skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are misreading anger where there is slightly ascerbic honesty:

> "set up only for those who wish to become theoretical physicists, not just ordinary ones" -> -- use of 'ordinary' instead of 'experimental' is intentionally condescending, hopefully for sarcastic effect

If you'd finished the sentence, you'd see: "but the very best, those who are fully determined to earn their own Nobel Prize. "

He is constrasting "ordinary" with "the very best". He isn't talking about experimental physics -- that's not his field.

> "finish those lousy schools first and follow the regular routes provided by educators and specialized -gogues who are so damn carefully chewing all those tiny portions before feeding them to you." --- Must be a joke. Nobel prizes are not awarded to individuals these days, they go to collaborations. There is no way to get into a collaboration, or likely a PhD program without an undergraduate degree in Physics. Legally not allowed in many European countries to join a PhD program...

The beauty of theoretical physics (and math) is that you don't need any expensive equipment or overpriced tuition. Just books and people to talk to. Both of these are available free (except some books cost $$$), on the Internet. That's enough to get started.

> "More than rudimentary intelligence is assumed to be present, because ordinary students can master this material only when assisted by patient teachers." --- if this isn't sarcasm, then this guy is a monstrous prick who just decided to insult the 'rudimentary' intelligence of all Physics undergrads who deigned to actually attend college. Again with the 'ordinary'.

It's a simple fact: Smarter folks can get farther without as much guidance from teachers.

> The opening paragraph continues the authors apparent disdain for school in general:
"But what if you are still young, at School, and before being admitted at a University, you have to endure the childish anecdotes that they call science there? What if you are older, and you are not at all looking forward to join those noisy crowds of young students?"

Common K-12 schools in many countries generally teach science and math very poorly. This is not a controversial statement.

Colleges are full of 18-22-yr-olds, many of whom are there to party; not a comfortable environment for some 30+ year olds.

> Which is a bit humerus

You seem to have a bone to pick.

> considering the importance he himself places on fundamentals with:
"solid foundations in elementary mathematics and notions of classical (pre-20th century) physics. Don’t think that pre-20th century physics is “irrelevant”"

What does that have to do with the high school and college learning experience?

>i .e. He did basically all this stuff he is brushing off as worthless. As in going to classes, with teachers, at an undergraduate university, before applying for a PhD program.

The into goes to lengths to explain the sort of person who doesn't fit into school, and would benefit from an autodidactic alternative. For everyone else...there's school. I don't know why you have such a chip against the possibility of thriving outside of college... too much student loans got you sour grapse?
>> The result is an innovation that will make the ease of mobile payments a reality for millions of Americans.

I don't think this is an innovation but more of an evolution of an already existing process.

>> ”The Walmart app was built to make shopping faster and easier,”

I have to get wallet from pocket, open it, take out card and swipe - 4 actions.

OR

I have to take phone from pocket, unlock it by tapping the screen 6 times (dont mess up), opening the app(, maybe navigating to the scanner), then scanning - 4+ actions.

That is neither faster nor, in my opinion, easier.

Where's the benefit for me (as a consumer) with these electronic payment systems?

[edited formatting]
I do agree with you, but there is a big difference between disruption of the peace and an immediate and dangerous situation.

Partying and anti social behaviour should be dealt with over time with care. Things like dry zones, fines for property owners, police presence and steering the crowd somewhere less impactful.

While not fair for you to deal with, the punishment needs to match the crime. Guns and violence aren't appropriate as per America, fines for property owners could be a solution, and most immediate action such as jail or on the spot fines needs to come after the situation escalates, not on a neighbour's whim.

A word and a written warning is absolutely enough to begin with, if it carries on then start to escalate consequences.

In my experience most people will either leave or tone it down when police show up. Just their presence is usually enough to let you know to keep things reasonable.

In Australia we have some massive fines for things like disturbing the peace, which is why police presence works. 300+ depending on state. But they are not enforced until absolutely nothing else has worked.
The fights are often more expensive than the settlements, and these settlements have gone from a rare black mark to being a cost of doing business.[1]

Similar discussions are common in the criminal law, and it is well-known that a large number of people plead guilty to crimes they did not commit; people do this because the costs to themselves and to their families are much higher if they fight the charges than if they just plead guilty.

[1] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/802ae15c-9b50-11e3-946b-00144feab7...
Hundreds of thousands of engine immobilisers hackable over the net
Thank you for reporting this issue. Going to fix it.
It's not about being dumb. You're taking it personal when no offence is meant. Understanding the difference cache hierarchies, or how you reach consensus in a system without a central authority, or to what degree various normal forms of data affect you, or being able to design a sound and complete DSL, or a lot of other things. That is what you get from a proper CS degree.

Does that mean that you cannot program of design programs? No, but there are people out there with more education better suited to design, say, a large scale medical system where certain guarantees must be given.
And also "The Logic of Scientific Discovery", Karl Popper.

I read it at young age, and it was an open-mind read.
It's really not obvious when you're studying. I often use knowledge that seemed useless at my time at university, but it has surprisingly come in handy every now and then.
original source:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10714505
> I don't use Go at all, but from the example above I can tell it is a horribly grotesque language...

If you don't us Go at all then you can't tell anything from a single 3 line example. It's like judging an entire Linux distro based solely on a couple of screenshots.

What the he'll is going wrong with HN lately that I can't open a programming thread without superficial criticisms from someone who's never actually coded in that particular language, and troll posts about how Java / whatever is better / already supports feature x.....

People complain about the zealous attitudes of language fanboys, but honestly I think the dogmatic negativity on HN is becoming a far greater issue.

</rant>
Use the Go oracle with an "implements" query.
If you could redesign a system of government free from major flaws we see today, how would it work? Current systems almost seem to have a tendency to "breed" the types of malevolent, inefficient, greedy and problematic power structures we see. I think that at the root of the problem are natural human flaws. It seems almost certain that given enough time, no matter how well intentioned people are, the cumulative effect of our natural flaws inevitably evolves the kind of system/culture that attracts and perpetuates these flawed tendencies. I think the process could be compared to natural selection. Has anyone thought about it like that? I'm curious. Is it possible to design a system of government which would not be influenced by inherent human flaws? A system which, by design, has a tendency to "select" characteristics that shape it to be more beneficial, free from its current flaws?
Does it work with Enigmail? (OpenPGP...)

For me, GPG is an integral part of working with email.
I don't understand the whole "I want to use my tablet as a laptop" craze and vice versa.

I use my Macbook Pro for laptop stuff, and my iPad Pro for reading books and PDFs and drawing diagrams etc. Why would I want to merge both devices into one?
How do you maintain derivations for your own software with respect to nixpkgs?

Do you have your own function that composes things and imports <nixpkgs>, along with overrides for things that you find deficient in the derivations found in nixpkgs? Do you include derivations for your own software as part of your fork of nixpkgs that doesn't make its way back upstream?

Inquiring minds wish to know.
I am glad I am not the only one.
Another way of looking at this is these executives didn't necessarily agree to the "social contract," they were simply born into it. There is frequently a rather pervasive attitude that life is competition and any rules were made to be broken.

Also, many would disagree that welfare makes the "world better for everyone." A more competitive outlook would say welfare simply encourages dysgenics on a massive scale and multiplies problems.
It's probably because they have eight "sensing rays" and plank may be located between them.
On top of that, the code above ignores errors, something that Go makes all too easy by not supporting exceptions.
in hospitals or other realms with patient data, be aware of HIPAA requirements.
Still no flying cars? The future of transit promises something even better
Not sure that would help though. You want someone with the theoretical knowhow to understand the problem at hand, so you can rewrite it to be simpler to program. In other words, a CS major with programming skills. They are in very high demand.
Being a teenager is a similar offense. In my teen days we drew the attention of 8 police officers (who circled the building) by sitting nearby a police officers wife who apparently didn't like our language. Mostly just frisked for drugs and whatnot; it became a running joke.
Sorry, but it's stuff like this that causes me to avoid most philosophy.

Yes, there are extremely small likelihoods for all kinds of extremely unlikely things. That doesn't make tools like induction any less useful. Sure you can't prove X, but you can show that the likelihood of ~X is far, far lower than the likelihood that you will hallucinate ~X.
And Python itself is pretty verbose compared to modern languages:

mySequence.filter { it % 2 == 0 }.sum()
> In the old days, people paid for cable TV so they could avoid ads. Now you pay for cable and get ads too.

Cable TV was invented to distribute tv to areas where antenna reception was not possible. It was just regular channels rebroadcast with the same commercials. Superstaions emerged like TBS that were once local channels but now became regional and then national cable channels. Still with commercials. Premium channels like HBO and showtime were the only commercial free stations and you paid extra for them.
Memory Optimization (2003) [pdf]
This. Is. So. Amazing. Specially since I am a horrible typist. This is a great and extremly fun way to improve one's typing skills!

The effects are also great
In the SNP case, and the other example I was thinking about - the multiple regional parties in Spain which defend their secession from the main country (see the recent Catalonia independence movement) - I'd say the nationalism is rooted in the basis of the right of self-determination, which is very dear to the Left.
It's a pretext, not the reason.
Speaking as a complete layman, Philosophy of Science rocks. Feynman was smoking crack. Philosophy of Science is an extremely important discipline. It will just make your head explode. (Along with epistemology and couple others)

I started on my learning journey using The Great Courses series -- it's kind of like famous professors giving an abbreviated overview (20-40 hours) of their 101 courses. Deep enough that it's not some Discovery Channel show, light enough that you're not up until 2 a.m. every night for a month reading Hegel.

I think that the reason most scientists like Feynman don't get it is that they treat philosophy as a scientific discipline. It is not. Philosophy is the asking of questions. Every now and then you get into a fertile area where those questions can become their own science. This is why philosophy is called the "Mother of all sciences" Oddly enough, I think philosophers themselves have lost their way, but that's a story for another day.

My advice to those who are interested is to get an easy introduction, and don't take it too seriously. I love philosophy because it's like meeting the smartest people that ever lived in a bar and having them talk about really deep questions. But you'll have more fun talking to a lot of people than spending a deep dive with one guy. They tend to have a few good ideas and then spend the rest of their lives over-applying them.

Philosophy is also a great way to begin to talk about the important questions involving technology and people. Don't let anybody tell you any different. I've been very interested in the Philosophy of Language and how it relates to technology teams talking to users about solutions. Just got through writing an essay comparing the conditions that led to Sir Francis Bacon's New Orgonon with conditions in the Agile practitioner community today. Anybody writing apps controlling the speech of millions should have a grounding in political theory -- or risk turning the planet into a cesspool of conformity just so they can make a buck. Cool stuff.
I've been using it with Ubuntu. We also have it working with OSX.

I'd love to give NixOS a try, but haven't gotten around to it. Version controlling the entire system is very compelling.
Pick 30 random people and replace them every 3 months. The new laws have to be voted on by either a referendum or a large random draft (1000 people) (which are also often replaced).

Problems are: keeping the random random.
People in general making immature decision, like lowering the taxes.
> As for MPWDrawingContext, it looks like a nice wrapper around CGContextRef.

Exactly (for now). It has a clear problem statement (the functionality is great but the API is awful) and then demonstrates how it solves the problem.

> C4 sets itself apart because it handles interactivity (gestures, etc.) and audio / video.
> You can draw / animate, and build fully interactive interfaces.

That cannot be what sets C4 apart, because the APIs that C4 is built on top of let you do all of these things.

It's as if I wrote that what sets MPWDrawingContext apart is that it lets you draw beautiful graphics. While it is true that you can draw beautiful graphics with MPWDrawingContext, you can draw those same beautiful graphics with CGContext, so that is not the distinguishing feature. The distinguishing feature is that doing so is just much more painful with CGContext and much more pleasant with MPWDrawingContext.

Framing it this way makes it immediately clear whether you might want to look at MPWDrawingContext (you don't find the CG API very pleasant to use) and helps you evaluate it (looks more pleasant to me, I'll give it a try vs. that looks worse than CG, close the window).

For C4, the first guess is that it's like Processing, but then I see that there's no interactive app, which to me is the key distinguishing feature of Processing. Since you don't currently have an interactive app, my guess would be that you are saying you have libraries that are "Processing-like", is that correct?

I personally always thought those particular libraries were fairly nondescript/generic graphics libraries, so possibly that's what I don't understand and maybe what you might need to explain.

The two examples you have on the home page don't make a very compelling case for the fairly grand claims, width vs. size.width is at best questionable, and CA/UIKit have both implicit and block-based animations that look just as good as the example you give.
By paying a premium, we're indicating to advertisers that we have buying power. Which is exactly who they want to target. So in a way, paying tends to attract ads?
Are you claiming that 49% of people are upper class, as in earn over $145,000 in states where that's the cutoff such as Maryland and Alaska?

Half the country earning at least $70/hr and employed full time. Really?

Only 9% earn under $40k in those states?

Can you cite something?

I claim that it's more like 7% upper, 49% middle, 44% lower and not a world of $170,000 gas station attendants and $150,000 dishwashers.
I've watched a few talks on guix, and there's lots to like.

I recall there's supposed to be compatibility between nix and guix, but can't remember the details. Are they going to share package expressions, have a transpiler, or something like this?
> Could you explain the difference between nationalism and tribalism?

A tribe could be described as a people of common genetic ancestry. On the occasion they have an ancestral homeland, that's called a Nation. For example, the Germans have Germany, the French have france, etc. If you were to replace the German people with Syrians, for example, the nation of Germany would cease to exist. The Syrians living in Germany have no loyalty to the nation. The loyalty the Germans have for their nation (or their nationalism) is only a function of the fact that Germans live there and they feel that is their home.

> Are you saying that we should deport the immigrants for their own good?

Nothing makes a Tribe feel more fiercely nationalist than a perceived invasion from an outside group. That really triggers the deep seated need we all have to ensure our genes and our race survive. That means expelling the invaders, one way or the other. The Reconquista is a good example of an event that was somewhere in the middle. There were lots of wars, lots of deportations, but not an outright genocide.
Could this also be used to burn waste? There are already experiments witch plasma gasification but those temperatures are much lower (13000°C).

Maybe some day we will all have a Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor in our cars[1]

[1] http://backtothefuture.wikia.com/wiki/Mr._Fusion
Huh? How are legitimate towers even supposed to know what the strongest signal is for a phone in an unknown location surrounded by unknown towers?

Also, do you even need to break any cryptography / MITM, or can you just be your own base station that happens to be called "AT&T"?
This one's at the foundation of our science though. Karl Popper's ideas on falsification have been very influential in how scientists frame their work. And errors of induction have caused some notable financial blowups because models missed tail risks.

The example you replied to was farfetched, but not an abstract ivory tower notion – it's something deeply built into how we view the world.

This doesn't mean there's no use of inductive reasoning, or that we shouldn't suspect that some things are far more likely true than others. But remembering the ultimate impossibility of inductive proof can help avoid real world errors.
So beside familiarizing the language syntax, I need to be aware of a set of unofficial tools and plugins, which are likely going to change in the next couple months, to be able to read the code.
Skyscraper-style chip design boosts electronic performance
Everyone's a PL expert.
Valve's Steam Controller Assembly Line [video]
Palantir has a core team of engineers building out a very general data analysis framework. Their core product consists of a GUI for manipulating and sharing annotated graphs (i.e. edges and vertices). The actual edges and vertices of the graph can have complex types defined by some arbitrarily detailed ontology. The GUI also includes tools for producing visualizations and charts from numerical and textual attributes of the edges/vertices. The core product is very powerful when configured properly and it is used to solve important problems in both government and industry.

Palantir also has a much larger corps of consulting engineers (FDEs in Palantir parlance) who actually build the ontologies, import a customer's data in to Palantir, and then provide ongoing support to users. A huge portion of this work is writing scripts to munge the data from arbitrary formats (SQL tables, CSV, Excel, etc) to the format supported by Palantir. A core reason for Palantir's success is that they convince large numbers of top engineering students from MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, etc, to do this relatively unglamorous work for below-market pay.

Due to the imbalance in headcount between core engineering and the consulting division, Palantir, in practice, operates more similarly to Accenture or McKinsey than to Google or Facebook. However, for some unknown reason, their valuation seems to be calculated like that of a high margin software company, rather than like that of a low-margin services business. In particular, to increase revenue by N dollars, Palantir needs to hire O(N) employees.
Well, I was referring specifically to the "defaulting."
The first hack for your next week should be time tracking
SWIFT Announces Possible Implementation of the Blockchain
They've been working on it for 10 years and have achieved nothing- then she went on a media PR blitz storm starting in 2013. Suddenly they're upset when not all their coverage is glowing.
Looks pretty out of touch with any reality to me...

49% upper class? Where did you get those bogus numbers? The actual numbers given (and even those skewed) are about 15%.
I don't see these ads. But I purchase a phone number through Skype - maybe they don't show if you're a subscriber?
How to Implement Time Keeping Software: A Painless Method