skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like anything with a political undertone, how recidivism rates are calculated is defined by the messenger. A politician wanting to take a hard nose approach to crime is going to want a higher recidivism rate so he/she can say that keeping people in prison reduces crime. On the flip side, the reality is that by providing jobs, education, and general opportunities, upon release there is a less chance that someone will recommit.

The real problem, as someone else pointed out, is that in most cases the individual is set up to fail in the justice system.

I will use myself as an example. I served a one-year supervised felony probation. On the last day of my probation I was cleared by my probation officer. Although technically my probation did not end until midnight, when I met with my probation officer in the morning she gave me a letter stating I had met my obligations and at midnight would be clear from further supervision. I had been planning a move out of the state the following day and in preparation had rented a moving van and was beginning to pack my things. With the van parked in front of my house, an overzealous sheriff deputy who knew I was on probation, stopped to see what was going on. Simply because I had already begun packing the van, he decided he would violate my probation for moving without permission. I was arrested again for a violation and subsequently spent the night in jail until a judge released me the following morning. Luckily my attorney was able to convince the state not to press for additional time and my probation was terminated. It cost me a little over $1000 in additional legal fees (or as my attorney so eloquently put it, do you want me just to play golf with state's attorney or take him to dinner afterwards) for my attorney to handle that for me. I was fortunate enough to be able to afford the costs, however, I have seen first hand how others without the means would have been violated and most likely would have served time or an additional length of probation resulting in additional costs.

While someone else pointed out that high incarceration rates are not entirely to blame on the war on drugs, they are directly related. We live in a society where zero-tolerance laws take precedence over common-sense laws. We incarcerate people at the highest rate in the world. The system is like a giant ponzi scheme. We incarcerate so many people that we have to charge outrageous court and other fees to afford to support the cycle of incarceration. Yet the failure to pay these same fees are often one of the leading reasons that people are violated on probation or parole. We have people serving mandatory sentences for charges that in today's society are no longer crimes. However, if a politician attempts to make a change and get those individuals released they are viewed as being soft on crime. An interesting study would really be a comparison of fees paid to sentence served. I know I was able to essentially pay more in fees to reduce my probation time. Similar to getting a mortgage and paying points up front to reduce your interest rate.
> Humans are nothing in impact comparing to a single volcano.

This is a myth which you can easily disprove yourself with a little research.

If a single volcano vastly dwarfs human eCO2 output, then surely measurements of atmosphere eCO2 levels in years volcanos erupted will show significant spikes in atmosphere eCO2 concentration?

Sources: https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/climate.php
https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/Gerlach-2011-EOS_AGU....

Globally, cars and trucks alone are responsible for about 15 times the CO2 emissions of all volcanos and that number is still growing.

Consider the CO2 record of the past few years:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_full

From that, you would not pick that the largest volanic emissions of CO2 over that range occurred in 1980 and 1991 or shortly around those times.
The Culture of NYC Is Being Destroyed
> When dinosaurs roamed we had 3 to 5 times current co2 and planet was nearly all green, pole-to-pole ... If you promote a green healthy planet, then you should lobby for a co2-fertilized atmosphere, not a co2-starved atmosphere.

Genuinely embarrassing as a key argument. He neglects to mention that sea levels fluctuated 50-150m higher during the period of the dinosaurs!

God knows how many major cities around the world are coastal.

This is the effect on the San Francisco Bay Area of a 1.5m sea level rise plus 1m storm surge:

http://sfist.com/2015/07/31/mapping_the_projected_8_foot_sea...
What tool is that in your first screenshot?
The security concern you mention (taking over the host) is moot if I've paid for root access to a physical machine (bare metal). By definition I've already paid for the host; there's nothing else to break out of.

SDN could easily be handled by an off-system component. I forget who, but someone who presented at ONS 2015 [1] mentioned the use of FPGAs for this.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhigroIsbIuet0qlIGBQi...
Kafka is a replicating database, but not of randomly accessible or queryable data - rather, it's for logs where you can start at any point in time (including realtime), and play the log forwards from there. If you aggregate access logs into it, then use it to feed stream processing frameworks (or feed it into Hadoop for bulk processing), you can use it very effectively for analytics workloads.

Or you can run your entire business around events-as-ground-truth rather than SQL-style-domain-tables-as-ground-truth. Various modules consume from Kafka and write aggregated records back into Kafka - basically a directed graph of processing modules with Kafka to implement every edge - and finally there's a module that translates the final product into what is essentially a live-updating materialized view for your web backend to consume. LinkedIn does exactly this - they open-sourced Kafka and spun out Confluent to help others use this model.

Stream processing is a very powerful way of thinking about data management - with the great side effect that "migrations" of data tables are limited by your imagination, and they never run the risk of data corruption. We use this paradigm, though not Kafka itself (Mongo supports this paradigm and simplifies a lot of things if you aren't yet at LinkedIn scale), in production at http://belstone.com.

Martin Kleppman's talks are a great place to start if you want to learn more: http://www.confluent.io/blog/making-sense-of-stream-processi... is an excellent overview.
He looks at it as an engineer...

Well, you're not wrong -- he's chosen a goal, and desperately tries to fit his processes to accommodate it. It's a shame he couldn't have tried looking at it as a scientist.
This is well-done, but I wish such treatments spent more effort establishing that climate change projections are (a) reliable and (b) catastrophic. Those two points are the essence of the case, and yet they're usually just assumed. (Note that whether climate-change is anthropogenic or not is utterly beside the point. That so much attention is paid to this peripheral issue is a major red flag.)
Yep, a friend of mine is building a product that exposes the private APIs that banking apps use in a developer-friendly way: http://teller.io/

That said, using your account data in that way with third parties is often against the terms of service that a customer has with their bank.
Why would it not be insightful?
Launching a Mac App and Becoming the Top Paid App Globally
Those articles are over a decade old. The size of silicon between an 8 or 16 or 32 bit ALU contained in an MCU is miniscule. Most of the space is taken up by peripherals and this is where Microchip has historically thrived but this is no longer so. There are a number of 32 bit MCUs that are cost competitive with 8 bit parts.
I think RMS did plenty of things in the short run back in the day that brought about more than just a little bit of long term rightness and good. The fact that it's easy to discount him in the present while he's still working away at moving the needle, not just for the day after tomorrow but also for tomorrow itself is quite special. Anybody else with a track-record like that would probably get a more receptive audience. Now if only he'd get his 'PR' to be as effective as his vision, that may make an even bigger difference.
If you're going to have a policy of being yourself, that needs to go with an understanding that yourself is mutable, and a policy of changing yourself to be better adapted to your environment. In this case, it's important to realize that the days when choice of programming language was very important are long past. Pay, working conditions, not having to live in a very expensive area are important. Programming language is a minor detail, not worth getting worked up about.
And we spend more on other things (like child care) because both adults are working.
I actually believe 'climate change' is a type of cover for geopolitical issues related to the petrodollar. I believe that humans affect the climate, but the real scientific basis for that being the primary driver of climate change isn't there. But they are using 'da earf is melting' as a substitute for another truth that is just as scary.

That truth is that the United States and its closest allies use about twice as much fossil fuel as the rest of the countries, and being able to continue that is completely dependent upon a massive military campaign that stretches thinner as the years go by.

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~paul20i/classweb/AFP2008/middleas...

Technologists can work on education and preventing the spread of war propaganda, which is rampant in Western television and media. Notice how the terrorists always seem to be loudly explaining which currently most strategic middle east country they come from.

If you want to believe the main problem is just that 'da earf is melting' or climate change or whatever, the root of the problem is still fossil fuel dependency.

The massive amount of fuel used for moving 3,000 pound vehicles to and from offices everyday, for work that probably 75% or more can be done over the internet with Skype or whatever, is the most obvious low-hanging fruit.

Another thing is, as the dollar hegemony fades, what replaces it, and what sort of conflict arises during that transition? Something like bitcoin might be a good alternative to WWIII.

We can also look toward alternative technological frameworks for society that support decentralization. Named-data networking, IPFS, Ethereum, etc.

Suburbia is a prime target for reform. Here is my idea: https://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/
I live on a block with several Section 8 renters, and they all seem like perfectly nice people with families.

We all want the thieves to live somewhere else, but the previous strategy we had for isolating them also involved segregating millions of low-income people and trapping them in neighborhoods without opportunity, child care, safe schools, or, in some cases, even grocery stores.

This way is better for everyone.
Snazzy!

I love it when the Keen peeps put out this type of content. Makes it easy to start a convo in house by passing a link + starting a conversation.

bookmarking <3
Bomb in a briefcase is a common movie trope, since most people's working knowledge of explosives and bombs comes from movies it's reasonable to assume that an older style clock in a metal briefcase like they do in movies would be interpreted by a few people as a bomb, especially those in positions of authority who view everything that isn't 'normal' as a problem.

Obviously Ahmed was aware enough of this to try to make the briefcase look less suspicious by wrapping it in wires which is generally how I try to make electronics in a brief case less suspicious.

A few years ago in the winter I had an issue with the electronics in my car so coming home from Reno, I pulled the climate control panel out of my car so I could manually connect the wires to make the heat go.

I ended up going across the border like this, and ended up explaining to the border guard the wiring of the car to assure her that nothing was amiss.

The border guards suspicions were naturally raised because most people don't even know how to pull the panel out let alone jerry rig their own climate control system.
Can you be sure you would have been given the job if you had portrayed your best you?

It's possible you simply dodged a bullet. Maybe this company misclassified a valuable resource, and (for all anyone knows) hired someone less able instead.

Given your practical background, why did no one ask for practical examples?

I agree with the general point - interviews are really about proving you can save time and make money, and everything else is a warm-up.

But still - the hiring process is notoriously unreliable, and it's going to be interesting to see where this start-up is a few years from now.
His conclusion isn't that alarmists are wrong; his conclusion is that global warming would be a net good for humanity, that CFCs don't cause ozone depletion, and that DDT is actually A Good Thing. And the last two, despite being flagrantly unpopular opinions, are apparently so self-evident that they don't even require explication. And that's just in 2 slides.

In general, there's a cogent argument to be made that some of the more extreme predictions people have made about the ultimate impact of global warming are maybe a little bit over-dramatic (and in fact, some prominant climate scientists called out Sanders for this). But this guy? Nutjob.
It's Postman[1], a Chrome app for making HTTP requests/testing API's that has a ridiculously full featured free version.

1: https://www.getpostman.com/
For those that don't realize it, Neha and Jay were two of the main developers who wrote Kafka.

Thanks for the heads up!
> Nuclear is low-carbon, but it's not renewable.

Sure it is, Nuclear doesn't just mean uranium fission, fusion reactors are nuclear as well and they will be a big thing in the future and we get better at doing it.
This is false. E.g. they make perfectly clear that some software (e.g. games) are perfectly fine being proprietary and closed source.
Amazing. This got me thinking about citation counts. The most cited paper in Computer Science of all time is Vapnik's Statistical Learning Theory (1998) with about 10k citations. The most cited paper of any kind of all time is Protein measurement with the folin phenol reagent by Lowry et al. (1951) with > 300k citations. There's a big time gap here, but not big enough to make up for a > 290k difference in citations. I always thought that CS was one of the more prolific paper writing communities, clearly not the case.

PS. I'm not sure which paper in the arXiv has the greatest number of citations. I don't think either of these papers are there.
Airline Baggage Fees Are a Good Deal for Travelers
I think this is exactly Bret's point that he makes in the essay. Citizens aren't empowered to find out for themselves and are instead asks to trust smart people:

"And why trust them? Their rhetoric is catchy, but so is the horrific “denialist” rhetoric from the Cato Institute and similar. When the discussion is at the level of “trust me, I’m a scientist” and “look at the poor polar bears”, it becomes a matter of emotional appeal and faith, a form of religion.

Climate change is too important for us to operate on faith. Citizens need and deserve reading material which shows context — how significant suggested actions are in the big picture — and which embeds models — formulas and algorithms which calculate that significance, for different scenarios, from primary-source data and explicit assumptions."
>Here's the thing. SpaceX already landed a rocket.

Right, which is why this entire thread is so confusing.

>In other words, nobody said "orbit".

Exactly. This makes the tweet a non-sequitor.

>But they did say Blue Origin beat SpaceX, which doesn't make any sense.

Yes, anyone who said that is incorrect. However, Elon did not directly address those people (at least not in these tweets).
This is about the polyp, not the fictional nazi-terrorist group.

Just in case someone else reads too many comics and got confused.
Read the paper. It's pretty great, and very detailed.
Sure, we build things... but not without layers upon layers of middlemen to just pass the buck along with interest.
My point wasn't that you have to "succeed" on the Mozart/Newton scale to be meaningful, but that being a parent is not a prerequisite for having a meaningful life.

I just used the examples that would make it easier for all to agree -- from them, it's all about what one considers a meaningful achievements.

Some people could not care less for either Jesus or Mozart, but could see that e.g. building a business or being a scientist or whatever can be meaningful too.
I've asked this question a few times but haven't really gotten a satisfactory answer. There are a lot of what I might call "epic problems" out there. Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes.

I don't know anything about creating vaccines or cures for malaria or HIV. I don't have a degree in social work or behavior science. I don't have any experience with economics outside of personal investment and filing my income tax paperwork each year. I don't have billions of dollars to fund a company to focus on these things.

I make a small salary relative to what's required for these things and have very limited knowledge.

I'm a programmer and a manager. So how do I contribute to these problems? How can I take the skills I have and get homeless people the help they need? How do I take my web development skills and reduce income inequality? How do I help stop the next Trayvon Martin incident?

I have no idea. This article goes into great detail about climate change, but I finished reading it and still have no idea. I don't even know where to start.
Ironically all that system is not designed to find the truth. It is designed to find more funding to support itself. I know that, because I did that myself.
A single set of glacial cores from Greenland tells you more that all that satellite BS.
If you remotely closely familiar with principles of climatic modelling, you 'd be rotfl, looking at someone trying to validate or backtrace that models. Because you'd be familiar with valid and comparable data scarcity. We lack actual climate data. Ice cores are really the only thing we really have.
Mate this is a pile of biased, self-aggrandizing, rambling shit.

Love the justification of his methodology over the Scientific Method:

• Not responsible for adequacy or value of product.

• Frequently being wrong is not a problem.

Whereas the engineer has to be concerned with:

• Consequences if wrong (people die).

Come on, dude.
Ask Mr. Science: How to securely manage your passwords
I view this as a very short term problem (i.e. the artificial effect on the planet through our own doing.) And I'm not saying that it isn't a problem and that we shouldn't be doing anything.

The planet naturally goes through warm and cool times. There's little we can do to mitigate that, we'll experience another ice age eventually.
(1) This is great.

(2) Political economy is a much bigger issue right now than technology. Most of what we need to do is deploy, and the tech we have is good enough for that.

(3) Low-hanging fruit for self-identified "Technologists" is to reconsider some of the blind spots caused by their social identities. David Roberts explains:

http://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9214015/tech-nerds-politics
Along with the fact uranium is not the only source of nuclear energy, "nonrenewables" that can supply current rates of consumption for thousands of years are effectively not "nonrenewable" in the sense we usually mean.

Sure, it can't carry us to a Kardashev Type II civilization, but we're only responsible for the problems of today.
> And yet the tens of thousands of new investment properties in Sydney and Melbourne that sit empty while waiting for a capital gain – labelled “speculative vacancies” by non-profit lobby group Prosper Australia – or which are rented to tourists at highly inflated rates, indicate that the market is not always a panacea for affordability.

Easy solution: for any period longer than 3 months in which the property is not rented with a minimum lease time of 12 months, the owner has to pay a fixed sum per square meter of the property; said sum should be based on the asked rent price.
Whoops. I use a 3rd party tool to manage user data and that requires access to local storage. I'll have to look into engineering that requirement out unless you have a user account. Sorry for the inconvenience.
This was more than ten years ago.

I'd like to point out that they did ask specific questions, I was just enamored of generalizing at that point in my life, and treated every specific question as an invitation to generalize.
Theres a great mental toughness book/concept called Mindset[1], and the concepts are definitely all over the sports world. The book is considered by some to be the Inner Game Of Tennis[2] of today. But one of the concepts in Mindset that they say even the top guys can mess up is that if you are in a negative state of mind, you must give yourself a trigger word, or some sort of positivity before restarting your concentration. In other words, if you are telling yourself, "I am playing like crap. Wah Wah.. Ok, now concentrate!" You are likely to fail. However, if you are able to stop yourself, or correct yourself and say, "run run run." Then start concentrating, you are more likely to succeed. In relation to the article, quiet eyes are only as good as the mindset behind them. (I hope that made some sort of sense). But it basically means you need to have the right mindset before you start concentrating.

The run run run is from an example in the book. I noticed when the Detroit Red Wings were on a losing skid this year players had "skate skate skate" written on the tape of their stick. Also, Roberta Vinci quoted Mindset after taking down Serena Williams at the US Open. And Roger Federer has talked about using a lot of tactics in Mindset.

[1].http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Mental-Guide-Jackie-Reardon/dp...

[2]http://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance/...
In the time honoured tradition of shooting ourselves in the foot by making better the enemy of best?

Neither concrete, nor uranium mining have to burn fossil fuels (and CO2 sequesting concrete is a real thing). They are decoupled from their fuel source, but the lack of incentives to improve that situation at present (due to the near entirety of electrical generation being fossil fuels) is the bigger problem.
On most metrics of performance Vista was a big downgrade from XP, regardless of your hardware.
The selflender team did something similar except they built a banking core:

https://selflender.com/blog/why-fintech-innovation-is-broken...
More: he is just unwilling to consume as little as his parents did at the same stage of life.

That is, I never saw what my parents' life was like just after they graduated from college. When I was born, they were several years past that. When I was old enough to remember much, they were pretty much into their peak earning phase. If I expect that lifestyle just after graduating from college, yes, I'm going to have a lot of trouble paying down college loans...
> It's really weird to see Berlin cited as an example for successful housing policies.

Still better than Munich lol. In Berlin you can at least find a run-down shared punker flat or occupied house if you're OK with that, in Munich you're straight outa luck if you aren't best friends with a RE broker.

LPT: If you ever have the chance to befriend a broker, do so - it might save your ass in the future.
Wow, the "Fair Source License" is just terrible. Please, no one use this license!