skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The README brings up a cultural reference I didn't understand. It says "Many people have received jobs from the big 4 after becoming a Rockstar"

I hadn't heard of "big 4" before. I thought it might refer to tech companies, like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. but couldn't figure out which 4. http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-sanity-check/schmidt-c... says "Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook", are the big 4 category of 'platform companies' while http://battellemedia.com/archives/2011/12/the-internet-big-f... uses the phrase the big 5, which also includes Microsoft. Then again, the speaker in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJZCUhxNCv8 comments about working at the "Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft - sometimes called the Big 4".

This suggests that the "big 4" is more a concept then an actual definition.

On the other hand, further search gives another possibility. The big 4 can refer to the audit firms of Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_%28audit_firms%29 ). It was "Big Eight", then "Big Six" and "Big Five", before ending up with 4. At http://www.narrowingthegaap.com/recruiting/how-to-get-hired-... you see "How To Get Hired By the Big 4: The Hiring Process (Part 1)" which starts "The Big 4 hire only the best and the brightest. This is only a partial truth at best. I know this because I have met some really dumb people working for the Big 4. So no, to get hired by a Big 4 you don’t need to have a 4.0 GPA with a double major in ..".

So does the github project mean the audit companies, or the tech companies? I think the tech companies are more likely to offer $200K jobs for programmers, but have little knowledge of the audit world.

I'll also hypothesize that the term "big 4" came from the audit world and was reused in the tech world by analogy.
I used to like Windows a lot, but these days it only annoys me. Which is interesting, because every few years I'd try to work on a Linux desktop and give up in frustration. With Ubuntu 14.04 and Mint, I'm having a great experience with very little annoyances.

On Windows, I don't like:

* How the Windows key lost its ability for instantaneous search. I used to type Windows, a couple letters, and ENTER to launch a program. Now it takes many seconds for the first letter that I type to show up (on a 4th gen i7 with 8GB).

* Most file extensions got assigned to the obnoxious, brain-dead nee-Metro apps and, to add insult to injury, it's a pain to close them. Having to reassign those extensions to regular desktop (aka "Windows") apps is an example of the annoyances that Windows now imposes on users.

* In general it feels like 2 different OSs fighting each other. Despite what Julie Larson-Green promised, I didn't "get used" to it, I just put up with it when I have to, and mostly avoid it.

* How, despite being careful and having Windows Defender, it's almost inevitable to end up with some spyware/adware which is very hard to get rid of.

* That Windows pretends to boot up very quickly by showing the desktop, then starts to load a lot of services (the "real" bootstrap) and stays unusable for up to a minute. In contrast, Mint's GUI becomes fully responsive in less time than it takes Windows to show the login screen.

* The command-line app (I mean the GUI itself) is terrible and I don't think it has changed in 20 years. Yes, I know of the alternatives. None feels as good as what comes with Mint by default, and having to install them on each system I use is another nuisance.

* So many upgrades that require a system restart. No to mention the ones with serious bugs that enter an install-rollback loop that takes hours each time (like the awful KB 2919355).

In short, I've developed a negative Pavlovian conditioning to Windows.
Maybe, I think change is a very abstract entity to apply properties to though. No I haven't seen it before.
Roosh V and Dr. Oz on Fat Shaming
This is one topic I have not been able to find many writings about. So, I wrote one.
Android App Spiky Tower
LittleIpsum – 2.0.4 Update
Both are reasons to keep salaries secret. The information advantage helps in negotiations with employees. Also, the secrecy prevents anger over comparisons. It seems unneccessary to me. Why not just pay people the same for each position, with merit bonuses for those who exceed/excel.
The BBC Micro had a port for a light pen.

There was a small rubber sucker attachment that you could stick to a TV screen, with the light pen attached. The BBC (tv station) had a programme (probably MicroLive) that would overlay a flashing block on a small section of the screen. The light pen would read that flashing and you'd have a small program.

Here's someone talking about it:

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2014/02/18/ian_mcnau...

The BBC (and Sinclair, and possibly Amstrad) did a lot to make computing accessible.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15969065
I get the feeling a lot of developers have only ever written one or two very specific kinds of software and think that their experiences generalise to all kinds.

Threading with locks isn't going to go away any time soon no matter how religiously one states their opposition to it. Take the case of mobile or indeed desktop app programming:

• Memory usage is important

• Real-time responsiveness is important

• Avoiding slow operations on the main thread is important

Some consequences of these constraints is that if you have a simple actor like design with a GUI thread (frontend) and a backend thread (network, other expensive operations) you can easily write crappy software. If the GUI needs a bit of data and needs it fast because the user just navigated to a new screen, sending a message to the backend actor and waiting whilst it finishes off whatever task it's doing isn't going to cut it. You need fine grained access to a subset of the data being managed by the backend, and you need it now, without yielding to some other thread that might not get scheduled quickly. And you need to avoid delays due to duplicating a large object graph then garbage collecting that immutable copy or (worse) running out of RAM and having your app be killed by the OS.

In some kinds of web server I've worked on, you're serving a large mostly-but-not-quite immutable data store. That data set must be held in RAM and you cannot have one copy for each thread because that'd not fit into the servers you use. And the data set must be hot-updateable whilst the server is running. You cannot just code around these requirements, they're fundamental to the product.

You can sometimes accept doubling your memory usage so the serving copy can be immutable whilst a new copy is created and updated. but sometimes that just makes you more expensive than your competitors.

There are lots of types of programming where for performance, cost or other reasons, you simply cannot say "shared state is hard so we will never do it". You just have to bite the bullet and do it.
That has been a long running joke on Amazon. Some of the reviews are hilarious.
Couldn't all of this be solved by having the numbers open but only internal to the company?
Easy peasy vector icons with CSS and sprinkles of SVG
There's a difference between noisy and biased. As long as the data is only noisy (that is, it has some random variations) I totally agree with you that it's fine to use, and that the results should be robust. However, if there is some sort of bias that only applies to a particular subset of the samples, all bets are off.

Just as a totally imaginary example, what if men with higher incomes are more likely to share their salary information than men with lower incomes, while at the same time the situation is reversed for women.
So now you will end up with more reports of high income from men and more reports of low income from women, even if their pay distributions are exactly the same.

I am of course not saying that this is happening here, but these kinds of things would indeed completely invalidate the results.
I can't really identify a common problem. Things I've seen include:

* After a complete, planned shutdown, neither server is happy to start until it sees the other one online. In the end, neither ends up booting.
* A failover occurs, at which point you find out the hard way there is state being stored in a non-replicate file. I've seen this with several different Asterisk HA solutions in particular.
* A failover occurs, and non-database aware storage snapshots leave the redundant server with a non-mountable mirror of the database.
Please visit this web www.mydeposit241.com use this number is you want to charge your life 475336051
Thanks good luck
Interestingly many people (including Gödel) have made logically sound proofs that a particular God with a particular set of attributes do exist. But the way they end up defining the god usually don't fit any religion's god.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument#Kurt_G.C3...
Why are you linking to an OCR of a scan? Link to the main page, where multiple formats are on offer:

https://archive.org/details/jstor-27899007

The main page even has a rather nice viewer to view the document in your browser.
Property based tests, contracts with Ruby
Ivy League Dropouts Are Building the Linkedin for Youth
You only have to rewrite headers if your mailing list is actually modifying the mails i.e. doing a MITM attack on the mail flow. Some mailing list admins feel very strongly about footers, subject line tags etc and then claim they "must" rewrite the From header, but I am not sure it's technically required.
> Many people have received jobs from the big 4 after becoming a Rockstar, using Rockstar

Hilarious.
This podcast on distributed scrum, suggests some ways to "push the curve to the right".

http://www.se-radio.net/2011/12/episode-181-distributed-scru...
If you're going to insert/remove a USB device several times a day, a 6" extender cable will keep your motherboard jack from going defective. Less than a dollar apiece, too.

There are cheap extender cables for PS/2, audio, VGA, DVI, HDMI; I don't usually recommend them for RJ45 because you can compromise signal quality on gigabit connections, but unmanaged 5 port switches are cheap enough.

One rule of thumb: if the cost of the labor in replacing a component is half or more the cost of the component, see if you can insulate yourself from replacing that component. When pulling cables through buildings, the labor cost far outweighs the cable cost, so pull many spares at the same time.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, as nobody has replied to explain their reasons for doing so, but the idea seems reasonable to me in this context.

I could see taking it a step further: instead of a Gaia theory, by which I assume you mean that the Earth is a sentient system, why not have all things that are causally connected be part of a universal consciousnesses? At what distance apart in space or time or both do we reject that individual components of a complex system could possibly combine to be conscious? Also, do all components need to be of the same type (individual human beings, in the United States example)? Can not other mammals and birds and fish and insects and forests and fields contribute?

The example in the article is a nation state, but is there any reason for rejecting a larger system? If the United States is conscious, does an American who goes to live abroad cease to be a bit of United-States-consciousness and become, for example, a bit of France-consciousness? What of astronauts, or those who will inevitably live on Mars someday?

Is the number of bits of nation-state-consciousness significant? Would China be "more conscious" by virtue of having four times the population? Is Canada only dimly conscious, having only a ninth of the population?

Finally, it seems strange to me that we'd use geographical borders to delineate separate nation-state-consciousnesses in an age when individuals so routinely communicate and travel outside of them. Nation states don't exist in vacuums, but interact and cooperate in many ways that affect each other mutually, for both good and bad. Perhaps all the people who speak a given language could be a conscious entity, regardless of where they live.

This is all fun to think about, but I lean towards the so-called neurochauvanism mentioned in the article and have a difficult time wrapping my head around the concept that something outside of brains could be conscious.
> theGuyWhoCreatedSwift.png

Laughed at this one.
Unit 8200: Israel’s cyber spy agency
Hehe. I recognised your username from /r/india. Got a laugh out of this :)
This happens because of DMARC. It does actually make sense, in a way.

DMARC allows a domain to say "email that claims to come from my domain must be signed by me. If it doesn't, burn it with fire, no exceptions". So Gmail is only following the instructions laid out by the sending domain.

This is helping to make the email ecosystem a lot more robust by ending the problem of From forging. Ordinary users rarely realise that the From header is otherwise meaningless so phishing them can be very easy.

However it does not play well with mailman's default settings, and a lot of mailing list admins refuse to help the email ecosystem become more secure (whilst often PGP signing their own mails, doh). So DMARC creates a lot of noise in the technical community from people who have to/want to use mailman based lists.
Literal much?

Brilliant mansplaining though!
Intereting! Searching for that I found this:

Modern Programming Languages: Fortran90/95/2003/2008

https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/documents/13601/162125/fortran_c...
Ask HN: Can the IPO Process Be Disrupted?
I've read that the IPO process can cost anywhere from $1-3 million, with recurring costs >$1 million annually. From what I understand, the key aspects of an IPO are 1) putting together the infrastructure to properly report on your company, and 2) marketing your company to public investors.

The first part would be the larger cost, with the reporting generally consisting of financial results, key business risks, executive compensation plans, and external auditor results. It seems like much of this reporting can be managed by a common software platform, and selling (either via internal auditors or setting up a marketplace) external auditing services could help reduce the cost of the software even further.

It seems like the marketing side of the equation could be more efficient as well. Right now, hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent going on flashy (read: inefficient and wasteful) roadshows to promote an asset that, shortly after IPO, will be electronically traded in massive volumes by automated computer algorithms, with little to no consideration of what is said in the 150 page S-1. There is already a decent sized industry focused on marketing/promoting private companies to VCs (e.g., Mattermark, Crunchbase), but all of this marketing needs to be re-purposed to satisfy institutional investor demands.

I realize institutional investors are a bit of a different animal, but is there really no other way around these costs?
That sounds like a bug on Google's end.
I've never heard anyone...

You'd be surprised at how petty some (otherwise very intelligent) people can be.

At a former job, the company paid to send some of team A to a conference for platform B ($1100 / head), while some from team C were sent to conference D ($500 / head). When one member from team C found out about the price difference between the two conferences, he started bellyaching and said the company owed him another $600.
And there are many people who are extremely good, but too shy to negotiate a higher wage. And there are people who are mediocre, who are good at making deals and get the higher pay.
Cute “Polar Bear” cub loves his veggies
I've always been incredibly confused as to why everyone clamours over Elon Musk's presentations. IMO, he's actually pretty terrible at presenting.

But he delivers great products in a very straightforward kind of way, and he seems to have such a forward-thinking ambition. That's why people idolise him so much.
Yes, indeed, it's all about defining the attributes. It seems to me that the gods believed in by proponents of extant religions were "created by committee" and don't have completely coherent, logically-consistent, non-contradictory properties.
But it means you also earn the same regardless of competence, creativity, or general usefulness as an employee.

There is probably no strong correlation between creativity/competence and the skills to negotiate a salary. There is probably a strong correlation between salary and gender, extrovertness, etc. and some correlation between years of experience and competence (within a particular scale). So, yes, it is inherently (more) fair.
Well the problem is obvious in mobile devices, but any asymmetric netsplit will result in a single node taking down your cluster for as long as the netsplit lasts.
The Latest on Virginia Tech, from Wikipedia
Instead of retaliating directly, here is what they do:

1. Create an alternate project

2. Move trouble makers to the alternate project

3. Cancel the project

I've seen this happen on more than one occasion.
All actions 2004 – January 31 2015

Total Obama strikes: 362
Total US strikes since 2004: 413
Total reported killed: 2,438-3,942
Civilians reported killed: 416-959
Children reported killed: 168-204

Only 168 children out of 3,942 that's 4% of killed children. If you accept this statistic as reasonable casualties then in my book you're a murderer.
A case for unstructured programming
That's fascinating.
But then also makes you wonder why they have gone to such extents to extinguish any radio signals in the vicinity of the project
What he's getting at is probably along these lines:

I define the "God" I'm looking for as an invisible green humanoid. Because something cannot be invisible and green at the same time, this "God" cannot exist.

It's naturally much harder to do this with Gods that correspond to particular religions, but from time to time it is possible. E.g. a jealous God that will destroy civilization if we don't offer it human sacrifices has not done this, so it can't exist.
> I was expecting unique code for each commit! :)

Good idea! I will implement this. As of now it makes commits with a random string (uuid.uuid1) and only final commit contains the Hello World in C++.
The real shocker is that Linus Torvalds uses gmail, where you have no control over anything regarding your account (exhibit A: look an awesome new spam filter which you can't turn off!). I would never have thought he'd do that.
> Sigh. What's wrong with using lock-free data structures?

They don't compose.

You can't use them to, for example, implement a bank account system where you need to atomically remove from one account and add to another, unless there is special support for that in the implementation - and there can't be special support for everything built in.
The evolution of the SaaS landing page
The fact is, even for technical people, approximations and hand waving are great as starting points. They set expectations.

Good approximations do this. If you say a proposed wind farm is going to produce enough energy to power 100,000 homes that means something even if I don't know how much energy the average home uses you can still think ~small city worth of power. You can also say electric bill is ~100$ / month so that's 120million / year worth of electricity even if your units are off it's going to be in the right ballpark.

However, if you say it's enough to power 1,000,000 light bulbs that's both ambiguous and not really useful. Because you both wonder if it's 60w or 100w, is that 24/7 or a few hours a day, and you probably don't really know how many light bulbs are in your house or how much energy they use. (TV's and other devices are even more ambiguous.) So, you can't get how much energy that is directly or indirectly.

PS: I still want hard numbers, somewhere even if there not a major part of the presentation.
Similar thing happened to me. Calvin Harris and Armin Van Buuren happen to come up on the office SONOS. And then Shazam thinks it's prudent to notify me that they've both joined as part of their new feature.

But ultimately, Shazam works on treating the individual fingerprints of songs then running transformations. So even if it was possible on iOS, which it isn't', they wouldn't be storing individual voices etc.
Interestingly, the one branch of philosophy (ethics) that actually has real world applications from time to time also tends to be the most specific in terminology.
From my experience, the defining parameter is now the timezone difference (or, working hours kept), rather than distance.
You can determine if those attributes are consistent with each other. Also, if they have observable properties, you have an angle of attack - whether to prove or disprove (or rather, to ascertain likelihood of) the existence of a being with such attributes.
Doesn't seem as concise as an ML is one of my factors in "nice".

Sorry, but that disqualifies most programming languages out there. It's not as concise as ML, but it's far more so than your average ALGOL dialect.

(Also, ML isn't as concise as Scheme.)

And BEAM reeks of instability.

[citation needed]

Furthermore the resulting apps seem to bear no relation to Erlang's robustness. Look at RabbitMQ. Lots of stability problems... So what's Erlang saving us from?

A sample size of 1, particularly one that's already known to be an infamous exception (RabbitMQ), isn't helping your case.
When America Accidentally Nuked Greenland
The following Planet Money story is worth listening to; there are some real challenges and downsides with making all salaries public.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/07/02/327289264/episo...
Tracking started with single site tracking and worked well with a simple cookie. There was no overhead and no bloat like heatmaps and 5-level nested scripts that display an invisible pixel. It was not evil except that users did not know that they were tracked.

Then the evil started with multi-site tracking. Trickery was required to implement cross-site tracking and the advertisers became too obsessed with 'knowing the user' that they overdid it. I would like to see proof that today's excessive tracking really pays off with higher click rates.

A lot of trickery uses javascript and there are only a few users who disable javascript since almost all sites uses it and sites get (seriously) crippled if javascript is disabled. I therefore am waiting for a browser vendor who recognises this problem and comes with a 'Javascript light' where only a small subset of javascript -- just enough to build great responsive websites -- is supported. Javascript light will not allow to generate heatmaps, invisible pixels and upload system information.
Surely you will say 'web programmers need system information' but this can be provided in a different way, i.e. browsers can send a header with the information that they want to give.

Another evil are the social networks since they have their 'like' button on almost every website that you visit and hence know exactly what a user does 24 hours per day. Just like the 'do not track me' feature, the web needs a new 'no like buttons for me' feature.
In all my decades of working, I always thought my employer would fire me if he knew I was discussing my pay with others. I know I was told that could happen more than once in my early years so I don't know why Google would be any different and I perfectly understand why such discussions should not take place.