skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get your point, as I was writing it I thought "this shouldn't be too technical otherwise I end up writing a tutorial" but had to be technical enough to give some context and practical examples... But yeah, I should have gone deeper explaining the Shadow DOM part.
Maybe it did, but it's still state aid to business. It bailed out otherwise nonviable businesses at your expense, while simultaneously devaluing your currency (any profit therefore notional and even then poor value when compared to the bond markets). The benefits as presented are little more than a smokescreen, and the story is not played out yet.
How to find the right work and life balance
> I can't reply to replies...

Click the timestamp of the comment (or find another way to access the permalink for the comment). The reply link should appear.
My pet theory is that some people hear words in their heads more than others while reading. I personally hate reading past stuff that I don't know how to pronounce. "regexp", "fn", and the like really bug me. ("regex", "fun", "func" would be my preferred alternatives.)

So when I read "kph" I read "kay pea aich" which is pleasing, while "km/h" is ambiguous. Rationally, I prefer "km/h", but I am irresistably drawn towards "kph". Seriously -- for me at least, the effect is very strong.
Ask HN: Anyone know a tool for shaping data in Excel?
An undergrad's experience with programming in college
Pulling apart appliances is a great idea. I've had that in the back of my mind but pushed it back for too long. Thanks for the reminder.

This article reflects some of my own views. I moderate my kids' access time to electronic games very tightly. We have frequent group discussions on things we've seen, done, learned, etc. The conversations are really amazing and are a good lead-in to bedtime.

It shouldn't surprise me, but I often hear more intelligent conversation from my kids than I do from most media sources. In fact, we sometimes analyse places like The Verge for their prejudice as an exercise in critical thinking around flawed arguments and fallacies. We look at youtube for history, engineering and biology videos. We've developed board games, Rube Goldberg machines, flying craft, gone on bike hikes, looked at water safety...

If you live in the suburbs and you look in your local area, there are many free educational community activities too. We've looked at construction, robotics, software and sports activities to name a few.

We even make up our own learning activities. Eg. we went shopping together and discussed food priorities, food costs for equivalent items, set a budget, discussed buying local v/s imported food, etc.

There are learning opportunities all around. I feel that education on computers is over-rated and critical thinking outside of a computer is underrated. It just takes a lot of time and energy. I usually put in a weekend of planning about a month before school holidays.
That's really interesting. I am like you were. I am a developer but all the decisions are done above my head. I don't feel like I don't understand the whys and I do have my own questions to why things were done the way they were and I have opinions on improvements. The problem is that that is not my job. The company wants business people to plan and developers to create - because that makes sense. Everyone's time is used for their strengths.

After you did your MBA, did you take up new responsibilities in work? Did you get compensated for being a more valuable member of the team?

Do you think it would be worthwhile for someone in my position to do an MBA considering I don't feel like you did?
Mathematics as done by humans is not just objective. There's a very social aspect to it; if you dress up the most amazing result in a drab and ununderstandable manner then nobody will notice it. You have to take the effort to make your result digestible and relatable, even for experts.

The proof can be completely fine, but if no one can understand it then it won't be accepted.
Why would any one lose their mind over this? You get your money back AND still get the glasses...
The headline reads like a scene from the last episode of Fargo s2.
Maybe I should get into the habit of doing that, then. I've only ever felt the need to do it for one site before (Daring Fireball which uses an unbelievable 11px font!), and I've been put off in the past by the inferior behaviour of zoom as opposed to text size (which now seems to not even be available in Chrome). Minimum font size would be a good workaround if it didn't apply to the developer console, which is pretty crazy.
Define "best". We've used a quarter million dollar one at my current company, and at a previous job we spent far, far more than that for military airframes.

Groves "Principles of GNSS, Inertial, and Multisensor Navigation Systems" contains a good description of the various technologies used and their accuracy limits for navigation.

Consumer grade MEMS are fine for airbags, the pedometer in your phone, but are not sufficient for intertial navigation, even when aided with other sources. At around the $2K-30K you get systems that can provide accurate navigation for up to 2 minutes or so. They are used in things like missiles.

Aviation grade IMUs need to meet SNU 84 standard, which requires a maximum horizontal position drift of 1.5km in the first hour of operation. These will run 100K and up. Marine grade (subs, rockets, ICBMs) run $1 million and up, and have a maximum drift of 1.8km per day.

None of them are good enough for autonomous cars w/o sensor fusion.
Or they'll believe it too and rally around you. There's being high on your own bullshit, and getting others high on your fantastical bullshit. He wouldn't have got as far as he has if he hasn't at least some knack for the latter.

I suppose the trick is to stay ahead of the wake of your reality distortion field, and being able to maintain such.
You think it could be modified to handle that?
There have been at least 3 previous solutions for AD in mice which have never panned out in humans.
That all sounds good. But why not just grab a book and read. I recently read "Crossing the Chasm," and it was completely eye opening as I was able to reflect on mistakes I made in terms of early market development when I "started out."

To each his own, I guess. Perhaps I just don't like to glorify schools of any sort.
I don't understand your argument. "meant to evoke our self-righteousness"- meant by who? What prosecutorial discretion? Sounds like he pretty clearly broke the law, and didn't even try to hide it.
Agreed. Boredom is a motivator, the issue is how it's relieved.

The easy fix is gaming, it's like junk food for boredom hunger. Take away the junk food and you get reading/tinkering/creative play etc etc.
The most confusing thing about this whole Shkreli ordeal is how someone who acts this way and is this young made enough money in the first place to buy out pharma companies. Maybe he inherited it?
Yup, mine is similar, "Always remember your roots."
Apache Cassandra Database Training in Hyderabad India
Correct, but they do have other rights-restrictions.

Regarding privacy though, I think we're in agreement that the only people who don't have it are those that are currently incarcerated as a result of due process.
You can act how you want behind closed doors. This guy did it on TV, on Twitter, on reddit etc. etc. That was his mistake.
You are committing the same folly you accuse him of. It would be fine to simply point out his use of it, but following that up with: "I'm surprised you got as many credulous responses as you did." You are basically doing the same thing. Prime that he is not an expert, then state that he should not be getting credulous responses. The implication of course being that his not being an expert means that his argument does not deserve credible thought and response.

Also, there's always a fine line with appeal to authority with regards to experts, which you would hope a judge would be in the field of law. For instance, is it folly to point to consensus in science? That is, after all, nothing but an authority.
Unfortunalty in a results driven world much of the work has been specialised ai work to justify funding or to do task x. General Ai is going to take a framework that may not actually be superior to specialzed algos that play chess or drive cars. It is also far more complicated to build and design with a fair likelyhood of not outperorming and becoming an underachiever AI.
Why This Year's Christmas Season Is So Angry: It's The Economy
If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend The Knick, a show about a doctor in the early 1900s, directed by Steven Soderbergh. It deals with these kind of issues.
"The password is...schadenfreude".
I started programming around 2.5 years ago and now I am in the final semester of my engineering. This blog post summarizes my experiences with programming in college.
Unless you're considering the opportunity cost of doing an MBA vs. learning a new technical skill for 2 years, I'm not sure how extra education could ever be a disadvantage. Sure, in tech (specifically in Silicon Valley), the value of the degree is pretty much ignored. I'd probably get the same opportunities out here with or without mine on my resume. I can't see it ever being a detriment though. Are you telling me that there are companies who will interview me, be all set to send me an offer, then find out I have an MBA and say "Oops, no-hire! Looks like you're a moron!"
I picked Berkeley because it's what TFA is about, and it's ridiculous that higher education should be one-size-fits-all. Such a move might be less disturbing, even welcome, from an institution which is already a job training center. It's still problematic that it's happening at Berkeley.
Do you play Chess online?

I liked Chess and was good compared to my peers when I was younger. When I play it now, the game feels very limited and not that interesting. I wonder if this is because I am no longer any good at it compared to my peers or if I am overstimulated from other games.
When I heard about the hoax, I felt stupid for falling for this thing about a Wu-Tang album with only one copy that the owner hadn't even listened to.

THEN I found out that only the Bill Murray clause was a hoax, and the actual album thing is true. Christ.
> Lets also not forget that if you can't make money off lifesaving drugs, you also won't bother to invent any new ones.

Well this is the smartest thing I'll hear today. Context, context, context. The story goes that the drug was already around, already invented, already profitable. Some rich people came along and bought the product for billions of dollars because they realized they could resell it at a much higher price. So yes, let's not forget that if you can't make money reselling AIDS medications at an inhumane price, you won't bother to. And let's also not forget how easy it is to come across as capitalist sheep when we ignore the basic facts of the story in order to support our own ideals.
I lift as well. It gives you a great feeling but also can be very humbling.

What routine do you follow?
Ask HN: Payment processor for non-profit donations?
I have a client who needs to accept donations for his ensemble, and I'm wondering who HN recommends for payment processors.

He wants to accept one-time donations, but also recurring (monthly and/or annually). For recurring donations, there are multiple donation levels (e.g. "Donor" would be $5-24/month, "Benefactor" would be $25-$49/month, etc.) and descriptions of donor rewards for each level.

What processors can handle these criteria?

1. Hosted on the processor site (client does not want to manage databases, card numbers, etc.)

2. Can host a donation page that has multiple subscription levels as described above? If subscriptions must be fixed ($5/mo rather than $5-24/mo), that's acceptable.

3. That a donor has an account with the processor is okay, but not required.

Ideas? Thanks!
> as easy for the end user to use as autotools

End-users don't build from source in the first place. At least, if they do, then the developers and/or packagers have failed to do their job.
I am reading this and http://castar.com/kickstarter-faq/

It is actutally more than just a refund:

"Backers must complete and submit the Survey by February 15, 2016 to be eligible for this refund offer and a unit of consumer product at no charge.

Backers who have completed the Kickstarter Survey will receive a message from PayPal with instructions on how to reclaim their backings along with a unique discount code that will be good for one free pair of consumer castAR glasses."

This is a very respectful behaviour from CastAR because as it looks, they used the Kickstarter money to attract the VC investment. As such, giving only refund would mean that the only benefactors of the funding would have been CastVR and Kickstarter and not the people who took the actual risk.

Edit: It looks like the only ones who would get burned are the people who ordered multiple classes and will now only receive one. They invested 272990, so about 1/4 of the campaign. I think that it is wrong that they will receive only one free pair of classes as their money was also used as the seed money.
Apple Names Jeff Williams Chief Operating Officer
I like the notion that we are all, to some degree, synaesthetes. Hence the colourful similes and metaphors that add spice to speech.

See? Can similes be colourful? Can speech be spicy?

To me this chimes with human brains being pattern seeking/matching machines. Enough meaning leaks across discrete word definitions that we can freely use phrases such as "an icy stare", "a prickly relationship" to appeal to senses that are not directly involved in stares or relationships.

I have heard language theorists suggest that this appeal to multi-sensory communication may have influenced the evolution of language among early humans. Unfortunately I have no memory of who said this.

Still. I enjoy the theory.
I like Numba, but it's sometimes jarring writing C-like code in a language which almost explicitly advises against it. Once you get into the habit of "FOR LOOP BAD" it's difficult to get out of!

It's interesting seeing what the effect of Big-O is. Once you introduce a logarithmic solution, it doesn't really matter that you're using Python because it's asymptotically so much better than the n^2 brute force approach. Nearest neighbour is a particularly nice demonstration of this, because it's an algorithm which is frequently used in realtime and obviously you don't want a performance hit of 2 seconds for every query!

Note Numpy has a builtin np.radians() which is a little cleaner than a one value look up table.

In [2]: %timeit np.random.random((10000))*3.14
1000 loops, best of 3: 245 µs per loop

In [3]: %timeit np.radians(np.random.random((10000)))
1000 loops, best of 3: 262 µs per loop
A couple months ago I wrote AWS In Plain English [1] - the most requested follow-up was for me to do Azure next, so here it is.

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286
I want to learn to cook more. Do you have any recommendations on something to cook tomorrow for lunch?
Partisan Discrimination
The problem is that the price system is the best resource allocation scheme that humans have ever attempted at scale.

When you sever the external link between the product going out, and the money coming in, you destroy some of the positive or negative feedback loops that take into account what people actually want and what they can do.

There has to be a hard external link between the outputs and the inputs, or you end up with a situation where rent-seekers charge in and gum up the works, absorbing resources without doing anything economically useful in exchange. The instant you guarantee a cash flow independent of actual results, you create sinecures, and those offices fill up and never go vacant again.

You could end up with situations where the agency cures a disease, but spends 100 times more doing that than it would cost to develop an acceptably effective treatment and also create a foundation that could pay to produce and distribute that treatment to everyone who gets it any time within the next 5 billion years.

Yay, woo, we cured it. But our inability to effectively prioritize resources meant that 99% of that cure budget was not spent on researching diseases that have a far greater economic impact. Oops.

Someone has to decide whether the money is well spent. And if that someone isn't everyone, then there is an agency problem, and rent-seekers scramble over each other to be the someone, so they can easily profit from that decision-making power.

Now, before anyone goes shaking their pompoms for the free market, I should mention that we haven't actually had one in medicine for a long time, thanks to the godawful market distortions that currently exist in the healthcare sector of markets where most treatments are researched. But at least that market-side link in the feedback loop still exists to some tiny extent, no matter how weak or tenuous it may be now.

So an independent research agency would be great for about 15 years. After that, it will start to become a gigantic black hole of waste and inefficiency.
Do you have a good physique?
This kind of stuff seems scary to me. One JavaScript engine decides to use this algorithm, another that. This type of change could lead to higher potential of bugs and unexpected behaviour, the average developer just can't figure out when say, using Firefox or Chrome for testing.

When algorithms are getting tinkered with behind the scenes, this leads me to believe there's still way too much churn in the JS space.
Yes, exactly. They actually still will get their benefits as updates and such.
If you want to get started with autotools, try to build yourself a minimal autotools
project. Once you have a working stub, you already took the biggest hurdle.

You only need to focus on two files: configure.ac, where you check for features, and Makefile.am, where you list your build targets and their sources. You can
also write normal Makefile rules there.

After editing these files, run `autreconf -fi` to create/update the configure and Makefile script. Then run

./configure
make

to build your project. Have a look at Appendix A/Basic Autotoolization on the submitted website or checkout libabc by Poettering/Sievers:

1. https://autotools.io/whosafraid.html#idm117385102076160

2. http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/libabc.html
Until our current big data AI revolution, AI was one investment catastrophe after another. Now money finally is flowing into AI again, and intuitions like this idea, backed by a little big data power can be explored again.

So even though the idea is fairly simple, I think anyone who thinks about AI for any trivial amount of time will come up with the idea that AI's somehow have to automatically generate imperfect generalizations, the final result might be a truly innovative product.

Actually building an AI that does this on a scale that results in useful applications is something that probably has not been practical for a long time, and might or might not be now.
I have a $4k sofa, from Ethan Allen, purchased a bit over a decade ago, and will confirm that the cushions are in dire need of restuffing, and there a piece of plywood (sewn into cloth) underneath the cushions to compensate for decay in the underlying supports. If mattresses basically need replacement after a decade, similarly-constructed things will also.
Yes, that was indeed the case.

Surely if I made a factual error on something that you were knowledgeable on - say, NodeJS - and you corrected me, you'd be slightly peeved - or at least see my behavior as odd - if I replied to you claiming that your friendly input was "outrage".
X, to help the less fortunate people
I'm not saying that the Wall Street folks are improving the products of the drug industry. I'm saying that a lot of very bright folks go to Wall Street instead of into science because of the opportunity to make a lot more money.

And they're not even really greedy people. We live in a country where even a PhD making $150k still has to stress about saving for college and faces potential bankruptcy from medical expenses. You don't have to be greedy to want to stave off that risk by getting a high-paying Wall Street job.
Likewise! From 12-18 years of age I spent hours making custom games in warcraft III. Much of this involved the use of the trigger editor, which was a kind of scratch like system.

It was through this that I learned how to program. While I did spend some time with python and other languages, programming in a video game was far, far more fun, and thus I spent hours doing it.

Due to it, today I have a great job, and in my spare time, I make my own games.
Corporations are legal constructs that require specific domain knowledge to correctly administer and develop. MBAs are ostensibly targeted at that (in the same way Computer Science degrees are ostensibly targeted at teaching you domain knowledge to think and reason about the specific mathematics that underlie computers and software).

What you get out of them and their utility probably is very contextual in the same way any degree is.

My suspicion is that for many roles and at many times in a technology business, the utility is low, but that for some roles at some times, it is quite high.

Ultimately, the thing that's might be funky is that if you hire someone for their expertise in domains pertinent to MBAs, you are putting them very close to having control of the legal construct of your business. Like a sysadmin, you need to place a lot of trust in them to ensure they are doing their job correctly if you don't have the domain knowledge to provide careful oversight.
Help Still Wanted:Ford Execs on Staffing Up Their Silicon Valley Research Center
Life, and especially the capitalism aspect, is a game of imperfect information. As with any other game of imperfect information, aggression plus the intelligence to exploit the information gained from aggression can get you very far in life.
> Sandberg suggested a career in tech might not even be necessary to catch Facebook’s attention. “We don't look for a specific background or skill-set when we make hiring decisions,” she wrote. “As my friend and Instagram COO Marne Levine says, we hire athletes and cross-train them.”

From a randomly selected job posting on Facebook's web site:

Requirements

B.S. or M.S. Computer Science or related field
Experience building high-performance, large-scale server applications and reliable software
Expert knowledge developing and debugging in C++
End-to-end experience in online ad serving and background in online advertising/auction theory strongly preferred
Knowledge of Perl, PHP, or Python a plus
Knowledge of Hadoop/MapReduce a plus
Do you have reference for one investment catastrophe after the other? I know it failed to deliver on the promise of translating human language, for example.
Ask HN: I just decided to drop university. What's your advice?
Hello HN!

Long time lurker, first time posting.

So... I failed another exam yesterday.
I can't deal with this anymore.
I'm dropping university (CS).

I can write code and have some small projects in my public
repositories.

I am not strong with algorithms and data structure but I
understand the implications of computational complexity on
running time and why good algorithms and good data structures
are important. Put simply, I never needed such tools in my
small projects.

So, out of the blue, my plan would be to go 100% on algorithms,
data structures, databases and portfolio creation. Ideally, I
would start scheduling at least an interview with a "big" company
every month.

What are your advices, HN ?

THANKS
"Loss aversion" should simply be seen as an observable behavior regardless of its cause. It makes no sense to say behavior stemming from diminishing marginal utility is not loss aversion if it leads to the same symptoms as "true" loss aversion.
No. Read the article :

Shkreli’s extraordinary history—and current hold on the public imagination—makes the case more noteworthy than most involving securities fraud. The son of immigrants from Albania and Croatia who worked as janitors and raised him deep in working-class Brooklyn...