skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would a cure for cancer be a small return on investment? You're assuming that the only people who could enter the market and find a cure would be the current players who are profiting from the current treatment or some global conspiracy to keep the cure hidden. If someone were to discover a very effective treatment, they would surely profit nicely. Hepatitis C was recently cured, a brutal disease that affected some of the most marginal people in society [0]. And it was done thanks to a profit motive. Barring extreme price controls on drugs by politicians, this type of progress can be greatly encouraged by the profit motive.

[0] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-now-have-the-cu...

[edit] I would also like to add, the non-profit approach [IMO] has failed to produce anything but the abundance of the color pink and self congratulatory galas for wealthy donors. Perhaps the profit motive and choice that has served society so well in practically all aspects of our lives can be equally leveraged on solving hard problems like disease.
True, but I was pretty surprised to see how large the differences were between his breakfast/caffeine state versus fasting state. That's a substantial difference and pretty interesting. I also think just tracking MRI variation (even for n=1) is useful - this kind of detailed longitudinal tracking simply hasn't been published before.
A good test - if the contracts are negotiated individually for all drivers - they are contractors. If it is take or leave with 1000s more like you - you are employee.

If you have no bargaining power - you are not a contractor IMO.
Self sustaining version:

Send us 3 stickers and postage. Get 2 unique stickers back. You get all the profits of the excess postage (assuming bulk rate) plus the extra sticker can go to a bin / advertising page of ALL THE STICKERS.
Can anyone comment on why this image from the article has a perfectly straight white line in it? Seems suspicious. It appears to be just a smidge above the belt line.

http://cnet4.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2015/12/09/bccd7491-ac30...
>Oh, and reading and understanding licenses is HARD?!?!? WTF?

Hey, man, you know what? Some people want absolutely nothing to do with legal/compliance folk in large bureaucratic companies. Not that they aren't lovely people, but that involving them in your work is more risk/work than it's personally worth.

>but really, at no time in the 90's and 00's did you think it may be worth some time?

Hearkening back to the 90's and 00's, I'd venture to guess that there may have been some amount NIH syndrome at MS with respect to OSS, in addition to uncertainty as to how future inevitable licensing problems would be resolved in courts.
In the project that I am involved[0], I have been doing stress tests with very large JSON messages. After evaluate a few options I came up that the project 'JSMN' was good enough for my purposes.

https://github.com/zserge/jsmn

I am not sure if there are Python or another language bindings available but that library is very clean and simple to use. It does not perform memory allocations as you (the caller) have to provide the buffers so it gives you good flexibility.

[0] http://fluentbit.io
It's just a matter of time before there's a kickstarter for a limited functionality MRI-esk device that will allow the multitudes to scan 24/7.
Tracking time inside the tools you are already using in 1 click
Letting you keep your own money is not a subsidy. That being said, labor and capital should be taxed at the same rate, there being no reason to distinguish them for tax purposes.
I feel you. I'm reminded of Robert Kegan's stages of development, whereof the rare individual who reaches stage four, the stage where one learns to transcend irrational personal attachments and instead cultivate logical, systematic principles and practices to guide behavior, nevertheless sooner or later starts to find niche problems or, let's say, glitches within his or her system, and hopefully is able to eventually reach a stage five, wherein one is able to move among systems freely, picking them up and setting them down as needed, because the whole damn thing, the human situation, is funny and crooked and lovely and not a neatly determined algorithm. Kegan's is of course an overdetermined system. It has problem spots. It can be picked up and set down. It's funny. Lesswrong on the other hand, I personally haven't yet found the part where someone shrugs and says, Hey, this works pretty well for me, but it won't yield you an e.e. cummings poem to appreciate on a snowy day. It feels like the beginning of an effort to evolve into something like that mysterious race of human computers who own the monopoly on space travel in Dune.
So, I googled for grass eating apes and found this:
https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=128106

Is this what you were thinking about?

The evidence seems rather sketchy, though. From the article:

"If early humans ate grass-eating insects or large grazing animals like zebras, wildebeest and buffalo, it also would appear they ate C4 grasses.

If they ate fish that ate algae, it would give a false appearance of grass-eating because of the way algae takes up carbonate from water, Cerling says.

If they ate small antelope and rhinos that browsed on C3 leaves, it would appear they ate C3 trees-shrubs."

Seems more likely that they ate the animals, though. I mean, otherwise, shouldn't our teeth have been different by now?
I don't deny the profit motive.

I deny a) the normative claim of there being some form of malevolence in it, b) the idea that it's the only thing firms maximize for when in fact we clearly observe that firms will sacrifice some profit for both internal equilibrium and sending out consistent signals to consumers and c) that a profit motive will not exist in a hypothetical socialist or communist society.

Whether it's the manorialist collecting rent on land or the bartering farmer balancing their supply of wheat traded to remain at a surplus while keeping a stock of other consumer goods they've bought, there's always a profit motive. The manorialist profits either from use of a land title or the use of land as a factor of production. The farmer profits by having their supply of goods be at a state where the marginal product of each good provides increasing returns for satisfying their ends. In other words, the farmer profits from having a heterogeneous stock over a homogeneous stock because they can use the former to obtain further goods to diversify their portfolio, or trade so as to improve the serviceableness and efficiency of their factors for growing wheat.
They like to emphasize and masturbate to that one paragraph in the Russel-Norvig AI textbook mentioning the concept of "Friendly AI" along with a citation to a Yudkowsky writing. Beyond that single case, I don't know any public "endorsement" of any of his ideas by experts of any related field (if you can call this one citation an endorsement at all).
What a horrible way to determine if people are being forced out... compare the rate against a worse situation.

We noticed that people with HIV died less frequently over the time period than people with HIV and stage IV cancer. Therefore, there is no HIV problem.

I guess they are getting the eyeballs the wished for to read through this flame-bait.
Or maybe we'll learn that governmental regulation isn't the only form of regulation.

Uber is better than yellow taxis by a wide margin because of market regulatory forces (reputation, repeat business, competitors, etc.) which are far stronger than governmental regulations. By shielding yellow taxis from competition (remember what these taxis were like 10 years ago?), the government actually harmed consumers and subjected yellow taxis to less effective regulatory standards.
The magnitude of the increase is irrelevant. The key question is whether it was reasonable to expect them to detect it, which is, in turn, informed by the question of how they could have done so. The obvious method to audit compliance against an emissions standard is to use the same test that the regulator does. Obviously, in this case, that wouldn't have detected the defeat device.

To detect it, they would have needed to either conduct a non-standard test, or audit the code. Both those solutions seem, to me, to be above and beyond what would be considered reasonable due diligence under the circumstances. Perhaps I'm wrong, though - perhaps other car-makers perform such tests as a matter of course? I'm happy to be presented with evidence that that's the case. Even if it is the case, however, that still doesn't absolve the engineers from blame.

The bottom line is this: You are suggesting that the engineers who created the defeat device should not be blamed for doing so because the Compliance department should have detected it. I'm saying that not only was it not necessarily reasonable to expect the Compliance department to detect it but, even that were the case, it doesn't absolve the engineers of responsibility for what they did.
Looks like two pictures that have been pasted together?
It took Uber 2 years to acknowledge the fact that, yes, you need insurance when you drive a car commercially.

It will take another few until they’ll acknowledge that their drivers are employees, not contractors, and can demand medical insurance, retirement funds, etc.

All these things used to be provided thanks to regulation, and we’re seeing now how removing the regulation leads to uninsured cars on the roads driven by people earning below minimum wage without any social security.
It might be worth mentioning that the titles of those two Popper books are the reason why Imre Lakatos's book recommended in the OP is called "Proofs and refutations: the logic of mathematical discovery".

(I don't think knowing this makes any particular difference to how one reads any of the books involved; it's just amusing.)
Better XMPP Identifiers – Ed25519 Public Keys and .onions
It would not change anything significant about HFT besides removing the H. There would still be a technology race to execute trades as close to exactly 1 sec as possible.

HFT firms make money by being the first to grab trades for tiny price deltas. If the law said trades could only execute on one-second intervals, the deadline to be first to grab a trade would become a tempo defined by human law, instead of a steady lag due to physical law. But there would still be a deadline, so companies would still race.
The physics behind MRI is great. All it does is line up the magnetic moments of all the hydrogen atoms in your body, flips their spin with a burst of energy then watches for electrons as they flip back to a lower energy state. Totally safe!
Possibly. But it's good to check assumptions periodically, and I find the assumption that the taxi industry before uber was remotely efficient to be dubious. Very few industries merit protection from open competition (in fact, I can't think of one off the top of my head).

So far, as a consumer, I prefer uber (or lyft etc, experience is undifferentiated hence why I'm bearish on uber specifically) over literally every other transport-for-hire service I've ever used.

The contractor debate should be seen as a first step by the IRS (and soon enough, other countries' taxmen) to take more from an economy that is moving to being self employed at greater numbers (and in growing, valuable fields). Uber and everyone should fight this tooth and nail, both in courts and through lobbying. As it stands, there are strong legal arguments on both sides.

As to the ultimate fate of Uber: even if they win this, they will lose. Other competitors will steal their network effect and grow by competing on the spread between pay to company and pay to driver. In 6-10 years, self driving cars will replace human drivers, but margins will keep shrinking and competition will stay fierce. It will remain a huge industry in dollar terms, but not exceptional from a gross margin perspective.
I've made a plot from this data: https://plot.ly/~PiotrMigdal/86/
(I was having problems in comprehending all data at once).
> The food companies have marched around the grocery store, adding sweetness, engineering bliss points to products that didn’t used to be sweet.

This is why is now really hard to cut refined sugar out of your diet, because they put it in everything.

> It is no secret that the rise in obesity in America has something to do with food. But how much?

Those first two sentences seriously made me laugh out loud. What are the other possible factors? One might say a more sedentary lifestyle, except I've heard that rates of exercise and outdoor activity have been going up. (I'll see if I can dig up a reference.) But maybe more important is that fact that you can sit in a chair all day and not gain weight if you simply control your calorie intake to match you activity level... Which is the only thing that needs to happen regardless of what you do during the day, inside or outside, lazy or active. Maybe that intro was trying not to come out and blame the food industry for the whole thing in the first 10 words, or leave the reader hanging so they don't stop there, but the probability that out obesity epidemic isn't 100% due to diet is zero.
Incomplete thinking. What about land-based fuel handling - creation, storage, transport, delivery? What about waste processing? The attack surface isn't just the ship.
> Hacking someone’s phone number is almost impossible to do, as someone would need to steal the physical SIM card or clone it at least. An almost impossible venture for the majority of fraudsters.

Wiretapping/redirecting SMS is actually surprisingly easy and doesn't require stealing/cloning SIM cards. Not sure how it compares to wiretapping unencrypted IP networks, but based on a demo I saw today I would guess it's easier.
That's not how it works, what will happen instead is that those other manufacturers will also be hit hard by the US regulatory entities.
It is similar, but one advantage is that you can run your existing CGI scripts (C/C++/perl/ ...) without a remote web server. That interests me as it would allow re-use of some existing scripts and it would also allow me to wrap some legacy interfaces.
Google has talked extensively about how they do Source Control, and it's freaking brilliant:

Perforce for source control. A FUSE file system. You configure it to point at a revision (or at head) of a branch (almost everyone is always on the main branch). Then it makes a drive (or folder) look like the Perforce repository, but read-only. It caches files as you read them. Then, if you try to make, modify, or delete an asset, it stores those locally, but makes it appear to be in the same directory as the rest of the repository.

I think this would be perfect for art assets.
The big example how the relationship is an employment one (IMO) is the integration test from US v. Silk (1947) -- and yes, it's from 1947 so take what you will from that but it is still one of the factors. Uber simply doesn't exist as a product without the drivers. The drivers' "businesses" are so integrated into Uber's product that there is no meaningful distinction that can be drawn there. Courts frown on rules lawyers, which is what Uber is trying to do right now.

There's another 19 prongs that have been used in the past to classify people who are employees as employees. I estimate Uber can only meet 7 or 8 of them, and I don't think that's enough to establish that the drivers are bona fide contractors.
جبس بورد الكويت هاتف 55090348
Trivago Internal Hackathon 2015, 2nd edition
> But cult-like at least to me implies more negative connotations. Isolating people from their friends & families. Abusive behavior towards its members. Stuff like that.

I did not mean it like that, and if that is how people understood it then I apologize. I meant it in the sense defined by Wikipedia: "In the sociological classifications of religious movements in English, a cult is a religious or social group with socially deviant or novel beliefs and practices". Or, in other words, a small fringe (possibly non-theistic) religion.
To save any UK peeps from having to Google, the Royal Mail no longer sell these as of 2011 (http://www.royalmail.com/reply-sender). :(
> Misallocation is a massive problem.

A little girl and her grandfather, an economist, are walking down the street. Suddenly, the little girl tugs on her grandfather's tweed blazer and says, "Look, Grandpa! There's a $20 bill on the sidewalk! Somebody must have dropped it!"

"Nonsense!," said the grandfather. "If that were a real $20 bill, someone would have already picked it up!"
It is an academic publication by Springer. That's why - academic publishing is just crazy. (Anybody around here doing a start-up that would make it obsolete?)

I would, of course, never suggest downloading the PDF from unofficial sources, but I could completely see why people are doing that.
Thanks. i m trying that.
Gotcha. Yeah, they definitely help to build the excitement when travelling into the city. The best thing about the Shard is the view from the top of it - gives a whole new perspective to the 'gherkin cluster' of buildings.
I left medical research science because it isn't survivable... the world cares nothing for curing diseases, and incentivizes people to do so as such.
Well it's the 'solution' principle, SoC manufacturers want to provide something that can do as much as they can to cover the ECU, Infotainment, dashboard, and every other little bits they can as one single 'package'. The SoC gets a lot bigger too, since it now need to provide the all around cameras for example, there's a push to use that power to do 'other stuff'.

A few years back I had a car that had a short when it was raining a lot -- the (digital) speedo and stuff with reboot -- but the car continues working all the same...

Soon I don't /know/ what'll happend if the SoC gets compromised (either maliciously, or just accidentally). I guess we'll have to have a few accidents for people to 're-discover' that redundancy and the egg+basket principle are a good idea after all...
The claim that the market forces are more effective are plain wrong.

Because uber is not operating in a free market. Uber actively destroys competition to gain a new monopoly.

We’ll be exchanging one monopoly with another.

How well monopolies work can be seen with Comcast, etc.

In other markets, where sometimes yellow cabs have been governmentally regulated, but in better ways (for example, anyone can drive a cab if they have insurance + drivers license, but only N cabs can use the cab parking), uber is not an improvement, but actually making the market worse, because they reduce competition.

Your argument is like saying "Instead of Comcast, ATT, etc we should all use Google Fiber". Great, replace one monopoly with another, and for some people – take Romanian cities, which have better internet than Google Fiber – the new monopoly would be worse.

We need an open market, not another monopoly.

And we need safe, competition-friendly regulation by the government, not private regulation, not governmentally-enforced monopolies.
Show HN: Property manager application
I have created a property manager application, whose aim is to manage the properties for the project for multiple environments / releases.
Complete appliation is deployed on HEROKU at https://vast-cliffs-8955.herokuapp.com/#/

Project Detail is available at : https://github.com/panbhatt/propserv er

Clients are available in : Java NodeJS
An interesting question. Reposting with "Ask HN: " at the beginning of the subject line may help it receive answers.
I will almost certainly never tire of re-reading this essay. For all his flaws as a writer and as a person, Lovecraft really knew how to manipulate fear.
A lot of workplaces do allow you to be an employee and have your own hours.
There was a good reason those regulations we created left an exception for contractors and those reasons very much apply to Uber. If some driver is taking hails from both Lyft and Uber should both Lyft and Uber have to provide him or her with health insurance? It is often the case that employees are listed as contractors when they shouldn't be but Uber's drivers are very much not an example of this.
>criminals who would presumably take precautions

This strikes me as weak. Sure, some criminals would still enable it, but most criminals wouldn't. I've made the same arguments in greater detail here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10580829 , and lower link to some criminal activity with hundreds of millions at stake that communicated over email.
That's kind of what i was thinking - somewhere between good ol' cgi and a reverse proxy ....

Unfortunate because I'm semi-looking for a simple service that will let me configure a stateful new frontend to an old API - title made me think it might be along those lines.
Airbnb host bias against people with 'black-sounding names' – Harvard study
A really good read, but this thing needs to be reformatted. Hard to parse giant paragraphs on the web.
Why? Isn't it the same in the end?

Money is fungible.
> I suppose there's a big difference between intentionally driving people out to replace them, and it being an unintentional side effect of all sorts of stuff that's going on. It was my impression that the problems with gentrification are generally of the second type, but your comment makes it sound like this is being done intentionally.

In some neighborhoods, it truly is a campaign to drive out the existing residents ("orchestrated a campaign of 'polite harassment' / "bought out tenants apartments from their landlords")

http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2011/04/nei...
Or...more likely...you are a contractor offering a commodity service in a market with ample supply.

There's no requirement to go into lengthy or customized negotiations to offer, accept or reject a contract.
Kind of early in the day for me, but you go ahead.
I suspect the engineers were ordered to do this, not that they came up with this by themselves. (In fact, I find that suggestion totally unbelievable.)

I agree the engineers are culpable but if they were acting under orders from their managers then the buck has to stop somewhere, someone is going to be the last one 'up the chain' that decided it was within their pay-grade to make this decision. The internal organization of VW is such that that decision could have only come straight from the top given the liability in case of exposure.

If the only way to ensure compliance is to audit the code then that's what you should do. It basically says the testing regime is so easy to detect that it can be used to defeat the test itself, Bosch correspondence indicates that this software is expressly not meant to be included in the final product and VW knowingly ignored that information, something a compliance department should have been absolutely on top of.
You might be thinking of CT scans? MRI scans should be harmless.
Are you able to operate as a Shibboleth SP?
Honestly probably not as all client interfaces I've tried end up lagging behind the web or not having all the features. It's a huge undertaking to recreate JIRA in a client.
Should've posted this link instead: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episo...
Wow! Google is releasing products at a super fast speed! Go Google Cloud!
Yes, but he did not admit to actual knowledge of the defeat device.
Most of the Gflops in a phone are in the GPU - precisely because it's massively parallel, like the Cray.

Intel's i7s and Xeons have a more general purpose architecture with much less parallelism, but still manage a steady few hundred Gflops on Linpack.
And spin don't affect biochemistry ? naively I'd say everything have a limit..
Such heaps of money could only be meaningfully invested in case of a large technological breakthrough that would enable the emergence of entirely new industries, skill-sets and supporting businesses. Think of the internal-combustion engine, electricity, and (we are already exhausting the potential of this one) the Internet.

Otherwise, the mere existence of that money (even if it never gets spent) serves no other purpose than to reinforce the status-quo.