skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Japan wasn't always filled with old people (even this is overstated as a percentage of the population,) and it was still extremely safe. I witnessed this firsthand.

Japan has a culture that expects and reinforces cooperation and responsibility and respect, and it's ethnically homogeneous enough that this is manifested even between strangers. It also doesn't have the kind of downright devastating poverty that I've seen in the USA even in well-off cities. There are a lot of reasons that Japan can do things we can't do, but I don't believe the percentage of old people has much if anything to do with it.
We charge their credit card. We don't think it's likely that people will use this to maliciously cancel people's Comcast, but we'll absolutely cooperate with authorities in the event of identity theft.
The great thing about exercise is there is no minimum effective dose.

Pushups are a great exercise, and they are more of a full-body exercise than they appear to be. They're an excellent starting point!
I would love to be able to do this with my 3yo son...but there are two things stopping me: Cars and helicopter parent culture.

Cars, and the entitled culture we have fostered around them, make streets hostile to pedestrians and likely fatal to small children, even if children followed the laws and common sense. I experience it practically daily. Every time I cross the street at a marked intersection, cars will stop for me 9/10 times. At unmarked intersections, its more like 5/10. Crossing at a stoplight with a walk signal on is still precarious because of the tendency of many drivers to blow through crosswalks without stopping so they can turn right on red. Every single day I experience a situation that could be fatal to a less visible child with a more fragile body and slightly worse situational awareness. No way.

The second problem is the CPS story. My neighborhood is extremely safe, but the parents here are borderline psychotic about helicoptering their way through their children's lives. Every time I take my kid to a playground, I end up witnessing helicopter parents freaking out about how my kid will climb a ladder by himself or jump off of a piece of equipment by himself... sometimes they swoop in to "parent" for me...and other times they will chew me out for being so irresponsible as to let my kid learn his own boundaries. As much as I respect the mission of CPS, I've heard enough horror stories about their enforcement of parenting methodology that I wouldn't ever risk having them called because my kid walked to the park by himself.

It's a shame.
FWIW, that "experiment" really is a hoax from a 90's self-help book.

Simimlar experiments have been held, but with different, much weaker results.

Edit: the now deleted parent had a link to the so-called "five monkey experiment" that is debunked here: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6828/was-the-exp...
In that case you won't need it at all, as in an "environment of adults" you would have a responsible boss who is capable of proper project management, so you won't have to work through the night just to meet deadlines.
>> Actually, people mostly talk about how
>> the world would be much better if NP != P.

> Seems like either could be viewed as
> "better" in some way.

Indeed, it depends on your internal axioms about "better". I don't have strong feelings either way either, and my feelings don't affect what's true and what isn't. The problem is open, remains open, and we deal with what's in front of us.

>> But you know someone who claims to be
>> able to solve subset-sum problems quickly.

> ... He also ran through many thousands
> of problem instances ... with varying
> parameters ... it did appear that there
> was a sub-exponential trend ...

Unfortunately that means exactly nothing. The whole point is that for many (perhaps most) problems, the proportion of hard instances gets vanishingly small, and yet those are the ones that we often need to solve. Showing a sub-exponential trend for randomly chosen instances, or worse, instances he's chosen to show you, is no evidence at all.

>> I have a graph to 3-color, I wonder if
>> I should convert it into a subset-sum
>> problem for them to solve.

> I'd guess he (the person who claims a
> P=NP proof and sub-exponential-time
> subset sum solver) would be willing
> to run his algorithm ...

Perhaps that would be interesting. I'll look into how easy the conversion might be.
The point is that if voters would otherwise support someone, but they can't run because an inner circle of political elites won't let them, then those people are an obstruction to democracy

I think we agree. I'm just pointing out that this is not a problem with this specific decision by the Democratic party, but an inherent problem with any system that allows a small number of powerful political parties to act as the gatekeepers deciding who can appear on the ballot. This is the system we have, and it is an impediment to democracy.
Good read. Here's the best part:

In 1816, I was consulted by a young woman laboring under general symptoms of diseased heart, and in whose case percussion and the application of the hand were of little avail on account of the great degree of fatness. The other method just mentioned [direct auscultation] being rendered inadmissible by the age and sex of the patient, I happened to recollect a simple and well-known fact in acoustics, ...
Overhauling Your Transactional Emails in Two Days
Even in the rough and tumble NY of 40 years ago, parents allowed kids to roam freely up until the tragic disappearance of Etan Patz in '79. [1]

Seems like that event and the subsequent media fearmongering is what really spurred the cultural shift towards helicopter parenting and a reduction in youthful independence in the US.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/hey-pare...
Thanks! We didn't expect this to blow up quite this fast!
Of course that is a component, but no one was sure if it was the whole story. Now we know.
Honestly - a large amount of crimes in Japan go unreported. Many murders are written off as suicides (which contributes to the high suicide and low murder rates reported by the government...). I don't really trust crime statistics coming from a country that's heavily influenced by Yaks.

This has to do entirely with public perception (as user alexleavitt also mentioned).

In Japan, I feel safe to leave my bag on a bench while I go use a public restroom. I expect my bag to be there when I return. It's probably not any safer, in reality, than it is where I am in the States - but I would never leave my bag on a table unattended where I live. I would expect it to be stolen.

In reality, it would probably be there when I get back. No different than in Japan.

When I walk around Los Angeles at night, I walk defensively and make sure I keep alert at all times and I'm always paying attention to my surroundings. When I was walking around Tokyo at night - it felt no different than the day. Except it was dark outside. I'm certain that had I had better knowledge of the "dangerous" streets of Tokyo, my perception would be different.

If I feel safe, I'm likely to feel my child is safe. In the US, a child walking on the streets in most suburbs is likely just as safe as in Japan... but public perception means you'll get child protection services called on you if you think about letting your 9 year old walk down the block to the store to buy a soda.
Fortunately, that violates most local zoning ordinances.
I reported an issue with spoofing on the Google play store about 6 months ago. They told me there was no timeframe for the fix, and no fix yet as far as I'm aware. Maybe if I post it here someone from google will do something...

Just so everyone is aware, you can use any email address as your company email address on the google play store without verification. This means when looking at an app, you see the email is support@legitcompany.com and think it's from them, but it's not.
Once upon a time I lived at an apartment and comcast did not bill me for an entire year of internet. It was awesome. And more reliable than the comcast my parents paid for.

Now I have Lumos, which is old Ntelos, which is even better than my free comcast.
I'd love to be able to agree, but in the US at least, it seems like it's all or nothing. There is little possibility of trading in half my salary for a 20-25 hours work week. Instead, it's 50+ hours or nothing.

Employers want complete control over your every waking hour, it seems. Even the ones screaming that they can't find skilled workers won't even consider allowing a consulting type relationship.

Buying a nice house or a nice car isn't a reason to feel proud, at least for me. It's a way to signal to the opposite sex that I'm a potential worthy mate. These things tend to matter once you're a little older ;)
There are laws that deal with gangs and organized crime. The Banditos and Cossacks are both very much gangs and very into organized crime. Being present at a gang shoot out while wearing gang colors is association. Is that fair? probably not, but that's what happened.
There doesn't have to be clear boundary. You can continue using the micro theory at the cost of computational resources and (often) loss of analytical analysibility. Or you can use a mix of both theories. Remember the map is not the territory; the theory/ies not the actual system.

This is typically apparent to people working in numerical simulations of systems that don't fall cleanly in one bucket. For example, someone in my department does simulations of biological molecules. They simulate only the part of the system they are interested in (a few atoms) using quantum mechanics. For the rest they use classical physics. The accuracy is much better than what experiment can achieve.
hanging around a motorcycle club with weapons at the ready seems a bit suspect....generally speaking you wouldnt want to pick a fight with a biker club when everyone is present...

unless you were a tax payer funded gang with no accountability and were heavily armed
Just as important - keep your diet on track. Lay off processed food, sugar, simple carbs (bread, pasta, etc.), and eat plenty of protein and complex carbs.
It depends, of course, on the users. Some of them are angels, some of them are... not very smart regarding technology. ;-) Also, some are just plain mean, at least if they are having a bad day.

At any rate, I much prefer dealing with users to dealing with printers. Printers are evil. I remember the time one of our engineers wanted to print a PDF file, and the result looked superficially the way it was supposed to, except every single letter was incremented by one (so "ABC" became "BCD")... Or the time two printers were configured with the same IP address - due to ARP caching lifetime, every couple of seconds, clients would switch which printer they would send pages to, so print jobs ended up literally being all over the place. ;-)
If you don't push the final button on the form after you enter credit card information, it won't cancel your account. You'll get to see almost everything.

If you want to see a sneak peek of the follow-up steps, send me an email at earl@airpaperinc.com and I'll send you what our follow-up instructions/emails would look like.

Cheers,
~Earl
The only problem I see is you are asking personal info (Credit Card etc) without encryption. You should fix that asap. other than than, great job.
A year old report on motorists passing stopped school buses:

http://www.ksde.org/Home/QuickLinks/NewsRoom/tabid/586/aid/5...
Great write-up. Thanks for sharing. :-)
Microsoft buys Havok, the physics engine for pretty much every game ever
Yes, some of us love to solve the problems others are having and make their day. If you're looking for a place where you can do high-level customer-focused technical support and system administration, contact me, we're looking for more good senior admins to do cloud support. My email's in my profile.
But did that increase productivity?
I also reported this on September 21st, after someone alerted me to this on Twitter.[1]

To think that uBlock Origin itself was suspended from the store back in April because its icon resembled too much that of the other uBlock.[2]

[1] https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/646059022790037504

[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/50
Yes, time is money isn't it? Like anything else it's easier the more often you do it. I have a template letter I adapt, and I use the automated kiosk at the post office to send. Do it when you are out running errands and it doesn't add up to much time really.

I can say that if I were running a $5 'let us cancel for you' deal I'd damn sure be doing it all by letter though. No way I'd pay to have a bunch of employees sitting on hold with Comcast when I could crank out form letters and mail them in big batches. Possibly easy money if you have enough clients to scale it.
This could be quite a scary prospect. There are certain anonymous and controversial artists who have solicited and received donations through Patreon. Some of these artists remain anonymous because of the controversial nature of their work. I think this is a scary prospect for both patrons and artists.
Depends on the recruiter you're talking to, but negotiation in most cases is done to get a 'buy' from the candidate. If I'm going to a client to get more salary, it is usually because the candidate won't accept the current offer (or at least says that).

Sometimes we'll negotiate just because the candidate wants to maximize the offer, but negotiation isn't usually as intricate or time-consuming as it's portrayed.

It does benefit me to close a deal quickly, but the easiest way to close quickly isn't by convincing candidates to take low offers - the best way to make a deal happen quickly is to convince the client to pay my candidate at or above market rate.

If candidate tells me $n gets their acceptance, the easiest way for me to close that deal quickly is to get $n+5 from my client - not to convince candidate to accept $n-5. And $n+5 also nets me more than $n-5.

The risk isn't the time spent in negotiations over a small difference to the recruiter's bottom line - the time is minimal. The risk is losing the deal entirely (and getting $0).
I don't think data science for health is in any way limited to wearables.

I think this is the first time we've had the opportunity to do real data science at a massive scale with patient data of all sorts, including electronic medical record (EMR) data. This is because we now have:

- Widespread use of EMRs

- Decent standardized schemas for representing that data (i.e. FHIR https://www.hl7.org/fhir/)

- Not-terrible medical ontologies (i.e. RxNorm for drugs, LOINC for labs, Snomed for concepts etc.)

- Reasonably accessible tools to process the massive datasets (<insert big data toolkit here>)

Many of these things emerged or matured fairly recently, so I think we're going to see a real explosion in medically relevant data science. Fitbit/wearable sensor data is only the beginning, I think things like meaningfully informing diagnoses of patients based on medical history beyond what a doc or nurse could do on their own is within reach, and the sky's the limit!

(Full disclosure I work for a health DS startup, and was an Insight Fellow, although prior to the health program existing)
Sorry to be a hater. I think the average HN reader knows a lot more about this than the average Bloomberg reader.
> USA has already been excluded from using Treefinder in February 2015.
My experience cancelling netflix was pretty painless too.. just a few clicks on the website, done... their "come back" emails were only every few months too, unlike some services where you'll get more than one a week for some time. After they had picked streaming service back up again, I re-joined... been pretty happy with them overall.
Yeah, basically the only way this wouldn't scare me off would be if it was explicitly advertised as a siesta-style schedule - e.g. everybody works X hours/day but with a break of an hour or two in the middle of the day to do whatever... and even only then if I was actually convinced it wouldn't be used to pressure for unpaid work.
Why single out Japan? Come and visit most of Europe and observe the same.
Is it any more dangerous now? Crime rates are generally down per capita I believe, hopefully car accidents too. I'm not sure this story about Japan is particularly unusual or odd in much of the world. I ran around London on my own from about 7 fwiw
Physics still wins whether it's helpful or not.
Printers are the first robots that were mass-produced. It's the first robotics experience most companies get. And we've been buying their learning experiences, because that's been the state of the art of robotic printing.
I agree that there seems to be a state of constant paranoia, but could you elaborate on this:

> In many cases, they're not safe because that's the assumption.
I don't know about physics specifically but there is a significant amount of discussion in the Philosophy world about the class of problems that you are describing.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vagueness/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/
The way I read it, the author was saying that it is a problem of recognition: Because you are not customer-facing, you are more invisible in the system and with it comes the lack of job satisfaction one may get from a pat on the back of a job well done via the customer interaction.

Certainly it' s a double-edged sword but that's how I read it at least.
The US has an outsized culture of fear that's far in disproportion to other countries. The reasons are complex but I'd posit one major factor is that the US has, by far, the most commercial and competitive media market of any country. This leads to the normalization of sensationalism in the chase for ratings and a systematic distortion of reality.

Watch the movie Nightcrawler for an example of the type of culture that pervades newsrooms around the country and understand the effect that has on people's decisions regarding safety.
This is where we agree to disagree. "Old people" is just one factor in my opinion. It doesn't throw any of the others out. (For that matter, "high average age" doesn't mean "a country of old people." It can also mean "A country with fewer children." Edit: I guess I am the person who used that phrase to start with, but I feel like you are twisting my meaning, I guess.)

Have a good day.
I still can't believe Soylent is a thing. What is wrong with food? People who want this make no sense to me. None at all.
What gets me is there's no need to not attribute the Popular Science article. I think it's perfectly reasonable to present treasures from the past. If this has ended with "this is a condensed version" or "this is a summary", then no one would have thought the worse. And the addition of the images (which do have proper citations), does add more to the original Pop Sci article.
Why would you think allowing daemon processes are bad? You want notifications without having your app front and center, right? Need a daemon for that.
Haha beautiful, I was just typing this same idea in my other reply. Good luck, you are saving people lots of hassle for a low price and I hope you do well.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the beauty and simplicity of the command-line's design. It has a lot less dependencies and complexity.

Slack's command-line seems to have good discoverability and uptake:
http://i.imgur.com/9UFHSAE.png
The way I see it, they are rude to you by making you go through hoops, so I am rude to them. I repeatedly say "Please cancel" to every new rep I am transferred to and/or every time they ask me a question or go into a spiel.

The only time I will not say "please cancel" is when they ask me any information that needs to be verified in order to cancel. This has worked with Comcast as well as a handful of other service providers that I wished to cancel. I have never been on the phone more than 6 minutes. Try it out.
Good question. I use Soylent as a meal replacement once a day. It's easier than cooking when I'm very busy during the day, very cheap, and I like knowing I'm getting some essential vitamins.
To use generators, I need something like Babel, so I may as well use async/await.
Something like this:): http://coolcomputersetups.com/images/037770.jpg
Came here to say this (about the name). What corporate pointy eared would buy a product called FogBugz over one called JIRA? I mean really. No contest right there.
I was disappointed that the article seemed to enforce this dichotomy as well, by bringing up the possibility of asking the people in question:

> But it has never been easier to proceed with good faith and Google, to seek out and respect context[...]

and then seemingly striking it down with the Shamsie essay:

> The moment you say, a male American writer can’t write about a female Pakistani, you are saying, Don’t tell those stories.

but leaving out the part immediately preceding the quote:

> But it should be clear that the response to this is for writers to write differently, to write better, to critique the power structures rather than propping them up, to move beyond stereotype—which you need to do for purely technical reasons, because the novel doesn’t much like stereotypes.

which doesn't at all preclude discussion.
Even with the intrinsics AES is pretty expensive

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-aes-ni-perfo...
This is the story of all humanity up until the last couple of centuries. Tribes, countries, empires killing and conquering. It's not a uniquely American phenomenon. It's still happening in many places today.

I think we need to stop leaning on past atrocities (without endorsing or excusing them in any way) as an excuse for not being responsible adults in the here and now. We can't change the past, we can only live the best life we can going forwards.
You mean in the U.S.? I honestly don't know if it more dangerous now than when I was a kid. I do know that kids are generally less free to roam around their own hometown without parental supervision than they used to be, something multiple other people have remarked upon elsewhere in this same discussion.

I used to play in the patch of woods behind my house. So did all the neighbor kids. Sometimes, a bunch of kids would get together and build an earthen dam across the creek. My dad would call us home using a hunting horn. I went where I wanted in my neighborhood. My parents knew where I was, generally, but that didn't mean they could readily physically locate me. So they called us home with the horn, which we could hear anywhere in the woods.

That kind of thing would get social services called on you today.
My question is why you chose Soylent over more tried and trued meal replacements like Ensure?
I think being so heavily pushed by Apple is actually a downside for ObjC here. I really enjoyed programming ObjC when I was programming for iOS and Mac. That was mostly because of the very rich API shipped with Apple products.

Can you point me to a list of libraries written in ObjC that work without Apple specific code? (E.g. without using anything starting with 'NS')
I have a desk like that (one out of a set rebuilt from giant wooden doors, of all things), but I find I only use maybe 6/10ths of the space.
I haven't tried the BTables format, but I agree with their criticism of HDF5. It seems to be an incredibly over-designed format with under-designed APIs.

(Why would I need a directory tree inside a file that only one process can write to anyway? Why wouldn't I just use the filesystem I already have?)
Stagefright 2.0: over 1bn Android smartphones vulnerable to latest bug
The Value of Quantifying Technical Debt
Comcast is actually my only utility that I didn't set up autopay for because I was worried about exactly that. They really should have an "autopay until rate increase, at which point contact me" option since their service isn't charged on usage.
It probably enables doxxing of anonymous artists and their patrons.
We have developed a system where we can process thousands of tickets using proprietary mobile and web technologies our programmers created.