skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is most worrisome is that even with all the overwhelming documentation, people, especially in the USA are largely ignoring it. Sure there are some that protest and there is much ado about the violations in European countries, but reality is that nothing substantial is happening beyond token and illusory reforms.

It's almost as if someone discovered a time machine, went back in time, showed everyone the documented and recorded evidence that a totalitarian dictatorship was forming; and everyone simply shrugged and called you a witch.

Unfortunately, humans are not really all that good at being preemptive. We are ultimately a rather stupid, reactionary life form that won't get it until after we have teetered on the edge of the abyss.
I find being a programmer helps me with reading law. A lot of the time it's just a bunch of if this than that statements.
Ah, got it.

The question is, are the twentysomethings really the problem?

There are a bunch of people doing startups and many of them fail, so the stuff that sticks doesn't depend on the "makers" but on the "takers".

And, like you said, the "takers" are the non-20-year-olds, of which there are many more.
>Do we have any meaningful HSR in this country?

We have the Acela which isn't quite high speed rail (it is higher speed rail - up to 150mph in some areas but a lower speed limits in others). The Acela is very popular and actually profitable. The Acela has the potential to improve speeds by improving tracks to be able to accommodate higher speeds safely in places as well as removing the remaining grade crossings and probably more infrastructure to ease some congestion. High speed rail has huge potential in some areas. Hopefully this potential can be realized!
Madrid - Barcelona (504.64 air km or 313.5 air miles) in 2:30h, and often just 2:15h (they give a longer time due to a delay over 15min means they've to refund 50% of the ticket.
That's awesome! I've been thinking for a while that coops make a huge amount of sense for software development. Thanks for putting the lists together!

BTW have you read http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/? It's very pertinent to the kind of organisation you've built according to your team page. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts if you have.
I knew about the surveillance program since 2006 and i dont work for the nsa....
The way I like to do things is mostly as you describe, but also to set up the configuration to be (de)serializable by your favorite xml library. The defaults are in the code, but they can be overridden on a per-deployment basis.
Amazing, thanks! :-D
Well, if we want to go that route, then one could say Frank Church was aware (and his committee made the results public) some 38 years or so before Snowden.
Travel time by train is mostly about how many stops [edit: legs] you need (which add through wait times) and what part of the network you're on:
Brussels/Cologne, which is used on the London/Cologne route was only usable up to 60km/h or so 7 years ago. That part took nearly as long back then as the entire LON/CGN trip does now.

Paris - Stuttgart - Nuremberg (580km) takes 6h51 including one hour between connections in Stuttgart.

Berlin - Stuttgart (591km) has a 5h34 direct connection.

Frankfurt - Bern - Milano (~700km) takes 7h47 including 30 minutes in Bern

OTOH, Frankfurt - Cologne (for which a dedicated high speed rail route was built nearly 20 years ago) is about 200km in 1h04.
Let's be clear that this is really terrible advice for every company except very, very small companies.

An HR department is not a "big company" thing that's there to get in your way. Its job is to do things like (e.g.) protect the company against liability in messy sexual harassment scenarios or (e.g.) hiring discrimination lawsuits.

The substitute for this functionality is not goodwill or "just doing the right thing" because this role necessarily involves a detailed understanding of employment law. If you disregard this department when building your company past, say, tens of employees, you are basically certain to be in for a bad time later. The book is written here by companies like GitHub, who have had major scandals that could have been prevented mostly or wholly by a competent HR department. If you look at their example and don't learn, then you are a fool.
I just got back from a very positive strategy meeting with my partner (I do the code and he does the ops and the sales) and this essay struck a chord with me. Why are we making so much progress when I'm a decidedly average programmer? I think it's because I'm a decidedly average programmer in enough languages to know what their strengths and weaknesses are and thus to be able to pick the right tool for the job:

- hardware-accelerated video decoding on the ARM - C obviously, with a small amount of ASM.

- web server - Python using web2py

- web interface prettiness - jquery and javascript

- server processes and admin automation - Python

- core apps - Luajit because it's so fast on the very limited ARM boxes we're using

- customer data munging and reports - emacs lisp because it's right there

- desktop apps for Windows, OSX and Linux - Python again

- some bash and Perl for sysadmin stuff

What Steve doesn't say - although it is implied - is that he knows enough languages at a practical level to make these kinds of judgement calls. And I know for a fact he's a far better coder than I am because I use his Penlight library for Lua every day.

Perhaps Flub can never be a force for change the way Lisp was because modern languages are incorporating enough features from Lisp to bring them close enough to the top of the hierarchy not to matter as much as before.
You mean: "I can't imagine it". That is something else :)
@dmarcelino always open to constructive criticism: the OrientDB Community Group has thousands of users that report their feedback every day. No one was banned nor accused for that. The case with @phpnode is much different for a lot of reasons, but this is definitely not the place to discuss it ;-)
Prediction: they'll start again within six months. (Remember that this post is saying they'll keep to the 2013 promise they recently reneged on.)
What bug?

This is something of a fear of mine, especially after my wife received a MRSA infection a few years ago.
I found the picture at the top to be a funny reflection of the problems of layout. The bird (I believe that's a cassowary as on the book cover) in a spacesuit is an interesting juxtaposition artistically, but the helmet face plate won't be able to rotate down over the birds beak and seal the helmet. A 'layout' case that the image didn't consider. Layout is hard.
It sounds like they were using this technique:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longwall_mining
And his T-shirt says "I only give negative feedback" with a circuit diagram of that type :)
How to Do Content Marketing Without Putting Pressure on Audience to Buy
How does price scale when you exceed the number of requests allowed in a plan?
If you're not a group of geniuses at MIT, you really shouldn't be surprised when you lose money gambling. If you're poor enough that I'm supposed to feel sorry for you, buying a lottery ticket is a very irrational thing to be doing.
I'm moderating down seriously misinformed posting.

I'm not sure what's worse, that you seriously think the longest high speed rail link in France is 106km, or that you think London to Moscow is reasonably compared to New York to Los Angeles. Why would you start from a city that's nowhere near the edge of the continent in question? The NYC->LA analog would be something like Lisbon to Moscow which, guess what! Is almost exactly the same distance.
Good article, lousy title. Immediately made me think "why women make uniquely gifted coders" rather than "women make gifted coders too".
Ask HN: Why doesn’t Microsoft release its OS in chip?
I'm curious why Microsoft, the unbeaten OS maker in the world, doesn't release its OS in hardware chip (only). The way I see it-

Advantages:

. Flash memories (specially NAND) are dart cheap these days. And if Microsoft decides to go for it, NOR memories won’t remain expensive given the volume of the OS Microsoft sells.

. Microsoft is losing significant amount of money to the hackers and crackers. And OS in chip only solution will force the customers buy the OS.

. OS hack will be significantly more difficult, if not impossible. Custom design of the chip will make hacking infeasible.

. Loading OS from flash to RAM will require significantly less time.

. Unique hardware identity per cheap (Apple’s iPhone 5s+ like) along with crypto engine will make the users and their data more secure.

Possible solutions:

. RAM Slot: OS in a RAM slot comes to my mind first. A RAM stick can have the OS along with RAM chips. Users plug and play the OS. No more hassle to install OS. It will ensure OS license/user.

. Single chip: Single chip containing flash memory, cryptography engine, MCU and RAM for data and OS update/upgrade management will be shipped with the motherboards of the devices. It will ensure OS license/machine.

. BIOS replacement: replacing the decades old BIOS with a full fledge OS chip makes sense in terms of dynamic hardware detection, and security of the system.

What's the catch?
But many times the hard-coded values get used multiple times, have relationships between each other, it's unclear where they are in the code, etc.

Keeping them all at the top of the file (connectionTimeoutSeconds = 30, maxConnectionRetries = 3, maxSimultaneousConnections = 5, etc.) lets you clearly see, at a glance, what the current configuration is and how the options relate to each other, instead of having them scattered across the code nobody-knows-where.

You don't have to go all-out and create some separate monstrous configuration file nobody will understand. Just separate out hard-coded values in constant names at the top of each file, for a start.
Some commentary: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2015/06/moldbuggery.html
The first link there offers a theory of how nerd culture interacts (or tries to avoid interacting) with politics to produce things like libertarianism and neoreaction.
Do you work in the UK ? The term "coder" is pretty common in the mainstream press.

It helps to make it clear that a developer isn't as important as a business person or journalist.
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As this article from 2012 makes clear, the positive return on investment resulted from unusual rules in one state lottery game that has now been discontinued. The typical state lottery in most parts of the United States has parimutuel pay-outs for winning tickets, meaning that if multiple purchasers have winning numbers, they split the prize in a way that ensures that the lottery doesn't pay out more money than was bet for that drawing. An example from Britain was a national lottery that had something like seventy-six different winners, who all bet on the same "lucky" number that happened to be drawn in that drawing. They split the prize equally, so that each bettor's individual winnings from a large prize were not particularly large. The number may have been lucky in the sense that it matched the drawn number on that one occasion, but the number wasn't INDIVIDUALLY lucky for each person who bet it.

Over and over and over, some people have winning tickets, but most people have losing tickets. When a lottery is structured in the typical parimutuel way, as most lotteries are, even if you buy all the tickets available for sale in the next drawing, which takes a big investment, you can't be sure of winning a full prize individually, because other bettors may have a collision with your choice of a winning ticket number. tl;dr: A bug in one state lottery game was discovered by MIT students, who invested in exploiting the bug until the game was closed.
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Blackboards do seem better for math and whiteboards better for compsci, oddly
Haven't tested, but does SSF support handshake obfuscation? You know, some FW has very intelligent traffic pattern fuzzing capabilities.
The problem is that we allow for consent to a contract to be valid. There are people who cannot afford lawyers for all the contracts they sign going about their daily lives. When I go to the doctor, when I buy insurance, when I get a phone... I am in effect being forced to agree to contracts that I cannot understand (doctor is a medical need, insurance is mandated under penalty of law, cellphone is a want, but it is really close to a need if you are trying to do a lot of things like getting a job).

Either uninformed consent counts or courts need to start saying these contracts were not given informed consent.
Can confirm, had a nutball bipolar sergeant. On his bad days, he wanted to fight me and then try to bust me down for "disrespect of a superior non-commissioned officer." On his good days, he would whine about how no one respected him or liked him.

I got meritoriously promoted solely to get away from him. The master sergeant congratulated him for "mentoring" me to be such a good Marine. Motherfucker.

Thankfully, he's now EAS'd and in Alaska with the bears, where he belongs.
Every (non-local) bus I've ever been on (Greyhound, Megabus, BoltBus, smaller local companies, etc... I've been on a lot over the years) has had a bathroom.
And those of us who have lived under such a totalitarian state cower in fear both of the government and the idiots ignoring the warnings and thereby enabling the government's tyranny.
You can also already do Madrid - Paris by high speed train, in 6:25. Which is 1270km.

http://www.renfe.com/viajeros/larga_distancia/productos/AVEF... (spanish)
Not really, Block systems are just glorified key:value databases.

Here are a few scalable open source block/object storage systems:

Lustre

Ceph

tahoe-lafs

XtreemFS

These are all opensource.

For example, if I wanted a fast global-coherent CDN, then all I need are webservers and GPFS, with some glue code to allow auth'd uploads/deletes. geographically scalable, with tiered storage levels.

If you want to run on dodgy hardware, then use XtreemFS. but you'll pay a performance price.

I'd be interested in a comparison in developer language(as in graphs code examples etc.), with a github link or similar.
It only works in flying because you are getting up higher where the air is less dense.
One thing that bothers me a little with the pi-calculus, is that unlike some abstract maths or theoretical CS, many researchers sell their results with potential real-life application arguments. After several decades of the same papers studying very similar type systems and equivalence with no application, one can legitimately starts to wonder if this is worth the effort.
Student Loans are not like loans for tangible things (homes and cars). When you default on your student loan they don't take your diploma back. You keep your degree, the increased earning potential. You keep your experiences and education.

Student loans are a complex web of federal guarantees, but if basic capitalism works, by defaulting you are going to make it more expensive for the next students, who have to pay more to cover the defaulters. Some students won't be able to afford it with the added interest rates.

Seems his education helped him be successful. So why should he pay for it?

"Lee Siegel is the author of five books who is writing a memoir about money."
How to instantly motivate yourself-increase your results: power of challenge
The problem is the function calls to the poorly documented API and some weird redefinitions of commons words. My go to example is affirming an appeal, which actually means rejecting an appeal, even though in normal language affirm and reject are basically opposites.
I also would argue that the design of CPUs such that any sequence of bits could be loaded in any in any register and interpreted depending of the current context, instead of having typed registers is not a shortcoming but a fundamental feature. It makes code small and elegant.

Indeed, the fact that digital data is fundamentally "untyped" and its meaning depends entirely on interpretation is the entire reason why computers are so powerful and general-purpose.
It doesn't affect people directly, so people don't care. When Facebook started using people's faces on ads, people cared - it affected them. Now though, the NSA does sweeping data gathering, as do all the major internet companies - but they don't show you how they use it, so nobody feels like it's affecting them.
Changehub – Manage software releases like a pro
It was posted two years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5033235), but I think it's worth reminding.
The Minimum Viable Test Suite
Timelapse Mining SIGGRAPH 2015
Many of you have probably seen this, but I highly recommend the PBS Frontline documentary, United States of Secrets: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-sec...

Binney, along with the other NSA whistleblowers, are interviewed at length for the film.

That, and Citizenfour were, for me, the most intriguing documentaries about these issues.
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Another marketplace is https://flippa.com/buy-apps
How did you know that all they had was in the whitepaper?
> The benefit of proofs in code would only be worthwhile if it was relatively easy for common programmers to prove the absence of bugs that would have been more costly to find and fix using other methods, and that that ease would not come at the cost of other properties (such as performance).

I don't understand why proofs need to be universally easy to write/understand to be useful. Why can't they be useful for a subset of programmers on a subset of projects?

> So far I have a feeling that this is not being delivered. Your run-of-the-mill clever use of types usually prevents very "cheap" bugs, and hard bugs are even harder to prevent with types.

Types can be used to encode complicated invariants of software systems, which will be automatically be machine checked throughout the entire lifetime of your project. There is a vast gradient from simple properties like 'this value is a number' to 'your data migrations are guaranteed to be completely reversible without any information loss' to 'the sequential composition of a set procedures will terminate within 600 cycles'.

Types are not only for preventing bugs. They model invariants, help design and allow easy reasoning over large software projects.

> This example of a purely computational real-world bug shows some more limitations of the type-system approach to verification, I think.

No it doesn't. You just pick one example for which it didn't really work out for some reason. That tells you exactly zero about if type based verification could be useful in the general case. (Or a specific subset of verification cases)

> To summarize, type systems have shown their usefulness in reducing the cost of software development, but they need to be considered as a component in a larger verification space, and they need to strike a balance between usefulness and ease of use.

Of course they need to. Luckily that's what smart people are working on every day, making types easier to use.
I didn't downvote you, but here oneliners are discouraged and often downvoted. They are usually very difficult to understand without too much context. For example, I don't know who is Conor McBride ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conor_McBride )!

Try to expand the comment. Something like: "Conor McBride has a article that agree/disagree with this [link] because [two or three line explanation]."
They're not ignoring it, they just don't know what to do.
If you put the const declaration just before you use it and then you or someone else uses it somewhere else, you are going to have an even harder time finding it. If it needs a const, declare it at the top so I know where to look.
But then shouldn't the government not be able to sell lottery tickets for the same reason?
I really don't expect Rust to exhibit what most people mean by "increased productivity", ever. Most people mean something fairly local by that, or at most medium sized, that it allows them to take some task and write code faster than other languages that accomplishes the task. Rust is always going to labor under the disadvantage that it holds you to a higher degree of correctness than other languages, and at best it can tie with another language that doesn't hold you to those guarantees of correctness.

Where it'll increase productivity or not is at larger scales. If Servo comes out at production quality in some reasonable time (call it 2 years or less from now, given where they are), able to function on the general web most of the time, and it's also faster than current renderers by a significant margin, and with some small fraction of the development effort (probably even if you include the entire Rust development effort; do not underestimate the effort poured into the existing engines!), I will consider Rust's story proved. We've now had many people take cracks at writing renderers, in the fastest language of the time for the task (C++), and I daresay they've converged at fairly similar levels of performance with little reason to believe the renderers are going to get much faster. Said renderers have had massive optimizations applied to them, and this Servo that I'm expecting to be much faster will actually be version 1.0, basically.

If Rust is to work at all, there will very, very rapidly be a class of development that it will be actually insane to write in anything but Rust... but that will only be the very high-and-large end. (It will take many more years for this fact to penetrate through to the development community at large.)
Maybe the issue is drawing the line at "we can make it work, but at such cost & effort as not be worthwhile" in a way that makes drawing the line itself worth the time & effort in doing so. Squeezing the last bit of energy out of an alkaline battery ultimately costs more than that energy is worth, as is trying to explain to the gullible/uninterested why that is so.
If you're interested, wouldn't you be better off reading up on what Linda Liukas has to say on it? She has certainly giving it much more thought than I have.
After reading the specific example given, I do have to qualify that as an out of context quote. The surrounding paragraphs make it clear he isn't targeting any one race in particular with the genetics business, just that the master-slave relationship occurs frequently enough and in enough forms that it seems to be fundamental to our nature as a people. I have a hard time finding that objectionable.

You're heavily implying that one can find writing wherein Curtis explains that black South Africans need white rule, but all the writings I can find "easily" (via google) are about how the current government fails to be at least as good as the apartheid-era government, which is an unpalatable truth but hardly racist. Do you have some specific examples? I'm not finding it as easy to come up with damning examples as you indicated.

I will admit I've found quite a lot that can be easily twisted if you're being uncharitable but I'm assuming you're better than that.

Overall, I'm getting the feeling that Mr. Yarvin is a victim of the modern moral panic led by "right-thinking" folks, and as seems to happen far to frequently, the panic seems to be precipitated by strange misinterpretations instead of what was actually said.

Sure, he advocates for forms of government few people want. I'm not too onboard with that meaning he needs his technical work suppressed.
I meant most interviewers are forbidden from discussing it by company policy, even if it isn't forbidden by law. My state doesn't ban asking about political positions in interviews, but I know I'd be canned if I ever asked an interviewee about that.

Agreed on everything else.
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Do I have to learn how to meditate before I go? How can I learn?

Where do I find a place like this?

If I want to do this, what are my first steps?