skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I come from France, I had a better education than you can get probably anywhere in the world (I went to les Mines de Paris, roughly equivalent to the top 10% of MIT)

What is it about French Universities that makes them so exceptional? I ask because I've heard this "I come from a French University, and it is reaaaally good" refrain from a lot of French people – but I haven't seen that many exceptional performance amongst them. [I should say though, I have met some really great and hard-working French university graduates, so the overall level is definitely quite good.]
I can't tell if your post is satire or not. Extorting people over their own deaths is not useful economic activity.
Well duh. If we don't need degrees to create computer programs, then why would someone need a degree for any other job in the world, which just involve pushing buttons on software programs we create?
For people who would like to go further, and explore writing command line tools (instead of only using them), in C [1], for Linux [2], this post and the linked article in it, by me, may be of help:

Developing a Linux command-line utility:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/09/my-ibm-developerworks-arti...

[1] In C, but the utility development guidelines described in the article mostly apply to other languages like Python and Ruby too, since the main principles are the same.

[2] It may compile and run on Mac OS X too, since it is a Unix, but I haven't tested it on that platform.
I am amused by how effective nationalism is, when used to cloth motives that might be considered more base. (personally, I think greed is often less evil than nationalism, but I'm a bit weird.)

In this case, industry wants more programmers, but doesn't want to pay the wages that would make this happen in a free market.
Loss of species diversity, 50 million years of evolution, and potentially profound impacts on ecosystems.

Look for the story in the past year or so about dramatic impacts of reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone.

How Wolves Change Rivers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q

http://www.livescience.com/17263-yellowstone-wolf-environmen...

Destroy a species and it's gone forever.

Moreover, if you're looking to eliminate suffering, it's humans and their rampant overconsumption which are driving that. Not the elephant.
Erm. Not really. Not if you want to play anything other than 78s.

78s were mono, and the data was encoded via a vertical movement of the stylus. A needle-and-paper-cup player will work fine on one of these.

Modern records are stereo, and the data is encoded as two channels, so the needle moves in two directions; these directions are diagonal to the plane of the record. The only real way to build a needle that will play these is via a magnetic pickup on the other end of the needle. These are rather non-trivial to build.

Once you've done that, there's an additional complication, which is that the dynamic range of the vinyl isn't up to reproducing the audio signal; low notes at high volume require large displacements and the grooves are too close together to allow this (even if it can move fast enough, which I'm unsure about). So you encode the audio signal in a standard way before pressing it onto the vinyl, compressing the low frequencies and... expanding? the high ones. The record player then undoes this encoding after reading the signal off the disk. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization for the full details.

Of course, getting a decoder is as simple as ordering the standard part and wiring it in. But now you've got a full electronic system, and it's decidedly non-trivial to build.

Modern vinyl has a lot of subtlety and sophistication to it. If you use a needle-and-paper-cup player on a 33, it'll make noises that sound a bit like music, but actually playing it properly is highly non-trivial.
That's a little clearer, but it's also not in the linked article.
Once place you'll find excellent public places in the US is behind the proximity-card gates of a good university.

Glorious, Gothic architecture reading rooms with hundreds of comfortable seats, power at each one of them, 100Mbit WiFi, and a cafe on site. Coffee shops with large seating areas, similar power and WiFi amenities, and no obligation to buy anything. Dorms have common rooms and lounges where students hang out long into the night, with several conversations going and Super Smash Brothers on the TV in the background. My school's housing system is designed around "houses" of 50-100 students occupying vertical slices of the dorms, and in most you can wander into your house lounge at any hour and be around your friends. Many universities are laid out around quadrangles, and on a nice day on the vast green space you'll see classes sitting in circles, students leaning on trees reading, a few frisbees in the air, etc. Depending on the social climate, drinking may be allowed in dorm common spaces (a more subdued, conversational kind of party than a bumpin' rager you'll find at a frat).

I wish I could have access to that kind of thing again after graduation. I'll miss it. Public libraries and most commercial coffee shops don't come close.
The thing that befuddles me is if someone came up to you on the street and handed you $100, you'd most likely refuse until you could figure out what the catch is. If someone offered you free movies or music on the internet, you'd either assume they were stolen or there was a catch. But when people download software that was both complex to build and intricate and expensive to maintain, they assume that there isn't a catch. I don't understand.
> The Loudness War needs to go away

according to your link, it is going away:

"Analysis suggests that the loudness trend may have peaked around 2005 and subsequently reduced, with a pronounced increase in overall and minimum album DR (crest factor) for albums since 2005."

This tracks with what I hear on new recordings.
"Something else" is removing the artificial constraints that created the monopoly in the first place.
I'm confused. What is this?
Not a given. Where I work, most of the reports I get from security admins regarding compromised hosts (found to be port-scanning, attacking other hosts, etc.) are for Ubuntu systems. You still have to secure any services you're running and take basic common-sense precautions.
No offence to you, but you're so capitalist it's to the detriment of human health and you should be ashamed.

I'm asthmatic, My life can cease in a pretty painful way if I'm denied access to drugs- my illness is an easily preventable one, so why should I die gasping? You're right I'll pay anything to keep living.. I'll literally starve before I stop paying for my medication. But why would you wish that upon me? Because drug companies can have an extra slice of pie?-- forgive me if I'm wrong but isn't private healthcare mostly about making shareholders rich and -not- about significant R&D on preventable diseases (which would then be a tax on the ill for their life).

I come from a country with social healthcare, I grew up the product of a bottle of whiskey and a bad decision, thus, poor.. I'm currently putting more money into my government through taxes than I ever could have possibly taken out- but given the draconian practises you seem to favour, I would have died as a child because there is no way my mother could have afforded to buy my medication -and- keep me fed.
I really hope this was a sarcastic comment. Personally, I prefer my doctors, lawyers and nuclear physicists to have formal qualifications.
The 25th Ig Nobel Prizes, Celebrating Humor in Science
I agree with the cramming suggestions, at least for this particular test.

In similar situations in the past (eg preparing for interviews), I've found it valuable to simulate test conditions: actually try to write a whole solution out on paper, and only when done, go type it in, see if it works, and correct the errors. You'll start memorizing things in no time if you make not remembering them actually annoy you.
> I wonder if you could get venture capital to start a modernized religion, using modern surveillance technology.

For the love of all that is holy, please stop asking this question. Because the answer is almost certainly "yes".

Roko's basilisk doesn't scare me. But the thought of a clone of the Church of Scientology that is technically competent scares the living shit out of me. Seriously, how would we defend against that?
An automated parody of HN, OP explains above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10248803

> I've pulled every comment and story from HN through the API and make a bunch of Markov chains to produce story titles and comments.
Why not skip step 1, then? Let the company sell it for however much it wants, and the non profit competes them out of business?
Ask HN: How mature is Jython compared to JRuby?
He's not even talking about an university and rather about a selective public college that only selects few people. Its selection is elitist and surprise, people who come out of it are good + have a good network. I'd say there's a strong selecition bias there.
I don't have a degree and I'm glad to hear this, I would rather I be tested on my knowledge and get a job over people who hardly know anything.
I agree as far as the physical format goes, but the loudness war is somewhat less entrenched in vinyl. Nearly all CDs and digital download versions of songs are released with mastering that has heavily compressed the audio to make it louder and heavily reduced the dynamic range - this isn't a digital format issue, this is actually lost information about the audio of the song because the volume has been uniformly boosted to the point there is not much difference in dynamics

A lot of the smaller labels, and some of the larger ones, will do a vinyl specific master that hasn't gone through this compression process and has the full dynamics of the original recording. Even with the coloration, I find these almost always sound better than the lower dynamic range versions. So, basically, despite vinyl being an inferior format, humans have managed to fuck things up enough that it can sound better in spite of being a bad physical medium for audio.
Nor does the phrase "natural monopoly". If I didn't know better, I'd say it was a phrase that was post-created in order to be a "valid" argument against a free-markets ability to self-correct without the presence of a state.
“With friends, I think, most people will agree there is reciprocity if not with money but with something else like company.”

Bzzt.

That is where your ideological map is attempting to define the territory.

Not all qualitative expression forms a transaction of quantitative proportions as (hyper)capitalism may have one believe.

I also sincerely doubt the discussion is somehow a debate on altruism, although when lensed through capitalist ideology it leaves few other classes as option.

Again, the slogans of hypercapitalism are rampant, as we have seen with both the “free lunch” and “you are the product” tropes that lay at the foundation of this thread.

Instead, it is likely a discussion of magnitudes and trust.

To an extent, all design insists on data and knowing. Take for example a shoe; we need to know your foot size and some other contexts, possibly such as usage.

Should we know your foot size or is this an abuse?

What if we are a shoe company and choose to register your facets in a database and across our stores? Is this a magnitude of qualia that creates a problem?

Now what if we choose to sell your shoe size to another vendor that may help you with other health choices? Another shoe vendor altogether? A company that isn't a shoe vendor?

Where do we draw the dividing line here on the magnitudes?

I don't pretend the answers are easy or clear, but they certainly seem worth exploring given the context.

Selling browsing data can be a serious issue of course, not the least of which seems perpendicular to the apparent direction of the original business model.

Who are they selling to? Insurance companies that care that you browsed about HIV medication or another software firm interested in security and the types of sites you visit?

Complex stuff for sure, but certainly not something to reduce to a polemic of altruism versus capitalism?
I think in general in most parts of the world people find these types of rooms for hire to have a yuk factor. Possibly because people don't trust the cleaning standards?
> Without samples of the original, it's impossible to prove a generic is equivalent.

I know we're in FDA-land where logic doesn't rule, but this beggars belief. This is similar to the nonsense by which HFA inhalers knocking generic CFC inhalers off the market.

Any competent organic chemist can tell you if you've got pyrimethamine or not. This isn't some exotic chemical. There's published spectra (http://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C58140&Mask=80). Having a competitor's drug will simply tell you anything new. If it does, they've behaving deceptively.
The biggest takeaway from The E-Myth for me as a software engineer was the idea of making a job easy enough for the least qualified individual to do it. The example they use is how to train completely untalented 15-year-olds to make burgers at McDonalds. McDonalds doesn't need to hire chefs.

In software engineering, I've seen teams look for years for a candidate with X years of experience in technology Y. In many cases, you don't need an expert, you just need a smart person.

Build up a library of books/articles as well as sample code and exercises. Then hire smart people rather than experienced people. We had a git repo with exercises in functional programming and scala along with unit tests and day one involved checking it out and getting started.

Also, simple code is more accessible to the "least qualified individual". You may sacrifice performance, but you will be able to scale more effectively as an organization.
This is perfect. I opened it on a new tab, and went off to read another article. After coming back and opening multiple links I found myself thinking "where are all this posts with gramatical errors coming from" for a solid one minute - until I noticed "pg" where my username should be!
Fifty Years of Stupid Grammar Advice (2009)
Even if that form is speech?
I see. Cool. I'm building an HN clone now. Hierarchical comments are a fun challenge. Any tips?
Supply chain stability. Availability is sometimes more important than cost, and if you have a government non-profit producing the drug, you're not wasting any money on the profit that a private company is extracting.

Drugs should be priced based on their cost to produce and whatever R&D needs to be amortized, not by how much value you can extract.
I think OP was talking about jobs at Instagram for dogpoop of Chihuahua.
Yes, but ...

> The Federal Trade Commission has reached a settlement resolving the Commission’s antitrust suit charging Cephalon, Inc. with illegally blocking generic competition to its blockbuster sleep-disorder drug Provigil. The settlement ensures that Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Ltd., which acquired Cephalon in 2012, will make a total of $1.2 billion available to compensate purchasers, including drug wholesalers, pharmacies, and insurers, who overpaid because of Cephalon’s illegal conduct.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2015/05/ftc-s...
I hope people stop downvoting you because this is an excellent question.

There is a number of species in that ecology today, let's call it N. It's a known good number of species: they work together, more or less, to stay alive as a group.

There are smaller collections of species which are nonviable. For example, if all species disappeared except elephants and tigers (2 species) the entire ecosystem would then disappear (the elephants would starve and then the tigers would) and eventually only inorganic material would remain.

There is a number of species, let's call it K, below which the probability of entire ecosystem collapse is nontrivial. We don't know what K is, but if we care about the existence of any ecosystem we must approach it carefully. And we won't know we've crossed it unless we go over.

We know K is somewhere between 2 and N. I think a good strategy is just to put the brakes on all extinction to try to buy us extra time to do science while we are approaching N=K.

As long as we keep N above K, we have a relatively easy problem: influencing a system at equilibrium. Once N drops below K we have a much harder problem: bootstrapping an ecology from nothing. Keeping N above K gives us more agency for less effort.

For that reason, I think the extinction of elephants would be bad.
dup from 6 days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10215049
> Truly elastic clouds with Zerg: OS-less Erlang on the cusp of becoming a permanent 3G connection to a billion dollars worth of online advertising
A feature comparison with other solutions is a great idea. We'll work on that and share here.
First I will say that I'm not an expert in these questions, so my thoughts might be off, but that's probably the reason we are discussing it.

The closest to perfect solution in my mind would include all the details to make the medicine in the patent itself (I'm not sure how detailed patents has to be today). This would make it easy for other companies to create a competition once the patent expires and essentially would create a free market.

In the scenarios when it happens that there is only a single player in the market for one or another reason, things get a little trickier. I guess one of the solutions could be a commitment by government to buy/prescribe certain amount of medicine. The price of a unit should be predetermined in such cases to avoid exploitation.

Overall the actual knowledge of how to make a medicine and having a market for it, should make such situation pretty rare when only a single player is left in the market.
I wouldn't recommend pirating the games.

if you don't, and you don't do webbrowsing from inside windows then I can't imagine the need for anti-virus.

90% of attacks are trojan horses (fake/embedded pirated software usually) and the remaining 9.9% is browser attacks.

I doubt anyone is defeating your firewall/NAT box to get a direct connection to your windows machine, and even if they did they'd have to find a service they can exploit.

:)
Does that mean that there is no deep learning here, only statistics and randomization?
Right now: it works badly with a lot of users at the same time (it solves puzzles generated by other people...). I will then have to deactivate it very (very) soon in order to fix this issue.

In general: I explain the outlines of the way it works on this page (http://www.lthr.xyz/programming/13/6/2015/eternity-ii-solver...). This is the technical aspect. But because not everyone likes the technical details, I wrote a parable on this very subject (Theseus, Penepos [a name I created to anthropomorphize P?=NP {PeNePos}], and the Eternal Labyrinth: http://www.lthr.xyz/blog/7/6/2015/theseus-penepos-and-the-et...). This is a core aspect of my project.

You will probably think that I am crazy, but my goal with my program is to simulate, as subtly as possible, the idea that Penepos symbolizes.

But wait, TetraVex puzzles are NP-complete (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0020019006...), and my algorithm solves large ones almost as fast it is possible to check them, so maybe Penepos is not just a fantasy... (You may understand with this sentence that I am a strong believer that P = NP).
If you just measure in $/sq ft then sure.

It's about the total cost beeing affordable, an running costs beeing as low as possible.

Also this started out as a DIY movement, but now that professional builders are involved, prices go up.
The thing that I think you may be ignoring is the negative effect that high drug prices (and lack of affordability) has on the economy.

Health insurance, mandated as it is now in the US, is really a secondary tax we all pay to ensure people get a minimum level of care in the case of required medical care. Increased costs in medical treatment affect everyone that has health insurance to a small degree.

This being a "life-threatening parasitic infection" means that normal rules of supply and demand don't quite fit (as well as the fact that health insurance already makes this an inefficient market). There isn't always a price at which people will be unwilling to pay, beyond their inability to pay.

More profits for companies that develop drugs are only good in their eventual outcome, which is new drugs that are either better or cheaper than the existing ones. Manipulating a market to keep prices high on a drug may result in a development of a new drug which is either better or cheaper, but we have to keep in the ind the actual effects on the market right now, which is a more expensive and less available drug.

It would be a shame if we allowed a company to manipulate a market in the hopes that the extra money led to a positive outcome and that resulted in real deaths and pain in the meantime. I would tend to think that if they need to manipulate the market in that way to get the money they need for research, perhaps their past research efforts have not been as beneficial as some other companies, and that money would be better going to the companies that provide real benefit.
Who said anything about ranchers? Where do you come up with this presumption about ranchers based on gps simple "poachers are shitty"? This is an article about poachers, thus the comment talking about poachers.
Postgres recursive queries make them pretty simple to deal with. This[1] is the query I used to pull a list of all a stories children recursively.

1. https://gist.github.com/orf/5565a572c6ddda039d6f
The last time there were API outages in AWS, our autoscaling logic could not determine the number of running instances, so it felt it had too few. It kept launching instances, and due to the API outage we couldn't manually kill the instances either...

So we wound up with over 1,000 of these machines running which then due to our fan out of their DB they needed to load into memory from other machines, our whole environment crashed until we could kill off the erroneously launched instances.

This meant an effective full reboot of our entire platform...

It's was not a fun weekend.
If it ever needs that then that's serious ground for worries.
Nothing wrong with statistics and randomization. :)
I agree but one would expect that AV vendors have enough opportunities to make money without sacrificing their users and their reputation. Look at how many products AVG has. I think they should do just fine by converting free users to paid subscriptions. Couple of years ago most of their revenue came from toolbars. Since then they have converted their business model to push more for premium upsell. They do it well, I don't have problem with such a business model. Free users serve them well as free marketing force, they don't have to abuse them.
Yeah. If you store them in a relational database you will grow a couple of grey hairs because you're essentially forcing a tree structure into a table structure. The concepts clash and it's kind of a pain, but possible since every post has 1 unique parent, so you can make upwards references and rebuild a tree from that.
I tweeted a link to this, and it's already fooling people. Well done!
SLAs are just contractual thresholds for getting some specified redress if not met. They are not promises.

Not meeting a SLA is not lying.