budget) without significant consideration for the acoustic result. If an acoustical consultant is on the job and cannot win the battle for better acoustics, what is the effect of the resulting compromises?

By asking the original questions I hope to learn the results of what design considerations were included and perhaps if the millenial worker is less sensitized to office conditions of yesteryear. My suspicion on the latter is "no."
Gliph – Secure Messaging with Bitcoin
> Some simulations want to have the same sequence of numbers.

srand(time(NULL)); does not provide that.