skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
NULL could mean "not applicable", in which case it is not an error. Or it could mean "unknown" in which case it is a data inconsistency. It could mean "not available", in which case it is a signal. It could mean "uninitialized data", in which case it is a process error.

There's no way to programmatically determine which of these cases it is.

>I don't understand the implication that storing NULL means something went wrong?

It doesn't mean something went wrong. It also doesn't mean something went right. It means nothing by itself.

NULL simply has no consistent semantics in a DB model. Its only semantic purpose is to make joins consistent, which often has nothing to do with your problem domain. That's why higher levels of normalization tend toward fewer uses of NULL.

Imagine you were using a database to log processes on a supercomputer. You log access to the machine whenever a process starts, and you write a NULL value to the end_time field for the process. What does NULL mean, here? Does it mean the process is still running? Or does it mean the process failed to write it's end state (for instance, if the machine crashed?) Does it mean the process is non-terminating? If you read this value from the database, would it be correct to wait for the process to finish?

You'd have to go and look at what processes are running. Which means this field no longer models the end time of the process, it models some dirty hybrid thing that you have to manually verify every time you read a NULL value. That's the problem with NULLs: they are bad at modeling your domain. It's a big middle finger from your data telling you to verify it yourself. It is one of those things that makes computers stupid, because you can't get past it without involving a human brain. (Which would make it very hard to make a computer learn how to build database schemas.)
The sad thing is that HN is responding in a similar manner, with people quick to judge and condemn the students as spoiled children.

I don't have a horse in the race, and I wanted to call out the author's blatant bias, and yet I was immediately downvoted to the bottom of the thread.

I am disappointed to see these knee-jerk reactions gaining consensus when we have precious little insight into the issues at hand and how they are actually being dealt with.
>What went wrong all those years ago?

It's always been there. Except now, they have the power of social media. Do you find a view "problematic"? No problem. Just round up a few thousand like-minded cohorts and burn the heretics.
Yeah, except not completely broken with shit like "let's run python in the browser with javascript!" and "let's animate UI components originally designed to be static with an overloaded scripting language!" and a million other things. The browser and web were originally designed to view webpages (read documents) and not run arbitrary untrusted code...

tl;dr you are making the point I refuted in my original post.
That's not the definition of the term "liberal". To be liberal means to accept or respect behaviour or ideas different to one's own.

Your definition of liberal more closely matches the definition of "libertarianism".
In other words, it’s quite annoying. Especially when you want to do nested styling.
Meh, $94MM a year is still probably not worth it just to store non-users data from Belgium.
The idea of Chinese people being a "minority group" makes me laugh. It is so absurd that it must be a strawman.
Of course it's a useful distinction. You could choose something else, like 90% of them wore jeans. But that doesn't mean jeans wearers are the problem.
I cannot agree with the idea that denouncing racism or call for the resignation of someone who has shown to have racist views is intolerance.
the over-representation of a specific political/societal opinion in an education setting is not a good thing

In the US context there is very much a reason for this: the right is hostile to intellectualism per se, and occasionally hostile to non-pragmatic education itself.

discourse

It's rather rare that the people one is speaking to in a comments thread actually change views in it, especially to the extent that they start off using codeword language. It's more for the 'benefit' of bystanders. And a bit of good old fashioned point-scoring.
Oh yeah, many places accept NFC cards. However most (anecdotally) banks do not issue cards with NFC support.

My old Amex Blue supported NFC 4-5 years ago, which was super rad. None of my current cards, however do.
Virtually all of these students are happy to not be treated like babies themselves. What they are complaining about is that their classmates who disagree with them may be trusted to do the right thing. And how can they do the right thing if they disagree with me about what is right? Clearly the only solution is for the school to force them to behave the way I want them to. The right way.
It was simple, but now is bad.

As a dutiful orc in the army I only needed for the warchief to tell me where to hit hard.

Same with Diablo - the rudimentary story was simple and got the job just fine.

Also warcraft 2 had ships. Their lack from III was a crime.

With WCIII they tried to make an epic story - and it was just meh at best. Pitching so hard Orc Jes .. I mean Thrall created such damage that the whole Horde feeling is suffering to this day. I enlisted Horde to play Kharn and instead got Roboute Guilliman
++ on the water rinse. It intuitively makes a lot of sense.

I've always wondered how much decay could be prevented if we just trained people to drink a glass of water after each meal.

One day I'll distribute a cola that includes a chewable calcium tablet to take after each consumption.
"It could be ready in 3 years." Yup, right with flying cars. Move along, nothing to see here.
Toothpaste is more than fluoride, it contains surfactants and mild abrasives to aid in the cleaning process.
Behind the Scenes at the Glitzy Oscars for Science
Do you think that data is worth 91M euros/98M USD a year? I don't, and I doubt Facebook (or its investors) do either. That's a strong opening salvo.
FYI: I just got notice of a reply that happened 26 days ago. Perhaps it is currently being sorted out.
No reason need be given for expulsion. Yale AFAIK is a private university and business and can do as it wishes.

The reason for jail would be violation of a restraining order. The reason for civil suit would be damages to the university's image or property.

The problem could be cleared out in 3 days and not a stir of it left after a week, were the administration willing to maintain control of their campus.
Come on now. There will be at least a school that stands up to it. There are still universities that ban premarital sex, for crying out loud.
You're thinking of fluoride applications.
My guitar rig includes a 31 band EQ. Does that answer your question?
How about not singling out FB and forbid the same to Google and others as well?
7 Cool things to do in Terminal
This is a pretty international website, I'd like to understand why you believe that mostly those in the U.S. are interested and involved in the discussion of this issue?

Besides, you assume that everyone in the U.S. have the same understanding of the word "liberal". It's always good to have these terms discussed and clarified.
I'd be shocked if most rapists confessed. That would, as far as I know, make rape completely unique in the world of crime.

Additionally, as another commenter mentioned, false confessions exist.

I don't understand your "standard procedure" comment. Either collecting the kits is useful or it is not. If it is, then test them. If it is not, don't collect them. If collecting them is "standard procedure" then change the procedure.
Psychologists' betting market hints at most reliable research findings
Glad to see that someone else responded, so I'm not alone here ... this is mostly nonsense. I have NEVER seen a report on toxicity of solar panels in use from "leakage", if there is such a thing, please post. Yes, solar panels contain elements like Cd and As, so do many of the electronics that you carry around in your pocket, and as long as they are bonded inside a semiconductor, they are basically inert slices of rock. However, most commercial solar panels today are silicon-based, with these other elements as dopants at a tiny percentage. A CdTe solar panel would be made of, well, Cadmium and Tellurium, both of which are pound-for-pound thousands of time more toxic to humans than silicon !!!! (though still basically inert slices of rock if they are in solid-state solar panels).

Admittedly, as with all e-waste, we need to look to what happens to solar panels when their life is up and they are landfilled or, hopefully, recycled. That said, over its 25+ year useful life, a solar panel will prevent tons of coal from being burned, which in and of itself would release a non-zero amount of cadmium and other heavy metals into the atmosphere.
That's probably the worst possible outcome.

These people are PAYING to go there. They are PAYING to live there. Are you saying they should have to put up with harassment and bigotry in addition to that?
For anyone else confused, Modified Stillmans is a brushing technique. Demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zEDhurn7zY
I think that this is the inevitable downfall of any online information source that doesn't have some kind of verification or moderation. People can pay for Facebook likes and Twitter follows and they'll continue to do so because it makes them money.

I know everyone's heard it on here, but this is also the same argument that gets thrown around Reddit all the time. People found that they can game the system for their personal benefit so Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc. get spammed by marketers. Marketing seems to be the common factor here.

When a social communications medium is co-opted by marketers, you can guarantee that the quality will go down and, by extension, the usefulness to its users. It's the same reason why everyone hates "Search Engine Optimization". It's not optimization, it's flat out manipulation and cheating and it makes "real" searches less useful.
Is Harvard proud of its "billionaire dropouts"? For anyone less successful I would think there would be some uneasiness in showcasing someone who never earned a degree. I mean when someone drops out it obviously means that the conventional university path failed them. This seems like a weird message to put in a school magazine. I guess Harvard can say that they at least helped Bill Gates on his path to founding Microsoft but they certainly can't claim them as one of their own?
Machine 'Prints' Brick Roads
I'm glad you mentioned this. I was on the fence initially and even had a bit of a spat with Popehat on Twitter over it (blocked by him now, heh). In the end, I'm getting really tired of people taking one side of an issue as the universal truth when there's much more going on. Some people may not be good at explaining things like the woman in the FIRE video, but that doesn't seem to be the entire story or even a significant part of it.

Worse yet, some are taking this as a launching point to dispose of the "safe space" concept without knowing what exactly defines a "safe space." For people who don't have anything to lose (white, rich, heterosexual, and non-transgender) this is fine. But for the rest of us who depend to communicate and get support on safe spaces online and offline it's a big deal.
Ian Agol’s proof of Wise’s conjecture (2012)
No. Why don't I let the professor himself explain it to your dumb ass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM-VE8r7MSI
Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow (2003)
>maybe we should return the web and browser back to it's pure days of marked up text documents with images

Good luck with that. You should bring back Gopher while you're at it.
earlier article of theirs here:
http://www.discovery.com/dscovrd/tech/amazing-machine-can-pr...
But who's the judge of right and wrong? And is it right to do wrong to those who are doing wrong?
The Potential Energy of a New Job
In contrast to all the 10/10 posts I couldn't hear the slightest difference.

Even after reading all the hints about what I should listen to in this thread.
Auditing your Docker instance down to a ‘Bare Necessity’ footprint
That's not the tactic at all. The Professor was open about who they were. The bullies were bullies not because they named the professor but because they demanded she be sacked.

The professor was brave enough to put her name to her opinion. I think those opposing her should also be as brave and let their names be known and let everyone see their responses. If that is negative because of the way they expressed them, then they might see that their behaviour is not terribly acceptable.
Batch processing is a subset of stream processing, assuming that the stream has a finite set of data. That is, it could be implemented as a collection of all the input from the stream, then executing the batch.

However, not all streams have finite data sets. This is a very important distinction.
I disagree that error numbers are nullable. It's just an integer, and there's nothing special about the zero integer. It's not like pointers where if you dereference NULL, you've hit a special case where anything could happen. There's a difference between a language-level NULL, as pointers have, and a value with no special language meaning which you give special meaning at a higher level.

If you want an example of a non-pointer nullable type, float and double probably qualify. Both can be NAN, which is effectively NULL for floats. Like NULL, NAN behaves completely differently from any other value and only convention and documentation tell you whether any particular place might produce or accept it.
LoL Guru team comp analyser update (lolguru.gg)
We had 2 busy months since we released LoL Guru (lolguru.gg) in the beginning of September. We wanted to give LoL players a new tool to analyze team compositions and understand their strengths, weaknesses, power spikes and so on. Many of you confirmed that we are on the right track which made us more dedicated to develop LoL Guru! Now we feel it’s time to give you an update on how things went so far development wise and what you can expect from us in the future.

Updated features:

In live game analysis LoL Guru is now able to automatically arrange the champions to the correct lanes. In the rare cases when it’s wrong you still able to manually drag & drop them to the correct lanes.

Automatic region detection. Now we will detect where you are, and try to select the corresponding server automatically. If you register we will save both your server and summoner so you don’t need to type it ever again!

Shareable links. Both in team builder and live game analysis you are able to share the match analysis with your friends.

Improved grammar and accuracy. (Still some work in here. Proofreaders welcome.)

Spanish localization: www.lolguru.gg/es

We count on your ideas and help to make LoL Guru even better. What else should we implement?
African or European?
Huh, TIL. Out of curiosity, is there a license that would allow them to be FOSS only for non-commercial use, but having customers pay for commercial use, like they want?
It probably sounds basic to you because you still aren't doing the math, and you still aren't doing the experiments.

The whole point of 24-bit is to give you flexibility when the singer decides that he's going to whisper one verse from three feet away and then shove the mic down his throat while he screams the chorus. Or you can be sloppy when you set the preamp gain—just give yourself enough headroom, and you'll adjust the levels later. Notice that I said "later", not "never". Even the most amateurish home engineer with a hangover the size of Texas is going to adjust the levels of different tracks in the mix. Once you've done the mixdown, the levels are "reasonable", and you can listen at home on 16-bit system. You won't hear the difference.

No mastering, no compression. 16-bit audio is still enough, once you've mixed a song.
No, the visa holder is required to provide proof of private medical insurance (which costs more than your standard private insurance). My employer did not pay for this policy.

The local middle school in my suburb was mediocre (north of Hornsby). I'm sure there are others that are much better. (One of) the final straws was when her math teacher gave her a calculator when she continued to ask for help with math. The other was when the principal embarrassed her in front of the entire school assembly because of an technical issue with her uniform.

At the time, I couldn't find any information on withholding exceptions for Medicare tax. It worked out in the end though because we got a large refund for the un-refunded amount as we prepared to leave the country.

We loved our time in Australia, so please don't construe my comments as disparaging the country in general. It was a sad day as we flew away to the US.
I think it's fair to say "McCarthyism" to refer to efforts to impose ideological homogeneity even if they don't precisely replicate some implementation details. Which is not to say every time somebody says "shut up" it counts, but visit to HUAC need not be a minimum qualifier. (Hell, since McCarthy wasn't on the HUAC, even Old McCarthyism might not pass that test.)
There were approximately 20 students that I saw in the video. Out of thousands. I think society is going to be okay.
22 tweets narrative of how the world will become a better place
Pioneer in Satellite Archaeology Wins Prize
Depending on how long it takes to "evaluate the goodness of a solution" techniques like multi-start gradient decent can rapidly become intractable though, especially in higher dimensions. There are a handful of open source libraries out there that try to tackle this time consuming and expensive black box optimization problem from a more Bayesian approach [1] [2]. There's also a YC company to do this as a service (full disclosure, I'm a co-founder) [3]. Combining these methods with TensorFlow could be very powerful and is one step closer to more automatic ML flows though.

[1]: https://github.com/Yelp/MOE (full disclosure, I co-wrote this)

[2]: https://github.com/hyperopt/hyperopt

[3]: https://sigopt.com/cases/machine_learning
The book gets to be repositioned somewhere else under the huge piece of cardboard between each trial.
Blood-Brain Barrier Broken in Canada
With a 1M^2 array, would all 4,000 transducers need to be active simultaneously to achieve 155db? I ask because it seems part of their core IP is the beamforming technology, which could mean physically steering the transducers towards the receiver, or only activating those transducers which point directly at the receiver.
Whether the US gov't is good at it is irrelevant, if we assume somebody else could plausibly be better.

But if they're anywhere near an upper bound, then whether they (a well-informed first-world superpower with a huge budget and a willingness to extradite people to places like Syria where there are effectively no rules) can make torture work is very relevant.

Because if they can't, and torture is useless, then clearly the question is effectively resolved, at least in the real world. If torture is simply ineffective in real-world scenarios then the question goes away.
No, in general, a threat of legal action might, if you want to take things to extremes, be a threat that, if you don't comply, the actor will attempt to secure an authorization from a third party (the judiciary) that would impose conditions under threat of violence, but it is not, in itself, a threat of violence, even delayed violence.
Streptococcus mutans + sugar = biofilm (plaque) + lactic acid

Lactic acid + tooth + time = cavity

Sufficient mineral content in saliva and replacement of hydroxide by fluoride in the bioapatite tooth matrix affects the time factor.

So there are four ways to completely avoid cavities.

- Annihilate the mutans-type bacteria in your mouth, and prevent recolonization.
- Do not eat sugars.
- Remove all your teeth.
- Die.

Obviously, the latter two solutions can have significant negative side effects on your lifestyle. The mutans biofilm plaque makes it difficult to eradicate the bacteria.

If your saliva is well buffered and mineralized, it would be very rare for pH to dip below 5.5 and have minerals leach out of the teeth. Diet would certainly also help in this respect, especially with regard to calcium, phosphate, fluoride, vitamin D, and vitamin K.
Dual-license under CC-BY-NC-SA and a proprietary one?
Sadly very few places support Apple Pay. And some credit cards make it a royal PITA to use with AP.
Using ed(1) as a password manager – Brain droppings
That's a whole lot of speculation!

Fortunately, there is a better way: http://www.ioatwork.com/selection-methods-almost-a-century-o...

EDIT: but to answer your question:

> How about heart surgery?

I'd prefer the provider that hires doctors based on work-sample tests and not years of employment.
Hopefully they do, but you gotta start somewhere...
From 0-to-illumos on OmniOS r151016
IMHO, an individual's life and freedom is worth way more than any dollar amount, but that is just my opinion.

That said:
DNA tests are far more reliable than eyewitness accounts.
Innocent people confess to crimes all the time.
Poor Man's Flux
What you're describing is exactly what Java Applets were designed to do 20 years ago.

And yet they never achieved a fraction of what "the current mess" has achieved.
Toxicity of vit-c is very low. Death by vit-c overdose is un-heard of. Intaking enough vit-c to cause death, could be due to sheer weight of substance intaken rather than bio-chemical function of vit-c.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#Overdose

Also studies conducted on animals (especially primates) that cannot synthesize vit-c on their own, show that they intake about upto 80x the RDA value of vitamin-c. So, humans intake as low as 1.25% of vit-c levels that monkeys eat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#Daily_requirements

Most often than not, RDA values are a joke and should be treated as bare minimum levels to prevent diseases such as scurvy and not as the optimum level. Sub-clinical deficiency in essential vitamins and minerals always happen.
Interesting to see who some top usernames are. Also interesting how little I care who anyone who posts here actually is in real life. All about that post quality, gents.
Wrong. The U.S. definition is the non-standard one, unless you consider it to also be the world. No other country defines "liberal" as anything similar.
Stressless wakeups with natural lighting
No, he's actually thinking of sealants. My sister and I both had it done when we got all our permanent teeth, it was SOP among military dentists in the 80s. The sealants wear off eventually, but it offers some protection for some time.

http://www.knowyourteeth.com/infobites/abc/article/?abc=C&ii...
Every time I come back to this thread I have to remind myself that all this outrage is (incredibly) over an E-mail about Halloween costumes. Just when I'm sure we've all run out of more things to get offended over...
We're talking about a city where 911 calls cannot reliably expect to get timely responses. Given that immediate need situations don't have good coverage, one should not be surprised that <insert other thing here> is not handled particularly well.
Professor's reply: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM-VE8r7MSI
That's what I was getting at with my comment: there are reasonable scenarios wherein testing a rape kit serves no clear purpose.

I'm all for the paradigm of testing them, but I'm not for spending money on cases where there's no contest of sex happening, or the perpetrator confesses.
Were your folks in the military? Everybody of my generation who grew up on military bases overseas had sealants applied when all their permanent teeth came in.
I'm not sure I understand, are you basically brushing twice? Once w/o toothpaste and once with?
true, and pseudotensor can be a mouthful too, but its still confusing.