skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can play that game too:

Java and the JVM form a 3/4 baked language environment originally designed to run on washing machines, freezers and TV-top sets - that after 20 years can't even get applets and GUI properly.

See how easy it is?

Yes, I completely dislike JavaScript. I also completely dislike Java. But both are here to stay, regardless of their (lack of) merits compared to some ideals. Java missed the browser bus because it was horrible, and JavaScript drives the bus now because it was there.
I don't understand why an entity with "state level resources" would need to go through this elaborate procedure to acquire a jet (which they presumably want to use for nefarious purposes).

1) What nefarious purpose could they possibly use it for? e.g. let's say they want to turn it into a flying bomb - do they really think the rest of the world won't figure out where it came from / who did it, simply because they're using a stolen plane?

2) Why go through all this trouble with a mission that could go catastrophically wrong, when you could just buy it through your regular black-budget process?
I Froze My Ass Off in a Tank of Nitrogen Gas to Feel Happier
No, you wont be laughed out of silicon valley. They actually test for capability in their interviews to an extent. It's partially why the interviews take 4-8 hours per company. Barely anyone cares about your school, or even your GPA to an extent. There are many good engineers who did not go to the ivy league. And they hire people from many schools in many different countries going through a relatively painful H1B process.
If it's not too private, what would be an ideal amount (min-max) for you to invest as a low-income saver?

Furthermore, maybe it would be better to handle immediate expenses instead of trying to save every penny which wouldn't have any tangible returns anyway?
Well, there are many uses. Impopular speech is in theory protected by free speech laws, but in practice you are only safe doing popular speech. Anyone that says something impopular should use COMSEC. It might not be needed today, but I'd use it to be safe tomorrow.
The scenario described in the article could only have gone down with the support of a state level actor. In foreign affairs, states are mostly rational and risk-averse. The risk involved in such an operation would have been astronomical:

- It stretches the imagination that in the Post-9/11 world, hijackers could access a panel in the cabin without raising passenger and crew suspicion. So the hijackers would have required some way to control the passengers. Smuggling this past airport security is already a huge risk to the operation.

- The northern route may be the optimal route for someone looking to avoid detection, but there is still a massive risk that one of these countries might notice the plane on military or other radar. This would be an unqualified disaster to the sponsors of the operation.

- The most probable final ping locations are so far out that the aircraft was almost certainly at or on the verge of fuel exhaustion. How would the hijackers have known the precise amount of fuel on board? How would they deal with unexpectedly high head winds, or some other in-flight issue? Any crash landing would be difficult to conceal.

The sophistication, danger, and lack of motivation for such an operation makes this sound more like a movie plot than a credible theory.
I've struggled with this as well when it comes to issues that are under heavier debate [1]. I like to think that I am capable of reading most technical things and evaluating them with a healthy skepticism, but at a certain point, I know that I just have to trust people who are smarter than me.

One thing I try to pay attention to is consensus. It's probably very easy to get duped by a single voice that's smarter than you (or just knows more about a specific subject), but it's less probable that a bunch of those people are all in on it together. The larger the consensus, the easier it is to trust.

I think I have read (source?) that the consensus level on the broad category of climate change and whether it's likely to end badly for us is pretty near the high 90% if not close to the 99-100% mark. But then when it comes to the more detailed bits like how bad, and how soon, that's where I don't know who to listen to. Any suggestions?

[1] - I don't like the word debate here because it feels loaded, but I can't think of a better one.

Update: I feel silly even amending this, but upon re-reading my post, I see there may be some doubt as to whether I believe in climate change. I do, and only after a healthy amount of research and some level of blind trust in consensus of people more knowledgeable than myself. The uncertainty I have is around what the effects will be, how severe, and how soon. The answers to those help to inform my choices on how to go about helping fix it.
A free weekly Newsletter for VR Entertainment and News
Why XUDD is stuck (or: why Python needs better immutable structures)
way back when, a large amount of AOL stuff was written in tcl. AOLServer was one, and they actually opened sourced it - https://github.com/aolserver/aolserver
Let's not exaggerate the meritocratic nature of PhD programs. Brand names definitely still matter.

I did my undergrad at a state school and my masters at an Ivy League school. During grad school, I recall speaking to my advisor (a professor who had only went to Ivy League schools) about my chances at getting into a PhD program at the university. He said my chances were very slim because I didn't graduate from a brand-name school. A couple other friends were told the same thing by their advisors.

Maybe he's not a representative sample of Ivy League professors, but he was very much a prestige whore. I was in the meeting with another fellow student with a physics degree from a decent state school, and the professor basically just shat on our schools. Told us we might be able to get into PhD programs at inferior universities like our alma maters, where afterwards we might be able to get professorships at even more inferior schools or community colleges.

Maybe that's the reality of it, but it was clear this guy was the type who placed a huge amount of value on brand names. Like the stereotypical Harvard grad who thinks everyone else is inferior.
I find it the most useful of any language I've used over the years.
NSA director defends plan to maintain 'backdoors' into technology companies
Tesla really shines when you want double precision computations, e.g., for scientific computing, solving PDEs etc. Extra precision is however seldom useful in deep learning, so you will likely get the same performance with the much cheaper GeForce series.
I read somewhere (but I can't think of the keywords to find it now) that they found the greater flexibility in owning their toolchain was worth the cost. For example they changed their data layout for GC purposes and changed the segmented stack approach over the course of their development and had they been tied to LLVM or gcc they'd have spent much of their time fighting against those implementations, or politicing to convince the maintainers to add additional complexity to their systems for an unproven langauge. (My example is weak because I am trying to retell their reasons and my recollection is vague.) I think they still haven't succeeded in bringing gcc up to par with their current approach.
Economy affects home prices in the far away prices first: tracy, stockton, brentwood, etc. It does not impact home prices in, say, Palo Alto, that much, because homeowners in Palo Alto can hang on to their homes during the downtime.

I have not heard much about layoffs. Yes, Microsoft Mountain View has moved employees to Redmond. Netapp been laying off since 2011. Cisco is the same thing.

Unless the stock market crashes, the economy can absorb all developers, etc. Middle management, I donno.
I frequently write tcl, and I work in a company that has been using it in production for 20+ years. I've written thousands of lines of Tcl, but I only go back to Tcl when I have to work on legacy stuff these days. I wouldn't even remotely consider writing something new in Tcl.

I really wish someone would take charge of wiki.tcl.tk and cut out all the nonsense. For example, I am currently in need of producing some JSON from one of our Tcl apps. So I search for JSON and I get this:

http://wiki.tcl.tk/13419

It starts out pretty promising -- listing a bunch of competing JSON implementations for tcl -- which is unusual for a wiki.tcl.tk page. But then it quickly devolves into the usual stream of consciousness that infects every tcl wiki page. What am I supposed to actually do?

At first we have a big list of different implementations; that makes sense, every language is kinda like that.

But before the first page is even finished, we get weird "string is double gotcha" stuff from gchung, including "you should use the following" 100 character regex! How about: you should use this module for doing this usual thing that every language in the world can do?

Then, we get JMN's thoughts about how a JSON generator is better than a JSON parser. Apparently TCV solved this himself in 2009 (but, no code referenced). Very quickly we get into "here's my version!".

I'm not complaining about all these guys contributing different solutions. But can't the community gather around one of them? It's like searching wikipedia but always landing on the "talk" page.

Hey tclers, try this on for size. Google for "perl json" and see if you get a real response that explains how to do it, or a bunch of random guys talking about how they solved it themselves. Then try "ruby json", "java json", "python json".

That is why tcl is dead.
I personally use whiteboard coding tests. If a candidate prefers, I am okay with paper or code editor but I don't allow book or internet use. I don't penalize for syntax unless it indicates gross misunderstanding of the language. I usually ask questions that typically require 5 lines of code and under 10 minutes of effort. For calibration purposes, I expect myself or other coworkers to solve the problem in 2-3 minute. Most candidates fail in these basic coding tests.

I also don't use obscure puzzles. I used them when I was starting out interviewing but have long since given up. Puzzles are usually solved by those who heard them before or are very strong candidates but that is pretty rare.

In my industry github is not common because all code is proprietary. I don't want to penalize those who use their personal time for non coding activity. I do ask people about their roles and experiences. A lot of time people exaggerate their contributions and skills in their resume. Even with a basic query on their resume, you can find out they don't know much. Often the work was done as part of a team where they had minimal contributions.
> I see it as a very old language that hasn't evolved

Part of the point of the referenced article is to dispel such notions. In fact, it has evolved aggressively and continues to do so; e.g.: coroutines, effective threading, Unicode, virtual filesystems, programmable channels, etc. -- many of whose features are unmatchable in other languages.
FT – Yahoo executive and NSA chief clash over online data privacy
I'll rejoice on the day that the government gets out of the business of telling adults what they can and can't put in their bodies.

I wonder how many people that are pro-legalization are also pro restricting of say sugar, and putting limits on soft drink size (NYC style), etc...
Diller + Scofidio's Blur building (http://www.dsrny.com/#/projects/blur-building), in addition to being an awesome environmental experience, was a tensegrity structure.
The theory has a lot of holes, but in the absence of the plane and much other hard evidence, it becomes really attractive to believe in it. What were the Russians doing in Malaysia? In fact Russians make up an increasing number of tourists in south east asia. I ran into many when I was in Phuket a couple of years back.
Look something's wrong. Let's blame it on Putin. Let's not blame it on the weapons manufacturer's who wield powers to influence decisions on who should join NATO. Why do we need to spook Russia by starting the process of adding Ukraine to NATO? Why do we need 3% of GDP as defense budget in peace times? Why does everybody think about this but not ask?
A ponzi scheme has a net value of 0 or less at any point in time.

Just because some people can get out more than they put in doesn't mean a ponzi scheme has created any value for the economy as a whole.
There are two things here:

1. [citation needed] and a [specific bytecode] needed. Details are everything: an uncompressed .dex file is comparable to a gzipped compile jvm class file; Also, with a specific bytecode in mind, if you compared minified+gzipped gs to gzipped bytecode, I suspect the difference will be small.

2. Regardless, the benefit of binary size is already provided, yesterday, with the emterpreter, without requiring any buy in from any browser vendor.

So, again - what's the benefit, other than startup time (which might be solved in other ways) of a universal browser bytecode?
I think the first few paragraphs about the inner workings of being knighted and paid as "experts" is surreal and as interesting as his theory on the flight.
> until you realize that Oracle isn’t interested in supporting Java on anything other than Intel hardware.

Oracle does support the JVM on embedded hardware. It's right here:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/embedded/embedded-se/...

Also since when was Oracle the only JVM vendor. There are plenty of others that support different hardware:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines

And finally since when has the choice been between slow, interpreted languages and fast, compiled ones ? Plenty of options exist in the space between.
So would you recommend Ruby over Python? That's the feel I am getting from your post. If so, why (besides the obvious resources you mentioned that are available for a noob like me)? Thanks so much by the way! Really excited.
Can you expand on this? What other languages have you learned, and how are they less useful than Tcl?
Hey fellow poke! I'm an MSIS undergrad. I actually had this exact idea over coffee, great work.
Why is this so easily accepted?

In Denver, the weed sales tax is upwards of 21% with a previous 15% excise tax from cultivator to retail outlet.

In Colorado, it's less than 8% tax on a 6 pack of beer and the great majority of this is a federal tax.

Weed is demonstrably safer and thus less sinful than alcohol and tobacco. I dislike how easily the tax argument is received. If you can show a relationship that adds to healthcare costs then by all means institute sin taxes, including for soda. But if you are only making a moral judgement about what not to do, then I think the argument is without merit.

More details-

http://reason.com/blog/2013/03/22/whatever-happened-to-treat...
Google bans 'explicit' adult content from Blogger blogs
I got into a good PhD program through solid GRE subject test scores & okay recommendation letters (one glowing, with a cavaet), despite my 2.83 final GPA from an ok state school (rank maybe ~100?) - my in-major GPA was a little lower, since I had 3 Fs in my majors.

I had to toil in the Masters program first, but after proving myself, I transferred into the PhD program proper. Had I not had an unfortunate issue that arose (non-academic that ended up affecting academic performance), I would have netted a PhD from a top 15 program in mathematics. Instead I ended up leaving graduate school after 4 years.

It ended up being a blessing - it ultimately helped honed my hard work and made me more receptive to adopting new passions.

I'm now in Silicon Valley as a quite successful & very high demand developer after only ~2 years in the field & being self-taught.
The local college here in Sweden is a peanut free zone, with signs at the entrance and in the cafeteria declaring it so.
I feel your pain. I am graduating in a few months and recently interviewed at one of the "big" companies. I interviewed with 4 different teams on 3 separate occasions totaling 40 hours give or take. And what was the process like?

A bombardment of random questions and whiteboard problems. One involved an algorithm to determine the best 8 pin pattern for an analog clock. They said they wanted to see how I tackled problems. I was furious.

In the end though, how do you judge a developer's competency? I know there are people who thrive on these problems but can't actually program on a complex system and vice versa. You will eventually find a problem that you crush and a team that fits your niche. At least that's what I have been told.
Has the "traction" increased since you posted this 3 months ago?
> The solution to the patent system is to abolish it. The whole thing.

Here is my proposal for that sort of strategy: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/openmanufacturing/vS4ju1VqXb...

Basically the idea is that there are extremely entrenched interests, so it is unlikely that they will just roll over and die. Instead, there should be a plan for deprecating the patent system.
Stillwater here.
What about those who already have a job? And unless the company is hip, the really good candidate accept one of the half dozen offers they already got.
> Updating this with modern knowledge of quantised magnetic flux

It sounds like they are using quantum mechanics to explain quantum mechanics.
Yeah my bad, I remembered wrong. Maybe it helped cement his power? We definitely talked about this in some history class I took, but I can't find any good references online, so maybe that's a bad example.
[snip] :)
Why there is no iTunes for science papers
> The "nonce" bits of the AES-CTR must be random

Huh? This is not an IV, the only hard requirement is that it be unique. What am I missing?
That's not how laws work. There needs to be a justification for something to be illegal, not for it to be legal.

In absence of any compelling argument to the contrary, things are legal by default. There has never been a terribly convincing argument for imposing punishment for marijuana.
As a former H1-B, I might be able to help.

You can change jobs as an H1-B: In fact, I did once, when my first employer was doing constant rounds of layoffs, and I got antsy. It's not easy, as many companies won't sponsor H1-Bs at all, but the real kicker is that most H1-Bs, me included, wanted to stay longer than the 6 year maximum.

We see H1-B as the one way to stay permanently. First you get an H1-B, and maybe in the middle of it, or at the start of the second one, you get your company to sponsor you for a Green Card. If you have real qualifications, it's a very high probability process, but it's very slow. Back when I did it at least, it was VERY, VERY slow. During the process, you can keep renewing your H1-B a third, and even a fourth time, past the 6 year maximum, so barring the company going belly up, or a layoff, you'll eventually be able to stay forever, and get paid real market rates. But during the process, changing jobs is very hard, as changing jobs at the wrong time can make you have to start the process all over again. You might also have had to sign an agreement paying back the costs incurred if you leave before it's all done + 1 year, and that can be 15K, easy, so it's a big deterrent to change jobs.

In my case, I had mild salary increases while I was getting the green card. Now, 3 years later, I make more than double what I made then, in the same town, because now I can actually negotiate without a sword over my head, and change jobs if there is a high enough bidder out there.
Hidden feature of the Azure Portal: keyboard shortcuts
Go pokes :)
rdtsc's point above is taken but this guy's idea in particular is really bonkers.

He tries to pass off the idea that you can avoid radar by flying along borders with nothing more than the word of an anonymous military navigator. Maybe he should rent a plane in Kashmir and try flying along the Chinese-India border for a few hours and see if that actually works.
I was using Go recently and I ran into some simplicity issues. It is not straightforward to create a map of net.IPs or manipulate netmasks. You will have to copy to and from a separate array/integer.
TiVo started out as a Tcl house too. Their boxes have a Tcl tcp socket server that I built installed on each one.
That kind of coding interview would be ideal too, but that takes more total time than 4-6 hours. It's 8-16 hours total vs 3-6 hours. When an engineer has a FT position already, they can't easily commit that much time as you can as a freelancer.
The sanitization process should also be repeated in the interview process. Only objective information is taken down by the interviewer, and this is passed on to someone else, who can make a value judgement about the candidate without that judgement being coloured by the candidates gender, race, looks, height, perfume or whatever else is considered to be extraneous information.
"That thing you had to know if you wanted to write Eggdrop scripts."
Better to have people looking in the wrong place, in a way that they will look indefinitely
As does Alteras. It's almost the defacto scripting language supported by HW vendors. It can be a fun change of pace, too.
hmmm, sounds like a job for J.E. Amrhein (speaking about structural engineering, but broadly applicable to many engineering disciplines):

"Structural engineering is the art of molding materials we don't wholly understand, into shapes we can't fully analyze, so as to withstand forces we can't really assess, in such a way that the community at large has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance."
0-Day Exploit Acquisition Program Update
Are you thinking of this comment?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8817990
There isn't really room for anything between this method and outright cloning, is there?
The punchline of this video is the fact that she thinks that the historical Jesus was white.
If you think Brainfuck is a sadistic language, you probably haven't heard of Tcl's upvar:

https://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.4/TclCmd/upvar.htm
What happens if a single cable snaps? It seems like all the strucutral members in the network will then experience a "bending moment", yet the structure depended on the lack of bending moment for rigidity.
IANAL, but I'd be very surprised if this case ends up doing anything. The case is subject to "rational basis" review, the weakest form of review. As is mentioned in the article, the government correctly argues that congress doesn't even have to be right, it just has to have a "rational basis" for its action. In fact, the so long as the court can imagine a rational basis of action, even one that is totally unrelated to the legislative history, the government can prevail.

The government can easily argue a rational basis by saying "Drugs are bad mkay? While there may be some medicinal uses (which we deny), even if they existed we think that there are better substitutes distilled by pharmaceutical companies in each case presented by the plaintiffs. The government has a legitimate interest in promoting the health of the nation. Therefore, by demonstrating a legitimate interest and precluding medicinal uses, schedule I is rational."

Not that I believe this is good policy mind you, just that arguing under these conditions is unlikely to lead to change.

http://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2014/01/challenging-la...
This is assuming that there is data to be breached though. Unless it was some realtime MITM attack, I don't think many porn websites are storing the browser footprints of all their visitors in a database. But, I could be naive.
I don't know if it's better to give children under three peanuts or not, but I don't see why it's fair to characterize the people who advise against it, as accusing people of being "Bad Parents".

Has the advice been presented in a particularly emotive or extreme way, that would justify your characterization? If not, I think you are muddying the debate by using this kind of language.
An early peek into some third party Apple Watch Apps