skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What developments in technology have caught you by surprise in the last couple of years? Follow-ups: What is happening faster than you expected? What did you expect to be important/successful by now but it isn't?

Data is getting less and less expensive to collect, but in our company's domain what is still unmeasured? What should we be measuring and why?

If you were me, at this point in time and technology what would you be studying in your spare time to prepare to create really high value 2 or 3 years from now?

Thinking of very narrow slices of technology landscape, where can I most profitably invest 100 hours of study time. [This is a smaller version of the previous question]
My wife went through this process years ago while we were in the midwest.

A couple of years ago, I wanted to look into getting a machine, and we had (and still have) Kaiser Permanente, in Northern California.

The first appointment was to pickup a take-home testing machine. It was just a 'come get it' process. I took it home, followed the instructions, and slept with it. It had a variety of connections to me, so it wasn't easy to sleep.
The next day, I took that machine back. The day after that, they invited me to another appointment.

In that appointment, there were about 50 people. We each sat at an assigned place at a table, with our new CPAP machine in front of us. They talked us through it, and invited us to come up and talk to one of two of three doctors, one at a time, at the end.

Overall, it took maybe a week and cost maybe a hundred bucks.

Health care is getting better in some areas, at least!
I thought about downvoting you. The comment was brief and offered no insight or context into what you were thinking or saying.

If you would have started out with the variant at the bottom, I never would have thought about downvoting you.
The moon is falling into the sun, just like the earth.
Does this change anything? If I don't have $20,000 90 days after I quit, why do you think I'll have $20,000 7 years later?
Author can put a hash of their creation on blockchain before publishing.
It appears their strategy is now "embrace everything".
This is what Android looks like in 2015
Sorry for the totally n00b question, but does this enable running iOS apps on Windows or the opposite?
While at Harvard Law School, Barrack Obama argued that economic status is better indicator of crime than race (can't find the cite, as there is more written about Obama than by him, at HLS).

If using an Artificial Neural Network, would this mean that race should be downstream from economic status? Maybe race should be a hidden layer? What should be the input nodes? Is there a way to automatically create input nodes?

Perhaps finding the better inputs could lead to proactive measures? For example, let's say there several inputs are: adolescence, public schools, evenings, and free time. That might lead to keeping schools open late for extracurricular activities.
Would someone in tune with the fiscally conservative mindset be willing to offer an explanation for the apparent fascination with cutting taxes and downsizing government? Specifically, what are the proposed benefits for the average citizen?
> In short, your ability to maintain proper social skills and develop a sense of empathy is largely dependent on the physical affection, eye contact, and playtime of those early years. Even something as simple as observing facial expressions and understanding what those expressions mean is tied to your wellbeing as a toddler.

Crap, is that true? Anyone knows other studies confirming this?
Yes. I use both ublock origin and privacy badger and for the majority of sites both plugins detect and block stuff.
I've been using this plugin since it's beta days and it's an excellent approach to privacy issues online and 3rd party entities.
Nobody in their right mind would exercise 7-9 years later if they weren't exercising in order to sell, making more than the AMT they would be paying in the process.
Sri Lanka Signs Agreement with Google to Launch Project Loon
Most importantly, the ability to develop iOS applications on a Windows box.
From the wired article:

But they also found that the car’s infotainment system was using an out-of-date browser, which contained a four-year-old Apple WebKit vulnerability that could potentially let an attacker conduct a fully remote hack to start the car or cut the motor. Theoretically, an attacker could make a malicious web page, and if someone in a Tesla car visited the site, could gain access to the infotainment system. “From that point, you’d be able to use a privilege escalation vulnerability to gain additional access and do the other stuff that we described,” Rogers says.
You'll be able to run Objective-C based applications on Windows as long as they have the completed APIs for the bridge (the documentation shows a list of things not there yet). It's pretty neat! You won't be able to download an application directly off your iPhone and run it on Windows though (at least I don't think you'll be able to at any point) as you basically have to recompile using this tool.
That was a great read. Thanks for a new blog to put on my RSS feed
An oddly written story. Claims significant money invested in these companies ("$1 billion since the start of 2014") and proceeds to name only two -- Flexport and Freightos. The latter of which doesn't seem to fit the central disruption-of-established-industry theme because they sell software to the incumbents.
In the late '90s, NeXT/Apple actually had a Cocoa runtime for Windows. It was called Yellow Box (but only shipped as part of Enterprise WebObjects, IIRC). It was closed source, of course, and 3rd parties couldn't ship apps using it.

In this bizarro world we live in, Microsoft has rebuilt essentially the exact same thing and has released it as MIT-licensed open source.
More money in your pocket because your taxes are lower. It generally goes along with not seeing anything in your life that is a benefit from government.
I try and read/comment on all of the OCaml articles that surface here. I've been learning the language for a few months now and I'm having a blast! I'm hoping we can carve out a niche in the infrastructure space for OCaml. It's a really approachable language for the ML family! I hope it grows.

Here's a couple of books I'm enjoying so far:

Think OCaml/How To Thinke Like A (Functional) Programmer - http://greenteapress.com/thinkocaml/thinkocaml.pdf (same author as all the other awesome Think X books!)

Unix Systems Programming in OCaml - http://ocaml.github.io/ocamlunix/

People also say really great things about Real World OCaml but I haven't had a chance to go through it yet.
They aren't artists they are businesses. They are using technology to resell their original creation.

They are selling a product not a piece of art and so of course they are going to be affected by the same technology as it renders that product a commodity more and more. Just as the truck drivers lost their jobs when the CDs didn't need to be transported back and forth anymore so will the artist loose the ability to re-sell what is fundamentally a commodity.
We are reading! This is a great question. We currently don't prove anything about liveness. We'd love to work on this.

As you probably know, Raft and other consensus algorithms are not guaranteed to be live in all situations. But subject to some assumptions about the frequency of failure, they are guaranteed to make progress.

In Verdi, systems are verified with respect to semantics for the network they are running on. Our semantics currently don't include any restrictions about how often failures can happen; a failure "step" can occur at any time. We're not sure what the best way is to introduce this kind of restriction, but we've got a couple ideas. One would be to guarantee that the total number of failures has some finite bound which is unknown to the system itself but which is available during verification. Another would be to model failure probabilistically. We will probably end up doing at least one of these things in the next year or so :).
I think using machine learning for this purpose is equivalent to using stereotypes or intuition to make such decisions.

The reason people don't want to use stereotypes is that we might end up in a positive feedback loop when stereotyped people get arrested for the things they were expected to do, not because stereotypes aren't effective.

If it is illegal to do stop and frisk, we should not be doing machine learning where features come from intuition in the first place.
Privacy Badger inspects the target domain and then pulls out requests to 3rd party domains. If you go to cnn.com and it makes additional request from your browser for resources at say facebook.com. Those 3rd party requests can be allowed, block cookies from the 3rd party or blocked entirely (so the request is not made). The really nice bit, is if Privacy Badger see's requests to the same 3rd party across multiple places, it'll filter it down automatically.
It would be likely for drivers pay to be cut in half, if Uber had to pay them as employees (just based on comparable differences between paying contractors and employees in other fields). Their taxes would also go up since they could no longer deduct the cost of their car and other expenses from their income.

Even if you pared Uber's take back to 10%, or 0%, it wouldn't cover the costs of making them employees. And it's the drivers that would take the hit.

Uber provides a tremendous lead-gen service for drivers. Everyone here who's tried to run a business knows that finding customers is the central challenge of a business. Uber completely handles that challenge for drivers, for a risk-free 20%. That's a pretty good deal.
How could I have forgotten this! Definitely go to the testing museum, it's about 1 block from the strip and is super cool.
Makes it easier to port an iOS app to Windows.
I read that the data in the stolen OPM records also contains polygraph data.

I wonder that if, say the US would decide to retaliate and steal similar data from China, they would find records with I-Ching readings? :-)
Well presumably you'd exercise at some kind of liquidity event so you can borrow the money for a short period of time. Lots of people will lend you $20k if more than that is coming back soon. Of course if they haven't excited in 7 years then you still have the problem but at least then you'll have a clearer idea of whether the company is going to be valuable and if it's worth excising.
StackHut – run your code as a microservice
Ok, from someone who has had sleep apnea for 5 years.

Screw steps 5-7.

Get your prescription and go to cpap.com (or another place) and buy an Auto CPAP (APAP) using your prescription. Use cpaptalk.com to get more answers and help with picking out a machine and other stuff.

Then you can "calibrate" it yourself. APAPs let you specify a range of pressures. Use the pressure you should have been told from the sleep study to pick a range around that pressure and just use that for a week. Look at the information yourself which any good machine lets you do so on your own.

The machine will show you how much time was spent at various pressure levels so if its hanging low or high in the range adjust the range to fit that value in the middle.

Rinse and repeat, its easy if a bit time consuming. Just don't look at the data after 1 night and make decisions.

And Auto CPAPs are generally FAR better than regular CPAPs. You can try to get one covered by insurance but that depends on the equipment providers and insurance company.
Funny quirk of the English language--had I written instead "How would one know?", I think it would have avoided the ambiguity that ruffled feathers.
A KurzweilAI thread about this, with some discussion:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/sri-lanka-to-be-first-country-in-t...
That's a nonsensically trivial analysis:

1) The features provided by Tesla extend far beyond those provided by "cloud-enablement"; the fact that "informed consumers" are buying the cars does not indicate that their purchasing decision came down to isolating cloud-enablement relative to cloud-features.

2) Your hypothetical informed consumers don't really exist, unless the only people buying cloud-enabled cars are computer scientists.
I think the title isn't overstated but awkward in a way that we're all translating it into an overstatement.

Between the quotes and not knowing what a language universal was I assumed they meant a universal language, apparently I'm not alone in this. The authors might write paper on this phenomenon next!
Show HN: I'm building a laboratory information management system
Tesla's snake-like charger can automatically plug itself into the Model S
Deep monitoring for Mesos clusters
Note: we built a rideshare matching system so this is from my experience

single person with 1 car has no network effect. 1+ passengers does. See my post above.
The dialogue was intended to be illustrative rather than informative. Health insurance companies, in general, absolutely will not reimburse for preventative measures, even if they are known to be effective. Every check has to have a diagnosis code attached to it.

They will, however, give you some cash or premium discounts if you enroll in their health nagging/spying program. You self-report a sackfull of valuable risk factor information, and they, in turn, frequently call you and read from a script at you. There is no material support or genuine incentive for positive lifestyle change.

As regular walking has such great, demonstrable health benefits, you would think that a health insurance company might do something like send you a free new pair of walking shoes if you send them your old pair, with the soles worn out from walking.

I can't exactly agree with the part about being enjoyable, relaxing, and mentally stimulating, though. That's largely dependent on your route and companions. Someone walking through a sprawl of suburban McMansions with an unrelenting babbler is not going to keep at it as easily as someone who can enjoy a hiking trail at a scenic park with someone who knows how to just shut up and enjoy nature in companionable silence. (~Any resemblance to actual walking experiences is purely coincidental.~)

The number one reason I have for keeping exercise equipment in my home is because I think you shouldn't have to get in a car and drive somewhere in order to have a positive exercising experience, and walking around my neighborhood is not one.
Some precedent here: Microsoft famously lost a lawsuit regarding contractors vs full-timers in Washington state. You simply can't treat contractors like employees in the state of Washington - you have to make a very clear distinction.

Now, 20 days ago, Homejoy closed down, and I said what I am quoting below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9903831

> the balance of power between the tech company and the "1099 contractors"

That hits the nail on the head. A 1099 contractor (a.k.a. freelancer) has to cut some 30%-40% off their wage to support things like self-insurance, etc (or add yea much). If you're "working" for a gig provider, you're not a 1099 employee by the inherent nature of the thing. Granted, you're not in a normal employer-employee relationship, but neither are you a skilled freelancer contracting your labor out on wages you yourself set and negotiated.
While I fully support the idea of TaskRabbit, Lyft, Uber, Homejoy et al, certain realities have to be faced squarely: they are not being real about the nature of their business. They really are something like employers, with something like employees.
Cheung is likely correct that a third legal category needs to be created (neither 1099 freelancer nor true employee), but in the absence of that, it seems profoundly more ethical to consider the workers employees.
OpenTable launches Takeout and Delivery service
Thanks! Let us know if you have any questions about the proof itself--unfortunately, it's not particularly well-documented, and Coq isn't super easy to read in the first place.
It's interesting that the Mozilla foundation, as part of a project to create a new rendering engine for Firefox (servo), determined that they needed a new programming language in order to do it right and produced rust.
Thanks for linking to your blog. I enjoyed your writing and look forward to following it.
That's awesome, glad to see Coinbase leading the charge on employee equity! We've just implemented something similar at Amplitude as well.

The 90 day exercise window is one of the biggest "gotchas" of equity compensation, especially for employees who are new to startups. Extending it to 7 years allows the company get far enough along towards liquidity so the employee knows more about whether it's worth it to exercise as well as not forcing them to come up with a lot of cash on short notice. Really glad to see Coinbase taking a stand for fairer compensation for employees.
Moto G 2015 Review
Is it possible to make a magnetic configuration that will repel all charged particles?

Won't particles moving in the right direction be attracted and you'll irradiate everyone inside when they slam into the shield, with some extra energy from it?
It's also interesting in that it touches on many of the factors that can inhibit the adoption of new technologies: lack of standards, regulations, entrenched interests like labor agreements, and limits imposed by existing infrastructure.
Good point. I know EFF has a mission versus the one-man show that is ABP, but isn't this mostly identical otherwise? Is Privacy Badger just APP with a political statement attached?

Maybe there's something to be said for that...put your money where your browser is and support the web you want. You could also just donate to the EFF, I guess.
Acupuncturists may not entirely be charlatans. When I went to Physical Therapy I had dry needling done which is basically acupuncture on the effected area. It really helped with inflammation and gave me relief.

Most times I've never had any relief after going to a doctors office. Muscle and back problems are like moving teeth with braces, you need to keep working on it or the muscles (or teeth) will go back to the original position.
Libcompose and our journey with Docker Compose
Personally, I think the idea of turning "performance" into a number is just fundamentally flawed. Giving the same salary to an entire team is a better idea
This is way too deep of an explanation. I mean, for one, Freudianism is about a century dead at this point, "the psyche" isn't "constructing" anything.

Do you think the cop who said "I was about to kick her in her fucking nub" is constructing a deep narrative about how she's a just warrior fighting for righteousness and the American way?

I think the most insightful part of this whole video is when they use the battering ram (ineffectively) on the pull door in the beginning, TWICE, and then just open the door.

There is nothing deep there. They just want to feel dominant because they've long ago overcome the instinctive aversion to conflict humans feel. Human nature, or rather, human evolution and culture, is not predisposed to violence, and the only way to construct people like this is through extensive training, over the course of years, and continued throughout their career, to mold them into remorseless killing machines. This training takes away the nausea of seeing a human life extinguished and replaces it with the adrenaline of a successful kill.

This mindset is far from accidental -- do you think the people who run police departments would allow something that seems this uncontrollable just happen? It's not like there's a huge labor shortage right now or anything, police departments could easily fire enough people to make examples. But that doesn't happen.

No, this is not a quirk of psychology, this is not a coping mechanism. This is a conscious choice by your leaders to build exactly this world. This is the world they are voting for. A boot, kicking a disabled woman's amputated leg, forever.
AWS Aurora – it’s showtime for Amazon’s new RDS engine
Do conservatives not use roads, schools, police, fire, healthcare and other services? Taxes pay for civilization.
Server-Side Template Injection: RCE for the Modern Web App [pdf]
and extend anything!
and... (gosh)
I like how this only kicks in after two years. That seems like a great compromise in terms of the employee getting initial options right after the cliff, but getting additional benefits after the extra year.
Hard to know if your success is driven by paleo, or by cutting out booze and soda and adding in walking, or if you're just taking less calories than before.

Whatever works for you is great, but I just hear so many people raving about diet X, when at the same time they started it, they also cut out candy/soda/booze and starting hitting the gym...
I think it has implications for language design. Some syntaxes are going to be better than others, based on this.

It also means that, for a function that takes several parameters, some parameter orders are better than others.
> Are you saying this in spite of the existing implementation of decent persistent data structures, at least in some languages?

No, s/he's saying that because of the existing implementations of decent persistent data structures. Practically all of them allocate way more than mutable data structures - e.g. trie-based vectors/arrays, trie-base hashmaps, tree-based ordered maps, etc. Essentially each new addition, modification or removal results in one or more allocations.
Dynamic Type Basics
Uber Driver's Collective Action Problem
I'm still running a Q6600 + 8GB RAM I bought in 2007.

I don't really do gaming, so my perf demands aren't as high as yours. But if you'd told me, in 2007, when I bought that CPU, that it'd still be usable - much less sufficient - 8 years later, I'd have thought you were crazy.
You might have been successful in saving $55 a week as a gainfully employed professional. You might be more willing to risk $20k given that the situation in 7 years is "The company is IPOed and there exists a highly liquid market for its stock" versus "It is entirely possible that I pay $20k and get nothing of value in return." You might, given a similar situation, convince any number of reputable financial institutions to advance you $20k in the anticipation that you'll be able to pay it back with ease (and are shortly going to be the sort of customer that reputable financial institutions try very, very hard to make happy).

You might simply benefit from having 7 years to find a few days and mental headspace to figure out what to do with your equity. Silicon Valley is rife with folks who lost exits, some small and some very-not-small, simply because in a stressful situation where they were switching jobs / apartments / marriages / etc day 91 came and went.

This is invariably in employees' interest.
It's a very cool feature of Datomic that the storage engine is pluggable, and easily changed depending on the characteristics of your data. Using Postgres is trivial:

http://docs.datomic.com/storage.html#sql-database
I can't speak for all startups, but I have worked for a couple, and this is what I know:

- It's very easy to be overqualified for a startup. We are looking for brilliant people we don't have to "untrain".

- Price is also a big factor. We can't afford to bring on experienced salespeople, who will often require a certain level of pay and benefits for their experience (we're not even set up to offer benefits yet). What we really offer is future potential for growth and personal investment.

- Startups really value loyalty. It's great that you are up to speed on coding and have side projects, but you don't want to convey the message that you aren't devoted to your day job.

- Have you applied to a wide variety of startups, or just the big "cool" ones in your area?

Is there any reason why you want to work at a startup? Unless you're a founder, working at one can be a frustrating and unrewarding experience. The vast majority of workers are fresh out of college and trying to build experience; either that or super-stars brought in to give direction.