skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn't true with regards to Software Engineer. Its mostly a protection against calling yourself a Professional Engineer which has a much more standardized accreditation process.

Also btw, in many CS depts in the US, students have to take very similar classes to the ones you described above, such as business ethics and what not. I know I had to. Along with multiple required software engineering courses...
Hermann Minkowski. Died suddenly of appendicitis at the age of 44.

"In the early years of his scientific career, Albert Einstein considered mathematics to be a mere tool in the service of physical intuition. In later years, he came to consider mathematics as the very source of scientific creativity. A main motive behind this change was the influence of two prominent German mathematicians: David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski." [1]

[1] http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Minkowsk...
Tobacco (which gets mostly smoked) and liquor can be heavily taxed, depending on jurisdiction, so if AKs want to put 10% or 50% or 120% tax rate and pass that resolution, what's the problem?

As to why beer might be taxed less, I think some of these things are due to history. Beer has been a mainstream vice since prehistory. If you were to introduce "New Vice #47", I'm going to guess, it would get a relatively high tax too, no matter how mild it might be to your health.

By the way, not that it means anything, but I'd be totally for high taxes on beer and sugary drinks.
> Not all old LEGO sets fetch such high prices, but of course all the popular ones do. These are the ones that we wanted when we were younger, and now that we have a bit of our own money we want to buy those dream sets from our childhood.

Many toys from our youth now command incredible prices because of this phenomenon. Retro video games can command absolutely obscene prices (four and even 5 figures sometimes). My Neo Geo collection in particular is worth dramatically more than what I paid for it.
While the "sin tax" is a philosophy that some people might prescribe to, the main incentive for the tax revenue is mainly the ability for the government to make money and fund whatever the government wants to fund with it. I don't think morality enters into it.
Maxwell's fluid model of magnetism
Well now we've just introduced a new way for them to monetize, haven't we?
Get off my lawn. :)

When I was in college, 91-95, your SS# was your identifier. It was the unique code that everyone used when they needed a way to identify people.

I gotta dig it out, but I think my SS# was printed right on my school ID (and the state issued card allowing me to buy alcohol with my out of state driver's license -- Vermont).
eh, if the argument is go to jail or pay some extra money, I'd rather accept the lesser evil. Even more so if it is helping states pay for socially beneficial programs with lots of positive externalities.

And let's be frank, there's still lots of black market sales in Colorado, for people that want lesser quality marijuana at cheaper prices. Many people don't mind the premium markup and the taxes for the convenience, legality and quality of legalized pot.
I hadn't heard about that oil rig worker, but unless there are details missing from this article, it seems a terrible shame he was fired. Given what he describes, I would have likely done the same thing, used whatever means I had at my disposal to try to notify some relevant official. His only mistake might have been making too clear a declaration in his email that what he'd seen was a plane, when his later description makes that appear less certain. Still, it is also easy to understand how, in the moment, I might have again done the same thing.

The best explanation I could find of why he was fired was that his email caused computer problems related to the resulting traffic, which was in no way his fault.
I was not able to correlate that hint with either a correct or incorrect guess. but regardless, please only make such attempts in private via email. ;-)

update: 10:30pm and still the only local cable/public cbannel out is HBO. I'm sure perfectly innocent reason. *cough

EDIT: thank you
YouTube Kids Launched on Android and iOS
Compilers and Compiler Generators (1996)
> Most mature FOSS products feel like monstrosities and culturally are intimidating (omg dhh is gonna think I suck).

I agree about intimidation. Some FOSS have very steep contribution requirements.

Here's a slightly exaggerated example:

Oh, you want to add a patch that moves line of code up by 5 lines?
Well, first, you need to sign up in our separate issue tracker.
Create new issue with properly formatted title and description and add bunch of tags you know nothing about.
Don't forget screenshots and demo webpage where you can clearly see the problem.
Now, you can do a PR, but you absolutely have to adhere to our issue title formatting. If there's even a tiny typo or it is not in a correct format it will be closed immediately.
And then you wait for who knows how long.
*It appears this comment has been duplicated multiple times in this thread. Apologies. I'm unsure how that happened.
Not really. Locking people up usually costs /quite/ a bit of money.
This has been an active area of political dispute for at least as long as I’ve been able to understand language and comprehend the news, around 20 years.
Where'd you get that number?
The 2 big companies to watch for layoffs this year are Paypal and Yahoo. Could be thousands each.

Paypal is just grossly overstaffed.

Yahoo is under pressure from investors to return the Alibaba proceeds to investors and cut their staff in half. (Some investors would like Yahoo to shut down and sell their campus off. Yahoo has no value as a going concern.)
C++ and Windows Internals Channel
I attempted to research this issue, and as far as I can tell Greenwald did not misrepresent Harris' opinion. I found the full context of the following quotes by Harris, which Greenwald presented, and they mean exactly what they look like:

>"We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim."

>"We are not at war with terrorism. We are at war with Islam."

>"The erection of a mosque upon the ashes of this atrocity will also be viewed by many millions of Muslims as a victory — and as a sign that the liberal values of the West are synonymous with decadence and cowardice."

>"Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies."

Plus several more along those lines.

I agree with both Harris and Greenwald to varying extents here, but where exactly did Greenwald mislead people on what Harris has said about Islam? One may think Harris is right or wrong and may disagree with Greenwald taking the stance that Harris is wrong, but I think Greenwald painted an accurate picture of what Harris thinks about the issue.
One thing that I've appreciated now that I've spent a decent amount of time writing Go as an individual developer is that it's much easier to jump into open source code and make small improvements and fixes because the language is very "context-free." When you're reading code, the control flow is always spelled out, property accesses never magically invoke getters, and it's generally hard to make things too complicated. There are things that annoy me but the downside is almost always bounded.
In Hong Kong, Grandma Has to Find a Job
History of Neural Networks
> It's like searching wikipedia but always landing on the "talk" page.

I think the TCL wiki is old enough that it dates to the era when that was what a wiki was supposed to be. The original c2.com wiki has a lot of that flavor too. The Wikipedia idea of having main pages that serve as working drafts of "articles" and moving the discussion to separate "talk" pages caught on a few years later. Of course that doesn't preclude switching now...
I found the paradox of this phenomenon and supposedly elder-friendly Confucianism interesting.
I appreciate the complement. I've read a lot about the region and have traveled a bit, but am not an expert.

If we could resolve the Israeli/Palestinian issue that would be a great help. However, I don't think anyone is optimistic on that front. If the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program are successful (and it looks promising) then at least one very scary scenario will be on the back burner. Pretty much everything else looks very grim.

I don't think that the NSA stuff will have any lasting impact on US relations with the Middle East/perceptions of America in the Middle East. It may have an impact on our ability to understand what's going on in the region, but I think that's very hard to assess from outside the government.
What security holes does PunkBuster introduce? Adware like Superfish and game client modification detection like PunkBuster are very different kinds of software. I do not support anything like Superfish.
Are local firewalls not cool anymore or something?
Perhaps I don't really understand the idea here. What prevents a farmer from only accepting votes from their friends (or themselves) and generating as much FarmerCoin as they please?
Maybe it was some passengers/cargo they were interested in. </tinfoil>
The oft-cited statistic is "97% of climate scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change" and the wikipedia article [1] is actually quite thorough. I personally do not know any scientist who doesn't believe in global warming, although I did know some skeptics a decade ago. Skepticism is healthy, but so is respecting statistical tests.

No one really knows the specifics of what's going to happen, but the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has started focusing on 'adaptation' as some degree of climate change is inevitable (and, indeed, has already happened). The IPCC would be my choice as the closest guess as to what the next century will look like [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_c...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report
Do the huge consulting firms that hire 80% of H-1Bs start sponsoring green cards? Because I believe that 80% of companies could sponsor their H-1Bs, while still sponsoring a tiny minority of visa holders.
That happens to every single popular post on Reddit. They have lots of weird fuzzing algorithms to counter votebots and adjust for a constantly growing userbase. It's not nefarious, and it's pretty common to see some picture at 4000 points that was at 6000 an hour ago. The score is only abstractly related to the number of votes.
I think this trend is a disaster for tech/finance interoperability. You should - for all intents and purposes - be your most liquid in your savings. Not your least.
If the seller is paying for "your" agent, is she really yours in the incentivized sense?

eg. Zuckerberg's college buddy who fronted the money for early FB servers was sure that "his" attorneys had his back, right up until they stabbed him, because they were paid by Zuckerberg.
LLVM supports precise GC now via the late safepoint placement infrastructure [1]. This infrastructure should be sufficient to support both the copying stacks and a precise GC.

This is a recent addition and did not exist at the time Go was created, however.

[1]: http://llvm.org/docs/Statepoints.html
> Frankly, most people don't give a shit

What's worse, truly not giving a shit, or giving a shit but giving up because there isn't enough outward validation?
This is an excellent article. Thank you.
I purchased the Lego Space Shuttle in October, 2012 for my nephew for $94.99. I had so much fun putting it together with him a couple years later that I decided that I want one myself and it's now at $300:

http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-4657599-Shuttle-Expedition-10231/...

I know this because Amazon has a notification at the top to tell me that I purchased it in 2012 and I can see the order. In the span of 2.5 years, it's tripled in price.

I wish he had done a graph of the prices for the same sets over time. That way I can compare if it is the Space Shuttle set that's skyrocketed in price or if it is across the board.
This is a common misinterpretation of Occam's Razor, IMHO. Simple explanations are not more likely to be true. What Occam's Razor says is that if you have 2 theories that fit the same data, you should pick the simplest one. Why? Because it is simpler, not because it is more likely to be true.

It is important to remember that when we are dealing with scientific theories, we are not really all that concerned with truth. Are Newton's laws "true"? Well, they work reliably given certain constraints and they are definitely more simple than other theories, so it would be stupid not to use them. However, there are data to show that Newton's laws don't hold in other situations. Newton's laws are not "truth" -- they are useful.

Another thing to keep in mind is that a scientific theory must make predictions which are falsifiable. In other words, it must not only fit data in the past, it must continue to fit data into the future. If your idea has no predictions, then it isn't a scientific theory to begin with and Occam's Razor doesn't apply.

In this case, the author has a theory which (presumably -- I haven't checked) fits the data in the past. Even if we had a simpler theory that also fits the data, we couldn't invoke Occam's Razor, because neither theory makes predictions about the future. The event is already finished and will not happen again. With Occam's Razor, I'm saying, "Well, we could imagine it to be like X or like Y and no matter how you slice it, it's going to work the same. I will pick X because it is simpler". But with this event, it makes a huge difference which "theory" I pick, so I can't use Occam's Razor.

Even if I could pick two equivalent theories -- let's say I had a theory that the plane crashed into a mountain and I had another theory that said the plane did a loop-de-loop and then crashed into the mountain. Maybe both ideas fit the data in the past and I could go and verify that the plane ended up crashing into the mountain. Both theories fit the data in the past and fit data in the future. I'll pick the simplest one because, hey, it really doesn't matter if the plane did a loop-de-loop before it crashed.

Now, maybe some people really care about the loop-de-loop. If they can't find any data that supports the loop-de-loop but doesn't support the straight-on-crash, then we are still going to reject the loop-de-loop theory. Why needlessly complicate things when there is no data to differentiate the two theories? But this does not mean that the plane did not do a loop-de-loop. There is no justification for saying that at all. We don't have any data to support one position or the other. We are just accepting the simple answer because it makes our lives easy.

Where most people get this wrong is:
- They try to apply it to non-scientific theories.
- They try to apply it to a single theory rather than a set of equivalent theories.
- They try to apply it to a set of non-equivalent theories.
- They believe that the result is "true".

That last one is pernicious because if you believe that something is true just because it is the simplest explanation that fits your data, you have stepped from science to religion.
I suspect the Andaman Sea would have served that purpose just fine. There are other options like the burst data has just been misinterpreted, but the deliberate faking of a never before used piece of data seems very unlikely.
You seem to be saying placement on the front page shouldn't impact the eyeballs driven to a story. If that's what you believe, I won't try to convince you otherwise.
And if it's that sophisticated of an operation, planned far in advance, they surely wouldn't need to auto-land the plane.
I live in the US and I don't think I've ever known anyone with a peanut allergy either...
Car Loan Without Income Proof Doc: Availing the Best Opportunity for Car Loan
> The fact that they have to be saying something for 24 hours a day, without repeating themselves too frequently, is virtually impossible.

If they were trying to put things in context as expected from journalists, they would have a lot more to say.
> as if the state is a creature whose feeding is a virtue in and of itself.

This isn't why people suggest it. People suggest it because they recognize many Americans are incapable of seeing the value of doing something if there is no economic incentive for it. So they come up with an economic incentive.
On top of everything others said, what kind of nation hijacks a plane with 152 Chinese nationals, unless they want a war with China? (And if they do want a war with China, why bother with such a complicated plot?)

If Russia did it, and if China finds out, does anybody think China will say, "Well, it's Russia, we'll protest at UN and demand economic sanction"? Moscow and Beijing will be in rubbles when the dusts clear.
We're safe. I found a backup
Sounds similar to how the extended rocket car story from cDc was written (http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0363.php) - it's a long story with a lot of background, including friends, past friend/family reactions, current as-author-writes-it friend/family reactions, technical details, diagrams, step-by-step ideas as they were developed and worked/failed in testing. There's also a lot of "this is a story of how I acted as a silly teenager, it was not a great idea" kind of self-mocking.

It shows how much a good story-telling can go with convincing others that you know the truth.
brilliant. opens the keys for big data @ a more palatable and scalable price point. impressive.
>He currently works at Canonical, where part of his work involves porting Go to ARM 64.

That's interesting. Has Canonical stated what their interest in Go is?
No? Literally an idea I overheard in a conversation.
I used to agree with the article's viewpoint wholeheartedly. It involved this romantic notion that the mutual risk shared by both parties in warfare served to act as a deterrent towards future conflict, thereby ensuring peace. Add robots and that mechanism is destroyed.

Moreover, is something really worth fighting for if nations wouldn't otherwise have the will to commit human troops?

Well, yes. Modern political reality is such that large military occupations for humanitarian purposes are incredibly unpopular, and suggesting the mere prospect of such operations is tantamount to political suicide.

Bad actors know this dynamic, and they exploit it with knowledge that western countries will almost certainly not intervene, allowing them to operate with impunity. Recent history points to genocide in Rwanda and Darfur as being prime examples.

Robotic infantry, built and deployed to any reasonable standard, tend to solve this problem.

The article cites concerns over increased civilian casualties if we were to deploy autonomous weapons platforms. On the contrary, like self-driving cars, it's likely that machine control would result in safer outcomes. In the case of robotic infantry, you're talking sensors and weapons that far exceed human capability in their capacity to be surgical. Combined with the fact that self-preservation could easily take lower precedence to preserving civilian life, and it seems clear that the net result would be a decrease in civilian casualties.

To be fair, the article's spirit likely was intended primarily in the context of aerial drones, and I admit turning drones into autonomous killing machines is almost certainly a bad idea, unless drones significantly ramp up their sensor capabilities and start using bullets instead of bombs.

If autonomous robots with the authority to kill are what it takes to make genocide a thing of the past and bring social change to countries where women are still considered property, and where not subscribing to the mandated faith results in death, then so be it.

Banning domestic use of such robots in developed countries would be a fantastic idea, however. Even any less-than-lethal forms.
Maybe not the websites themselves but the ads they might display might store this information. I.e. if they capture your fingerprint on a porn site while browsing in incognito mode and then capture your fingerprint while browsing in normal mode on a regular website. Simply put two and two together.
Adding that high tax was always about winning the support of a broad coalition of interest groups and voters that was necessary to push the bill through, at least that was the case in Washington. There were plenty of people who, while not strongly opposed to marijuana, would have just as soon left it illegal if not for the promise of some sort of broader benefit to non-users in the form of additional tax revenue. Still, I agree with your fundamental point that it is a shame that we feel the need to justify something which just makes good policy sense by using tax dollars as a carrot.

Incidentally, in Seattle at least, the high taxes and difficult restrictions on where marijuana can be sold means that a lot of people there still get there weed the same way they did before: either through the more loosely regulated dispensary system or illegal growers.
TCL is an incredibly useful language to quickly construct small code snippets in, and is especially good as a REPL language - as a command line interface.

On the other hand, it's the bane of my life. It's particularly bad (and verbose) at anything involving expressions. Unfortunately, that's mostly where I find it being used, because it's very popular in hardware. You'll find it being used for emulators, simulator, FPGAs, JTAG interfaces, and so on. There, it's shuffling a lot of data around, and in particular performing bitfield operations. It's notoriously verbose at doing all of that.

Hardware register definitions and the like are also usually expressed in a C-like fashion - that is to say they're usually using square brackets e.g "some_reg[2]" notation. This is annoying for TCL, because square brackets are its "string eval replace" construction, so you end up escaping stuff.

Its error traceback, usually "puts $errorInfo", is also awkward and often doesn't give you the right locality of where the error was, especially if it's syntax-related. One of the most infuriating aspects is that the comment character "#" doesn't obey the rules you see in other languages - it's not like a pre-processed character. Scope rules still apply within comments, e.g you can open a proc definition and it'll complain about a dangling brace because it still parses the comment line contents.

The everything-is-a-string design is awesome but also makes it inherently slow, to the extent that even on a modern system it can end up being the bottleneck in execution. It also results in really weird parameter passing rules between functions. I'm not a fan of having to occasionally add magic intermediate string evaluation steps, or the wildcard expansions necessary for passing lists. It's error-prone and sometimes feels like just hammering the interpreter until it Does What I Mean.

Everything-is-a-string is also damn dangerous, and can result in arbitrary code execution if you're not careful. Anyone who's ever run an IRC script or bot has probably experienced this, and knows what I mean.

That's not to say Tcl is crappy. It's just a language which was designed in another age, and it's really showing it. It's awesome as a command line REPL, but I highly recommend something else (Python or Lua) if you're doing anything even moderate scale behind the interface.
Oh that's really interesting. Am I alone in the impression there were an unusual number of Asian (specifically) airliners that disappeared or crashed under unusual circumstances?

I've recieved some other numbers (12; aviation-safety.com for 2014) but the consensus is that 2014 is the safest year on record.
Ad networks, probably including adult ad networks, regularly track browser footprints. You don't need an MITM attack, you merely need a porn site which runs ads. That consists of about 100% of the porn sites I browse.

The EFF has a nice demo of it: https://panopticlick.eff.org/
Snowden does Reddit