skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"In our knowledge of the things of the universe (whether mathematical or otherwise), the power to innovate that lies within us is really nothing but innocence. It is the original innocence that we were all endowed with at birth, that lives inside all of us, but is often the object of our contempt and of our most secret fears. This innocence is what brings together the humility and the audacity that make it possible for us to get to the heart of things, but also allows things to deeply affect us and get under our skin so that they leave a lasting imprint on our minds and souls."

Grothendieck's writing is beautifully translated and is a beacon of moral courage.
Drones to take down drones
Yes, it is ok. I'm not sure why it wouldn't be.

You should be interviewing with as many companies as you can, not just one and hoping you get the job.
Your frame of reference is a bit off. To wit:

You say: "technology isn't just programs, [it is] also change... a lot [of people] are victims who lose their jobs..."

When in fact, the "victims" of this process aren't subject to the technology, qua technology (technology is simply a tool - derivative of the Greek "tekhne" for "art" or "craft"), which is to say, one doesn't create a technology which then has a mind of its own (yet), but rather, they create tools that other individuals then have a choice to either use, or not.

And so when you say "technology gives[,] and technology takes," what you really mean is "people chose how to spend their [time/money], and [those choices have consequences]."

Which is to say that you are implicitly saying "We ought to decide how people chose to spend their [time/money]".

Would your reaction be the same to the ironworker who made a living on horseshoes two hundred years ago?

Of what do you wish to be "Critical"? Of choice? Of giving people the ability to spend less of their time and energy on certain tasks?

Five hundred years ago human beings spend most of their time producing life-sustaining staples -- growing what for bread, chickens and cows and hogs for protein, vegetables for vitamins and nutrients. Now we can buy a week's worth of sustenance (which used to quite literally consume 12 hours of labor per day), grown to higher standards, in greater quantity for less than $50 -- the equivalent of a single day's labor at minimum wage.

Do you wish to be "critical" of this tekhne as well?
Obama to Call for Laws Covering Data Hacking and Student Privacy
I'm trying to unpack the authors' definition of "fairness". These are the relevant sections I've found:

> Fairness is not summed up in Gini coefficients of income inequality, but in access to the foundational goods and services that all citizens should enjoy.

> But we believe it is time to think radically about delivering fairness not by redistributing income or reforming schools, but by re-organising sectors of the economy.

> The centre-left’s nostalgic attachment to redistributive taxation has faded, and all parties now increasingly problematise fairness as a matter of managing internal competition: the result is standard packages of policy remedies whose reach exceeds their grasp.

> Either way, the conscience of our competitive age is about “equal opportunities” through policy remedies which, in our view, are necessary but not sufficient for a better, fairer city.

> But procedural fairness does not secure substantive outcomes in high-income countries, where the proliferation of anti-discrimination policies since the 1970s has been accompanied by sharply increasing inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth.

> Fairness in terms of outcomes is, of course, much harder to achieve than fairness in terms of process on social housing allocation.

> Our argument is simple. If we want fairness, then we should focus on the foundational economy and reorganise these activities to make them more grounded.

> We believe the emphasis needs to be shifted towards social innovation that promotes a civilised, inclusive city which performs fair outcomes in all its decisions.

So far, it seems to me that authors promote a view of fairness that is about (a) opportunity, (b) access to 'foundational' goods, and (c) procedures (i.e governance). I'm not sure if they put as much emphasis on equality in terms of income and wealth.
Local privilege escalation flaws in Red Star OS 3.0 and 2.0 desktop
Semantic Analysis of Startup L. Jackson Points to Dustin Curtis
Hey. Sounds like we have a lot in common - both devs in Australia, looking to do something entrepreneurial but balancing that with home life. Please get in touch (see my email address on my profile page).
Urgh, that should be "principles".
AFAIK LINQ pretty much is a library since its just extension methods, in itself I don't there's any other specific language feature needed to support it, is there something else you had in mind?

I do agree though that LINQ seems to hint at and start evolving C# into a different semi-functional kind of language, and what we're stuck now with is a language with one foot in both worlds. Hopeful another language will come along one day and chisel out those ideas into a more pure form. (and I'm not meaning a pure functional language like for instance F#)
A re-reading suggests that the authors are less concerned by inequalities in income or wealth. See "2. Stop fixating on redistributive policies which will not deliver fairness, and start thinking about reorganising policies which build a grounded economy in the areas which are not exposed to competition." In other words, just moving money around to equalize, say income, does not necessarily affect their core principles of "fairness".
3rd World Country Space Program
You can do it like on the TV show "The Apprentice", and the team with the most profit wins. Simple.
A whole can of of a tasty variety[1] of tuna fish, seasoned to taste with cracked pepper, lemon juice, etc.

I like to have a couple of pieces of toast with it as well, drizzled with olive oil.

Since it's not recommended to eat tuna every day (owing to concerns about mercury) try substituting with salmon and trout[2] several times per week, which are both low in mercury (relative to tuna).

[1] e.g. http://www.traderjoes.com/fearless-flyer/article/1655

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Bumble-Bee-Smoked-Salmon-Fillets/dp/B0...

[&] http://www.amazon.com/Bumble-Bee-Smoked-Skinless-Canola/dp/B...
Sure. But the amount of risk you're taking on, relative to the reward, is much, much, much higher.

Management consultants make a lot more than code jockeys do.
Can you go part time at your main job?

Also, if you're in Hobart there are people around who are doing similar things. Surely there are lectures at UTas or something. Perhaps a system admin job at UTas might be a better option as well.

CSIRO robotics have people in Hobart as well. Have a look and see if there is something there.

Plenty of people work dull jobs to support their family.
Just attach a chain to your smartphone and call it a "smartpocketwatch."
This is cool, I love scraping. I have been playing around with https://www.kimonolabs.com which is a similar tool to import.io
Simple: Tell them if and only if it puts you at an advantage.
It sounds like this guy just learnt about HTTP details.
I'm just going to be honest, because the honest answer is simple.

It is not my job, or anyone else's, to square the circle of sound cryptography with good UX. Advice not to use broken crypto doesn't become bad advice simply because the good crypto options have crappy UX. If you care about security, good crypto trumps bad UX. If you don't care about security, just use Google Chat. Seriously: you are probably better off even from a security perspective using Google Chat than you are by using fly-by-night crypto.

If you asking, "why don't more of the people who strongly believe we need better encrypted messaging contribute UX work to the good crypto projects like TextSecure instead of inventing their own broken systems?", I'm as confused as you are by that phenomenon.
"Yes, the homogenized group of Americans, Europeans, Indians, Chinese, other Asian and Middle Easterners present in the valley clearly won't engage in outreach to skilled people.
Another popular meme: those greedy capitalists are constantly lobbying congress to give them permission to reach out to skilled people from around the world in order to lower wages. Better stop them, it's bad for workers!" -yummyfajitas

It's pretty clear to me that staunch isn't talking about racial homogeneity:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8871859
Awesome I will use this! :)
There's a 13.3" grayscale touch panel on the Sony device, https://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/product-DPTS1/?PID=I:digitalpa...
To provide a custom GUI, you would need people to click on a link in the email, which sends them to an external website.

Or, you would need to have them use an app, and make sure it is installed.

In both cases, the users would need to understand the UI. Even the most super-obvious UI takes a little focus to follow and use properly. Especially if they want something a little out of the ordinary ("if X is good, then X, otherwise Y, but only if Z").

Compared to those, writing a sentence in English actually sounds fairly convenient - that's how humans communicate naturally.
Yep. We're mostly adults here, right?
Wouldn't much matter. In most cases the cellular location data and the nearby wifi networks are nearly as good.
Its nice. I will use this to keep an eye on events in Sydney.
Or best bros/sisters forever.
> Where's the AI needed?

Marketing, I assume. Giving people their very own Jarvis to interact with could be a selling point (even if it's less efficient than a GUI-based scheduling solution), and the "AI" buzzword will certainly draw more attention to the product than a scheduling app would normally get.
The factory worker does not have a choice about whether his employer want to use robots or not.

You are proving my point by applying the very flawed logic of the luddite fallacy that I am really critiquing.
Technology for me will ultimately be judged by the degree in which it's use requires the commodification of my self. From my taste in entertainment to more invasive information such as my location and who I interact with, I feel it's important to put into consideration who I'm trading this information with and for what in exchange.

As long as a service requires my submission into an database which will be sold off and used to strengthen marketing and other forms of persuasion, I have no choice but to assume the worst case usage. With that assumption I feel it is most ethical to mostly not participate.

I hope that I'll be able to sit back and hop on when popular tech services have given me an alternative form of payment other than my person as an information commodity. I have no idea as to whether that day will ever come.
CRDTs and Programming Models; an Eventually Consistent Ad Counter
Interesting. I like this, "Hard categorical distinctions are weird. They are all obviously approximations that may simply be a result of the fact that all our words happen to have spaces between them, when this isn't necessary." Reminds me of something I've been thinking a lot about recently, which is how often even extraordinarily smart people fail to make the distinction between systems of reference and their referents (even when aware that it's a potential pitfall). It's a pervasive mistake in physics-derived philosophies, too: thinking properties of our system of description are properties of the system being described.

There's this question in philosophy of mathematics, whether math is discovery or invention. It's good that the issue is recognized there, but it seems very rarely acknowledged in science. Sure, it starts and ends empirically—but we can't say anything without inventing a way of stating it: we always choose our terms, a framework to express our discoveries in. When we find 'weird' properties cropping up in physics, why is it immediately assumed to be a property of reality itself rather than in our form of expression?

As an example, Arthur Eddington describes quantum uncertainty as a consequence of the fact that the language of physics switched from referring directly to physical phenomena, to describing our knowledge of these things; so when we only have partial knowledge, we frame our descriptions in terms of probabilities.

Anyway, I guess we may be products of our era since I'm from the 80's as well.
HOLY CRAP.... Dude
Care to elaborate? Sounds like you've struck gold.
Definitely.. this software just allows agencies to share information with each other and search each others databases.

Useful, but nothing nefarious in itself
The introduction is superb:

" One day in November, Ferran Adrià, the Spanish chef who turned foods into foams and pioneered a new era in gastronomic innovation while running one of the world’s most popular restaurants, bounced through a loft space in Barcelona. He peered at pencil-sketched mind maps tacked to plastic foam bulletin boards and examined books jammed on narrow shelves — until he reached the end of a display table featuring a variety of Asian soup spoons. Then he stopped.

“I have a question,” he said in Catalan to the small group of visitors and staff members trailing him. “What is wine?”

There was silence. Four seconds, five seconds, 10 seconds. Finally, cautiously, someone offered, “A drink?” Mr. Adrià's eyes widened. “Maybe it is a drink if I put it in a cup. But what if I make it into a sauce and cook with it?” His voice was sharp. More silence. Mr. Adrià spun away and began walking again. “Now,” he said over his shoulder as the crowd shuffled in his wake, “what if I turn the wine into ice cream? What is it then?”
Well I would argue that it didn't work. I didn't even know that Microsoft was involved with Minecraft until you mentioned it.
This is the right answer. Remote work gets a lukewarm reception on HN but it's incredibly useful. Our entire development team is remote and wouldn't have it any other way.
And what happens if you actually forget your password?
Schematics on such specialized, highly integrated chips with unknown internals are almost useless from a security standpoint.
And how long does it take you to schedule that phone call and fill out the appropriate paperwork?
Indirect normativity is a losing strategy because you don't know what the resultant ethical system will be. https://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2012/04/21/indirect-norm...

Humanity has already solved ethics, so there's no reason for us to give up and ask AI to define ethics for us.
I was wondering the same thing. Crespare means "to curl" in Italian. So it means... Who will curl the curly? I suspect it's some sort of pun on a well-known Latin phrase, but I have no idea what it would be.
:shame:
"We're not ready to show it off publicly yet, as it looks like what it is, an R&D project."

So this is just a press release about a product that doesn't work yet, with no technical details other than "it finds another drone and drops a string on it". Not very interesting.
> I think you could accurately say machine learning is a subfield of ai.

Yes, that is a widely accepted view of AI/ML. "AI" designates any method to give machines cognitive capabilities, while ML is a particular family of techniques (statistical learning) for giving machine such capabilities. Other branches of AI would include symbolic AI, expert systems, and other 70s techniques where processes were explicitly programmed rather than learned from data.

Today, because these other branches have largely fallen out of favor over the past 40 years, ML has become almost synonymous with AI. The semantic distinction is still there, though.
Nice. I had seen some list-indexing uses of squareBrackets before. This looks interesting, also reminds me I should write tests.
I'll just step in and say that, as a non-coder who nevertheless has to understand how code works, Foreman's book "Data Smart" is an invaluable primer on the theory and practice of machine learning.

Certainly I'm no machine learning pro, but as a discipline it's a whole lot less mysterious to me now than it was before I read that book.
>God in classical theism is not a "thing" among things.

Neither is an invisible horse. These all fall under the category of things that there is no physical evidence for.

>So wouldn't it be helpful, for the sake of the thought experiment proposed by shawndumas, to at least see where his reasoning leads?

No, because his entire premise is based on the existence of something that follows no logic or physical laws. Something that violates the laws of logic cannot be reasoned about.
I found this a very personal and honest explanation about the limitations of one approach to learning a programming language or framework. Without prejudice, lets call it the "agile approach" to learning-> you want to get started quickly and then iterate to a better place.

In my own experience, I've always been dissatisfied with this approach. It builds too slowly, and you either reinvent the wheels that already exist in the language, or fail to take full advantage of transformational abilities of the language. Assuming you already know how to program in language X, you end up "Writing X in Y" (as in, "writing Java in Ruby"). I do prefer the alternative, which is to spend some time reading the language manual and references, fully understand the language before going off to do some damage. Learning is process that is never completed; however the "RUP" approach to learning gives you a much more strongly connected belief network on which to hang concepts you'll be introduced to in the future. This is opposed to having to take new lessons as standalone facts to be memorised: see the article's confusion regarding pointers and references.

However, we often don't get to spend that time upfront learning things. Sometimes the project deadline requires you to pick up that new framework and get something working -right now-. Alternatively sometimes I need to work with something that I don't want to spend all that energy learning, and it's easier to just hack along, rather than actually commit to a deep learning of the framework.

There are two questions this raises for me.
1) As an engineer who claims to value craftsmanship, how do I reconcile with the fact that I don't really know at least a few of the tools I use? Is the right action to actually invest my own time in learning new frameworks, no matter how skeptical I might be of their value outside this one project? This risk-reward calculus is especially exacerbated in an ecosystem with a lot of churn in frameworks and libraries. In such a situation, what is the right approach for me?

2) As a producer of knowledge tools for other developers (libraries, APIs, maybe one day programming languages), how should I define my interfaces knowing that some of my users will not bother to learn them? Do I have a responsibility towards them?

Slightly more speculatively, I wonder how this would affect language design? One of pg's aphorisms is that tools designed for use by people the designers consider inferior will generally be poor quality. However, that doesn't stop such tools from being popular. I don't think we've truly plumbed the depths of a language "designed for lazy and/or sloppy people", and I'm willing to bet that executed well, such a language could be very popular.
Cris Moore and coworkers found a bunch of these http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~moore/gallery.html
Including this awesome 28-mass one
http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~moore/cubic28.loop.gif
Oatmeal with frozen blueberries or raisins with a little brown sugar.
Copy paste of Joe_Doe's comment. Which seems dead but sais "[noobtor]" instead of [dead]. Never seen that before?! However should he have registered via tor to leak a bit of insider info I don't want to let this die because of tor flagging.

----------

Palantir is trying to raise another ~400mm to finance their operations. And I honestly think this just another PR stunt to attract investors. The 'secretive' attitude is just a game of deception. They are deceiving investors into believing that the company has a real product. However if you talk to any FDE or Embedded Analyst, you'll immediately realize that this is a consulting company. Which should be valued at far lower multiple than a real product company.

Every new contract requires dozen extra people...That's why they are on a hire spree right now, (because of a large 'consulting' contract with a an oil company, that should stay unamed). However, with oil trading at 50s, they are scared and they trying to get some cash to cushion a possible contract cancellation.

To be continued...
So... Startup Weekend?
I was wondering the same thing; I checked the French dictionary on my desk and "crépir" (which would be the expected derivative of "crespire") means "roughcast", or plastering/cementing without smoothing the surface. I also found a Portuguese word "crespo" meaning something like "ragged". So I can sort of make sense of the phrase "quis crespit crespulum" in context as "those in a rough spot leave rough edges".

But I'm not at all confident of that analysis.
>Indirect normativity is a losing strategy because you don't know what the resultant ethical system will be.

That's the point...

>Humanity has already solved ethics

Where on earth do you get this idea?
Reminds me of the 2009 Scheme Steering Committee Position Statement, they stated (correctly, imo) "the Scheme community has rarely missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity."[1]

I think many of the design choices the author is griping about (which numbers mercifully avoid) is an illustration of this tendency, which itself is a result of the two boats Scheme had a leg in for years: both a minimalistic language with elegant semantics, useful for pedagogy and optimal for hobby implementations ("50-page purists") and a viable, modern, competitive language for nontrivial applications.

Despite all this, you'll take my Scheme and Racket away from my cold, dead hands.

[1]: http://www.scheme-reports.org/2009/position-statement.html
>so I ask; in what way is my argument invalid?

I never said it was. I said it had a bad assumption, which makes the whole thing entirely pointless and self-serving.

Entering a debate where you make your arguments using the form "Assume I am right about the thing we are debating. Now here are all of the logical conclusions of that." is completely worthless because nobody cares about the logical conclusions when the argument is about the part you are taking under assumption.
I acknowledge that it must be tough working on the CSS standard, and it's a job that I'm glad I don't have. But understanding and using CSS is hard enough without examples like this:

This opens up a great deal of new ways to match
content. For instance, a developer can match all
paragraphs that contain nothing but images:

// Match a paragraph that does not have anything that is not an image
p:not(:has(:not(img))):not(:empty)

You don't start introducing :has with a convoluted multi-negative example like that. You save that for after the reader understands what :has does, to demonstrate how it lets you do really complex expressions that you couldn't do before. Or maybe you don't bother with that at all, since it's probably a rare case, and the much more common case that you should emphasize is that :has lets you style an element based on the children it contains, which CSS doesn't let you do today.

And what does this mean?

Caveat: at this time the :has selector is not considered fast, which means that it may not be available for use in stylesheets.

Where else is a CSS selector useful? In particular, where else is the most interesting part of CSS Selectors 4 going to be useful? Don't tell me Javascript code, because I can already do this stuff in Javascript code, and more, without having to worry about browser support for a new CSS standard.