skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's great, but what are you going to do about the larger problem of a declining local tax base?

Fewer Chicagoans, apparently, are employed in building network infrastructure and data centers than in things like video rental and so on, and the more people who are happy to use Netflix the more money flows out of Chicago's local economy. Meanwhile the cost of providing services within the city presumably remains about the same. I gather Chicago has massive unfunded pension obligations due to union lobbying and so forth, but for all practical purposes those are like any other unwanted financial obligation, they're not going away unless you can come up with a good reason why those secured creditors should give up the property interest they negotiated.

several hundred companies that are all going to have to implement this tax in their software if they want to sell locally

Well, this isn't very logical. First, there are 3 million people in Chicago which is a significant market, so it's very unlikely that any firm is going to suddenly refuse to do business with anyone in Cook County even though the administrative cost of said business is due to rise. Where a business is located is wholly irrelevant in this case because it's a consumption tax, so how is it going to kill any jobs in Chicago?

Also, why would you expect these companies to implement the tax in their software? That would be absurd. There are lots of software-as-a-service companies that take care of calculating sales taxes and suchlike so that other companies don't have to, just as there are companies that specialize in administering payroll or other business tasks so that firms can focus on their core competency. From a startup's point of view the additional administrative overhead is likely to be marginal.

We're going to kill this thing.

Oh stop. It's easy to stand up and say you're going to be against some unpopular measure, but that doesn't address the deeper problem. What is your better alternative solution? Forgive me for touching on national politics, but I'm reminded of the national Republican effort to kill Obamacare; I understand what your party dislikes about it, but after 50+ votes to repeal it and endless speechifying there's no results and no concrete alternative on the table. The repeal argument depends on a nostalgic argument that everything was working great before the unwanted policy came along, but the reality is that the previous systems were deeply unpopular and dysfunctional.

It's not that you shouldn't be against this proposal, I share your belief that casting around for new things to slap taxes on is a bad way to shore up public finances. But your arguments are shallow and being against things isn't a real economic program. What positive proposals do you have?
My first assumption was x,2x,2(2x) - then I tested 0,0,0 and got a NO which disproved my first assumption... the answer is obvious after.

Did anyone else test 0,0,0?
Yes, I remember the days of the giant Java reference book being shared among cubicle-mates.

The other thing to keep in mind is that much more of the code we relied upon back then was closed source. Anyone remember the bad old days of decompiling Weblogic to track down what was going on with some strange bug under the hood?
That was my first thought today. Faced with a programmer who had to look up how to determine array length, what would you conclude about their skills?

I seem to remember a Joel on Software post a while ago that said that deep and specific API knowledge was a must, and I remember disagreeing rather strongly with that too.

The last company I ran, we used a programming test in a language the candidates didn't know. It seemed to be a better predictor than the C++ test it replaced. Because it separated knowledge and understanding. I'd rather have people with deep understanding who can offload their knowledge retention burden, than trivia-gurus.
All I can say is that I've never regretted spending too much time looking for more information, on the web or otherwise, but I've frequently regretted not spending enough time after re-implementing someone else's mistakes for the past several hours/weeks/whatever. It's the lesson that keeps on giving.

[Not that I'd call myself an experienced programmer, but I'd say the same is true of scientific research and many other things.]
This was the best result I could find for demonstrating what the soviet smallpox weapons program was about. This outbreak showed that vaccination did not provide protection and the strain caused a very high rate of haemorrhage. When you have only 10 individuals infected you can't really estimate the large scale death rate.

The death rate for the strain they developed was estimated from animal studies - not even the soviets were bad enough to test this directly on humans.
I have a very limited understanding of how distributions work so this is probably a stupid question but why don't RHEL/CentOS update the Linux kernel they ship with their 6.x OS? Isn't the kernel supposed to never break user space apps?
Engineering MeetUp – July 30th – Minted
Happy July!

Minted is having a quarterly Engineering Meet Up on Thursday, July 30th. It will be hosted in the Minted San Francisco office, and Tim Worsley, our Distinguish Engineer, will be the guest speaker. There will be a 30-minute presentation, Q&A, and then its mingling time!

Please come by, we would love to meet you! Kindly RSVP using the link below:

http://www.meetup.com/Minted-Engineering-Meetup/events/223515355/

About Minted :
Minted is a design marketplace that connects you to the world’s best independent artists to create something one-of-a-kind. Minted’s unique crowdsourced model represents a modern marketplace – one where the community decides what goods are showcased and sold. This model ensures fresh, on-trend designs are continuously being added to Minted. Our community of independent artists and designers spans 48 states and 43 countries. Our art, stationery, and textiles products have reached over 40 million homes worldwide. Minted is funded by Benchmark Capital, IDG Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Technology Crossover Ventures, and Norwest Venture Partners, along with angels Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!, Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp, and Yishan Wong, former CEO of Reddit. We are headquartered in San Francisco, CA.
And yet, one has the right to alleviate their pain. It's their body. And sometimes things like aspirin are useful.

Yes, they say it doesn't suffice. It is a good start, but we need more. People are still hurting.

My thoughts on BIID are the same as for anything else: if

1. The major healthcare organizations believe that there isn't a better treatment for BIID, and

2. A person is shown to be mentally competent in every way except for having BIID, and

3. They want surgery to remove their foot, then

why should I deny them the right to modify their body as they see fit? It's their choice.

I have not heard that there is a good consensus on BIID. It is far more rare than being transgender, and far less well understood.

But consider anorexia - they fail the first criterion, because medical science does have better ways to treat anorexia than to let people starve themselves to death. Many people with anorexia with proper treatment get over it, and thank the people that helped them get over it. I would therefore make a rare exception and agree we should not let anorexia suffers starve themselves to death.

But that is simply not the case for transgender people, hence the medical establishment does support gender reassignment surgery, hormone therapy, etc.
I feel the same way. It worries me that it may come back to haunt me in an interview environment where the fact that you don't have something in RAM could make you look incompetent, when in fact it's just a conscious choice on where you are going to store your knowledge.
iTunes sucks..
I'm sure you find it "interesting". I'm not casting doubt - I'm saying let's not get carried away. Are you AGAINST seeing what data he actually has?
> User-agent: *
> Disallow: /reply
> Disallow: /fb/
> Disallow: /suggest
> Disallow: /flag
> Disallow: /mf
> Disallow: /eaf

Nothing blocking listings... OR PadMapper...
They don't update whole kernel, but they backport features and bug fixes from newer kernels to the ones they ship.
There was Compuserve dialup. Expensive and slow as molasses.
Sexuality isn't a choice, but coming out is.

Pride is important to show that people are proud of who they are and are glad they made that choice.
Craigslist doesn't prevent Google from crawling them. Not only that, Craigslist also sued at least one company for scraping Google results in order to index Craigslist postings.
I first heard this proposed in Oregon (implement GPS receivers so you can pay per-mile taxes (and be tracked!) so that we don't have to raise gas taxes!)

It has also come up in CA and (I believe) at the federal level, to offset increased efficiency gains.

It's absolutely maddening that politicians consider it to be EASIER to implement a whole new, complex, rube-goldberg-esque tax, rather than just nudge the rate on something that's already well-understood and implemented.
And for significant corporate crimes too. Often government employees don't get paid like corporate executives so I think it'd be unfair if they alone were held to a higher standard.
>if tomorrow the world decides to run on battery powered cars

There's no indication that will happen in the next 10 years. Certainly not quickly. Any shift away from gas will be gradual and give automakers plenty of time to react.
That would be a great use case. And really, not even for the illegal stuff either. Is this an M&M or advil? How much and what isomer of caffeine is in this drink? Is there shellfish in this? Is that poison ivy?

I mean, really simple stuff for anyone to get hurt with chemically, things like this can help with. Maybe not the full functionality like we see on star trek. But, I'm sure people with allergies, ravers with molly, moms that want to know what is safe for their babies, etc can all have something that can help mitigate risk in some small way.
GM's been on an "insourcing" drive since 2012: http://www.engineering.com/Blogs/tabid/3207/ArticleID/7469/G...
>Once they have every single person who breathes on the dole, this will give them unbelievable leverage against the people.

That may not be a bad thing if we're talking about people who contribute nil to society.

>If the government is giving everyone a check, how hard is it to argue that the check should be more? Not hard.

Not hard to argue, very hard to accomplish. Political change in many countries is slow and welfare recipients are rarely afforded much sympathy by the working and managing classes.

In any case, the real function of basic income is so much more than a moral institution (we've heard those reasons a million times and I won't touch on them here). The exciting thing is that it gets the useless and/or uncommitted to self-select out of the labor market. That means better productivity, higher quality services, a better work environment, lower labor supply and higher wages. They can continue contributing little-to-nothing, be provided a reasonable minimum by local standards, and leave the rest of us to accomplish what we want to in business, research, etc. That would be a HUGE weight off the backs of workers and companies, and I would gladly pay to keep people who can't be bothered out of work. Make no mistake, we're already carrying these people financially and professionally. Not having them gum up our operations would be well worth whatever instinctual annoyance their mooching causes.

That's the conclusion I've arrived at.
Ask HN: How can I prove I know how to write software with nothing on my GitHub?
I work so many hours with my current job, so I have no time to work on my personal projects. Money has been a struggle so I have been looking for a job. Employers ask to send them a link to my github account, but I don't have many public repositories and my current job has no open sourced software I can show. (I also signed an NDA)
RHEL focuses on stability over bleeding edge features. What this typically means is that you will have an older kernel / user land packages installed, then Redhat backports security patches into it's maintained ports. You can read about it here [1]. The end result is a fairly stable kernel and system OS. But, you have to live with an older feature set (think 2-3+ year old package with just security patches applied).

I've maintained lots of RHEL boxes as a sysadmin -- here's my take. This type of release cycle works pretty well, in that you can almost always apply patches without hosing your system due to "new features". One example of something this protects you against, is a package changing the expected config file format, or maybe the expected command line arguments. Another good example, would be a change to a kernel driver for some storage array, or network interface, that could quickly break lots of systems!

This type of release cycle also gives commercial software vendors a known target to develop against and sell support for. Say for example, that you are using an enterprise database like Oracle/Sybase/DB2, they will verify their product works against RHEL 5.x/6.x/7.x and give you commercial support, as they have a pretty good understanding of what you are running. But, if the kernel/packages are always moving targets, it would be near impossible to support your end platform, so this also adds to the backporting of security patches without adding features thought process.

Although, it is also a pain, in that you are typically way behind on cool things happening out there on other distros. So, there are pros and cons to it. But, if you are running a large mission critical DB cluster, you typically want things to be extremely stable, so for the target market (the enterprise) this works pretty well.

[1] https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/backporting
For an answer, see the broken windows fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
> I'm interested because people here were saying that AMA was going to be the only thing to save Reddit, and that Reddit would start selling AMA opportunities.

/r/IAMA was the only subreddit Reddit took seriously, to the point of giving it its own iOS app and tailored design. It's also believed that high-profile AMAs (like Obama's AMA) are the largest driver of traffic to the site. (I haven't checked the data, though.)

The firing of Victoria indicates either a) bad management who don't know what makes AMAs successful or b) Reddit has alternate plans to make AMA more marketable. The lack of notice is suspicious, though.

In the meantime, Alexis is making unfortunately snarky responses to the firing: https://www.reddit.com/user/kn0thing
A perfect example of bashing.
This is a ferociously regressive tax. How about something a bit more progressive?
Also he didn't know what numbers whose digits add up to 88 would do.
In fact, WebRTC's datachannel uses it
You can see a public version running on the Chromium source here [1], which is pretty nice. Notice that it understands symbols and so forth, which essentially involves building/compiling all the code. I think it is ahead of what you'll get elsewhere, at least for C++.

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#/
They aren't called gay pride anymore, just pride. Almost everyone is welcome.
I am not surprised. RHEL 6 is getting long in the tooth!
The kernel isn't just about user space apps though - it's about interaction with hardware. Updating the kernel can have large (or subtle) impacts on the performance and characteristics of hardware, which in a production environment can be dangerous, hard to track down, and impact your application anyway.
That's a slogan, not a solution. Purely at the local level, I like things like street lights, roads without holes in them, public parks, libraries, functioning emergency services and so on. So do a lot of people who live in cities, and they get upset when those services are cut. Now those things involve a cost, so the problem we have is how to minimize that cost and distribute it equably and efficiently. 'Starve the beast!' is no more of a viable plan than 'Eat the rich!'
I haven't seen a court case against any individual or business over "use tax", but I'm skeptical that rebranding an inter-state sales tax as a use tax suddenly makes it Constitutionally acceptable, given that it taxes the same thing. Nonetheless, neither of us are lawyers, and that question probably won't be settled unless someone actually takes it to a sufficiently high court.
It's not so much pride like in an accomplishment, but rather pride in contrast to the shame that society enforced.
Doesn't "publishing with a paywall journal you acknowledge that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal" contract with "it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige".

Your arguing that if I post it on a blog, it gets lost in a sea of other content. If I publish it, then I get validation.

If I understand correctly, you are saying that one of the fundamental reasons for publishers to exist is because they validate someone's work (citations, vetting, peer approval). Why does this have to happen at the expense of public access, if the research that goes through that vetting process is publicly funded?
Yeah, it kinda acts as a proxy for 'touching' something. OUr finger get a lot of info from the surface texture, resonances in the material, tensile strength, etc. that a computer just can't have yet. A good specm could help fill in a bit of that data set.
Having grown up with google, I still sometimes look at code (that I just got to work after an exhausting search on Stackoverflow) and think, "man, future generations of coders must figure out something more practical" and I'll probably get to tell them, "yep, that's how tedious it was" stories as well. What strikes me the most is how often code repeats, how often mistakes repeat. You can google a quite specific problem and more or less always find a result, likely a Stackoverflow article with tens of thousands of views. While it's great that we now have a collective knowledge tool to fight this, it also illustrates how much programming is still running in circles. We take pride in expertise and skill, but how much of this is memorizing workarounds and exotic quirks that shouldn't even be necessary?

What will be the next google? The next Stackoverflow? I doubt it will literally just be a better version of either. It will probably be better IDEs and debuggers. Heck, I doubt we'll continue to type as much as we do...
To be fair, `ag shotgun` would take less than a minute to run and skim the output of. If nothing obvious turns up, you try other things.
I didn't mention harm. Like many ingroup/outgroup terms, it can be used to strengthen group membership and it can be used to raise a barrier between insiders and outsiders.

For example, last fall I had a conversation about the term "to architect", a http://www.neatorama.com/2014/09/06/The-20-Most-Controversia... . It's from this conversation that I learned to think about terms as also having an ingroup/outgroup meaning.

The discussion concerned the idea that (building) architects don't say "We architected this" but rather "We designed this". Quoting from http://www.archdaily.com/451372/for-architects-only-how-kany... :

> When Kanye West spoke with students at my alma mater on Sunday evening, he said “I really do believe that the world can be saved through design, and everything needs to actually be ‘architected.’” In the social media frenzy that followed, a recurring response that I saw on architecture-centric sites was to snicker at West’s use of the word “architect” as a verb. For many, this was symbolic of West’s ignorance and hubris as he presumed to talk about something without knowing anything.

As that article points out, as well as the pointers I gave in my own side of the conversation, architects do say "to architect", and have done for many decades.

We of course have many terms that make it possible to distinguish between a good programmer and a non-programmer. A short list includes "closure", "garbage collection", and "mock object". These are specialist terms that convey a meaning not captured by standard English terms. While barriers to the field, they are essential barriers because the underlying concepts are meaningful.

But "grok", while it is supposed to have a meaning somehow different or deeper than "fully understand", is not actually used that way and is not an essential specialist term for the field.

This makes grok (and other words like 'frob') a meaningless barrier to entry. As I mostly work to get non-programmers (in my case, chemists) to do more programming, this makes it a barrier I dislike.
> The exciting thing is that it gets the useless and/or uncommitted to self-select out of the labor market. That means better productivity, higher quality services, a better work environment, lower labor supply and higher wages.

you're going to have to explain this logical leap as it is non intuitive and I don't see any sources on your comment.
Compuserve was great for its time. It allowed you to connect to other developers. I have never been more active on forums then I was on the compuserve forums. It WAS the place for developers.
"NASA has recently demonstrated an X-Ray data modulator [3], although at less than 1 Mbps. Further engineering may close this gap."
It's quite well established that if you don't pay sales tax at the time of sale (e.g. via mail order/on-line) you are required to submit a use tax voluntarily by self-reporting.

Of course pretty much no one does this. There are exceptions such as some states aggressively going after taxes on the sales of cars you buy across the state line/etc - but in general it's wink wink nudge nudge.

If you're in a state with sales tax, and have ordered from an out of state retailer you are breaking the law if you don't pay use tax on that item.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_tax
Wow, this takes me back. I remember getting in trouble at school as a kid for using this to attach executable code to e-mails and bypass all the warnings and filters. That must've been, ooh, about a decade and a half ago now. I'm shocked it still works in our modern security-aware age.
I think I know what you mean. I guess it's quite comparable to people who are proud of being born in their contries.

In my opinion, pride is kind of the wrong word for that. I think what is often called pride is actually the will to (publicly) stand by who they are. With the parades they can express that. Maybe it's a "we know you hate us for being different, but we are many, so it's quite normal to be gay" thing.

I think, though, that they can be proud of themselves when they publicly stand by their sexual orientation in a world full homophobics.
>Typically local taxes only affect those who have a physical presence in that jurisdiction

You are only partially right there. The local presence requirement is for the obligation to collect the tax. If your company doesn't have a local presence, your customers are still required to pay the tax themselves. Very few tax payers actually follow that rule which is why local municipalities are so adamant about the taxes being collected by the business.

The Netflix side of this tax is technically on consumers so Netflix has no real legal obligation to include it on their bills. So it seems to follow the same rules of any other local tax.
The right way to do that would be with FTIR or Raman spectroscopy, and this sensor is capable of neither.

At best, this is an ersatz replacement for the tunable filter on a hyperspectral imaging system. There are some advantages (off hand, acquisition rate is a big one) to a more diverse mosaic filter, but other than in using QDs as the actual filter medium, this idea is not at all new.