skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> > expressive enough so "scripters" feel at home

As much as I love all things Haskell, there is no way it fits the "scripters can use it" bill.
I apologize in advance since I'm a bit short for time at the moment and I'll just post a short(-ish) reply to the questions I can answer from the top of my head (more or less).

> Girkin's presence in the Crimea before the 21st (which didn't happen) was supposed to be evidence of that.

The medal forged by the Russian Govt. itself is the most damning evidence[0] (it's basically a confession).

> Much of how to interpret the dates depends to some understanding of territorial sovereignty

There's nothing to interpret: at that time Crimea was recognized as part of Ukraine even by Russia (see below).

>> At that moment it wasn't disputed even by the Kremlin. The "disputing" would come a bit later.

> It's status has been disputed in modern history since at least 1991 when Crimea declared itself an independent autonomous state.

In 1997 Russia and Ukraine signed a Treaty in which Russia accepted Ukraine's sovereignty over Crimea.[1]

> Could you expound on how the Ministry of Foreign Affairs... is a propaganda front for the Kremlin

Many of its statements are effectively regurgitated Russian state media news pieces, many of which are outright lies, while others are twisted to further a propagandistic agenda. It is amazing that a Foreign Office would base its official statements (and arguments used in international negotiations) on outright propaganda (made up or twisted stories the sole purpose of which is to incite hatred towards Ukraine within Russia).

> Can you show where TASS or RT have claimed such ridiculous things

Sure, but first: most of the well-known media outlets in Russia are state-owned or controlled/censored. Because of this there's practically no difference between them with respect to the journalistic integrity (or lack thereof) in their reporting.

"Channel One", the biggest Russian TV channel, ran a story[2] of a woman (allegedly from Slavyansk) who claimed that some Ukranian soldiers have crucified a child in front of his mother. Then they proceeded to tie the mother to a tank and drag her around the square (and she claimed to have seen it with her own eyes). Needless to say, this turned out to be a lie[3], but the story was circulated by many Russian news outlets without batting an eye.

As for ITAR-TASS and RT, you can read about some of their exploits here[4] and here[5][6][7].

[0] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/25/putin-s-cri...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Crimea#Autonomous_R...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1TJLNcc5DY

[3] http://www.stopfake.org/en/lies-crucifixion-on-channel-one/

[4] http://www.stopfake.org/en/tag/rt/

[5] http://www.stopfake.org/en/exclusive-german-professor-for-it...

[6] http://www.stopfake.org/en/itar-tass-lies-pro-ukrainian-radi...

[7] http://www.stopfake.org/en/china-did-not-declare-its-support...
of-russian-annexation-of-crimea/
The images themeselves aren't that great for identification. However, if they combine it with traditional facial recognition techniques - such as distance between the eyes (a genetically determined characteristic) - it would (for example) be able to narrow down suspect lists to a few people using DMV photos. Wanted fugitives living under false names that have managed to get a real driver's license are regularly caught these days using this technique.

So instead of generating images, this software could simply take a DNA sample and spit out the characteristics the facial recognition software already takes as input. Up comes a list of names and addresses of the handful of people that the DNA can possibly belong to, even if they have never been in a DNA database. The software already has to calculate these things before delivering the facial image, so delivering the characteristics would actually be a subset of the capabilities he has already built. Scary stuff.
Quit your fibbing! I joined Netscape on April 4, 1995, to "do Scheme in the browser". Immediately I was out of luck on several fronts:

* Put on the server team with the McCool twins (NCSA httpd and then Netscape's reboot of same) and Ari Luotonen (proxy guy), working on "HTTP1.1-lol".

* Told Java was in play with Sun -- the deal was not done but it was likely to go forward in Netscape 2 -- so maybe never mind about Scheme, but:

* If there was to be a "scripting language", it had to look like Java.

Kipp Hickman (Netscape first floor, and my kernel hacking colleague from SGI) and I wrote the "Netscape Portable Runtime", NSPR 1.0, the "large software libraries" you allude to, in April and May.

Kipp used NSPR for his Java VM prototype, which Sun helped convince him to abandon (single-source implementation required or else bug-for-bug compatibility would be a nightmare).

So, much of that "dealing with virtual machine-type problems" code was from me, not from some anonymous and non-existent team at Netscape who had "months" ahead of May to develop at leisure.

When I switched to the client team in early May, @pmarca and I had been conspiring (with Bill Joy of Sun on-side; he signed the trademark license for "JavaScript" in early December, 1995). Marc made the case for "a language you put directly in the HTML" -- not something you compile into an applet. This idea got enough support for me to spend ten days, a week bracketed by weekends without much sleep, hacking the first "Mocha" runtime.

I spent the rest of the spring and summer embedding that Mocha, then LiveScript, interpreter into Netscape 2's rendering engine and network library; I had help from the front end hackers (@jwz and Spence Murray on the XFE; @knobchouck and Garrett Blythe on WinFE; Aleks Totic on MacFE), who did all the native control integration; we collaborated on the front-to-back-end API.

During these months, the only file I didn't write in the original JS implementation was mo_date.c, the Date object. Ken Smith, who joined from Borland with three others as a team, helped do that by closely porting Gosling's JDK1.0-prerelease java.util.Date code from Java to C.

Why you are making up facts now, I have no idea. If you have some overriding animus against JS or me (or both), take up a better argument than making up false history. That inevitably blows back.

If you can't believe I wrote as much code as I did, you should see what TJ Hollowaychuk has done in the last few years. But yeah, I was writing lots of C code then.

If you want to see others testify to my account-in-brief given above, check Quora (http://www.quora.com/In-which-10-days-of-May-did-Brendan-Eic..., http://www.quora.com/Did-JavaScript-evolve-from-another-prod... [other witnesses testify there], http://www.quora.com/How-did-ScriptEase-influence-the-design... [refutes an obsolete fraud to-do with NOMBAS]), listen to the JS Jabber show from last fall, and ask anyone who was around then. I've given some twitter handles above.
If Rust had asynchronous I/O this would be less of a head scratcher.

Too bad that AIO and related, necessary primitives were forsaken for other priorities.
Yep! New research couldn't come sooner - while luckily I'm not deathly allergic to anything, I have moderate reactions to a wide spectrum of environmental stuff. I got shots for years in my teens which helped a lot, but now I've noticed in my early 30's some of that immunity seems to be decaying.
I kinda get the author's point here - to run a proof of work based system you need an incentive to actually do the work. Bitcoin has such incentives, and so it will succeed for any tool that people try to run on it.
If you try to create a new system, you have to convince people to do the work in the first place.

So it makes much more sense to use bitcoin as your distributed consensus system, for whatever application you choose to place on top of it.

I'm not sure I agree with the premise, though - which is that people actually think that - I reckon that Sam Altman's comments might just be a way of saying 'Bitcoin is in the news a lot, I think it's a waste of my time, but I don't want to write it off just yet.' It's good, it makes him sound profound, everyone's kinda happy.

The question is: What non-currency applications would actually benefit hugely from being decentralised in such a way?
> Another compiler that can't be bootstrapped from source code.

It can be bootstrapped from source - it just needs to be bootstrapped either using gccgo[0], or using the 1.4 compiler (which is guaranteed to work for all 1.x compilers, not just 1.5)

> Another magic binary to trust not to have a Thompson virus.

"Reflections on Trusting Trust" gets posted on HN regularly, and it's an interesting exercise, but you are far more likely to have an exploit hiding in plain sight in a compiler compiled from source once than you are to have one that only appears after multiple iterated compilations.

It's a good concept for security experts and compiler developers to be aware of, but the likelihood is incredibly small.

Also, for what it's worth, "Trusting Trust" is over three decades old, and there have been numerous response to it in the interim, with lots of study. It's like saying "Your problem reduces to 3-SAT, and satisfiability is NP-hard, so you can't solve it', throwing your hands up, and leaving it at that. In reality, solving 3-SAT in the general case is NP-hard, but it is well-studied enough that, in practice, solving SAT/3-SAT is actually pretty easy most of the time. Some of these responses have even been posted elsewhere in this thread, though they're also pretty easy to find online as well.

[0] which is written in C++ - frankly, I'd be much more concerned about a single-compilation bug in any C++ code than I'd be about a multiple-compilation bug in Go.
The Bitcoin wiki gives full details[1], but tldr, 51% attack breaks most elements of the blockchain (reverse attacker's transactions => double spending, prevent transactions from getting confirmation, prevent valid blocks originating elsewhere) but doesn't allow the attacker to arbitrarily rewrite history.

As far as "hasn't this already happened", some of the mining pools in aggregate have had or presently could combine to get 50+% of the Bitcoin mining power[2], but to perform the attack requires active coordination from all pool participants. If an attack like this were launched, it would be obvious to anyone viewing the blockchain, likely destroy the value of Bitcoin, and hence their investment, so is economically not a good idea for them.

[1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_...
[2]: https://blockchain.info/pools
I was referring specifically to the academic job market, which is about as bad as it has ever been. In humanities disciplines, there are hundreds more graduates than jobs every year.
Hack my network--please
What defines "trusted access?" One of the points of bitcoin / blockchain is not having to trust anyone involved.
Schools do have that policy, but in my years in school and indeed adult life since then I've never been aware of knowing anyone with a peanut allergy (anecdote not data etc.)
Thank you for reminding us to test our code both locally and in production. I always forget those pesky details.
> Of course, this also means that there is a UX problem to solve. But that's part of the problem with email cryptography, isn't it?

Interesting... could this really just be a UX problem? Why do we understand HTTPS without problem? Or am I naive in believing HTTPS is widely understood by the layman?
Comforting to see my own privacy stack is almost exactly the same:

Tails running specially configured Tor (five hop circuit, permanent guard nodes, and routes through countries unlikely to cooperate with one another), GPG for email, OTR for IM, Signal for mobile, and True Crypt + Apple disk encryption.

Funny thing is, I don't even have any particular use for it other than kicking around vulnerability and security discussions with friends and colleagues that I highly doubt anyone is even trying to intercept. But it is very comforting to know that it's the same set of tools relied upon by those with something highly significant at stake.
UW also has one of the best schools of public health in the country.
here's some tips on expanding your applicant pool: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/25-tips-for-diverse-hiri...
Skateboarding is not a crime, but if making bad posts was, this would count.
When I was in graduate school, I was somewhat involved in the process of hiring a few professors. Whoever we would have hired was probably going to get tenure and remain in the department for decades. Intangible personal and interpersonal aspects of the candidates were therefore about as important as the quality of their research, because nobody wants to be stuck working for 20 years with someone they don't feel comfortable with. Naturally, this has a tendency to perpetuate the gender and race imbalances in academia.
The author states "...the data suggest that faculty hiring isn’t a simple meritocracy. The top schools generate far more professors than even just slightly less prestigious schools. For example, in history, the top 10 schools produce three times as many future professors as those ranked 11 through 20."

I don't think this is adequate evidence, and my own experience is that it's very hard to compare, after all most people only went to one grad school. I know that my grad school had much better students than my undergraduate school, but it's almost impossible to quantify how much. Even hard still to compare the top 10 to 11-20. I do believe that it's possible that the top 10 schools produce 3 times more "professor tier" students. Even though application to a particular school has a lot of randomness, most students apply to 10-20 grad schools when they apply, and this removes some of the randomness.

It's actually very hard to measure the true bias towards top schools, if it exists. I don't the the "send out resumes and change the school" trick is a good approach, because most of the signal is going to be in the school. The question of whether schools adequately update their information once they have the full picture of the candidate, remains unanswered.

Also, at least in my field, schools advertise their "placement" of students in academic positions to prospective grad students. So students are well aware of the job prospects when they start grad school.
You can. You just have to bootstrap all the way up.
Those are not actual lego sets. They are pieces broken out of lego sets that are no longer sold. It's marketed by a third party seller to the collector's market. Each figure came from larger sets. I'm sure you are aware of this, yes? And if so, you agree that your post is very misleading, yes?
You know what would save a lot more space, time, data, cpu power, hardware, and energy?

Not using cryptocurrency.
> What is a "software patent" or a "patent troll?"

Patent trolls are Non Practicing Entities who file lawsuits against companies who are actually practicing an invention. The problem though is that when the United States was created, it chose to drop the requirement to practice for a very specific reason: it discriminates against the poor and middle class, who might be smart enough to invent some world changing technology but have no way to raise millions of dollars to produce their invention. Such a requirement was seen as anti-democratic by the founding fathers, and historically NPEs have actually made huge contributions to human knowledge... E.g. the person who invented the computer didn't have the money to actually go out and build one.

There certainly have come to be a lot of abuses with the current system that need to fixed. But it's worth keeping in mind that while Mark Cuban himself might not be a bad guy, the reason the founding fathers chose to let people file patents without having to build out the invention was precisely to protect us from people like him, who could come in and just steal someone else's efforts wholesale because they happen to have more money. And in the past couple years, a lot of law professors who were originally against NPEs have now reversed their opinions and acknowledged that the situation is more complex than they had originally believed.
I was alluding to Ken being the author of the old, as well as one of the authors of the new compiler. In jest :)
Alaska on Tuesday Will Become Third State with Legal Marijuana
The changing nature of middle-class jobs
If your company had no salespeople, would the developers still have a job?
Probably gccgo, which is included in gcc.
We expanded the submitted title a bit. We're open to suggestions for a better one.
Silly me, I thought everybody's face was DNA-generated...
Ugh, that page is hard to read. The meta tag incorrectly identifies it as iso-8859-1, it's really windows-1252. So close, but yet so far.
The linked set is discontinued. There are several different sets of basic bricks (of various sizes), currently branded under the Classic "theme": http://shop.lego.com/en-US/Classic-ByTheme
Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances
Our Most Popular Articles Last Week (California Breweries and Palo Alto Startups)
None at the moment.

I have Google Glass and I am looking to sell it. The Sony ones look so terrible they're not even worth mentioning. There isn't anything worth developing an app for, if you're aiming at consumer market.

If you want to instead target medical or something similar, then Google Glass could be a good choice, I guess, I know there were companies working in that niche.
Do users have to submit anything sensitive on this site? Are there any forms where sensitive information could be plaintexted across the wire? I would love to know.

If it's purely static HTML files, then I see no point in switching to HTTPS just because it's the trendy, hip thing to do. Perhaps 'switching on SSL' for the sake of it is counter-productive and not needed in every case.

I can see the panic here because it's a .GOV site, but can we confirm this is just static HTML?
Yep. The first thing I do is turn that off for all the projects. Super annoying.
Go watch the oscars or something...
If you get admitted to an okay masters program and obtain a high GPA (3.8+), and you do some publishable research then you would have a fighting chance to get into a decent PhD program. Keep in mind that getting into top 50 PhD programs in the US is very competitive, but showing that you have the skill to do research by already having a publication or two will dramatically help your chances. Graduate students are the cogs that keep a professor's lab churning out research, and showing that you are capable of that will help tremendously to get into a PhD program.

So, I do think it is possible to "redeem" yourself, and I know several people that have done this. I also went to a low ranked state school for undergrad, went to a higher ranked school for my MS, and then did a PhD at a well ranked university.
No. Moore's law is stopping hard. No material represents a real advantage over silicon.

Static RAM cells haven't scaled for about two generations now, but you could still scale functional transistors.

Now, even that is stopping. Moore's Law was more an economic law than a physical one.

Exponential growth has to run out sometime.
Congratulations to my IBM Personality Insights colleagues. They are paving the way for many additional IBM services to come!!
Great story thanks for sharing. The parts about your personal and business security problems was surprising. I would think Cloudflare is a pretty niche product with a rational customer base. But I guess if you really piss off some developers they can think of clever ways to make life miserable.
Online poker is very much alive. You can check it out for yourself twitch.tv

I personally recommend pokerstaples stream. He's a very math based MTT player.
Make sure you're sleeping well. Go to sleep by a certain time, and wake up naturally every day, for a week. It took me years to learn that, for me, consistent sleep results in consistent productivity. An exhausted brain is an undisciplined brain.
UPDATE Pepper delayed until summer; Aldebaran execs Maisonnier and Baillie leave
Follow up blog post: http://blog.higg.im/2015/02/24/new-icann-name-collision-for-...
Gender and race imbalances are much less important to me than ideological imbalances. What's the point of having different sexes and skin colors if they're all part of an echo chamber?
Because quite simply, resumes don't work. Lots of great developers have terrible resumes, lots of terrible developers have great resumes, they have zero correlative value in picking hires. When working on hiring pipelines I spend most of my time arguing for their complete removal.

Interviews around resumes can have amplifying effects. Being able to talk a good game about your past does not mean you can perform at writing software. Further there is a whole class of developers who do very poorly explaining their past and selling themselves. Lots of those developers do a great job of solving actual REAL problems for REAL businesses. Further, some of us work in environments where talking at any depth about the technical problems we've solved open both parties to potential lawsuits.

Maybe in some industries, with some population of developers a Github profile is useful for evaluating candidates. But there are whole swaths of candidates who have no profile on Github, or only use it for dumping toy projects or experiments. It is certainly not something you can build a repeatable hiring pipeline around.

This leaves us with very few options. Design sessions on a whiteboard suffer from many of the same problems as traditional interviews, but they are at least similar to an activity that is actively part of a developers job. It is a near daily occurrence, at least on the teams I've been on, to have sessions solving problems at the white board.

Work samples are ideal, but the combination of business relevant, not proprietary, representative and able to be completed without being a huge burden is very hard to come up with.

So, while I completely agree, our industry is terrible at filtering talent and in the future we are likely to back on our current processes as silly, I suspect the future will hold more design sessions and work samples, not less. Hopefully we just get better at creating them.
Looks like https://app.it.okstate.edu/idcard/ is down.
My pirate ship did have some custom parts for the hull, but it most certainly didn't look like that Tugboat. The hull came in several pieces, each of which could be easily repurposed for other uses because they had rectangular edges for other pieces to attach to. I don't think this is just nostalgia messing with my memory. The damn ship didn't even float, because water leaked through the gaps between the pieces.

I admit that I may be biased because of the particular selection of Lego sets at the stores in my area. But if Lego itself hasn't changed, at least their marketing focus seems to have changed.
You seemingly don't quite understand the technology and the assertions in your second point and last paragraph are not correct.