skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Plus, reducing the safety of using a shared resource (the roads) absolutely does cause harm, even if no injury occurs in a given case.
Awesome. Thanks for the correction.
PL/SQL Sonar: check rules
>Maybe if you're more interested in keeping things simple than in making more money.

Yup, that's exactly my own motivation. I've set mine up to run fairly automatically. Obviously it needs oversight and growth. It just doesn't need them right away.

So if I want to take a couple weeks off, I can. And I don't have to hold that many details in my head/when working I can hold more longer run details in my head.

I value that more than earning a very large amount of money.

This is a good article laying out hte mindset behind this. The four freedoms are the main consideration:

http://www.jackkinsella.ie/2014/04/24/on-passive-income.html

You can do quite a lot while keeping all four, but it has some obvious tradeoffs at higher levels of business.
One could consider med school to be a series of tests on the merits, including the subsequent internship/residency and licensing standards.

It's just not possible to study at home and be educated enough to be a doctor. You need huge amounts of expensive resources (cadavers, equipment, live patients, etc.)
This makes more sense for professions that are "all books", so to say. E.g. law, where all you really need is a slightly longer test (or not even that).

But this makes no sense for medical school, which teaches a lot that would be extremely difficult to test directly. Often the direct test would basically amount to going to medical school for some non-trivial amount of time anyways.
Jeff Bezos has always been a bit of a dick.

This just codifies his dickishness, this kind of crap a century from now will be written about like Dickens wrote about 19th century London.

Appalling in every way, I think I'm going to shop elsewhere in future.
Rawlemon's Transparent Spherical Solar Panel
Exactly, and no, attempted manslaughter should not be a thing and that's basically what a DUI is.
i32 -> u32 is not lossless, since u32 cannot represent negative numbers. And indeed that's not listed in the implicit conversion table in the page you linked to.
>I have yet to hear an insurance company step up and state how they are going to handle these issues.

Well, if a company puts out a decent self-driving car will great commercial opportunities, any smart insurance company will want to get a hand at that pie (insuring its drivers).

From then, it's up to how good the car company can convince the insurance company that their car will have an equal or less accident rate than a regular car.

If the car company can show them that it has an equal accident rate, an insurance company would be stupid not to insure it. And doubly stupid if the car company could show the cars having a smaller accident rate.

So shouldn't be that difficult -- and far easier than also having to convince the buying public.
‘Gene drive’ techniques have the potential to alter whole populations
If anyone else is curious about CHR$141, it's how you can show doubly-tall letters on an Acorn BBC Micro's teletext display...

http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcwin/manual/bbcwinh.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext
Well, the system is designed to make sure companies can dominate and control government departments. So, hey, working according to plan.
Here are Amazon's Leadership Principles, complete with phrases and stock photos: http://www.amazon.jobs/principles
They are awesome, made a massive difference to the pain I was getting and improved posture at the same time, win/win and dirt cheap as well.
> I've come to realize that science is always wrong, when viewed with a long enough lens.

I fundamentally disagree. An enormous amount of science has been right, and has lasted essentially unchanged since the time of discovery. No one is refuting the germ theory of infection, information theory, or classical mechanics any time soon.

A lot of belief has been asserted and sustained by people who stand to gain from that belief being widely held. This is always happening, whether it is the Pope or Dow Chemical, and this is most of the science that gets discovered wrong after the fact. Most of it would have been proved wrong immediately if results hadn't been faked or attempted verifications hadn't been prevented or suppressed.

I'm excluding theories that are first approximations that are further refined later from 'made up' science, of course.
> No, but they do get into the car reckless as to harming someone else

False, you can be charged with DUI while perfectly sober; DUI applies to far more than alcohol.

> Why is manslaughter different than murder?

Manslaughter means accidental, murder means on purpose; if you don't see the difference, perhaps you need to think about that a bit harder.

> When the state of mind is the same, why should luck in the outcome change the punishment?

If you don't see the difference between an accident and doing something on purpose as requiring different punishment, well then you just fundamentally disagree with about all of mankind. If your car tire blows and you hit another car and kill someone through no fault of your own, apparently you think that's an equal crime to murder. Really... c'mon... really?
People think they drive better when slightly drunk because they have impaired senses and do not notice potentially hazardous conditions that they luckily avoid.
Yes, and last time I saw, they could break 11 bits long keys. There are probably better ones now, it's been a long time that they don't make the news.

Anyway, they are still far from being practical, but do exist.
> Travel via the common means is a right, not a privilege

Rights aren't unconditional.

> That driving requires you make such promises is absurd.

Here's why driving requires you to make these types of promises:

http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/traffic_deaths_...
> "Potential extra features (worth extra points):"

> "+ Protection against front-channel attacks."

I think I just hurt myself laughing.
Gossip and rumours don't matter. Internal politics can be about concrete things, trying to influence this or that decision etc.

If you cannot even SEE or talk about their project with the members of the other teams, that stops right there. Sure, you can rumour in the cafeteria about it.
Clinton Wants Tech Firms to Hand Over Data on Terrorist Take Downs
Sanal Santral – TfonTelekom.com
Religion also affects the study of climate change. There are many evangelical Protestants who believe that is blasphemous to imply that anything that humans could do could change the weather in any way, because God created the weather and runs it as He sees fit.
Quite true.

If one main goal is WebGL then the best option is to adopt a WebGL native engine, instead of trying to cram a native experience into the browser.
java.util.LinkedList also implements that interface. ArrayList has the same semantics under the hood as an array (fast insertion at arbitrary places, fast random access, slow extension), and any Java programmer who's remotely familiar with data structures should know the difference between the two. Especially when LinkedLists are so commonly used under the hood in e.g. the java.util.Queue family.
Is it reassuring that Amazon treats its white-collar office workers just as terribly as their blue-collar warehouse workers? http://gawker.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-are-treated-like-...
It's like a tl;dr or Steve Yegge's blog.
I agree with this. However if you accept that the circumstances of a society's existence are highly variable too, that each of the many different genetic outcomes you speak of is relevant only under very specific circumstances, then we could have a situation where a "talent" is viable at some times, and not viable at others. In that case, we have an evolutionary interest in maintaining many different talents, many of which will remain latent/unused, in our multi-individual society, until circumstances wish?

Furthermore, and unrelated, it is also my personal opinion that highly "talented" people in the definition that society places on the word, often have deficiencies in terms of other prerequisites for success. It's a bit of a zero-sum game in some ways. I happen to be an excellent mathematician, but I massively envy the (far less inspired) discipline that one of my colleagues has allowing him to be much more effective in the day to day grind of business. Basically, I'm highly talented by most definitions, more than him (again by the societal definition) but I'm not very effective at making money in a world where that seems to be the scoreboard. Try as I might, I just do not have his work ethic. I just cannot do it. So who has the talent? Him or me?
Initial impressions on teaching a machine a new language
> try to build features in a way that it doesn't require people to edit code

You might want to take a look at Eager (https://eager.io)
The more I read, the more I get the feeling that Amazon has a divide between technical (dev) roles, in which is it's largely similar to any other large somewhat "hip" company, and non-tech roles, in which it sounds like something of a sweatshop.

I'm not surprised to see you disagree with the commentary on the "leadership principles" -- they (at com/principles) seem to me almost totally generic.
Knitting for Javascripters
I assume this is something put up by Dan Bernstein, since that's his domain.

Please, can someone explain what this is about? E.g. Dan mentions the inventors of Rijndael, which is AES. What is his complaint about it?
It's not really true in America, either. The (small) European cities I've lived in have far better transit than even major US cities, but any American city with a "greater metro area" population in the millions will have enough public transit that you can survive without a car and without living in an extremely costly area.

It requires some walking and biking, and some employment options do disappear. But most of those employment options are recoverable because the salaries (e.g. at suburban office parks) pay well enough to cover the cost of a cab from the nearest bus stop to the office every morning.

IME the lack of public will to walk a half mile, ride a bike in the rain, or wait ten minutes at a bus stop is by far the greatest barrier to use of public transit in America.
This sounds like a boom/bust company. This all works while the stock is going up consistently. Eventually it won't, and this place will implode.
So were Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Like Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie before them. It's part and parcel of being aggressive, creative and demanding. You can't build an industry that goes against the grain of established practice and drag 10,000 followers with you unless you're a big of an egomaniac. There's probably 1000 people out there smart enough to envision an Amazon-like business, but they are content to enjoy what they have and not stress themselves out by building a giant corporation.
Cash for Cars Sydney
Driving is not the same as traveling . being a passenger is a right.
I have heard repeatedly that potential workers are asked behavioral questions during their interviews about the leadership principles. I wouldn't call that "taken with a grain of salt." Anecdotally their turnover rate is high and a larger proportion of tech workers have to be on call than other large tech companies-- this could be due to the nature of tech, clouds and probably the largest web portable on earth. Different divisions are going to be different, and the article focuses on more extreme cases, true, but Amazon is a "tough" place to work, no question about that, at least compared to Google or Netflix.

If Amazon is not a nice place to work, honest people writing good journalistic reporting on it are going to write negative stories, no way around that. As negative stories, this particular article isn't bad. At least it puts a leadership-principle spin on it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065243
Bayesian Financial Models
tl;dr: Inattentive driving kills. Alcohol can cause inattentiveness. So can texting. If someone constantly texts while driving except for when they're 0.081, then they're probably a safer driver drunk than sober. Which is to say, they shouldn't be allowed to drive in either condition.

1. Regarding the last sentence of my prior post, I think you're also underestimating the extreme danger associated with inattentiveness while sober driving and/or how common distracted sober driving is. I 100% believe an very attentive person at .081 is less dangerous than an idiot texting and messing with the radio while driving. Which is to say, both are extremely dangerous.

See e.g. http://distracteddriveraccidents.com/texting-driving-dangero...

2. You / the grandparent are under-estimating the impact that attentiveness has in drunk driving accidents, and also underestimating the ability of drunk people to be attentive on demand. The VR test is not a good test of impairment because the drunk driver will be artificially attentive during the administration of the test.

Driving drunk is dangerous even before motor control is significantly impaired. And the reason for that is mostly psychological -- a bit reduced reaction time, okay, but the reduced attentiveness and judgement are really far more dangerous. The guy flying down the road 40 over "just wasn't paying attention". It's not that he would have noticed but didn't because "delayed reaction time". He never would have noticed because he was drunk and didn't have the good sense to pay attention while driving.

The problem with the VR test is that, when put on the spot, a drunk person can focus for a short or intermediate period of time. So that VR test isn't an accurate reflection of the actual typical behavior of an impaired driver.

Under-estimating the only-on-demand abilities of drunk people would be a deadly mistake when designing measurements of impairment. Measuring ability, not behavior, is not enough. Drinking changes behavior in ways that are dangerous while driving for for which a drunk person can often compensate (e.g. when confronted with a potential DUI, but often not when driving home on a routine route).
Using the word "salary", and talking about paying cabs to drive to buses shows that you ignoring the reality of a huge segment of the working population, who work hourly, and have childcare needs.
I guess it comes down to your personal anecdotes versus those of "more than 100 current and former Amazonians — members of the leadership team, human resources executives, marketers, retail specialists and engineers who worked on projects from the Kindle to grocery delivery to the recent mobile phone launch". Strictly on the weight of the evidence...

(Not that everything NYT prints is true, but your can be certain that a front-page story trashing one of the most successful companies and founders in history has been vetted and fact-checked to a fair degree.)
Top datasets for health hackers
Phaser – A fast, fun and free open source HTML5 game framework
Show HN: Quantum – An Oculus Rift game we made while learning Unreal Engine
I've combined this with fartscroll.js and Pride and Prejudice to form a horrible reading experience: http://3till7.net/uploads/2015/08/pride-and-prejudice/
Ideal lattices are a generic defense against quantum hacking. Server load balancing is a dynamic process which may actually induces vulnerabilities to distributed denial of service attacks, whether or not the maintenance occurs regularly. Especially dangerous DDoS is statistically timed to gain root access by damaging the infrastructure. Irreversible destruction of the hardware is attributed to atomic decay processes which are incited by zeta normalization of the attack timing.

Any virtual machine may encapsulate a finite-dimensional p-adic space. Honing a conditional random field on that model is technically the same as training an AI to preemptively reject any possible series of attacker signals. In this way, the multiplicity of primes can be mapped in order to secure, contain, and protect any and all esoteric data.
The interesting thing with Google Groups is that Google cannot even crawl its own pages.

This is because it fails to follow its own specification for "escaped_fragment" URLs.

http://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/s...

http://groups.google.com/robots.txt

Google wants webmasters to "opt in" and let Google access #! URLs without using Javascript (they want to be able to use a bot). This is done by providing an alternative "escaped_fragment" URL.

But Google themselves will not allow users to access Google Groups #! URLs without using Javascript. They will not provide alternative "escaped_fragment" URLs. Why not?

Search for the newsgroup comp.unix.soures and you will see an error message that Googlebot was unable to access Google Groups because of its robots.txt

Of course, you will also see comp.unix.sources has (fortunately) been mirrored on numerous servers elsewhere, probably well before the Google acquisition of Deja.

I think Google should give these old newsgroups back to the community in their original format.
Well, probably the word "discovered" would fit better. :)

Here is a paragraph from "Funktion und Begriff" (1891):

> Wie nun Funktionen von Gegenständen grundverschieden sind, so sind auch Funktionen, deren Argumente Funktionen sind und sein müssen, grundverschieden von Funktionen, deren Argumente Gegenstände sind und nichts anderes sein können. Diese nenne ich Funktionen erster, jene Funktionen zweiter Stufe.

For non-german speakers: Frege makes a distinction between functions that take things as arguments and functions whose argument are and must be functions. He calls the former ones "first order functions" and the latter ones "second order functions".

Today we call functions whose order is greater one "higher order".
I worked at Amazon right out of college - I wouldn't do it again, but there's a reason why Amazon continues to hire a lot of people despite their growing (and already rather notorious) reputation as a workplace.

Amazon is considered one of the big AAA-tier companies, at the same venerated level as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, et al. Having Amazon on my resume opened so many doors like you won't believe.

I think a lot of people join Amazon knowing the toxic workplace culture out of necessity - our industry doesn't have a fucking clue how to hire people and leans heavily on "signals" like working for specific famous companies.

As long as we continue to not be able to interview people effectively, and instead rely on things like "having worked at Amazon" as a positive hiring signal, the Amazon hiring machine will continue to function.
Thanks! That reminds me to get my AAA membership!
Crunching Apache Parquet Files with Apache Flink
> > They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs
I don't recall anyone telling me this

Maybe one of those poor habits is remembering information like this and you got so good at it that you forgot this :)
That's not necessarily true; there are three types of popular pressure cookers[1]. Fagor-type pressure cookers release steam constantly (this could be the kind GP has), old-school weight-on-top pressure cookers release steam intermittently (this may be what you have in mind), and Kuhn Rikon pressure cookers release no steam at all (this third type is best for flavor since no volatiles are lost to the kitchen with escaping steam).

1. http://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=2561.html
True 20 years ago I used to cycle in London and NOT! undertaking traffic and not riding in the gutter was my golden rule
HotCodeLand: code life on instagram
What about Unreal 4? I read that they support HTML5 pretty decently by using Emscripten. I really do not know what is their current status on that subject.
On the one hand, I zero percent want to work in that environment. On the other hand, I can see why it would appeal to some people.

If you've ever worked at a place with stifling bureaucracy, where building consensus laboriously over months is necessary to move forward with even relatively minor decisions, then you know how liberating and empowering it feels to work in a place where people are focused on getting things done, where you can make decisions and drive forward quickly, and where ideas get debated openly and decisively.

But yeah, I suspect most people would prefer that taken down a few notches.
Toccata and fugue in 101010 minor on a DRAM harp.
Reporting on his comments in a book interview with Oprah is hardly "propaganda"! Good on Oprah for bringing up the topic. Everyone knows he's responsible for the fiasco of the Iraq war and there were no WMDs. Oprah prodded him as much as was appropriate, then left it at that. Reuters was just repoting on the interview. I'm pretty certain if you bothered to look you'd probably find lots of Reuters stories where they probe Bush much deeper on this issue and give him a thrashing. (I haven't looked myself, but I'd be very surprised if that wasn't the case).

Anyway, if you think that is propaganda you should perhaps visit Russia to see what real propaganda looks like.
Doesn't the OO approach just move the work of the switch statement into the class declaration of the model? In practice, OO is about encapsulation, and FP is not. So it's probably not too surprising that the author chose not mix metaphors.

This is also modeled after an architecture in a statically typed language that expresses possible actions as a single union type, in which every possible type must be handled. There's no similar compile-time guarantee in JS, but a switch statements with constants is a reasonable approximation of the idea.
Yes, it's true that as part of the interview process they ask behavioral questions to try to use the leadership principles to evaluate a candidate. An example might be, "can you tell me about a time when you had to build something but you had very vague requirements". So I think the leadership principles are taken seriously, but I don't think they're treated as gospel. Bezos usually says something in the all-hands meeting like "these are our leadership principles unless you know better ones". People usually roll their eyes at the "frugality" leadership principle - the term "frupid" is used pretty frequently.

The high on-call load is a pretty frequently complaint.

I haven't worked at Google or Netflix, so I don't really have a basis for comparison.

In general, I think Amazon is a pretty demanding environment, but I think if the environment was as Streitfeld describes it, I wouldn't do well. I don't think I have that great a work ethic and I don't think I handle stress or workplace conflict particularly well, yet I've managed to be successful at Amazon.
Saturday+Musing:+Are+You+A+Bare+Butt+Woman+And+Makeup+Taxpayer?
i did.
Startup Ninja: A collection of wacky startup ideas
Sen. Dianne Feinstein is worried net neutrality might help the terrorists
It seems to me it's pretty much like the Army.

Push people hard, a lot will give up, but whoever remains is pretty strong and performant (for how long who knows, of course)
That's not what "victimless" means. Victimless means no one is harmed, not even statistically, in consensually. Getting high at home, or having consensual sex, are victimless crimes.
The Tedium of Managing Code
Believing that having more than twice what it takes to make it in the top 1% of U.S. income is "not great" and that a major lifestyle compromise is to make 5x the average U.S. income for a family of four both strike me as symptoms of a delusional view of wealth and income in the society you presumably are a member of.