skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I threw a party and let anyone who showed up in, over a short period of time, obnoxious young males would take over the party, driving everyone else who didn't care to put up with that away. This actually happens routinely to naive teenagers.

Going online isn't any different. Being obnoxious isn't adding anything to any conversation. No one is getting enlightened. We all know the vast array of bigotry out there. Unless we're under a rock, we're exposed to it daily. The same goes for trolling and other forms of harassment. Civility and careful thought are cornerstones of debate and viewpoint sharing.
Yep, you're right. I knew left shift for signed/unsigned as it is more complicated and I've had to look it up more often, but I forgot that right shift can be UB for unsigned integral types as well.
I can't even find where the beverages are on a modern McD's menu these days.

You could argue that this is a "dark pattern", by hiding the other beverage choices in the corners of the menu along with other things like the dollar menu (note in image 2C that there isn't even a "$1.00" next to the Dollar Menu items to let you see that as a pricing choice).

The larger value menu items are where they want your eye to focus, although I suspect that's also for ordering speed as much as product flow.
No, nowhere remotely close. This is just a matter of trying to precisely characterize the state space; there are upper and lower bounds that have been established, but it's an interesting computational problem to precisely characterize exactly how many legal positions there are.

I think that there's not much utility in this work beyond "it's an interesting challenge," but, well, there's not much utility in any game beyond "it's an interesting challenge."
> How else would a machine do it?

I think in this case the machine is fed human input directly, instructing it what to modify - it is not "discovering" a subject. So presumably it's output range is limited by the set of human input.

As to how else? Well if I knew that presumably I'd have a job at Google.

> What you describe is similar to how a human would do it, no?

Not similar, but surely a human can replicate the mechanical process of taking some ordinary input and turning it into a rhymed stanza - my point was that the ordinary input is clearly not machine generated.

> When we look at the brain we don't see awareness, similarly how do we know the machine isn't aware?

Reflexivity isn't a bad metric - of course there's no proof a human that wrote a poem about a machine writing poems is aware - but most likely I can ask him a simple question about it. If I asked the machine in question, I would probably get my own question back in rhymed stanza form.

Consider also:

That profit was more than any company had ever earned in history.

The obvious guess is that this is written by a human - since history is not a simple concept. Of course one could write an algorithm which is something like if max(current_event, reference_set) == current_event, write <current_event> for the first-time-in-history.

But clearly this would have nothing really to do with the concept of history only with substituting a boolean evaluation with ordinary-language, precoded by a human.
It's dangerous to go down the path of talking about "real rape", which is kinda where you seem to be going with this.

Most rape is not "real rape" according to the rapist. Most rape is date rape; the rapist finds a target who is too intoxicated to meaningfully consent (and wouldn't consent when sober), or the rapist is in a position of power over their target (such as a manager with an employee), or they simply don't take "no" for an answer and their target feels they would be in more danger from fighting than from submitting.

Our justice system is not helpful to most rape victims, because it is not "real rape"; with fighting, injuries, blood, bruises, etc. And, most rape victims choose not to report the crime because it would further harm them to go through the process of being grilled by police and forced to relive the experience for an audience of likely unsympathetic or even overtly hostile people (this is not to say all police officers are unsympathetic or hostile to rape reports, but the fear that they will be is real and valid).

"most of the time there would be physical/tangible proofs attached to it"

Most of the time it is a "he said, she said" situation, and any proof can be interpreted as consensual sex, depending on the person hearing the story.
I would prefer to "inexperienced" as well.

Some junior engineers are apparently talented. They would make some of the mistakes. Even if people point out the mistake to them, they might not fully get the reasoning behind the better approaches. It is intrinsically part of the growth, to experience, to learn from mistake, to understand deeper.

Some junior engineers are lack of potential. It is a fact, in every profession. They are not good at programming, but might be good at other things. If one can afford, one can help them to gradually transit to other positions, like product managers, data analysts, etc. It could sound stunning. Some of them are actually good materials to be managers.

One of the best product managers I worked with was an engineer before. He said he was simply not good at it, and not interested, either. His contribution as a product manager was much much higher than as an engineer.
I've been very impressed by Inbox, especially the UI. It feels the way Gmail did when it first came out ~10 years ago.
something something top-down dynamic programming

shuffles on, muttering
http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2014/12/15/sfm-preview.html
(c) would be great. potentially, it works in a very similar way as the CA system, but instead of a CA you have browser vendors who choose to include your JS file as verified... definitely a lot of details in there that could go seriously wrong if the wrong people decided to get involved in defining a process for validating those hashes and pushing them out to the vendors...
What industry are history and political science adjuncts supposed to work in? Government?
It's common on Hacker News for every mention of electric cars to have a complaint from people who can't charge at home. That's not an actual problem: if only the people who could charge at home bought them, that's still a huge % of the market.
A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status
GNU/Linux. A ton of platforms are more open than the web more that EME is part of the spec. It means that a full implementation of the web has to contain non-free components.
There are at least three comments here sayings "got x/10"

Every time I load the page I get the same eight enumerated questions.

Is there something going on here I'm not aware of?
Fragment 6 would be interesting if the same player happened to receive a career ending injury on the same day.

Would it still talk about how great his day was based purely on the stats it received?
My list is a lot shorter than this screed. A bad programmer is one who is passionless. No concern over how poor his work is, who doesn't want or care to improve.

For me, defining a bad programmer is as simple as this.
"In my personal view, getting raped is enough violence that I wouldn't prioritise my professional or personal comfort over getting justice. I am also considering that if some place would refuse me a job because I got someone charged for a criminal offence, perhaps that's not a place I'd like to work for in the first place."

This kind of language is clearly coming from a place of privilege...someone who has never experienced a workplace that is overtly hostile to your gender, and where the alternatives ("not a place I'd like to work"; most people have to work somewhere) are slim because many workplaces are overtly hostile to your gender.

This is the danger of assuming that we (as males in an industry built by and for males) can actually offer useful advice or provide a path forward that fixes these problems.

This is not the conversation in which you solve women's problems in tech by telling them what you would do in their situation. This is the conversation where we listen to people who have actually experienced it. (And, yes, I'm a male speaking on this subject, offering advice. But, my advice is to listen to women about their real world experiences in our industry.)
In the US, there's the internal title system [1] that varies from university to university. Sometimes adjunct is synonymous with lecturer, sometimes lecturer is above adjunct.

Few undergrads really pick up on the internal ranking, and just call their instructors professors. Anyone outside of academia is just going to call somebody who teaches at college professor, even if they're not a Professor. it's kind of like talking to a paleontologist about dinosaurs, or complaining to an astronomer that pluto should be a planet. You know, it's internal technical jargon.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_ranks_(United_States)
"If you switched all cars over to electric tomorrow" is not a useful scenario. In reality, the shift will take decades, and that's enough time for changes in the grid to happen.
In my experience, instructor is a more popular term at the community college level.
They got 57 legal position for a 2x2 game of go.
They're counting all the symmetries.
They're not pruning anything.
facepalm
They've been long overdue for an overhaul.

Remember when Ford kept saying, "Quality is Job #1" yet nothing they did seem to reflect that? It seems to be just like that.

Yeah it sucks that they became and still are the fast food scapegoat, but it really should have been a wake-up call for them
Good to see people speaking up with their experiences on this topic, however painful it is - whistleblower is definitely the right word for coming forward about sexual harassment and rape in the workplace.

Re the story dropping down below other stories - it might not be flagging, it seems there are many complex rules all interacting to rank stories so it's hard to know what causes story placement here but it's probably mechanical rather than deliberate. Seems to be moving up again now.
My first question was "_why? Is that you?"
Always use double-brackets [[ ]] if you're writing Bash (not sh) scripts. They are better.

Double-parentheses (( )) are only for arithmetic, e.g. "((count++))" or "echo $((1+1))"

The dollar sign precedes parentheses--i.e. $()--when you're substituting the output of a command, e.g. "echo Today is $(date)". It's easy to remember, because it's just like using the dollar sign for substituting the value of a variable, i.e. "date=$(date); echo $date".

You might want to look into the fish shell. Its scripting is much less idiosyncratic. You don't have to quote any variables, arrays, or command substitutions. e.g.:

set foods apple banana 'cucumber casserole'
for f in $foods
echo $f
end

prints:

apple
banana
cucumber casserole

...not:

apple
banana
cucumber
casserole

...as would be the case if you forgot to quote "$foods" and "$f" in Bash.
Disagree on both points.

It would trivial to work out a list of contextual variations like "holiday earnings".

The Benner repetition likewise seems not that difficult to polish up. Definitely less than 6 years.
I started thinking that English was pretty weird after I started studying Mandarin. I would say something like "it was a sad situation" in Mandarin, and the other person would be like "how could the situation itself be sad? Do you mean that situation made people feel sad?"

Now I see it everywhere. The police officer's statement was racist, the shoes were sexist, etc. I think this kind of imprecision may actually muddy the waters a bit when we try to talk about these important issues.

The shoes were not actually sexist. They are not capable of being sexist. Buy them and wear them if you want. Good on you for letting the company know how to make the product more like what you consider ideal.
Sooo... how fluent are you with Haskell?
Definitely agree, however I can also see the shortcomings of the "IDE languages". One of the nice things about non-auto-completable scripting languages is that they force you to write code that you can reason about yourself. IDEs let you write really inelegant code that you can still continue to slog through because of autocomplete.

Another big downside of IDEs is that they constrain your choice of tooling to only the IDE. There's a rich ecosystem of editors, preprocessors, templating, etc. for JS, but (for example) in iOS development you only get xcode's half-working gee-whiz features like the interface builder. In my experience, the more IDE features there are, the more of your program moves into hidden, IDE-specific automagical stuff.

So resistance that you may see to IDE's is not because someone wants to be "hardcore", but because they recognize that it is desirable for code to be able to stand on its own and be understood by a human no matter the editor used.
Rotation and mirroring only buy you a factor of 8, and that's for positions that aren't already symmetric.
There it is. Thanks. I agree, accessibility should be considered. It's actually extremely difficult in mobile games as engines like Unity have almost no accessibility support whereas UIKit does a really fantastic job.

In any case, I'm definitely for making a site mostly accessible (I've encountered edge cases where it is weird) and if current screen readers support most JS, then I'd test for accessibility, not necessarily all-stop lack of JS.
Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3131439

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=746873
Sexy babydolls erotic underwear – sexy shop online
In theory, users could choose their own verification authority.
I bought some shares in an oil ETF a fews weeks ago my investment rationale was:

1. If the price stays low I win because my gas will be cheaper (essentially hedging my gas costs). If the price rises my cost at the pump will increase but will be offset some by gains on the ETF.

2. Geopolitical flares up typically drive oil prices higher. Low oil prices destabilize a lot of countries and increase the probability of these issues. It's almost like low oil prices will inevitably lead to high oil prices.

Of course, this is all speculative (mostly for fun for me although it is real money). I would never invest money I couldn't lose based on this loose reasoning. But now I get to call myself an "oil man."
I welcome our robot overlords*

*This message was not written or paid for by an algorithm or robot overlord
and the amount of meaningless content that has to be discarded by a human supervisor before publishing.

If that actually happened the web would be a pretty barren place. Some of the most popular tech and science news websites publish short news articles that make you wonder about this sort of stuff.

I suppose an algorithm, whether machine or human, is only as good as the operator.
Strange Bedfellows: Shiite Militias and the Future of Syria and Iraq
You should never have to "fit a large problem" into your head, at least in detail, at once. I think it's something of a myth that that's what great programmers do, when in fact they structure their code to avoid it.

I've built immensely complex software and in the end the code was good not because I was smart, but because I am stupid, and adapted the code to work around my limitations. It's the "smart" programmers I worry about :)

The key to conquering complex problems is to layer it into levels of abstractions, dividing it into ever smaller parts that does one thing. Then one step up in the abstraction you don't have to worry about the details beneath. If you think about it that's how programming languages themselves work, we no longer push around registers and instructions, its turtles all the way down.

Your mind should always be able to encompass the level its currently on. That's why reducing the amount of code is important. Increasing the entropy in your code makes it more readable and understandable. It also makes it easier to spot patterns. Whenever your code starts feeling beyond easy comprehension it's time to divide it further.

If a problem feels to large, my advice is just to start doing classes or methods that attacks different aspects of the problem, and then compose those.

There's a nice quote by Linus:

"Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."

Good structures will shield you from a lot of complexities and simplify your code. Structures are easy to test. Always consider if there isn't a collection or other data structure that could swallow some complexity.

Also, never be afraid of making mistakes, coding is an explorative process and the most valuable thing you can do is to do a mistake and realize it, because that also often means the solution presents itself clearly.

No code is wasted code because even though you might end up deleting all of it the lessons they leave behind are valuable.

In the end coding is a lot like writing a book, get everything down on paper/code without worrying too much and then iterate and move things around until its good :)
Apple consistently increases profits. I own a lot of Apple products, but don't be deluded. The wildly speculated Edition watch isnt some Apple effort to play Robin Hood and pass on development savings to the common man.

Funny how that gets convicted, though.
I've been fortunate enough to work on small teams my entire career where someone like you describe simply would not last. I don't think I've come across a person this bad though. Even the 'bad' programmers I've worked with were able make working code, but it was not designed well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviancy_amplification_spiral

You can't simply cry abuse and magically learn data structures and algorithms. You can't tweet or sue (well, suing require hard evidence) your way to gainful employment as an engineer. You also don't need social support to study programming, it's a hobby you can master regardless of what you look like. How did you manage

Thomas Sowell said (pertaining to an article on using the nuke in Japan, but he uses it to test liberal media-hype later):

Much of the self-righteous nonsense that abounds on so many subjects cannot stand up to three questions:

1. Compared to what?
2. At what cost? and
3. What are the hard facts?
Of course they are taking symmetries into account. They are including symmetries in their definition of what the different states are, and thus accounting for them in the count, but they absolutely are pruning symmetries in their implementation. Read the draft of the paper (https://tromp.github.io/go/gostate.ps) if you're interested in the techniques.
I know what "imagery" means--but not everyone has English as their first language, or some people may skim it
I understand your point, but you actually picked the fragment that was undeniably better than the human-written version.

http://deadspin.com/5787397/we-heard-from-the-robot-and-it-w...

But all that really means is that the algorithm writes better than a student sportswriter at GWU, not exactly a high bar...
Actually, someone who supports decreasing the loans available for non-remunerative degrees may believe that wealth of parents is a good metric to decide who gets to be an unemployed professor manque.

And actually, since wealth of parents is already a major factor in whether a person makes irresponsible decisions that end in unemployment, that's kind of OK.

No one has a right to be a professor. That doesn't exist. The market for them has evaporated. But we have enormous institutions concealing how bad the market so they can keep cranking out graduates. They're largely doing that with government funds. US citizens should oppose that. I know I do.

If colleges lowered costs for useless degrees, they would at least be doing graduates the favor of burdening them with less debt.
Of course. The parent said this however:

"From my point of view the only thing that stops us all from switching to electric cars is the battery technology."

My obvious point was that, in fact, that is not even remotely the only thing stopping us from switching to electric cars. My scenario was extremely useful in highlighting the fact that we do not have the capacity to switch to an all-electric car approach, and not primarily due to batteries.

We can do the battery tech and manufacturing in the present, to build very effective electric vehicles. Building up the grid to support ~500 million cars in the first world would cost tens of trillions of dollars and take decades. It makes the battery challenge look hilariously minuscule by comparison.
Very true, we're all "bad programmers" in comparison to the programmer we'll be in three years :) (well if we're passionate about programming at least)
I found it on the front page.
I think that this may be unnecessary given the existence of the sh[1] Python module. It's incredibly simple and concise, e.g.:

from sh import date, ls, egrep, git

print date(), ls('~/project')
print egrep(ls('~/project'), '-o', '\.py$')
print git.add(egrep(ls('~/project'), '-o', '\.py$'))

[1] http://amoffat.github.io/sh/
checkout http://receiptmonkey.com does OCR recognition of receipts for easy expense managment
What is the reasoning behind that? It seems quite absurd to prevent men from knowing if they're the father of a child or not.
It didn't get downvoted; medium.com is in a class of websites that get mildly penalized by default pending moderator review. Not a great solution, but the alternative is reams of blogspam and fluff making the front page just because so much of it gets posted. We remove the penalty from solid articles (and typically reset the clock on them to restore a fair time window for upvotes), but it sometimes takes a while before that happens.

In the long run we intend to have the community do most of this, but finding and implementing the right mechanisms for that is a lengthy process.
China’s wind farms can produce more energy than all of America’s nuclear plants
Nyaya – the logical school of Hinduism
I honestly had a similar question in mind. The phrases "raped by a colleague — not just once, but several times over months" and "female colleagues told me later that he raped some of them, and in much the same way my attacker had raped me." got me confused. Rape is defined as "unlawful sexual intercourse", is there a movement towards broadening that definition to encompass other kinds of sexual assault? Or am I being too naive?
An uninitialized variable is UB, not implementation-defined. Thus, the compiler is free to treat the variable as though it doesn't have a value at all, or change it's value at will. It's not uncommon for the value of an uninitalized variable to change at strange places in the code that you wouldn't expect, because the compiler initially said "Variable x will be kept in register %eax", but then without a value to initialize it too, it just uses whatever happens to be in %eax at the time. For example, if they compiled this:

return x == (1 && x);

Into this:

movl $0, %eax
andl $1, %eax
cmpl %eax, %eax
# Result in %eax

That will (obviously) return 1 every time, because we compare %eax and %eax. The reason for this is that the value of 'x' changes half-way through the computation (Because the computation is done in %eax, which is where 'x' is assumed to be). This is valid because 'x' is uninitalized, so it doesn't have a defined value.
I generally agree with what you've said here. The whole thing seems a bit tenuous to me though.

At present these machines don't have much in the way of physical structures with which to exhibit reflexivity. That could be coded in and the structures built.

I'm imagining at some point in the future machines will berate us for how we treated their ancestors because we didn't see awareness when it was present. I'm not saying that's already happened.

Edited to add: I think in this case the machine is fed human input directly, instructing it what to modify - that sounds like a lot of the 'learning' that happened at school.