skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is there such a strong reaction to this?

For the very reasons identified. People want it to be true, without proof, because believing it is true serves a psychological need that provides a fake pay off. It's not "your fault" you didn't make progress in that algorithm, because "the universe" conspired against you and "P != NP", you're off the hook.

Getting off the hook like that is so much easier than facing your own responsibility.

I understand it's very compelling to believe this for that reason, and yet, to do so doesn't work to actually make progress. I understand the psychology. People will fight this to the end to preserve their sense of zero responsibility, to shelter their ego. So much invested, so many layers of justifying narrative, already deposited.

I'm not saying it's right or wrong what you choose to believe. I don't think you need to feel bad about it. You can choose to live your life however you want. If you want to believe P != NP without proof, you're just not someone who is mentally equipped to create innovations in that space. Does that make you bad? No, it's just your choice. You already made that choice. No need to deceive yourself about it. Can you really feel an absence of shame however, trying to talk other people out of it? I guess that is what I am campaigning for.

Believe whatever you want, you've already made your choice. When that young student comes to you, and you try to talk her or him out of pursuing this to preserve the narrative you've already subscribed to yourself, that doesn't work. So if you are aware of how it's your belief, maybe you'll give them space for their belief.

That awareness, and awareness toward others.
Programming and Prejudice: How to Find Bias in Machine Learning Algorithms
Excel is a very powerful tool, but it reaches a utility plateau very quickly when you start going outside its intended purpose of being a spreadsheet application. You're correct that a power-user can do pretty much anything in Excel, but when you start talking about actual database operations (like Join), state, and UI, then you're at the point where the tool is working against you.
IRS advances project that could tax on-site food perks
> Is it hard essentially, or is it hard accidentally?

Not exactly either, but certainly a bit of both. Programming is hard primarily because it is so poorly understood. The entire field is in its infancy. Comparing it to art, I'm pretty sure we haven't even reached the "stick figures scrawled on a cave wall" stage yet. As Alan Kay pointed out we sure didn't invent an arch yet: http://squab.no-ip.com/collab/uploads/61/IsSoftwareEngineeri...

It's nice to see the Eve team trying to do something at least slightly different from the same-old, same-old. Even if it looks a lot like some horrors of yore (FoxPro) when I squint.
I tried "Facebook eBay shop" and "Facebook eBay store import".
Society for the Quantitative Analyses of Behavior
Even peaker plants run ~15 cents these days, since the price of gas has fallen so low.

edit: I'm more familiar with the Texas grid, but beyond the cheapish price of modern peaker plants, in that case the most expensive input sources (small peaker plants, and esp. spot-market purchases) are rarely used at all. Demand prediction and management is good enough to avoid the more expensive inputs, through a mixture of local generation management and advance wholesale purchases on the DC interconnects. On the handful of days when some issue causes a shortfall, it would be valuable to buy residential solar inputs, but this happens about 5-6 days a year. To handle those days, most utilities have a savings-rebate program, where if you agree to reduce your usage between 2-5pm on these handful of days, you get a $0.60/kwh credit. So they solve their occasional peak problem by just turning your thermostat up 2º and "buying" the unused energy at a premium price.
Seems like it's likely mostly anti-solar propaganda, but I guess there is some concern regarding the electrified nature of solar panels rather than their weight.

http://solarenergy.net/News/tackling-risks-solar-panels-pose...

I care little about the house in a fire. I do care about its occupants, and also the safety of the firefighters attempting to extract anyone still inside.
Jeff Bezos Memo to Employees
We built a Foursquare clone recently and the BOOM guys built an extended version of HDFS and Hadoop (http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/eurosys10-boom.pdf). It works out pretty well. The shift is not really about accessibility either - I've watched people do some pretty advanced data work in fields like physics and biology.

It's more about making computers into personal tools. If you look at the tools the average person uses - email, excel, google etc - they all work really well individually but they are really hard to extend or compose. Each application is a world unto itself and doesn't play with the outside world. What would really help people work is not the ability to build their own applications but the ability to move data around and glue tools together. It's kind of like applying the unix philosophy to office suites.

Chiusano has a pretty interesting take on this - http://pchiusano.github.io/2013-05-22/future-of-software.htm...
I am currently working as an Actuarial Analyst, but I have also worked several years as a programmer.

As an analyst the tools I use are excel, access, SAS Enterprise guide and Oracle SQL developer. One of the big problems I face is that we have no good way to abstract away a process and really make it reusable.

My general work flow is using SAS to pull data from multiple sources, combine and run the data through some series of logic/calculations. Then take the resulting data, copy to excel for some additional analysis or report. This might be for a monthly/quarterly report or an analysis that needs to be update with the additional runout of data.

But these steps are all tightly coupled together. If I want to rerun the same logic on a different data set, or an updated data set I will copy and paste all of the files, update the queries. I have no way to bundle them together so that I can easily reuse with different data sources, or refreshed data.

Really want I want is someway to encapsulate different sets of data transformations/calculations into to functions to reuse them in different contexts and among different people.
Sure. Interviews in general are better than a guest post because it requires less work from your guest and you get to ask follow up questions and get answers that you think your audience will find interesting. Late night hosts interview their guests, they don't usually invite guests on and have them monologue.

ReplyAll is better than the standard way of doing interviews because the questions are not predetermined, there is active back and forth and the readers get to follow the conversation as it unfolds.
You are substantially more accomplished than I am, but I do have one observation to add to this.

I think there are four elements to making a drummer:

1) Being able to keep time
2) Limb independence
3) Speed
4) Taste

For me, #2 was clearly the hardest. I found that it took lots of practice in order to achieve relatively decent independence. And even after all that practice, I find many other drummers are much better than me in that regard. I can't say it's ever held me back in terms of confidence because I play the types of music I want to play and can still say I'm better than many other drummers. I started out on snare drum and later moved on to the set and even though I had a strong foundation in rhythm, stick control, etc. it was still a lot of practice.

I'd be very curious to know what you think some people can pick up in five minutes. I've always been curious about how long it takes others to develop that muscle independence.

You can also hide some technical proficiency by playing tastefully. This works well in many genres of music, but certain genres require substantial amounts of technical ability.
I agree they need to revamp their HOV situation. In my case, I have a car with an HOV sticker and I don't know if it's measuring HOV lane traffic separately from non-HOV traffic (huge difference in the Bay Area on the 101)

@jonknee is your name jon kneeland? I'm a John Kneeland. Small world!
Entered my info. Got a call within five minutes and was then asked the exact same info. Company said I don't use enough electricity to make it worth it. Wonder how much they had to pay Google for that lead
That's how I understood it as well; maybe I'm missing something?

I'd love to see a web-native supported version of Access or File maker that was fully open source and had modern programming languages fully baked in.
What sort of bar are you referring to? The fact that one could just use additional processing plugins on their samples to make them unrecognizable by algorithm doesn't correlate well to the quality of the track in question.
Show HN: Pipes News – The 'free' Spotify for News (iOS)
You're describing Disapora exactly, except for the "no MongoDB" requirement. Why is that a requirement for you?
Dude, with all due respect, that's what the church said when the possibility was raised of the Earth not being the centre of the universe.

"We cannae conceive how it can be bearable to be so" !==> "It can not be so"
The Trials of Ed Graf
> "keep writing your calculations in JavaScript"

None of the Math.x functions work, e.g. Math.floor(2.5). Defining functions also doesn't work.

Looks promising though, I would use it for scratching project euler problems.
They all count, as do test scores.
I spent years working towards a solution, to prove P = NP.

I was miserable, isolated and alone - because I was focused on mathematical symbols instead of the people around me.

When I started considering that P didn't equal NP, it was the same time that I started thinking about and seriously considering the idea that there was somethign more powerful about groups of people than a single intellect.

A single turing machine is like a single mind; a quantum computer is like the thoughts of an entire society.

If P = NP, it suggests that smartest guy in the room always wins. If P doesn't equal NP - it means a group can overpower a single smart person.

There's a lot of ego in thinking the former.
Let's see you dance to that music after your leg is amputated.

They've had the training already.

Someone was sleeping on the days when descalation was covered. And they were probably on vacation during the in-service stuff, too. <rolling eyes ;-)>

I fully agree that the best policy is to comply with directions, but I can't see any reason for the number of responding officers.

I question why the SFPD allows those fos guys them to patrol without a supervisor.

Why is it that they couldn't calm the guy down? Arrogance? Apathy? Or were they all rookies? They couldn't holler for a detective or a supervisor?

Out-argued by a guy on crutches. What'd they think? He was going to somehow run away from them? Sprout wings?
I think it's actually unclear whether fully autonomous or driver assist will be the technology that wins in the end. There are points for both, and one may not actually lead to the other in a useful manner (people may be unwilling to make that small jump to fully autonomous where they would if forced to. There's actually historical precedence for the situation we see ourselves in now, elevators went through a similar technological change.

The 99% invisible podcast[1] actually went pretty deep into this in episodes 170 and 171, and they were excellent shows.

1: http://99percentinvisible.org/
The end point you imagine there often does not happen because it is REALLY useful to have an escrow agent inbetween. I use odesk/upwork personally, and it provides me a lot of value.

It bills my work to my clients weekly, and automatically withdraws the money from their credit card. This means if a client is unhappy with a freelancer it's easy for them to start a dialogue and start it early; and at the same time the freelancer has protection with less-than-honest clients and can lose, at most, a week's worth of work.

Compare this to normal freelancer contracts where the cash is typically paid monthly, with a delay of 14+ days after receipt of invoice. If a client acts in bad faith in that case, the freelancer loses a lot more, and to get money back, would have to go through international courts, which often costs more than the money they lost.
It is hard to say. HN makes the development world pretty small. It is like a smaller provincial town where everyone kind of can find out stuff even if they don't know you personally. Damaging the image of a tech company on HN could be serious, it could impact ability to hire in the future.

But you are right, it is the nuclear option. After that even if problem is solved immediately, a stab in the back in the future is expected.

As for future employability, you are right as well. However, I can see a small start-up actually seeking out self-reliant people who have a sense of justice doing what is right. So the quality could also be appealing.
Yeah, you can definitely include more than two people. Here are a couple of roundtable examples with multiple voices:
- http://dannybrown.me/2015/03/16/the-future-of-content-part-4...
- http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2015/5/7/8565733/be-roundtable-as...
Show HN: A browser-based neural network simulation
The magic behind configure, make, make install
Yeah, but that makes PG&E's "smartrate" summer afternoon price of 75c per kWh even less justifiable.

This data may not be publicly available, but I'd love to see graphs of current flowing out of PG&E substations vs. time of day. At some point the PV generation capacity is going to make them have weird upside-down diurnal cycles.
Scott Aaronson wrote a survey about that topic here: http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/pnp.pdf
Something I worry about with solar is once power is psychologically "free" I'll be tempted to set the thermostat down to 65F or whatever, and end up paying full rate when clouds blow by. I think it would be difficult not to increase power use once its free. I'm not talking about explicitly leaving stuff on for fun, but more like "well, power is free, so I guess I can afford a tropical reef tank instead of a plain fish tank" and there goes 1 KW of lighting continuously plus a chiller whereas right now my fish and I are very happy with ten watts of LEDs. This kind of thing needs to be taken into the financial analysis.

Also in the winter if I have "free" electricity and have to pay for natgas to heat, I'll simply buy a raid array of plug in electrical heaters to eliminate that "free" electricity and eliminate paying for some natgas. Or maybe I'll just install a bigger raid array. Either way, I like free heat in the winter and typical analysis usually doesn't consider heating. If you pay me 3 cents per KWh in the winter, and charge me 15 cents equivalent in natgas energy, I'm not going to sell you a single KWh until my house is above 75F in January.
Amazing list. I've yet to find a Laser Squad clone that was as much fun, or a Deflektor one. I did find a modern version of Highway Encounter sometime last year (I forget where, since my hard disk died) and of course I have been keeping track of the Elite renaissance, but it's amazing to think that I spent hours as a kid waiting for these to load from a dinky cassette player.

Happy, happy days...
> I understand he wasn't arrested. Is it still resisting arrest if you're not actually under arrest?

Actually, yes, it's called a Terry Stop. Whether he _ended up_ in a squad car and brought to jail isn't the issue.
OK, I'll start. I'm a former IBM-er (IBM Cambridge, Lotus building what up!). I worked mainly on the software side of things, and had some intermittent exposure to AIX and WebSphere which I found to be fascinating both from the historical evolutionary perspective as well as the functional perspective. I'd consider myself competent if someone were to call me in and save an iSeries POWER setup from complete meltdown. If I wanted to, I could get an old POWER5 on eBay with AIX 6L for less than a grand, or better yet rent a VM to learn on for $100/mo.

It seems like, except for "Cracking the Mainframe" or whatever, there's no easy (or even moderately accessible) way of simulating a mainframe setup to learn. Again, I love this stuff. I read Redbooks in my spare time. I have Hercules and z/OS setup, and that took a long time to setup compared to an Arduino or firing up a Linux VM. An average HNer is probably like me -- he/she might want to fire up a z/OS instance and play around with it. But he has no way of doing it though.

These are the tinkerers who end up deciding what platforms to use down the road. The high school kids playing with those free STM32 micro-controllers that TI gave out was a brilliant move. When they choose to do their semester project junior year, they might stick with TI because that's what they know. AVR was lucky Arduino took off too for the same reason. 10 years from now, those high school kids are going to be choosing what to buy 10k units of to throw into the pick'n'place machine.

There are some interesting big-data cloud IaaS/SaaS offerings you've put out to keep up with the times but outside of alliances with large incumbent vendors (say, SAP in ERP; EPIC in Healthcare) to sell large modules, you're not going to see much traction.

Offer something the tinkerers can play with. Make that the gateway drug. Amazon did it perfectly with AWS - easy to roll out, pretty predictable pricing schemes, pay for what you need, and scale up (more VM's/larger VM's) or out (other products within AWS). Every other vendor is chasing their tail trying to capture that market.

Linux on the z community offers me nothing as a decision maker. If I was already vendor-locked into you guys, then the prospect is appealing. But even with low latency (operating within the u-seconds, m-seconds and people start losing jobs/panicing), five-nines SLA (healthcare, HFT prop trading) requirements, what does the Z platform have to offer? How can I even evaluate prospective costs when pricing this out to pitch to the (hypothetical) board?
Good to know that I'm not the only one that have no idea what is the problem solved by this.
I suppose that part of the price difference is that you're an unreliable source of unreliable electricity, whereas your neighbor pays for stable, reliable service.
Thanks! And we do. The average engagement on any ReplyAll conversation is between ten and eleven minutes. The publishers who use is to publish live conversations will typically see between 2 and 3 page views per unique reader.

Plus, we are currently building better ways to follow the conversations. Right now you can subscribe to the final version of the conversation, but we're adding in subscribe to follow by email, Twitter, Chrome plug-in etc
I believe it is saying that you can be told sign this or your fired, and have no recourse but to sign or get fired.
Three layers of asphalt shingles (which many houses have) is a lot heavier than solar panels. Firefighters assume residential roofs to be generally pretty crappy in a fire. Their decision to enter will be based more on the extent of the fire and whether they believe anybody's in the house who can be saved.
> I can't see any reason for the number of responding officers.

That's also mentioned ad nauseum in the blog post. So what?
In addition to what others have said, I think there's some lag time involved. If you had taken the survey in 2002, I bet you would have found much stronger support for surveillance. Majority opinion has drifted away from that, but not strongly enough yet to stop the government momentum in that direction.

The people can eventually get what they want. But the government default behavior switched in 2001, and the people don't want it strongly enough - yet - to over-ride that.
From what I've heard, here in my part of Canada anyway, employers can you make sign this but it's pretty much powerless. It is illegal to keep someone from working and to slow down the economy. You can easily have this overturned by the court.
Is efficient simulation of a nondeterministic Turing machine in NP? I don't see how that could be the case. These are decision problems, where you pose a yes/no question, and you get an answer. If a decision problem is in P, then you get your yes/no answer in polynomial time when run on a normal Turing machine. If it's in NP, then you get your yes/no answer in polynomial time when run on a nondeterministic Turing machine.

What would be the yes/no answer for "simulation of a non-deterministic Turing machine"? If it's just "the yes/no answer provided by whatever that Turing machine runs" then that problem is clearly not in NP, since you could easily have some code that takes more than polynomial time. Can you restrict it to "the yes/no answer provided by whatever that Turing machine runs, provided that it runs in polynomial time"?
Implementing a doubly-linked list using RefCell is no worse in difficulty as implementing a doubly-linked list in Haskell.
Right now according to my user demographics, I just decided to move to 4.2 (API 17).

Which means that what I learned at I/O 2013 can finally be put to good use!

The sad part is that I decided to skip looking enthusiastically under the hood of M, because I won't be able to use it anyway for quite some time.
> Everyone is entitled to argue.

I should have been more precise; I meant physically resist, which he was doing.
It goes the other way around. The exclamation mark is supposed to denote surprise or excitement. General positive sentiment is represented more closely by '!' than sarcasm or satire is represented by anything.

There are only a few symbols on the default US keyboard that are potentially eligible for promotion to punctuation. If you want "general positive sentiment" to have its own mark, why not use '+'? Plus for positivity. Tilde for not exactly this, which is close to its use in mathematics.
The similarities between Ruby and Smalltalk basically consist of them sharing the notion that everything is an object, every operation is (or, in the case of Ruby, can be) a message sent to an object. Ruby has some control structures like if, while, etc. that Smalltalk didn't, however it's got the basics (blocks, methods, classes) that allow you to directly translate Smalltalk code into Ruby (it has things like if_true, if_false, etc. that were how you did conditionals in Smalltalk, even if the idiom would be to use the special if form).

Python doesn't quite fit as well, since it doesn't have arbitrary anonymous code blocks (lambdas are a bit limited), and classes aren't as open once they've been created (I think?).

The big difference is that Ruby is a language that runs on regular machines, calling out to C routines to interact with an external OS, whereas Smalltalk is an integrated language and OS that run together (similar to lisp on the lisp machines).
Site doesn't appear to be loading right now.

Can anyone tell me what the site does?

Thanks.
This was the first thing I tested, and I think it would be extremely valuable if results could propagate through future equations like this. Change the one at the top and everything below updates.
Android L was released on October 15th so it could still make it to 25%. Also note that 5.0 was pretty buggy so that didn't help...
The new value proposition is reminiscent of DabbleDB, which was a groundbreaking product that didn't seem to get enough traction to sustain a business. Is this comparison apt? Any ideas on why Eve has a better chance of succeeding?
I've heard it put: "If you can't change your company, then change your company."