skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I take slight issue with talking too cavalierly about ranking programmers

Reasonable. Programming skill is not a 1 dimensional trait... and it's a bit bloody minded, even if it were. I threw myself in the fire with the hypotheticals because it made me uncomfortable, even as a hypothetical for the sake of argument, to be doing such a reduction.

> Should you therefore mistrust by default the software written by those folks, due to being burned by output from the lower 10th working in the same language?

Sure, absolutely. This manifests as a willingness to review their commits for mistakes, and to support their efforts in trying to reduce the chances of making certain types of mistakes, and an insistence they do the same for me.

And once I've gotten a better handle on their skill, assuming they're good, we'll both invariably regret it when I start to get complacent with my reviews and they check something in with a problem we've now both missed. It wouldn't surprise me if the best programmers I've worked with sneak more bugs past me than the worst as a direct result of this...

> And all this despite the fact that we have some mitigations these days, such as address randomization, fewer pages being executable, privilege separation, safer coding styles and practices being pretty well known in some circles, etc.?

Yes, absolutely. Why even indulge in any of these mitigations if you trust yourself and your fellow programmers with unsafe pointers? Each of these is vitally important specifically because we can't. And unfortunately, these mitigations are imperfect solutions. A horrifying amount of software disables them outright - and even when enabled, exploits still show up in the wild - they just get more convoluted and end up with lower success rates.

Better language choice is yet another potential mitigation. For me that usually means C#. This too is imperfect: I'm still more than able to write an unchecked buffer overflow with an unsafe block, or a marshaling API call, etc. ad infinitum - but it's an improvement.

> And where would that lower 90th be if it weren't for the fact that these days people are primarily being taught in memory safe languages?

Spending more time learning about and fighting memory bugs instead of shipping features, a sad waste of productivity. (I don't think that's the answer you were hinting at, but I'm not sure what is. An aside: My field still worships and is primarily taught memory unsafe languages.)
Such a great question. After 9/11 I was really hoping for a huge humanitarian, economic, and serious political effort in the Middle East along with the inevitable military actions. Didn't happen. No one even talked about such an idea (a Marshall Plan for the Middle East sort of thing), and whatever minor efforts have been made along those lines get no press.
please do share, if you found a picture of noteworthy legitimacy that shows even 1% of the figure quoted above i.e 20 million. (btw the population of DPRK is 24 million as per wikipedia, thus 20 million seems a lot inflated.)
The principle of democratically elected civilian leadership of the military in the US was the issue, not a specific military strategy in the Korean peninsula.

MacArthur undermined the chain of command. That's why he was relieved. Full stop.

It's too bad how it work out for all parties involved, particularly the people of North Korea.
+1 I stand corrected.

I've updated my tests and qsort seems to be faster than sort, for this particular test case.
Drchrono – iOS and Django programmers needed
Can anyone elaborate on the experience that Product Managers had in these times?

Thanks!
He was speaking in 1996 and characterizing Generation X at that time. What you're comparing to seems to be Generation X now.
How do they maintain their order?
Well, the US never seemed to be bothered with that moral conundrum when it came to Iraq (no WMDs, did not cause 9/11, mind you) or Afghanistan.
Erle-brain, a Linux-based autopilot for making drones
I guess that depends on your definition of 'easily' - you can provide custom allocator s fairly easily. What's more problematic are things like the memory usage patterns of std::vector and std::string. Once you know how they work you can avoid the pitfalls or use custom alternatives.
The same benefits as forgoing a helmet when walking down the street.
Not new but very very rare to include current leaders

http://time.com/3640774/the-interview-sony-north-korea-movie...
Measuring Your Site's Responsive Breakpoint Usage with Google Analytics
Very cool, I'm gonna use it!
An Italian accent is not so easy to conceal, though :)

I think I've been lucky myself - in 6 years living abroad I was questioned a lot only at the apex of the whole Berlusconi debacle... And even then I think it was more out of curiosity than jest. Ymmv, I guess, depending on the environment...
Your comment is partisan tripe, absolutely worthless. This has nothing to do with liberal/conservative/Rep/Dem and everything to do with a belief in fundamental human rights. 10,000 terrorist attacks on American soil would not convince me that torture is a valid tactic.

Even if you find yourself lacking all morality and humanity, you should still be aware that torture has been proven time and time again over hundreds of years to be utterly useless in getting truthful information out of the victim. There is no justification whatsoever, and there is no intel being gained via torture that could not be better gained in other ways.

The rational conclusion is that torture is not only barbaric, but pointless as well. 9/11 and the irrational stupidity that happened afterwards should not be held up as some kind of divine justification for war crimes.
Such an act of dedication to science how they accomplished "feeding the horde".
I'm not sure I follow.

It may be useful in some cases to describe why you believe or disbelieve something (as you say).

I do not see why it would never be useful to state that because you believe or disbelieve something, you have a certain emotional reaction to some thing.

It seems like a potentially useful description of why one has or chooses a given emotional response.

Even if it so happens that the belief leading to the emotional response is wrong, it could still be useful to describe the relationship between the belief and the emotions or feelings or opinions on policy.

For example, suppose I believe that all insects have a significant chance of poisoning food they land on.
In this case, might not it be useful to know that the reason I am not ok with flies is because of this belief?

So even if the person is wrong about their beliefs about AI, I don't think their explanation of why they are OK with AI as a result is "meaningless".
Less than pleasant first experience. Card failed, reason never communicated clearly enough. Very slow and archaic support.
You put things in order by memory address and they stay in order when you access them. An array is just a special case of a hash map -- one with a trivial hash function.

That's why the lend themselves to the same syntax so well.
No primitive types: tuples, lists, sets. Having only arrays to work with and being weak typed results in a lot of headache.
Thanks for your insight. As I said in the very beginning: "If you can - take your tax money elsewhere".

This includes other countries.
Six Handy Ways to Cure Mosquito Bites
"And C++ isn't just for large, complicated programs; it's for small, complicated programs too."

hahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! -- I was thinking that, but hadn't put it into those exact words yet.

I was thinking something like "C++ is definitely for complicated programs" -- not that they necessarily need to be complicated, but that C++ often unnecessarily complicates them.

I really wanted to like the STL a long time ago, but I gave up eventually. Happily my frustration with C++ led me to investigate other programming languages (not that it was the only one I had used), and I write precious little in it lately -- mostly just to modify code others have written in it.
You still have to carry twice the fuel. What about a refuel station orbiting mars? Replenish the mars fuel station with fuel before the manned mission departs, they can just use that fuel stored at Mars when they return from the manned mission.
Bjarne should know better than to directly compare the performance of std::sort and qsort. One is typically printed in full in a header file, while the other is typically compiled separately. If qsort were found in a header file, it could be inlined into identical code to the C++ version, regardless of the fact that there are void pointers lying around everywhere.

There are caveats: the compiler might not choose to inline unless you force it to, and if you do that then you'll end up with duplicate code in the case of multiple calls with the same comparison function, while C++ can automagically merge duplicates (although you probably want to write a wrapper function anyway, and C++ will still waste compile time generating the duplicates if the calls are in different source files). Also, if the sorting function calls a secondary function in multiple textual locations, and that function is significant enough that inlining it would produce wasteful code, the pure inlining-based approach will be insufficient (but I don't think most sorting algorithms do this).

In other words, C++ makes it easier to do this sort of thing. No surprise! It certainly makes it prettier. But when it comes to performance, in practice the above would likely not be a big deal for qsort, so the difference between the two functions is really more a matter of convention regarding the implementation location. Benchmarking the two and explaining only that type safety "makes for excellent inlining and good optimizations" is simply misleading.
The Amazing Story of the Blind Engineer (Who Is Also a Triathlete)
Ok, so how the US could be punished for making international crimes on a regular basis (CIA actions, 150,000 civilian deaths in Iraq ( https://www.iraqbodycount.org/ ) etc) ?
My Da Vinci 3D printer does this - the cartridges report how much filament they have left, and the gcode for a print includes how much filament the print is meant to use. When the printer thinks a cartridge of filament is empty, it refuses to use it, even if it still has filament in it.

Like many other DRM'd products, there are hacks for the printer that can get around this (one resets the filament "odometer", another convinces the printer that your print uses zero meters of filament).

Existence of these hacks typically doesn't affect the makers of these DRM'd consumer-level products (like the cat litter box or the Keurig machine), in my estimation. Most consumers simply won't know that they have an option to either by choose another vendor, or find a hack to get around it.

People who buy 3D printers are already primed to hack that thing to pieces, though. In that case I think the DRM was a waste of time and money. They didn't understand their target market.
(to get around paywall: google the title and click through from google)
How does this compare to the optimized hashtable implementations in the various JavaScript runtimes? I imagine their requirements are similar?
Im working on The Pale King right now and fuck its a hard read. Infinite Jest is next on the list when I work up the courage.
By using a doubly linked list, where the first element in the "bucket", contains the next pointer to the next element in the hash table. Read zend_hash.h & zend_hash.c It is fairly complicated and explaining it in depth is beyond the scope of this comment.

This "bucket" also handles the collisions by using separate chaining. There is actually two "next" pointers, one for the chains, and one for the next element in order of insertion. Very confusing and requires reading through the code and playing with it.
The problem here is we don't have a very fundamentally good theory of mind. AI will come from philosophy departments, not CS.
Did you not see the South Park movie?

The major failing of this movie is that it was going to suck. The trailer screamed "unwatchable".
He's mixing up "Marxists" with "everyone other than anarcho-capitalists". Again. It's a depressingly common mistake.
"Unfortunately, this means Regine Gries is still feeding the bedbug colony every week."

--Shudders
Not sure I see your argument. Credit cards can obviously be improved upon and it doesn't seem that credit card companies are doing much in regards to its form factor and ease of use.

We've got a couple choices. 1) Wait for companies that have enough R&D budgets to develop something that doesn't directly cost consumers or 2) fund another company to do so.

For #2 it doesn't differ much if that comes from a VC firm or crowdfunding campaign besides the VC firms adding a layer of abstraction.

I agree that we don't see this kind of money flowing around in other industries but you also don't see much change on most industries.

I'm not advocating the VC model or saying that SV spends money on what I believe are the most important problems. But I'm also not seeing how it's dumb money.
Ask HN: How to Promote your startup on a $0 budget
Erle-brain is a palm size Linux computer running Debian that includes 25+ sensors and allow you to build drones easily. It's the result of the work performed during BeaglePilot project last summer in porting the APM autopilot to Linux. We include a pre-flashed image with:

- Linux 3.8 kernel compiled with the PREEMPT option (best results we measured through BeaglePilot)
- Debian Wheezy file system
- ROS Hydromedusa
- mavros ROS package
- APM running natively in Linux (and linked with ROS through mavros)
- preconfigured daemons for launching everything automatically, WiFi dongles support, etc.

Cheers!
I believe this project is intended to be more of a 'design fiction' than a functioning photosynthetic material (RCA is well known for this type of work). Of course free organelles that aren't maintained by the cellular machinery will rapidly cease to function. They will maintain their green color but won't be able to perform membrane/macromolecule repair, gradient regulation, signaling, foreign body defense, etc.

This is still a useful project however as it may serve to catalyze future research into robust photosynthetic materials.
You're right, you definitely need significant single site capacity (2-3 sites with 100Gbit/s, not just the entire system, for instance), and you may even have to play routing games to move traffic around if that's not enough. Any other sites may have to get shut off during massive abuse incidents.

It's a tough call to say if it's better to protect the rest of the network by trying to isolate the attack, even though that means you are totally down in one region. I'm inclined to keep 1/2 running than to have nothing, but if I have this release valve of moving traffic to the farms designed to soak up abuse traffic then it makes my decision easier. I should be able to get back up worldwide, if I've done my provisioning properly.

One of the nice things about this kind of attack is that your attacker has no choice but to follow your routing, whereas if you use your DNS GSLB to re-route an attacker away from your HTTP server farm (to handle a different sort of attack), they may not stop hammering on its IP address. After all, it's pretty unlikely that they respect DNS TTLs.

This approach is simplistic, but it's basically the only solution. The nature of a DDOS attack is that you cannot predict its origin, beyond the distribution of compromised client machines around the world. E.g. your attackers are pretty unlikely to come en masse from Africa.

Spoofing is an issue. Not much to do about that at your farm level, but you can start working with your upstreams to get ACLs in place to prevent some portion of that. And if the attack is prolonged and sufficiently large, the only way you're going to stop it is to identify sources and get help from involved networks and ISPs.
Digital Learning Initiative
At Bartlett High School in Anchorage, Alaska, there are a lot of low income families. Myself being one of them. My sixth hour English teacher is having a fundraiser to raise money for 5 Samsung tablets and cases for her classroom. She believes that by doing this, it will enhance the learning experience by allowing students to quickly look up words and phrases they do not understand. It will also help teach safe habits on the internet and great researching skills. I too believe in these things and is why I am sharing it with you. Most schools in the ASD are switching to BYOD standards, yet, a majority of the students cannot do such because of the income status of their household. This is why I am asking for your help. It would be great to be able to quickly look up things I don't understand without having to worry about my phone being taken away and such things. If you are able to donate just a little, it would help a great deal.

Please visit the website and if by chance that you donate, please in the comments say "credited to Alexis 6th hour"

Thank you.

http://www.donorschoose.org/project/lets-find-it-and-learn-it-cooperative/1387065/?verify=81695292
It's not just getting fuel to Mars. It's building and operating launch infrastructure there. Unmanned LEO missions from KSC get delayed and fail. On Mars there won't be spare parts or separate ground crews, and the spacecraft will have to be readied having been through launch and touchdown cycles rather than a slow gentle roll from a VAB to launch pad.

The speed of light means no real time support from Houston. If ten people go out, then ten people have to get an interplanetary space program established on Mars. It ain't gonna be a matter of pushing the easy button.
Cloudfront is temporarily down
Instead of narrowing gender gaps, the technology industry created vast new ones
CloudFront is Down at Christmas time
Most of my websites using Cloudfront are down.
Later I tested other websites angel.co, Even that is down.

It's Christmas time we have more sales, this is the worst time. What is the use when we don't have it at the time we need it?
Thanks Kevin <3
There's an example in Part 1, where string concatenation is used as an example. C++ requires "adding" two string objects and C requires manipulating char pointers. And thus, C++ is a better teaching programming language.

Although true, I feel this argument is rather weak: it's true, that when teaching I wouldn't want to start with pointers and malloc's from the get go, but it does not mean C++ is the only alternative.
Sounds like a very cool project. Any idea where we can find more info on it? Specifically, it would be interesting to learn where does the freed Carbon go: this topic is not covered in images and the little text that is available on the site. Also (or perhaps related to it) what's the longevity of the leaf and what does it require for photosynthesis to run (regular leafs require at least water and removal or generated organic material)
Backlit e-readers 'damage sleep and health'
I disagree on the wide screen field of view.

From what I understand, reading comprehension actually improves with text in contained width (i.e. columns) [1][2]. My experience in using a higher res monitor is that it takes a bit more effort to read the (smaller) text. Larger + higher res combination might work though.

PS. I run a two-vertical / portrait monitor configuration and it makes my job a lot easier to orient myself within the code.

[1] - http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ColumnModeSometimesBetterThanWidespan
[2] - http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/3553/why-do...
Sounds better than labelling anything you've seen twice as a meme/idiom/myth/design pattern, etc.
http://imgur.com/7gwzTcR
Did anyone else hear "America, fuck yeah!" after the last paragraph of that CNN article?

"Yes, let's go out and get all the republicans (the unintentional irony of the GOP supporting the movie notwithstanding) to buy tickets to see this movie to show those foreigners that when terrorists try to scare us, we just buy a bunch of useless shit."

Perhaps one of the dumbest things I've heard in response to this situation yet.

Sorry - I know I'm fairly new as a commenter (long time listener, nearly-first time caller!), and my karma may take a nosedive for this one. I just couldn't hold this one inside.
A pessimist's guide to world in 2015
Amazon CloudFront is (again) having issues
Most requests end as 503 with "X-Cache: CapacityExceeded from cloudfront".
Does AngularJS really go well with Node.js/JS versus others?
Making treatment affordable and more accurate using supercomputers
This is why you never run over anything in a car. Ever.
How to Learn Anything Fast
oh god, why ?
If you're teaching programming, don't teach C++.

If you're teaching systems programming, don't hide pointers. In this case, knowing the addition operator is useful iff they understand the underlying operations.... chances are, if they're learning C++, they don't.
The study only seemed to compare An iPad with print books. While I am sure many people who do use an iPad for ebooks I am sure there are many more Kindle readers, which may well have given a different result.
By others meaning(Ruby, Python Java etc) for real time, concurrency type of capabilities? Or am I terribly misinformed? I dont have Node experience but Ruby seems not too easy to put together with AngularJS.

I understand Node.js's primary con is the usage of multiple CPUs. However my understanding of backend is not as good. This article also talks about difficulty with relational databases? Can someone explain it better or correct it if the link is wrong?

Wish to hear your experiences (both sides) dealing with Node.JS and other parts of your stack as a whole. Please feel free to rattle all you wish, I will be happy to hear more about them.
Catbirds like Linus Torvalds, for example?
Politics.
It should have been called PHP6. But to "avoid confusion" they skipped that number,which of course leads to more confusion.
Not to mention, the spec of Java has the benefit of being built on very firm semantics, regardless of how well they were designed. C++ has no such solid footing on which to stand.
Debian Code Search: how we reduced query runtime from 20m to 2m for slow queries
California Lemon Lawyers
The manufacturer makes “a reasonable number of attempts” to repair the car. This means that the vehicle has been fixed for the same problem for 4 or more times, or that it has been out of service a cumulative total of 20 or more business days during a 12 month period of the warranty.
See calemonlawinfo.com
This is a beautiful sentiment from one of my favorite writers, but it also highlights why these arguments are so often unproductive. Obviously, there are people who think that handouts result in a net loss in happiness for the world. Especially in progressive nations with functioning economies. You might disagree with that calculus, but it's silly to think that the people on the other side are just big meanies.
He moved to Tokyo earlier this year. This is mentioned in his post. For example:

"Appointment Reminder’s key stat of interest is monthly recurring revenue on our publicly available plans, since this is the most predictable revenue in any of our businesses and thus lets me make consequential decisions like “Move the family to Tokyo, where rents are 5X what they were in Ogaki” (that happened, more later” or “Bring on help” (that also happened, more later)."
He mentions in this post his family moved to tokyo. I guess the downvotes were from those to lazy to mention this?
This doesn't seem quite right - if I own a car and use only 1/3rd of its capacity, I generally expect it to last 3x as long, so the unused capacity costs me nothing. Even your annual steam cleaner example will favor the purchaser over the renter, given enough time.

So the difference between renting and owning must come down to the cost of unused capacity, which means the fixed costs. Where those fixed costs are high, like a parking space in SF, you want to amortize them by maximizing utilization, which means sharing cars. But where those fixed costs are low, like parking in my driveway, unused capacity may be so cheap that owning costs less than renting, even if the car sits idle most of the time.