skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Micro-frameworks are a great way to get into web development if Rails is too intimidating. I cut my teeth on Sinatra. As I got more comfortable I started using Rails.

I now use Sinatra only if I'm absolutely sure that the project is not going to need anything more than a single page of code. I've re-implemented Rails functionality, poorly, way too many times.

Cuba looks much leaner and meaner than even Sinatra. Can't see many use cases for it, maybe if I were implementing a non-standard API for, say, a game engine. But who wants to use Ruby for a game? Pure HTTP applications, I can definitely see the appeal. But the second you need to serve HTML, you're gonna want Rails.
The FDA allowing the purchase of generics from reputable manufacturers in India and China, regardless of patent law, would also decimate the current system.
It's not clear from context in your comment if you're saying this, but, for `x: &'a T`, 'a is a bound in two ways:

- it is the maximum possible lifetime of the x variable itself,

- it is the minimum lifetime of the `T` instance x points to.

These are 100% related of course (x can't point to something that is invalid), but it is worth being careful about which end of a reference/pointer you're talking about when talking about validity.
Redhat does a lot of upstream development.

By comparison Debian just has enough resources for keeping Debian running. SUSE seems to be an afterthought at this point. Ubuntu seems to mostly be concerned with itself.
The link is down (shows a jpeg with a single white pixel), but I guess that one is the same:

http://themetapicture.com/points-of-view/
Why do you assume a single payer is inevitable? Are there some countries with great healthcare systems that are multi-payer? Switzerland comes to mind. Singapore?
3.7 KB image → 466 KB of text
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Arbitration should probably be a near mandatory starter. What shouldn't be allowed, however, is absolute binding arbitration, where, constitutionally guaranteed, access to courts is disallowed.

Probably, a public arbiter would be highly successful. There is great need for arbitration and those who do it best could be rewarded appropriately.
There were two different issues at play:

1. A system hang due an assertion in journald spamming kmsg.

2. The question of whether systemd should be logging to kmsg or doing anything based on the "debug" kernel command line argument.

Linus got pissed because, based on Steven Rostedt's post to LKML and the referenced bug report, it looked like Kay was refusing to fix issue #1, but that bug had already been addressed and a fix committed to systemd. In the aftermath there was also a flamewar over issue #2, which is what Lennart is responding to in that G+ post.
One important note that was just uncovered that Valeant was abusing the DAW designation. Doctors can write "Dispense As Written" on a prescription to imply that they want the Brand Name drug rather than the generic one. IE, a doctor will often write something like "Tylenol 500mg" but they don't really care if the patient gets any random acetaminophen. If they write "Tylenol 500mg DAW" that means they want the patient to get the brand name Tylenol.

It's looking more and more likely according to internal documents that Philidor was changing doctors' prescriptions by writing DAW on them so that the patients would get the much more expensive Valeant option instead of the cheap generic version -- this is highly illegal, people will definitely be going to jail for that.

Edit to add a source:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-29/philidor-s...
Wait for Go to be stable enough for Android...
So basically invalidate the patents that exist? That would certainly disrupt the system and would likely results in no new drugs.
I don't see what you're getting at. Group A is better and there are more of them. What's the problem?
or "utilities we need for the average people"
Ok, we put "tvOS application" in the title.
They aren't really a monoculture inside, though. Economics, for example, is pretty politically diverse, with economists ranging from socialist to libertarian in their political preferences, and yet still can't reproduce much.
Apply Occam's Razor to these supposed group differences. Which do you think is a more plausible reality?

A. Interviewers prefer candidates who are like themselves, interviewers are mostly white men, therefore most hires are white men.

B. The uterus and melanin both inhibit programming ability, interviewers are perfect judges of programming ability, therefore most hires are white men.

To look at the present (incomplete) evidence and decide that B is the more likely story, is racism/sexism.
They understand it perfectly - you're conflating the law (the government isn't allowed to prevent you from speaking) with the principle it's based on (restricting people's ability to speak is a backwards, repressive thing to do).

Freedom of speech != the first amendment.
What is Valeant doing that is illegal/unethical? After reading the article and your comment I still don't really understand what they did.

All I know for sure is that Valeant buys a lot of pharmacies, and one of them accused them of fraud? What are the specifics of what they're doing, and how is it harmful to consumers?
There was a really interesting episode of the podcast called White Coat Black Art that generally covers the Canadian health care system. In the recent election a single payer pharamacare system was part of one of the platforms, so the podcast host went to Sweden to see how they do it.

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/blog/pharmacare-sweden-sty...
Show HN: A very minimalistic puzzle game
WOW. I hadn't read that.

Some else posted this link a few days ago.

http://azvalue.blogspot.com/2015/08/valeant-detailed-look-in...

I think the cash flow analysis is pretty damning. Valeant says they are pulling in a lot of cash from all of their acquisitions, but if you calculate what the cash flow would need to be for that to be true, it's over 200% of what Valeant actually has on it's 10-Ks!
They probably worked on other things over the last 2 years as well. I wonder how many hours were actually spent on modifying 1000 lines of code. Probably a staggeringly high number, certainly all LOC are not equal.
I've heard that the system in Europe is very "friendly" to workers, but that seems absurd. To me its not even so much the inefficiency, but the general hostile relationship it creates between employee and employer. It probably contributes to the high level of youth unemployment in some European countries. Worse of all, such perverse incentives result in cultural shifts as to whats acceptable. To think that someone readily admits that he would be willing to sabotage his workplace due to a sense of entitlement of 2 years with 80% benefits is really appalling. This isn't some out of work layman, replaced by technology. This is a highly skilled knowledge worker making probably an income probably in the 95 percentile of his country. Just because you can exploit something doesn't make it okay.
This discusses the paper :

Spectral Variations of the Sky: Constraints on Alternate Universes by R. Chary
http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.00126
Data urls already solved this problem, and much better too.
Alternatively: basic income.
As the person who originally pushed extremely hard for all of the lifetime elision that we have today, I agree with you that this case is still too verbose.

That said, the reason it wasn't included in the original elision RFC (https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/141) is that the design space here is a little bit more subtle than some of the cases that did make it.

In particular, I believe that it's important to know that a particular struct contains a borrowed value somewhere.

So let's say you could leave off the `'c` on the Sheep struct, and I wrote a struct containing `Sheep`:

struct Flock {
sheep: Vec<Sheep>
}

Now, we have visually lost the fact that a borrowed value is stored inside the flock. Since data structures can get very recursive, this rapidly causes useful information about ownership to get lost.

What I'd like to see personally is:

struct Sheep<&> {
age: &i32
}

struct Flock<&> {
sheep: Vec<Sheep>
}

What this would mean is that you can always see, by looking at a struct definition, whether it contains borrowed values (anywhere recursively), but without the grotty need to define and wire up lifetime names.

I like the fact that this maintains the strong mental notion of ownership (the meaning of the & "operator" in Rust), but, as with normal elision, it eliminates the wiring that a good compiler should be able to do for you.
Your ad hominem attacks are completely inappropriate, and in fact might help prove the author's point, by your showing so much unwarranted hostility to him based solely on his politics.

To the substance of your post: I don't see any reason to suspect he wants a "war" or even a "contest". All he is doing is showing a large, deep inconsistency in academia:

1. Academia believes diversity is good, not just for fairness, but for results.

2. Academia is massively uniform, politically. It has almost no diversity in that area.

3. Academia hugely cares about diversity in all other forms, but does not care at all about this particularly large lack of diversity in their own home.

In other words, he's showing that academia is hypocritical. I don't see any way to avoid agreeing with him on 1-3 (even if I personally do not share his politics, which I do not).
Compute min(accepted a) and min(accepted B) instead of the means.

Dude, your comments are normally smarter than this. Yeah, you can easily fix Grahams's test -- all you need are some numbers that do not exist and that we cannot measure.

We're talking about VC's evaluating founders. That does not, and cannot, get reduced to a numerical score. And even if VC's did use some sort of scoring rubric, then we would still not know if there was unfairness in the way they made the scores, or unfairness in the selection process. It would just be punting the problem down a layer. PG's central claim -- that a third-party can detect the bias/unfairness in the funding process just using math -- is false.

You can only know if the process is biased/unfair if you have deep qualitative understanding of the process.
Keeping people in a zoo is more disagreeable to me. This liberal idea of keeping tribal cultural of any kind around is incredibly disturbing.

What does conversion of people to a western system of beliefs have to do with keeping people in a zoo? No one said anything about keeping people there; what I take issue with is the coerced or forced conversion of people.

We should not be using the communities poorest children for instance as repositories of language.

I don't think anyone implied that, I have no idea how you've extrapolated that idea from the statements made.

As a rich, educated person I would never want my child to learn a dead language. Even Latin with it's ivory status. Their future will be hard enough.

I fail to see what your socioeconomic status has to do with this conversation. Regardless, "dead" languages are not at issue here. Even if they were, understanding languages that are no longer in common use is important in understanding the past of humanity. I only object to the active discouragement of learning.

Learning for the sake of gaining knowledge itself seems like a reasonably admirable trait.
Black slavery proves my point. Seen in the context of an experimental social institution, it was a massive failure that barely made it 8 generations before it completely imploded on itself (and took the lives of 650k Americans with it). There's no doubt that it seriously harmed everyone associated with its practice (including in ways you don't usually hear people mention, like decreased ambition and work ethic for everyone, slaves and masters, in slave economies), even mostly-innocent parties who were "guilty by association" like the free states. We're lucky that the US survived black slavery.

Slavery has been tried many times but the gross inequity it inflicts means that no one can operate a stable economy or social system that depends on it.
Seems a bit childish
It might be more clear to observe that many popular Internet things created in the past 20 years have content restrictions. I think it's totally valid to ask why that is and by what mechanism(s) it was caused.
Not all things need to be useful, sometimes they're there just to stimulate thoughts and ideas. I like this, it's insane but creative.
If feel the addition:

"C" the applicants you're looking at have roughly
equal distribution of ability.

makes the reasoning more tautological/weak.

If we take two dart boards (one for female -, one for male founders) as a visual, where hitting near the bull's eye counts as "startup success".

If we take "C" to be true, then the darts would be thrown at random.

Now we draw a circle around the bull's eye. Anything landing in this circle we fund. If this circle has a smaller radius on the female dartboard, than on the male dartboard, then evidently the smaller female circle will contain more darts closer to the target (better average performance) than the larger radius male circle.

But then we do not even need performance numbers: Smaller radius circles will have less darts in them. Using "C" we only need to know that the male-female accept ratio is not 50%-50% for us to have found a bias.

In short: If you see a roughly equal distribution of ability, and (for simplicity) a roughly equal number of female to male fundraisers, then you should always have a roughly equal distribution of female to male founders in your portfolio, performance be damned.

The technique is still useful for when you do not have these female vs. male accept ratio's, and a VC publishes only success rates, but this information on ratio's is often more public than success rates/estimates.
Actually, I just looked into it, that's no longer possible. I was talking about contravariant lifetime positions, which happen with functions, but now it seems like function pointers are invariant in those positions, not contravariant.

The idea was to have something like

struct Foo<'a> {f: fn(&'a u8)}

should only be able to accept pointers that live shorter than the struct. But contravariance seems to have been removed.
Ask HN: What do you think about Medium?
Recently I have been very fascinated with medium.com, because I really love the idea of merging a blogging platform and a social network, and nobody has done this right up to this point. And also because I am thinking about working on a competing project, since I have many ideas on how this can be done better.

I would really love to hear your thoughts about medium, and I would be very grateful if you could answer a few questions:

- How do you feel about medium? Love/hate/indifferent?

- What did they do right, and what are it's flaws?

- What would you do better? What needs to be changed?

- What do you expect to see in the future? In 5 years, will medium be what twitter is now, or will nobody care about it? Will they be able to maintain the content quality, and if yes then how?

- How do you think they are going to monetize it? How would you do that?
Which are essentially two of the big branches of normative ethics: deontology and consequentialism.
Yeah it's in West Papua rather than PNG.
The prosecutors job is to pursue a case they know is unjust against a defendant they know is innocent?

Because this helps society?
Well, my rephrasing was meant to be more than just s/validity/liveness/: I find that removing quantifiers (like for-all) often improves my understanding, as it usually gives more obvious context/motivation for what the goal is. It is then easier to understand the more formal version once I know approximately what it is trying to do.
I'm not familiar with Minsky's book, but the core idea seems to have a lot in common with the modular theory of mind [1], which was explored in a MOOC that I found fascinating, and which is now available in a self-paced form [2].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_mind

[2] - https://www.coursera.org/learn/science-of-meditation
Which is more plausible?

a) the action of natural selection, sexual selection, and the hormone environment magically stop at the blood-brain barrier, or

b) there are real group differences between human populations?

We've already eliminated all overt discrimination. If you continue to cry discrimination, you're essentially postulating a giant unconscious conspiracy. I find the idea wildly implausible. It's much simple to just accept that not everyone is equal in aptitude and ability.
> On Medicaid and have HER+ breast cancer? Tough, you can take some horrible chemotherapy that will give you 6 months, not the new HER2 drugs that will give you 5+ years of life.

Which is exactly how it should work. The government should allow limited monopolies as an incentive for innovation, but it shouldn't be subsidizing them with taxpayer dollars.

The vast majority of new drugs have few if any benefits over existing drugs, they're just government handouts to the wealthy. So I fail to see how a system that provided the best possible treatments for 99% of health problems for every American at a fraction of the current cost wouldn't be vastly better than our current system.
A charitable interpretation of what he or she said is this: don't evaluate bias by looking at outcomes of the average applicant, look at the outcomes of the borderline applicants. Even if there is no perfect way to define or measure the minimum acceptable applicant, I think it is reasonable to identify whether applicants were borderline or not.
Couple of years ago, someone from HN was trying to improve their imagination skills, based on the life of Nikola Tesla. Not sure what happened to that experiment. Anyone knows?
There is a simple explanation for differences in abilities between groups that has nothing to do with their genetics are so-called natural ability: the fact that groups often grow up around other members of their group. Both nature and nurture are largely in common for many groups, so it could easily be either that causes the observed differences in ability.
It's actually most of the "pro's" and amateurs alike that have gotten people compromised for over a decade giving bad advice. The advice to all standardize on a few things that get the most attention by attackers resulted in botnets of hundreds of thousands to millions of nodes that required just a few 0-days & pre-made expliot kits with high reliability. My methods blocked all of that in the field despite tons of recorded attempts and even pentesting by pro's. Everyone else doing it had same results. QED. So, are you all continuing to offer the same bad advice because you're amateurs at real security or just involved in defrauding your customers for profitable consulting fees?

So, let me break it down again in concrete, proven terms suppored by decades of INFOSEC research and field work. History shows any complex system has vulnerabilities. To attack, the attacker must know the system, the vulnerability, how to exploit it, and the specific configuration. If defence in depth, then the attacker must know that for the whole route to them. So, you either have to make those have no vulnerabilities (good luck) or you have to implement measures to prevent their exploitation. That requires changing one or more of the pre-conditions of a successful attack. So, measures that eliminate vulnerabilities by design (eg Correct-by-Construction), prevent their exploitation with obfuscation/transformations, or deny enemy knowledge of their existence all provably increase security. I combine all of these in anything I do with strongest, most-analysed versions of each that are available. Positive field results followed while others get smashed repeatedly.

Note: This is especially true if the operational requirement in question, like protecting whole HW lifecycle, is in its infancy in INFOSEC techniques and has little to go on. Then, obfuscation, applying strong stuff where possible, R.E. samples (eg ChipWorks), and layers of detection/audit are best thing you can do. It's what we're doing now. You're side would suggest mask/fab/packaging companies should publish all source code and security methods online for attackers to study. Given what happened to desktops and servers, I'm glad they're listening to me instead of you. ;)
You mean no new drugs funded by for-profit companies. Drugs would continue to be developed by governments and non-profits.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10484815
If you want an extremely small system, you can put everything you need into the initrd. It's not strictly an initrd then, since it's not really used for bootstrapping a larger system image.
B. The uterus and melanin both inhibit programming ability, interviewers are perfect judges of programming ability, therefore most hires are white men.

Serious question: can you at least steel man this point of view rather than making it a ridiculous straw man? If you cannot steel man it, what makes you so sure you really understand the argument?

For bonus points, you can also point out the glaringly obvious complication to this chain of logic: A. Interviewers prefer candidates who are like themselves, interviewers are mostly white men, therefore most hires are white men.
The article does not "clearly state" reverse causality as "most likely"; it mentions that as a possibility.

It's a fair, well-qualified headline – "hints at the possibility" – summarizing the new evidence.
Similarly out there beliefs Bali...

http://www.smh.com.au/world/communist-victims-exhumed-in-bal...
Yes, it can be true. FirstRound could still positively value that experience, but just not be valuing it enough.
Your comment makes sense; indeed, fairness in selection process does not imply that people aren't being discriminated against. For instance, the SAT is fair, but denies those with less opportunities a chance to get into top-tier schools. I can get on board with that.

> We can't really think about whether rules are applied fairly or not, but whether the rules produce the outcomes that we want.

This is a more explicit way of phrasing an attitude that I've noticed in my community (a liberal U.S. university). However, I don't think it's obvious that this is the right principle to uphold.

I squirm with discomfort at the idea that we will only support "fairness" and empirical data to the extent that it is applicable to the outcome that we personally desire. This seems to imply that all evaluation metrics are "biased", until we can find a measure that selects equal representation across all demographics, regardless of the size of applicant pool or ability distribution among that pool.

What outcomes, exactly, do we want? More representation of under-represented groups? How does this relate to the goal of maximizing return on the portfolio? What does this mean for people who want a "meritocracy" (if such a thing can exist)?

Thoughts?