skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Frickin' government, man... If it weren't for them always interfering, I could have a diesel VW that was fast, efficient, and non-polluting!
Ask HN: Does becoming rich make you a target for criminals?
I think he's abbreviating "internet protocols" to "IPs".

He's asking why we have human-readable/text based protocols vs a binary protocol.
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Don't feel bad for disagreeing with me! I found your comments extremely interesting. Especially on the topic of language acquisition, there are people with deeply entrenched views, so I can understand your hesitation, but it's important for people to get a balanced view, I think.

It's hard to self-rate your fluency ;-) I find that I am very fluent in my normal every day life. Most people say that I speak normally and I really don't spend any extra effort to speak Japanese vs English. In fact, in many situations I find Japanese a lot easier. But, I lack proficiency (one of the beefs I have with CEFR is that it conflates fluency and proficiency, though it is arguably better than some other systems). I'm pretty sure I wouldn't pass JLPT N1, for instance. Sometimes there are things on the news that I don't understand. Reading books aimed at high school level and above has me reaching for my dictionary (although I use a Japanese-Japanese one now). That kind of thing. I think my biggest frustration is where I want to talk about science with someone and I just don't have the vocabulary.

I definitely optimised for fluency in my studies and my recommendations reflect that choice. I study vocabulary and grammar as I encounter it rather than from a list (though, like I said, the N3 and below lists are remarkably aligned with reality in my experience). Most of my effort is directed towards finding realistic language that I am likely to encounter and making sure I can understand/produce it.

Just due to life circumstances, I have the opportunity to chat with a lot of Japanese children of various ages. Studies show (in English at least, and I suspect Japanese is very similar) that children acquire about 1000 "word-families" a year. Which means that a 10 year old has a vocabulary of 10,000 words (plus all the related similar words, so police and policeman count as 1 word in English). JLPT N1 has a vocabulary list of about 10,000 words IIRC, so it is interesting to compare that proficiency with that of a real 10 year old child.

In my experience, the average 10 year old child lacks a very good portion (maybe 30%) of the vocabulary on the N1 list and does not understand any of the more complicated grammar (and can't produce any son kei keigo ;-) ). So if a 10 year old child has more than 10,000 words of vocabulary and only knows about 7,000 words on the N1 list, what are the 3,000 words that the average 10 year old knows that is not on the list? Also, a 10 year old is incredibly fluent in Japanese, but is missing quite a lot of the grammar in N1. If one wants to be as fluent in a language as a native speaker, will adding grammar help?

My personal experience has been that adding proficiency at the expense of fluency slows down the process. It's not necessarily bad, and if you like studying for proficiency you should not deviate from your path. As you mentioned, language acquisition is a long road. You have to do what motivates you because otherwise it is too easy to give up. But, having said that, I still feel that optimising for fluency will end up being the faster approach, on average.
It'd be interesting to hear about the issues you've found around SignalR and offline mode, as we are building on very similar stack so far and your experience can help others who are using Orleans
This is exactly why I spent a few hours trying to work out if I could perform some advanced trickery to plumb the pypy tool chain into something that would end up producing a pypy.jar or other JVM equivalent. Turns out it's not that easy. C to JVM isn't a well trodden path.

Jython is awesome and all but its fighting an uphill war against rapid progress in 3 with far too few resources.
I am not following. You said they didn't make one, but they made one anyway? So they made one or not?
You're at far, far, far more risk for missing the years of professional development than you are for experiencing any signaling risk at negotiation, at least as of October 2015. Most non-profits have, by the standards of AmaGooFaceSoft, boring technical problems where 5 years of doing them is worth less than 2~4 weeks at their firms.

Though, that said: there's no guarantees that when you have the conversation in April 2019 that you'll be in the best hiring market for your interest in the history of ever, which is approximately where we are right now.
How does one go about getting a monopoly on calories?
I'm sorry, but I have to nitpick on the AARP graph showing the average annual rate of price increases for 227 drugs.

Anytime I see data that is a subset of the real data set, I have to wonder why they did that. Why not the average annual rate of price increases over all prescription drugs? Why only 227 of them?

Also, I disagree with this quote: "Only when a 46 percent discount was applied to a pricy Hepatitis C treatment, Harvoni, did it become a good health care value -- at about $40,000 per year."

That's patently untrue. Hell, CTAF (California technology assessment forum, which assessed drugs for MediCal) found that Harvoni, at it's full price of almost $90K was cost effective. The real problem is that it would cost too much to treat everyone.
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Chasing after elite jobs seem like something of mug's game to someone who wasn't born into them. Entrance into the upper echelons of American society isn't impossible, but the odds are sure as hell stacked against you.

It's illustrative to consider an example: working and middle class Asians. It's almost a truism at this point that, while they're good at getting good educations and jobs, they almost inevitably end up hitting a wall ("the bamboo ceiling"). And it's almost as if it's by design. Society told Asian kids that they have to study and get good grades to get ahead, so they did. Too well! So the rules changed, and then they had to have extracurriculars. And they did that too! Piano, Academic Decathlon, tutoring, tennis, violin... they aimed for what were seemingly all the good extracurriculars and excelled in them. But then certain gate keepers were like, "whoah, way too many Asians are getting in. Gotta change the rules again!" And so that kid with a perfect GPA, great test scores, even some research experience, and on top of that does pretty well in both cross country and piano (albeit not nationally ranked) gets kicked to the curb because he's too "cookie cutter." The new criteria are "extracurriculars, but make sure to do something that makes you stand out and be super unique!"

So now that's the new publicly-stated resume to optimize for. The right activity to do, as it turns out, is "do whatever only the already-elite have the resources to do." Elite gatekeepers have a set of signifiers for entrance into the upper class for one and one reason only: to keep out riff-raff like you. Any entry criteria that would change the cultural and literal complexion of the upper class too much is, ipso facto, a bad criteria for entry.

And consider the best case scenario: you do get in. But even then, you're still an outsider. Hell, you didn't even go to Andover or Exeter! And you didn't even travel internationally for the first time until you went to college? Back to the fields with you, peasant!

For most people, aiming for professional, middle-class jobs seems the most realistic goal to aim for. Ain't a bad lifestyle at all, if you can accept it's silly to try to win a game that's designed to make you lose.
Look on youtube for his reaction time to the shoe-thrower.

Sharp as a tack - moved like a pro athlete.
> How much does state competitiveness play into China's firewall policies?

State competitiveness is baked into many of China's regulatory activities as a form of "soft power". Some China-watchers feel this makes the market less innovative, while others feel it encourages the creation of local versions of foreign products. Of course these typically include censorship and are jokingly referred to as "x with Chinese characteristics".

An example was when Apple was making a lot of boastful noise about crushing it in China, and very quickly got dinged on state TV: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/china-sing...
Define rich and define criminal. In the United States, any fair reading of the stats indicates that being poor makes you a target for criminals.

Kidnapping for ransom does not exist in the United States. (That statement sounds like an exaggeration, but look it up -- the FBI basically exists to solve kidnapping and it does it with extreme prejudice. [+])

If you e.g. sell a startup for $20 million and suddenly have a very large balance in your checking account, you may have the experience of having to suddenly become radically more sophisticated with regards to a number of white collar threat vectors, some of which are formally criminalized and many of which are not.

One example of many: you will suddenly have many people attempt to involve you in real estate deals with high-above-market returns and no risk. This successfully transfers hundreds of millions a year from people who happen to have money (including those who might not ping HN's radar as rich -- retirees are at particular risk) to a combination of scammers and, well, real estate speculators who just happened to misunderestimate their chance of failure.

Some friends/social acquaintances of mine can relate a number of not-very-fun experiences here, none of which involve consummated victimization but at least a few of which require costly ongoing defensive efforts.

[+] Edit: I looked it up, and contrary to my expectations the nationwide incidence of kidnapping-for-ransom is a non-zero number (on the order of two dozen a year nationwide). My prior expectation was, literally, zero.
A Curated List of Awesome Infosec Courses(and More)
> if anything I had a bit of geek pride in my voice

:-) Cool. It is impressive to beat AWS at a game that everyone assumes they are the best at.

> Things you'd want to know?

This is kind of weird...but no, not really...for my team, I think we're zealously happy with AWS and it's their game to loose.

And "only" 40% cheaper/x% faster isn't enough, given the switching costs of moving everything over. As long as AWS remains good enough.

So, basically my "it doesn't really matter that you're cheaper" attitude is what made the connection to "a great business/adoption rate doesn't come solely from technical excellence".

Which, as a programmer/technologist, is frustrating. If I knew what it did come from, I'd be off doing that, instead of kibitzing on HN. :-)
Turns out that stuff does actually grow on trees.
Also worth reading Peter Lipton's "Inference To The Best Explanation" [1] then :)

Peter Lipton was my advisor for an undergraduate thesis in HPS at Cambridge, sadly he died quite young

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Inference-Explanation-International-Li...
Thank you! I've raised funds with the Kickstarter campaign but really it is the expressions of appreciation that keep me working on the project.
I came here to say pretty much the same thing, but you beat me to it :)

The fact is that these elite jobs, while demanding, don't require particularly unusual talents. Many people can perform them. The supply is far greater than demand, which you can see, for example, in the number of people who apply for entry level positions at large financial firms, where many of the elite jobs are. It's similar at the elite universities, which could all easily fill their classes with valedictorians if that's what they wanted.

But yeah, it's pretty much what you said above. People like those who are like themselves and there are only so many spots available, so naturally they're going to pick people from similar backgrounds unless the candidate is lucky, charismatic, or significantly better than everyone else (which is unlikely when you're already choosing from an elite population).
China is the mysterious 'Other' and is not allowed nuance.
I too love Feyerabend, and would recommend his autobiography "Killing Time"[1], apart from his great writing, it also puts a great deal of context onto his work, and especially onto his relationships with his contemporaries; most particularly Imre Lakatos

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Time-Autobiography-Paul-Feyera...
Red Yeast has not been banned, you just can't sell it as a treatment for high cholesterol. Why? It hasn't gone through clinical trials.

You might argue what's the difference between a tablet of lovastatin and Red Yeast? Well, I don't know and the FDA doesn't either that's why you can't make medical claims about it.

I'm glad it worked for you! Also, lovastatin went generic a long time ago and it now costs a few hundred dollars (if that) a year to treat a patient.
In my anecdotal experience, the price of asthma inhalers (Albuterol) have gone up significantly, which sucks since they have a limited shelf-life & it's common to have multiple (car, office, bedroom, etc). Like epipen-countered allergies, asthma is a life & death situation.

From a quick web search, this site[1] shows:

> To go from inhalers that cost 5 dollars to 60 dollars especially for those who don’t have prescription drug coverage has been awful.

As a consumer, I can either forgo inhalers or use expired ones (instead of spending $$$ to keep them current).

[1] http://www.dailystrength.org/health_blogs/dr-orrange/article...
I read this as just "actual DNS". An actual DNS server, that serves the records you need, like SRV records. Eg. djbdns[1]. It's not like using DNS SRV for service discovery is some crazy thing; Kerberos uses it, and by extension Windows AD[2].

Other "recent" uses of SRV is XMPP server discovery.

Anyway, SkyDNS might be great -- but is it tested/aimed at being better/faster than other battle-tested DNS servers? Everyone needs to host DNS in some way -- can they standardize on one server, and just use SkyDNS? Should they?

Or is the main thing just wrapping a REST api around DNS? [ed: like [3,4]]

Even if I need/should use a non-standard (non-authorative, not connected to the Internet root) DNS infrastructure for service discovery, do I need to turn off caching if I want to use SkyDNS for it?

A lot of these kind of questions leap to mind.

To draw a parallel, one can use nginx for TLS termination, reverse-proxy and as a host for static assets -- often it'd be good to set them up as different services, even if they run the same software. It a) allows easy switch if needed (maybe HAProxy turned out to be a better load balancer), and easy scalability. But all else being equal, without any major differences in performance (order of magnitude), or feature set -- having two instances of one piece of software is likely simpler than having one instance each of two pieces of software.

So, in that light, "What's wrong with actual DNS"? :-)

[1] http://anders.com/projects/sysadmin/djbdnsRecordBuilder/

[2] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc961719.aspx

[3] https://github.com/ajclark/bind-restapi

[4] https://doc.powerdns.com/md/httpapi/README/
Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone
I invite all of you to explore this concrete proposal and I'll greatly appreciate any feedback. Many thanks in advance.
What does emissions regulation have to do with prescription drugs? People really need to stop it with the false dichotomy BS.
It made my day when I saw @craignewmark of CraigsList fame tweeted the article and offered encouragement:
https://twitter.com/craignewmark/status/648143262281109505

He's got old school Internet values like it used to be.
This was quite unexpected and has brightened my day
> Baidu’s new Windows 10 distribution channel, Baidu “Windows 10 Express” will make it easy for Chinese Internet users to download an official Windows 10 experience.

What Microsoft really wants is to use Baidu's channel to distribute Windows 10. When Windows 10's market share is high, Microsoft will drop Baidu of course.
It's funny he said 'Suits'. Just before that I was thinking Junior looked like the Harvey character on the show.
I think your conclusion is right for most people, but you're a bit too cynical. The system isn't rigged purposefully. It is just that the people who decide who gets the elite jobs all act a certain way and had similar backgrounds. Naturally they like people like themselves and so the jobs go to those people. Even then, there are lots of qualified people from those backgrounds who don't get those jobs. Everyone is competing for a purely positional advantage (i.e. in order to move up, someone else must move down) and the 1% is already large enough to replenish its own ranks.
The implications are apt, I’m afraid
Kee Bird
> are Apple doing this too?

Surprisingly, they didn't seem to be last time I checked (2013). There were many apps available in the CN app store which you'd think the govt would remove, especially around comms and reading material.

If it hits the govt radar they will definitely act, which could have massive technology and public perception implications for Apple.
Australian state government suspends registration of Uber drivers
Chop: Easily Block Ads and Trackers. Live on the App Store
Right - this seems to advocate a sort of cargo cult around membership of the upper class. If you go to the right schools, dress the right way, participate in the right activities, that must be how you get an 'elite job', because upper class kids do all that and they get those jobs. It's literally as naive as thinking that building model planes and control towers on your island will bring real planes in to land.
How elite do you want to be?

I've had three bosses in the last year. I would not have traded places with any of them. Not for any amount of money.

There's not a sum of money you would pay me to be a professional ass-kisser. Oh don't get me wrong, I'd take the money. I just wouldn't kiss any ass. Then you'd fire me, and I'd consider that a fair trade.
Real shame that game never eventuated, the execution so far looked really cool.
Put yourself in his shoes. You have a choice of the following headlines on the New York Times. A: President can't pronounce 'nuclear'. B: President orders ten thousand nuculer bombs. The smart choice is of course A.
also they don't have elite friends and family in high places

one cannot underestimate the power of these social connections
Here are some more courses to add to that list: http://overflowedminds.net/foro/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=36#p116...

Also in open books I'd add this work in progress: https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/cryptobook/draft_0_2.pdf
I realize publicizing winners keeps casinos in business, but how do B. Clinton and B. Obama fit with this, in contrast to the Bushes? They studied hard AND played the social game. But I guess President isn't really an elite job, since they're beholden to the real elites who didn't have to study for inherited power and influence. I'm not trying to make the case the game isn't rigged, only that it can be hacked.
Which brand do you use btw?
Society told Asian kids that they have to study and get good grades to get ahead, so they did. Too well! So the rules changed

Of course. People at the top generally aren't those who do as they're told. It can't really be any other way.
Yes and no; base R is extremely stable, but if you need to install dplyr, maggrittr, ggplot2, Rcpp and knitr/rmarkdown to reproduce a large fraction of the work that's been done in the last few years that seems somewhat equivalent to language evolution. But with rough edges, because some of the nice workflows that this opens up (say piping) are not necessarily in line with the way R wants to deal with objects.

In my experience, Julia is uninteresting to most statisticians because of the lack of mature libraries and because R is already good enough for most of the stuff they want to do. I don't think that relatively small language changes like the one discussed in the original issue are even on their radar, and I doubt that these changes are driving away people that would otherwise be maintaining packages.
aren't they mostly/all binary? as far as i can tell most protos I see just use bits for anything featureful, and text is just text
Who thinks he's nice?
I dont see how wifi in 400 stations is going to help anyone. If the stations are in well populated areas, then mobile internet should not be a problem in any case. In rural and lesser developed areas, wifi means nothing to consumers. The younger generation does have wifi smartphones, thanks to Chinese companies putting out dead cheap ones. However, of what use is the wifi in railway stations, I fail to understand.

If the use is for train information or related stuff, the govt. has to maintain that info on screens and notice boards.

If it's for talking to others, well, that too is of limited use. Most people wait for maybe a couple of hours before they board onto a train.

If this is to help people waiting in lounges, then I'd rather they (govt.) monetize it. Especially for those waiting in AC class lounges. In anycase, no one here really plans for long layovers in railway stations.

I just dont get of what use is wifi in railway stations.

Better thing for the govt. would have been to invite and pay google for creating a distributed fibre optic network across India, connecting rural villages, using their expertise in handling large amounts of data.
It's not mentioned elsewhere, so I'll do a top-level comment. Think hard about moving from SF to Nashville, as the social and political differences might be quite a surprise. While the tech work might be similar, the people you'll see day to day will be rather different...

It might not matter, but don't go into the South unless you understand that it's different in the Red State areas vs. the Blue.
I can see something like the Open Skies treaty, actually working. But that doesn't end the surveillance it merely formalises the situation so all parties have equal access to the same level of spying capabilities on each other.
A convergent sequence doesn't have to be a digit expansion and so might not have the nice property that "if it's just repeating, it's rational, otherwise irrational."

Furthermore, it wasn't proven until the 18th century that Pi was irrational (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_that_%CF%80_is_irrationa...). To this day, it is unproven that pi+e is irrational, yet the decimal expansion is easy to compute (and you'd be a fool to bet on it being rational).
The joy of doing the same thing over and over again
Point taken. The type of nonprofit I'm thinking about is the type that might go through YC though e.g. Watsi. How much would that change things?

Also, how about if you're product manager at the nonprofit (e.g. with a budget and doing some hiring) vs. just an engineer at a big firm?

To clarify the last point, you're saying the hiring market for junior engineers is especially great right now, so it might make sense to lock in the money while you can?
One-based is just wrong. I've never been in a zero-based language and wanted one-based, but I go the other way all the time. Arrays beginning with zero are isomorphic to the ring formed by Z modulo N, and you can use a bit mask for modulo with a power-of-two array size. It's not an "implementation detail" that arrays start with zero it's a "zero is important to mathematics" thing.

If I want to build a hash table, a power of two size for the underlying array is a nice performance optimization since you can use a bitmask instead of a modulo operation, and it makes a big performance difference, what does one-based give you other than some nebulous "it just _seems_ simpler to think about" kind of nonsense? I love how we expect people to grok the type system but we're afraid zero-based arrays will scare mathematicians off.

See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_arithmetic#Integers_mo...