skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lack of empathy can be overcome with a rational commitment to adhere to a personal system of ethics.

If a sociopath doesn't actually care what happens to other people, they can still formulate a list of rules to follow that prevents them from appearing to be a sociopath.

I recall reading about a brain researcher who was studying the measurable physiological differences in PET scans between the brains of serial killers and the control group brains when he discovered a brain scan that matched the psychopathic pattern in some other scans done for Alzheimer's screening research. It was his own brain. [0]

Surprise! You have a serial killer brain! Why don't you act like one? Maybe you just have better impulse control. Maybe you prefer to amass your wealth as adoration from fans and acquaintances. Maybe you prefer to humiliate others in video game arenas than to get any real blood on your hands.

So a smirking asshole like Shkreli isn't just a matter of sociopathy. It's being a sociopath so incredibly careless and stupid that he just couldn't avoid inciting the torches-and-pitchforks mob against him. If you make enough people hate you, you're going down for something, even if you have been careful about following all the laws to the letter, or at least covering your tracks.

If Shkreli really is a sociopath, he won't care about getting caught or going to jail. The burr up his butt will be that other people are better at his lifestyle than he is, and can prove it. (You lose! Good day, sir!)

[0] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscient...
> .encode() and .decode() are so ambiguous and unintuitive

They are not. What is unintuitive is the default encoding in Python where an encode can trigger an implicit encode and the other way round. The `encode()`/`decode()` availability of strings was never a problem has you have many bytes -> bytes and str -> str codecs;
note 44% of the demographic. Ya, crazy .... see how prohibition worked well. Just like the war on drugs. Policy does nothing. Its ineffective, and we need to drive poverty down to target the leading population of gun violence, the poor. It's ironic how the African American population is left out of the conversation in Liberal media. Nobody goes to the ghetto in Chicago and asks THEM about gun violence. The modern liberal is a FB subscribing 18-25 year old that doesn't understand the history that drove the conversation to where its at today.
89, 263, 201, 500, 337, 480
Poe’s Only Bestseller as a Living Author Was a Schoolbook About Seashells
Some people can never be good singers, because they're tone deaf. Or mute. Blind people, with perhaps a few exceptional, uh, exceptions, can never be good basketball players. People with exceptionally low can never be programmers.

On the other side are the virtuoso's. People who not just through training, but innate ability are at the top of their field.

The rest of us are somewhere in between.

It strikes me as downright ridiculous that there's an infinite ascent to becoming a better programmer, considering that it's trivial to think of examples of people who cannot even master the basics.

I think anecdata in this case doesn't quite cut it.

That said, I very much applaud the sentiment of your message, as I think a lot of people err on the side of thinking that they are innately incapable while diligent practice and learning might get them quite far.

But that doesn't change the, in my opinion, completely sensible observation that some people are just not cut out to be great programmers. Programming is difficult!
Yes, however I originally felt uncomfortable commenting much further here, at the risk of being accused of sexism.
If it's a seedable generator, it certainly is.

There are applications in creative coding and gaming where it's critical to have a reproducible random sequence that gives the same results on all platforms.
Exactly. When Australia changed their gun laws, the suicide rate went down by 65%.
You could do that before with % substitution too. But I prefer .format() because (1) it's the new idiom and (2) will coerce to string without me binding the type in the format string.
There's quite a difference between "guns make people suicidal" and "guns enable impulsive suicide"
The article also says

> Gun homicide rates have actually fallen in recent years, but those gains have been offset by rising gun suicide rates. Today, suicides account for roughly two out of every three gun deaths.
If I could downvote this for being a sensationalist article, I would!

Here's the operative phrase: "The convergence of the trend lines above is driven primarily by a sharp drop in the rate of motor vehicle fatalities since 1950."

It's amazing that we've improved vehicle safety in the last 60 years, yet there is zero reason to conflate that with homicides involving a firearm.
Woman sues Airbnb after finding hidden camera in her rental
Revealed: divorce software error to hit thousands of settlements
>By the way, the judge in case actually demonstrated quite a deep understanding of the web. Unable to get WhatsApp to comply, he ordered all telecoms to block WhatsApp IP addresses, which was quite a smart move.

Because VPN services do not exist in or are not accessible from Brazil?
By that logic we should get rid of swimming pools...http://www.poolsafely.gov/drowning-deaths-injuries/

Probably ladders as well...
Or retire early/rich. This is why I encourage my younger coworkers (well, all of them really) to try and put as much into an IRA and their 401k as they can afford (ideally maxing it, once that's done every pay raise goes entirely to you and the gov't (as taxes)). When you're in your twenties you usually have a far higher tolerance for discomfort (so if you want to travel you're more willing to do the hostel stays and such) and have fewer external obligations. By the time you're in your 30s you're making enough money (as a professional engineer/scientist type in my field) that those contributions are a small (but still significant) part of your income, and if you need to reduce it to cover family expenses you still have a lot of money banked and earning towards your retirement.
Show HN: Try Facebook's static analyzer Infer online
His partner is Zoubin Gharamani. Zoubin is a brilliant researcher, he had one of the best invited talks at NIPS this year.
In my experience, if you start spreading a good idea out there, what can happen is that people will initially act as though your idea is outlandish and worthless, but later on, this idea will percolate in other people's mind, they'll do something with it, and claim it was purely their own invention. Google has more resources than this guy, so they can prototype things much quicker.
That's kinda a useless distinction. Nobody read that title and pictured sentient guns tracking down and hunting humans. Autonomous cars doing that might almost be plausible, but realistically the same applies there.

"Gun related fatalities are currently as high as automotive related fatalities in the U.S. for the first time" might be a more precise statement, but it's a worse headline.
A loop that bears repeating
I quote:

Bernie Sanders tweets, “At the end of the day, providing a path to go to college is a helluva lot cheaper than putting people on a path to jail.”

I wonder sometimes, if the best way to question the increasingly dangerous idea that a college education is the best path for the most people, is to stop fighting the sentiment directly, and simply shine a light on the knuckleheads who continue to perpetuate this nonsense. This latest tweet from Bernie Sanders is a prime example. In less than 140 characters, he’s managed to imply that a path to prison is the most likely alternative to a path to college. Pardon my acronym, but...WTF!?...

It’s a cautionary tale as predictable as it is false. But now, as people are slowly starting to understand the obscenity of 1.3 trillion dollars in student loans, along with the abundance of opportunity for those with the proper training, it seems the proponents of “college for all” need something even more frightening than the prospect of a career in the trades to frighten the next class into signing on the dotted line. According to Senator Sanders, that “something,” is a path to jail.

I try not to be political on this page, because the truth is, arrogance and elitism are alive and well in every corner of every party—especially with respect to this topic. But I have to admit, this is the first time I’ve seen an elected official support the hyper-inflated cost of a diploma by juxtaposing it with the hyper-inflated cost of incarceration. Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of it.
No one thought to check the results, there was no gratitude for the person who found the bug.

Mention also was not made of software testing.
But it's not a meme... it's a word. The word is defined as "a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience." I think that's a very apt explanation of this guy.
I disagree a little bit with you. One clock radio I pulled apart had a mechanical time display and while the radio was indeed an inscrutable PCB covered in components it matched the level of complexity I expected to see.

Nowadays the complexity is hidden under a smooth patch of black plastic that can have smart phone levels of complexity internally and no hint at the that from the outside.

Obviously it's swings and roundabouts since you can indeed find a wealth of information online about any of these subjects but sometimes it feels like it's harder to kindle the initial fire of curiosity.
It also costs governments to do things inefficiently. Money spent on something is not spent on something else regardless of what organization spends it.
This. If there's a 10% chance it works and you don't die, I bet a lot of Alzheimer's patients would jump on it.
In the words of Mel Brooks in the History of the World Part 1:

And here, in a cave, about 2 million years ago, the first artist was born. And, of course, with the birth of the artist, came the inevitable after birth... The critic.

Lest I get down voted for bringing humor to a comment on Hacker News, I will make the further point. Are your comments meant to be art criticism? Ok. They should be judged as art criticism. You say it's "another madonna" as if all madonna's are junk art. Many of the madonna's are the most studied religious iconography and artistic masterpieces of all time. Almost all of the most renowned artists in history have completed a madonna. Who is to say it has been done to death in every medium? Are you attempting to say that no artist can come along and make a new masterpiece madonna? And frankly, you'll have to argue much harder to make people believe that the madonna has been done to death in every medium, particularly MR images.

As for your argument that million-dollar paintbrushes should be left to non-novice artists to create something interesting. We create art with what we have on hand. This person happens to have a 3 tesla MRI machine. Why shouldn't they use it? If another artist would like to come along and use it, they can work with the university that holds it to use it. What a horrible argument to say that because they are a novice they should not be allowed to use such a beautiful tool for their own artistic enjoyment.
Managed NAT (Network Address Translation) Gateway for AWS
5 Web Design Do’s and Don’ts
Gomorrah http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0929425/?ref_=nv_sr_2 does a really good job of portraying this aspect.
Ilan Schnells AOT generator for perfect hash functions[0] has served me well. It takes a code template so you can generate code for any language. It also uses the much more elegant CHM algorithm[1] (Which is also implemented by the venerable CMPH library[2] if you want to compute these things dynamically.)

If I was doing dynamically in C++, like the author of this post, and didn't want to add a runtime dependency, I might be tempted to implement CHM using Boost Graph.

[0] http://ilan.schnell-web.net/prog/perfect-hash/

[1] http://ilan.schnell-web.net/prog/perfect-hash/algo.html

[2] http://cmph.sourceforge.net/
Senate probing whether Cruz leaked classified surveillance data during debate
Who's to say we won't innovate our way out of heat death? Disrupt entropy!
Encoded things are not meant to be human readable, like some sort of "secret code". The underlying bytes of some Unicode string probably won't be human-readable if you read it byte per byte--it will be like the platform's "secret code" for your string.

Conversely, you can decode the byte message into something readable, ie. your Unicode string.
You could always compare how much your perceived reality matches predictions from your mental model. If you look at the concept of 'schemas' in child development, you'll see children focusing on one thing over and over again, like 'containment'. Putting a block in a box, taking it out, putting it in, taking it out. Each time they're learning that when you put something inside something else, it's still there even if you can't see it, that you can pick them up together etc etc. They're slowly exercising the different ways they can interact with their environment, learning to model likely outcomes. Learn enough of these schemas and you can start making more complex plans to see what the world does in response.
Disagree. The original commenter is correct in saying that the naming scheme is not obvious. Something like to_bytes(encoding) would be a lot more clear.
Diversity training? DHS not allowed to look at the social media of the San Bernardino shooters when they were entering, where they would have seen threats? Polls showing growing discord in the military between the right majority and the left leadership? Wall St. and corporate support for abortion? Clinton's explicit inspiration from Alinsky? US support for Hamas / Muslim Brotherhood / Hawai'ian Separatists? Nobody wins everything unless they treat their opponents like Melians.
Nothing happens. (Firefox, Linux, USA)
I'm the average Javascript programmer. I'm writing some web app and I need to do some cryptography. Let's see, there's Math.random and Crypto.getRandomValues. Let's go with Math.random, for shiggles. I'm probably copy-pasting from Stack Overflow.

Will renaming a function or two fix my bad behaviour?

The answer to "Should I use Math.random or X" is neither! I should be using a cryptography library like SJCL or tweetnacl-js:

http://bitwiseshiftleft.github.io/sjcl/

http://dchest.github.io/tweetnacl-js/
>assume that I simply do not understand the issue as well as you do

Not, I assumed you had different understanding. Maybe you do have a more accurate understanding of the situation but that isn't clear yet.

And as for giving a simple explanation? Why is that a bad thing? I want to communicate clearly so you can understand me.

>That's why I can't stand LWers.

I'm not a LWer. I don't have an account there. I've never interacted with the community at all. I've just read some of the posts.

>Here's an excerpt on him talking about the basilisk.

Which just supports my understanding.

As he says:

>Basically, the same obvious precautions you'd use if Lovecraft's Necronomicon was online and could be found using simple Google keywords - you wouldn't post anything which would cause anyone to enter those Google keywords, unless they'd been warned about the potential consequences.

Which is analogy akin to my coding one.

>But since you are so DESPERATE to defend Elizer

I think Elizier is a pretty messed up person. He clearly has mental issues. At the same time, I am very thankful to him/LW/HPMOR for personal reasons. Which is why I will step up to defend him when I think he/LW is being, I guess slandered?

> (when I have not once said that I dislike him - something else that you would have noticed if you bothered to LISTEN)

I never accused you of disliking him.

Honestly though, for as much as you've condemned my behavior in this discussion, I'm not the one repeatedly insulting people.
I've seen similar situations at scientific conferences. To be fair, the Republican caucus was trying to significantly cut the budget for the field at the time.
I have a few data points - I worked in the banking industry for many years and saw this sort of behaviour all the time. People, including entire teams were fired, not because the banks were losing money and had to cut jobs to survive, but simply because they wanted to increase profitability.

If you want citations - there are vast masses out there - here is just one:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/hsbc-unveils-overhaul-of-global-...
"Just because I didn't own it didn't make it less so my home." Isn't that actually wrong by definition? When you own something, it's yours. When you don't, it's not.
It is an unfair generalisation in both cases. The wiki list of scientific fraud examples is very heavy on US examples.
> But if you place this much value on any given piece of news, then maybe it shouldn't be free.

Definitely agree.
The Sybil Attack (2002)
That's unbelievable.

I live in a place that is basically an average US market. Here a $1M home is a legit mansion or a serious amount of land. A two-earner 200k household can afford a suburban 2,500-3,000 ft^2 on 0.1-0.25 acre in a development with a good school district. Something like this: (http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/55-Spruce-S...)
Well, arguably, the article states two-thirds of these gun deaths are suicides, so not many, to be fair.
What does the premium plan offer that the free one doesn't?
The Cochrane report on statins confirms your claim:
http://www.cochrane.org/CD004816/VASC_statins-for-the-primar...
I think what you're responding to is NOT about willingness to experiment with unproven drugs, but rather a feeling of horror about dementia and Alzheimer's disease. These are awful afflictions that impact not just the victims but also their families.

That said, regardless of whether or not they're proven/approved/tested, drugs are never magic bullets. The ones used to treat the most serious chronic diseases always come with serious risks and profound side-effects. I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Guns are banned in Brazil and we got the highest homicide numbers in the planet.
The Mystery Behind the Most Popular Ugly Christmas Sweaters
Free Online Course – Statistical Shape Modelling: Computing the Human Anatomy
>Yes, I could. But since you've so far been a total arrogant assface, and since your tone implies that - rather than a genuine interest - you simply want to bait me into a further argument so you can show off how much you're in love with Elizer... I'm going to pass.

For a conversation you being pretty insulting. But, no, contrary to your assumption its actual curiosity.

If you are worried about this argument continuing if you refer me to such works, I promise not discuss them if you post them.
Announcing VLC for ChromeOS
Trying to do anything non-trivial in GNU make macros is the most bewilderingly awful programming experience it is possible to have. They are horribly broken in every respect, from little stuff like awful syntax (whitespace is insignificant except where it's significant!) and poor error checking (detecting undefined variables? Who cares?) to the really big stuff (can't do arithmetic, despite having core functions which take numbers as arguments!).

A while back I wrote a compiler which targeted GNU Make and made it run Conway's Game of Life (complete with hand-tooled arbitrary precision maths library written in make). I learnt more about this stuff than is healthy to know. The compiler output is... special.

http://cowlark.com/2013-10-19-insane-make
I expect there is a Venn diagram that would cover this small subset of people that fulfill your 2 requirements but most people probably fall into one or the other.
I really need to be less sarcastic.
Putin: Donald Trump is “the absolute leader of the presidential race”
I'm Australian, live in Canada, am a hunter who owns a rifle and am currently visiting the US. In the last couple of months, I've seen more guns than I have in my entire life.

Two days ago I walked into a friends unlocked garage to find at least 75 guns, mostly loaded, with ammunition lying all over. Some semi-auto assault rifles, some hunting rifles, tons of handguns. All perfectly legal (and legal to not be locked up too).

I think it's sad to live in a "successful" country where regular citizens feel the need to carry a loaded weapon in public. I think that's a strong indicator something is very wrong with this society.

I'm not an expert, and obviously guns don't kill people, though it's my observation there are a LOT of readily available guns in the US, and the US has a lot of guns deaths.

As an avid hunter I would never advocate "Taking the guns away", though I do think a few things should change - I believe gun laws in the US could be somewhat similar to Canada and Australia (no semi-autos or fully autos, basically no handguns, must be locked up, must apply for a license, need license to even buy ammo, etc) and gun enthusiasts can still have appropriate guns, while the sheer number of guns would drop substantially.

Citizens already can't own surface to air missiles, so we've already established some weapons are not suitable for private citizens, now we're just talking about what falls into what category.

I know it's a very difficult thing to change, as gun ownership is the 2nd amendment and is seen as a right not a privilege.
>> People tend to vary wildly in choices and opinions. Who knew!?

But some people think their choice or opinion is somehow the "correct" one and should be imposed on everyone ;-)
Realtime Emoji use on Twitter
As an armchair sci-fi fan, I'm gonna give it a download, though I'm a little worried its stories might exhibit the same sort of… well… enthusiasm that the EFF itself is guilty of sometimes.
Life-size R2-D2 fridge has unearthly price tag
It's anecdotal for me, but where I am in Illinois, there is a BN in Old Orchard Mall which is a Simon property and is a high end mall (Nordstrom, Bloomingdales etc...). It gets a ton of foot traffic and is packed on the weekends. There is another BN in Schaumburg, IL, an affluent suburb about 20-30 minutes away and it is not in a mall. I used to live there and go to that BN a lot, it was very quiet and empty unless they were running an event.
I think you're substantially misreading. The author is saying that people describe loss aversion in ways that are not obviously distinct from DMU. He does NOT say that they're the same. What he says is that most definitions do not distinguish loss aversion and DMU.

You give an example where DMU doesn't explain the phenomenon, so we can see loss aversion. He might be happy to accept your example. But that doesn't mean that in general you don't have to point out that they're distinct, because your case is rather extreme.
I'd argue that for Qt this approach makes sense because they provide a well defined API that they stick too. The developer can also ask for specific component if it just want them (like QT GUI, QT SVG...).

I agree that this is more problematic with less common, more buggy libs where the API keep changing, but in this case it's quite easy to check for specific files, specific functions, ...

All this assumptions have huge consequences in terms of velocity and ease of use.
The 'there should be one – and preferably only one – obvious way to do it' rule sounds like another reason. It's like being asked to choose between a perfect general use knife or a Swiss army knife.

You're missing the obvious word. It's not about removing options, it's about having good and clear defaults.
That script is 2500 lines long, and appears to have been written by a wizard. If my only other option was producing something like that, I'd just bite the bullet and use autotools. (IDK, that may be your point?)