skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Art, in this context, means the content of the render() function. There is a great deal of ambiguity, a great deal of magic, surrounding the implementation of render() for a complex system. It's easy to come up with mechanical isomorphisms for low-entropy representations of state; it's very hard to come up with evocative representations.

This is the role of The Artist.
Howard Buffett Is Getting His Hands Dirty
Design is a bit more than the 'color of the packaging' but I do agree it feels odd to try and get it in w/ the STEM. It calls attention to a certain anxiety within the design community about their own value while at the same time trying to overburden the relatively useful STEM shorthand.
The notion that mass immigration from Syria to Europe is a necessary consequence of the war is trivially falsified by looking at the timeline. The Syrian civil war started in early 2011. Daesh entered the war in early 2012 as al-Nusra Front, and operated as ISIL since 2013. The Caliphate was proclaimed in summer 2014.

But mass migration into Europe did not start until summer 2015. Obviously it did not take the Syrians four years to realize that there was a war in their country.
At Pycon, there's a lot of socializing and community building going on, and those are very important. But if you really care about meeting people with specific technical interests in order to advance on some project together, there are plenty of strategies to go about that.

1) Give a talk about the technical problem you are interested in. People who also care will attend, and later meet with you to discuss the topic (and related ones) in person. Giving a talk yourself is probably the best way to find people interested in your subject.

2) At Pycon you can book open spaces (e.g. https://us.pycon.org/2015/community/openspaces/). There are basically a bunch of small rooms, and you can book some time slots to assign the room a certain topic, and see whether like-minded people will show up. (You could also do something non-technical like board games...)

3) After Pycon proper, there are usually a couple of days of code sprints (e.g. https://us.pycon.org/2015/community/sprints/). This gives people the chance to advance an open source project together. Some people use that as a way to meet in person with other developers, or it's possible to recruit new developers for a project.
don't know what to do? drop some bombs.

way to go.
You could sell your genes. Should you?
I just wear a clip-on.
Bicycle touring is an absolutely fantastic way to see any country, I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in adventure travel. Although if you've never done it before I'd recommend starting in Europe (with its large network of cross-country bicycle paths).
In my opinion, and as a customer of Fastmail, I think this is the right call. xmpp as a usable federated chat protocol is pretty much dead.

For those who wish to keep using it, setting up your own server (prosody is pretty good!) isn't too hard these days.
What a sad day.

A hearty Fuck You to Google, Facebook, and Apple for tearing apart this open federated standard. Users don't benefit from being forced to use your shitty walled-garden proprietary communication apps.

(Yes, forced; if I want to talk to my friends, it usually has to be via whatever proprietary chat network is in vogue at the moment. There was a brief golden age of IM during which GChat (federated XMPP) was king, but GChat's been in its death throes for years, and the current flavors-of-the-week are AIM and MSN all over again.)
For a business to succeed it has to provide value commensurate with the price it charges. If you can buy the books at independent bookstores at substantially lower prices elsewhere and you buy them at the indie anyways solely for the purpose of supporting them then that isn't doing business, that's charity.

If your business is actually a charity, consider going non-profit. Non-profit places to get books already exist though, they're called libraries. Independent bookstores sell the same books for more than Amazon so they can't compete as a business and they cannot compete with the state sponsored information access the local library system provides.

All that's left is to open up an overpriced coffee bar and serve the hipsters who find the irony of the bookstore's continued existence appealing enough to walk in the door. It's already amazing such stores survived Barnes & Nobles rise during the 90's and early 00's.
It's foolish, but I still buy Advil instead of a generic brand because I like the tasty coating. I can't be the only one, right?
Which reminds me of:

Loke Groundrunner: I'm going to trust my feelings and use the power of the thumb.

Voice of Oobedoob Benubi: Use the instrument panel, Loke.

Loke Groundrunner: What?

Voice of Oobedoob Benubi: The instrument panel. That's what it's there for. Advanced weaponry designed to hit tiny targets.

Loke Groundrunner: Ok, ok.
You would find valuable (IMHO) Paul Graham's lessons from his experiences moderating HN:

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

My opinion (copied from another post I made awhile ago):

I happily would accept unfairness, and suffer its slings and arrows myself, for a higher signal-to-noise ratio. I'd happily lose a few good comments in return for of better quality overall (i.e., false-positives are not really a big deal - so what if my good comment occasionally gets voted down or otherwise buried).

By prioritizing quality over fairness HN can best distinguish itself from a million noise-filled alternatives where 'rights' [or democracy] are the priority. Everyone has a right to their opinions, but not to my time.
From one Indian to another -- here are some tips:

a. Read, listen, write -- as much as you can; while being aware of /every/ word. Try to express yourself differently. Say/write the same things using different words / sentences. Pay close attention to how other people express the same idea using different words. All of this can be done with 'normal' communication -- ie: email, news, mailing lists ...even HN. So, you won't be doing any extra work than you would normally, you'll just be more conscious / aware.

b. Don't beat yourself about your accent. Embrace it. Most people won't care about the accent as long as they understand you. Also, if you improve your language and grammar, then you'll find that an accent actually adds personality and flair to your words.

c. Learn to love the language itself ! Savor the words, critically examine sentence structure, play with phrases and think about what you are communicating and whether the manner in which you are doing it actually serves to emphasize what you intended to.

d. Finally, take sometime to learn from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37134/37134-h/37134-h.htm

( the link above is the html version from Project Gutenberg but there are various other formats available. And here's its wikipedia article for the curious -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style )
Mail on Sunday belongs to the Daily Mail, known British very low-quality tabloid. Flagged.
Terrorism will end if we refer to terrorists as "unnamed asshole". Same with school shootings.

"An unnamed asshole shot up a school today. We will never know why because fuck that asshole."
Adsuck – a small DNS server that spoofs blacklisted addresses
Gitlo: GitHub-Trello Integration
Those sorts of megadoses are used for migraines as well. I've also taken 800 mg for very severe pain on the advice of a doctor. At higher doses on an empty stomach is can give you a buzz of a sort.
> "K–20 education"

I've never heard 8 years of college referred to like that. It's... strange.
> What alternatives did these politicians have and ignored? What else could they have done?

They've ignored the most important alternative that is unfortunately often forgotten or seen as weeknes - that you can also do nothing. Or at least do only things that make some sense.

Airports aren't really more secure than they were before 9/11. I'd argue they're even less secure against terrorist attack, because if you wanted to maximize the damage to people, you just go and bomb the security line. You've got hundreds of people tightly packed in a closed space there.

The reality is, terrorism (or generally, politically-motivated murder of civilians) simply doesn't happen often enough that we should care. It's also by definition pretty much completely unpredictable, because the attacker has freedom to pick their target and spend as much time on preparations as they want. Arm the population? Terrorists will use remote-detonated bombs or suicide vests. Turn all airports into high-security facilities? Terrorists will attack at security checkpoints, or just switch to bombing buses instead. If they wanted, they'd murdered us by the thousands already. The reason it doesn't happen is that humans generally just don't go blowing themselves up and/or killing random people.

Also, keep in mind that causalties in terror attacks are only collateral damage, and not the goal. The reason for such attacks is to push the harmed society into the state of panic, at which point they'll start overreacting and doing stupid things to themselves and others.

So in the hypothetical more rational world, what could have politicians done?

- Leave the airports be vs. starting the security theatre industry. Not to say all air travel security is bad; pilot cabin doors are an improvement, though after that last catastrophe in Europe you could say it's an double-edged... shield.

- Don't start two wars vs. starting two wars. This definitely made more terrorists, not to mention it killed about three orders of magnitude more innocent people than 9/11 itself.

- Don't terrorize Pakistan vs. drone-strinking the living shit out of civilians there. This definitely created more potential terrorists.

- Shut the fuck up about it in media. Ok, so the towers fell, it's a tragedy. We should mourn the dead, clean up the mess, redirect funds to investigate and bring to justice people responsible, but otherwise there's nothing to see here.

- Redirect the saved money to other programs. 'gnaritas posted a helpful CDC "top 10 causes of death in the US" list. Any money spent towards fixing any of the items on this list is much better spent than directing it towards "war on terror".
There's a reason why I said "average user", though.
Caltrain needs these.
Nice approach; this is a common sort of dilemma for API design.
Jetman Dubai [video]
The words "I" "have" "a" "dream" take less than six seconds to say, so surely that information content has been hit upon by others in the past... As someone else has posted, there's a great documentary about the whole sampling/resampling scene that explains a bit about the attractions of this particular sonic segment : Suffice to say, there's a lot more to it than just a 1-2-3-4 pattern.
While the FastMail shutting down XMPP is about low usage, the real cause is that Federated Chat failed to work.

Federation is something that is rarely promoted in modern ecosystems. Before Twitter/Facebook, we had RSS/Atom, but these have all failed as companies pour massives investments into "winner take all" approaches to their products. In the short term, it is easy to see why: Why compromise on iteration of features and UX by allowing a competitor to interoperate? Why wait for a new field to be standardized in Atom?

We see it all the time in the consumer space, federation has died, but even look in the infrastructure space, something like Docker: Yes, Docker Hub, is "kinda" open, I mean, anyone can create an account, but it's not a federated scheme where everyone can host their own Images easily. But we use it anyways, because its a better user experience, and its subsidized by a company not directly making revenue on it yet, but wanting to control the user experience.

So we drop support for any federated user experience pretty quickly. And now we are all on Slack, on Facebook, on Twitter.... And it is mostly great. Or we wouldn't still be there.

But I still wish for a federated future, but I doubt it will happen.
I would only be alright with STEAM if Art majors had to take the same math and science classes as the other majors have to take.

There are too many people getting Art degrees and then want to have a STEM job and just don't have the math and science skills required for the STEM jobs. Art is easier because it doesn't have the math and science classes that STEM has.

When I think of design I often think of Engineering and not Art, and that might be because I was a STEM student. When I design a program there is no art involved unless it is a video game or something. I usually give the user control over what colors they want the background and menus to be.
Without reading, none of these would be possible - so maybe it needs to be STEAMR
Indiana Pi Bill
This is clearly some sort of spoof. Or someone has completely missed the point of STEM, y'know, hard stuff where there are right and wrong answers...
It might work if they delete the original photos (if that's still possible on modern devices).
Yea you've got it mostly right. It's based on a statistical distribution derived from actual flight data.
They can get you fired, prevent you from getting hired, cost you that contract, keep your kids off the football team or out of the good school, pass laws that make your life difficult

Right, which censorship can't do anything about either.

When the sheriff, mayor, judge, prosecutor, and jury are all white and all know each other [...] you may not want to trust your fate to their protection.

No, but rights issues and law-enforcement abuse can be escalated beyond Sheriff Chuck's fiefdom. It's not perfect - I understand that marginalized people are usually poor and lack agency, however a system exists. It needs improving, but that's what we should be focusing on. Not on words spoken but the tools and processes that exist to help bolster individual rights. Those tools protect you as well.

that blacks don't face actual discrimination, therefore the threats are empty.

It would be more along the lines of if they didn't face actual violence due to effective law-enforcement, the threats ARE merely words. So focus on effective law-enforcement, the sticks and stones, not on what people can and cannot say. Otherwise you're just sweeping a cancerous sentiment under the rug where it'll grow and fester.
Bongoes.
I've been following Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) who has some really interesting solutions.

As others have said, bombing didn't work the first time...

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/133201726716/france
Private nudes?
It is kind of absurd. Music is intrinsically about reuse, recycling, and reinvention [1]. Sampling is really just a continuation of that.

[1] Axis of Awesome, The Four Chord Song, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I
Customize is also fast. A few years ago I converted 15 years of elisp cruft over to customize and sped my emacs start up by roughly 10x (used to take about 10 seconds).
You can teach an engineer history a hell of a lot more easily than teaching an art historian how to do stochastic calculus.
I dunno, it seems it would be easier to inspect rail lines using rail drones rather than aerial drones.
Ask HN: What would be a safe and secure VPN to use when I visit China
I will be visiting China in 2 days and found that most of the apps social network apps that we use in the US are blocked.

I would like to know a safe and secure VPN.

Thanks in Advance
>"For example, consider the ‘null’ hypothesis that the new drug has exactly the same effectiveness as the old drug."

I'd encourage people to ask: Why should I consider that null hypothesis when it sounds like a strawman? Wasn't the use of strawman arguments debunked over 1000 years ago?
"In software, your material cost is near 0..."

Material cost (e.g., hardware on which to deploy your program) is only near zero for small systems. If you're implementing a large system for a billion users, like Google search or Facebook, writing inefficient code could cost you a few extra acres of hardware in a data center and enough electricity to power a small city.

Actually, even small systems can have significant hardware costs associated with software. If the embedded software in a device you're building doesn't fit into your ROM, you'll need to use a bigger ROM, which may add up to a lot of money over a production run of millions of devices.
Its our own fault for embracing those shitty walled-garden apps.

But honestly - they're not trying to appeal to us. Every time I get stressed at the Googlemonster or Facecrook I remember that all I have to do is press delete and use something else.

edit: these apps are built for 1. people who don't / didn't care in the first place 2. noobs 3. my parents 4. advertisers wallets
Here is my pitch: Software is not just about Computers and Code. It is a new paradigm(a new way of looking) for building any kind of systems. This idea is so general purpose that it will help you in any area or domain you want to pursue in your life. So yes, I would suggest go ahead and learn it, learn it in terms of a new way of looking at systems, learn it as a new outlook.

The only reason Software has so much impact on the world is not because it is some specific technology, but because it is a new paradigm and paradigm impacts everything.

You will probably start with a specific sub set of programming, like web app or mobile app and you may feel that it is all there is to programming. But if you continue to program other kind of systems like microcontrollers or embedded systems you will realize the true potential of it.
Previous discussion about the death of XMPP:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10483936

My comment from that thread:

> I've been running my own XMPP server for years, with federation enabled. A few years ago, it seemed like the logical successor to AIM and MSN and all those other walled garden IM systems. And how easy! My XMPP "name" was the same as my email address. One less thing to put on my business card.

> But since then, I have realised a big problem with it - no-one uses it! Today I communicate with the world by iMessage, SMS, Twitter, and email. "Instant messaging" just seems to have died as a concept entirely, replaced by yet more walled gardens like Snapchat.

> My XMPP server is being turned off for good, next week.

(It has since been turned off.)
It's not about skills, doncha know, it's about inclusivity and safe spaces, these days.
Stargate in No Man's Sky?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZRAvh8TeVQ&t=7m28s

One of the planets shows a ring like structure which oddly resembles a stargate - maybe a yet-to-be revealed method of travelling between planets in this vast universe?
Well, they added a feature for this as it's quite useful. Click the "Past" link underneath the title on page.
It is rare indeed that I read an article that so closely follows the mould of my own thoughts on a matter. One stand-out paragraph (among several!):

>And then there is the rapid casting aside of ancient, wise rules. Our irreplaceable liberty and justice, which took a thousand years to create, are in shreds thanks to hasty and emotive measures that did no good. And now we have the shame of lawless confinement of untried men in Guantanamo, of torture that Englishmen, far fiercer and crueller than we think we are, abandoned as barbaric hundreds of years ago. And we have the horrors of ‘extraordinary rendition’ by secret flights to secret prisons, in which dark things took place. How can we claim to stand for liberty and justice if we do such things?

Yes indeed, how can we claim to stand for liberty and justice if we do such things?

Another:

> these things would still be hard to prevent if we turned ourselves into a totalitarian state of surveillance, identity cards, perpetual searches of the innocent – like going through an airport, only all the time.

Yes. This is important. There is a certain level of destruction and terrorism that we, as a society, must learn to accept as inevitable, unstoppable. We should still try to stop all terrorism, of course, but we should maintain no illusions about what is even theoretically possible. There is no amount of money or effort or freedom we can spend to prevent all terrorist attacks. Therefore, it's important for us to take these blows, much as we take the blows of natural disasters, and simply move on. Our society is mighty, and we can do it.
We've turned chat interoperability into a business over at sameroom.io.

What other option is there, really? The other option is no interoperability.

A very relevant post: https://sameroom.io/blog/announcing-support-for-google-hango...
This is disappointing, but I don't really blame them. Thankfully, IMAP is too established to succumb to embrace, extend, extinguish although Google seems to be trying. Chat protocols haven't been so lucky.

Hopefully federated chat will pick up, but it seems business models around social networking pretty much preclude any kind of federated communication between services. If adoption rates for Diaspora, Friendica, Pump.io, GNUSocial etc. are any indication, XMPP looks doomed. :(
Anonymous declares war on IS
Terrific post! Its great to see things implemented in short, 1-file programs. Tends to demystify things a lot.

What did you use to make the diagrams + gifs?
People are not copying the composed phrase, they are using the performance directly. The original audio recording is sampled, processed and replayed as a component of a new song.
Let's see: An extra-judicial hearing, in front of a panel of laymen with no training, rampant perjury without consequence, guilt standard nominally preponderance of evidence — but in practice it depends because of all the above. I'd say they're more than similar, no stretching needed.
"Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them"

- Steve Jobs' Commencement Address at Stanford University, June 2005

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
Without Oversight, all of these can turn into a force of evil. The necessary Oversight needs to be framed in the context of Law. Therefore, I introduce to you STEAMROL(L).
There is an implicit assumption that STEM does not have any artistic/design aspects to it. I imagine people who claim this have never had a long conversation with a mathematician about what their job is actually like.
STEM is already too much about a gigantic T (apps! apps everywhere!) at the expense of S, E, and M. A would be even bigger. This is nothing but entryism.
I think 'A' independently has much lower value than when its combined with STEM skills (in terms of problem solving). If you are strong in STEM as an individual then adding 'A' would make you much more effective at solving problems.
Do I need to stretch before exercising?
Ad hominem. Any thoughts about the arguments presented?
Yep. For any calculation of up to a dozen or so numbers it's far easier, quicker and more pleasant to use my HP than the computer, and even more so when in a meeting or on the phone. UI matters, physical interfaces matter.

http://aviation.stackexchange.com/q/22729/8205
Not sure how realistic this solution is though. I suppose we could remove most of their technology with a well used EMP, but would that have a negative consequence on civilians?