skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whenever someone says that some rivalrous resource is a 'basic human right', I have a hard time taking them seriously.

As I get older, I have mellowed a great deal, and I understand how smart people can reasonably disagree about a large number of things...but I honestly can't fathom how intelligent people can fail to grasp that you can't possibly have a 'right' to a finite, tangible resource which you yourself don't produce.
Cool analysis...I think the works of Shakespeare are vastly underused for fun little tests of text mining and visualization, given how accessible (well, in the downloadable/publishing sense, if not the language :) ), ubiquitously taught, and relatively standardized they are, as far as works of literature go.

But in terms of the article's visualizations, this seems to me a good example of how network visualizations (note that visualization is different from analysis, which are often conflated) are not especially effective, other than to make people want to think "Oooh that's complicated" whether they derived insight or not.

In contrast, I find things like this matrix diagram of Les Miserables, as found in the D3 gallery [1], to be much more straightforward, even before you use the dropdown box to interact with it. It's not as attractive or high of "wow" factor, but its information clarity more than makes up for that IMO.

OTOH, one thing that the spaghetti network maps do show is that there's much room for more sophisticated analysis. The OP looks at whether characters appeared in a single scene together. I was about to criticize the uselessness of the Hamlet graph:

http://www.martingrandjean.ch/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Sha...

But then I realized...that's what it should look like if you are simply doing scene presence analysis. From my memory, Hamlet interacts with a great many more characters than do Gertrude or Claudius, such as the Ghost and the gravediggers. However, technically, the Ghost and the gravediggers appear in all the same scenes that Gertrude and Claudius do. I think the network graph would look much different if it were based on adjacent dialogue (or some other way to distinguish between co-appearance and actual interaction). It's a little more parsing but it would be more accurate in quantifying the strength of the network ties.

[1] http://bost.ocks.org/mike/miserables/
Yes.

If we can arrive at a place where a sufficient number of us want to impact this, we could get an amendment done.

But, that takes a sustained civic effort, and there is the rub. Do we care enough to actually do that?

I think I do. When I ask others, I get a wide range of commit potentials. I don't think enough of us care.
Life After ‘Shark Tank’
wow, this is a great list! thanks
Having solar at the point of use also mitigates costly upgrades to bulk transmission lines. Solar absolutely doesn't need to only used in equatorial locales to be useful. With the cost dropping so much, base load battery storage doesn't even make sense. The dominating factor for solar installations is mounting and wiring, not the panels themselves.
> "Good explanations."

Thanks.

> "What's more interesting is the Amiga model of CPU + accelerators is becoming the new default in high-performance applications. There could be a revival of OS's natively supporting accelerators of a niche market that cares about that sort of thing."

It's possible, though I'd like to see an OS designed from the ground up to support this type of heterogeneous architecture. A few years back I wrote a few notes about how to make better use of reconfigurable computing (on an Amiga forum, funnily enough), still think the basic ideas are sound, though there are plenty of details left to work out:

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=679874&postcount=...

> "The Octeon II's often go for around $200 on eBay. They have 16 cores, multi-Gbps network acceleration, onboard crypto, Linux support, and use little power. That's the kind of shit that has potential. Maybe that plus a good FPGA for high-end model where main SOC is multiplexed like usual but one app at a time gets FPGA and/or GPU. A bunch of simple cores, the right on-board accelerators, and FPGA could combine in performance-critical apps to blow Xeons out the water despite being on older process nodes."

The Octeon III sounds like quite a high end device, I'm sure it'd be a beast with regards to performance, but do you know of anything similar at a lower price point? Does $200 get you an Octeon II evaluation board on eBay?
Roscosmos, no, but Energomash was allegedly partially privately owned and operated until the consolidation in 2013;

http://spacenews.com/russia-moves-forward-with-industry-cons...

I'm with you on the rest though, more than just changing the board members, dismantling the education pipeline or installing lackeys in the production facilities will do much more long term harm.
<3 this! Are there any plans for some type of export utility, e.g. some type of JSON serialization of a finished model?
mattdotc's idea of a Real Hipster in the actual fringe, trend-setting-in-2016 sense may or may not be accurate, but that's not necessarily critical to his/her intention behind using "hipster" — that people are buying into vinyl culture for superficial reasons.

A point which I think wrongly implies that there is no substance to the upsurge in record sales beyond profits. I feel like it also has a lot to do with our increasing involvement in digital media / computer fatigue[1]. People's 200gb iTunes libraries have made them numb.

[1] http://www.tokafi.com/news/computer-fatigue-and-rise-human/
He writes such extreme things to get a reaction (and a following of complete morons). Attention is oxygen in that business. Not that that makes it any better of course. Notice how you said it's "almost entertaining", well, that's what he's aiming for.
I still, deep inside, hold a dwindling hope that all humans can one day learn to treat humans as humans. Basically, literally, to treat others as they themselves would like to be treated. As humans.

It saddens me to hear of times when that doesn't happen, particularly in such devastating ways that affect someone's life so fundamentally.
Are there any trade-offs to this approach? This seems so obvious to me I'm confused why it is more widely used.
Funny enough, I traded in Rstudio for Jupyter notebooks for R, especially for demos to other people since it is much easier to see tables, graphs and such.
There was even a review paper on group differences in genetic markers for cognitive traits posted on HN. How do you get more controversial than that?
1) That isn't how regressive taxes work. Stating its regressive on rich ppl is simply a failure to understand what the word means in context of taxation.

2) The proponents of flat tax schemes frequently set the exemptions low enough to raise the tax burden on the poor.
Finished reading. The text is cut short on this page, but even after reading what is there, I am left amazed. A few points (mind you, I haven't read anything from the classic besides what they managed to force me to ingest in school, which as you can imagine is not much):

- Though I found the discussion overtly long (yay my non-existent attention span), it's surprisingly easy to read; I expected ancient Greek texts to be much more difficult in terms of language and style.

- All the whining I see and do about manipulators, liars, salesmen and contemporary advertising industry, Plato has described thousands of years ago. It's like, fuck, why do I bother rediscovering and repeating what ancient philosophers knew all along, and why the society doesn't seem to be learning from those lessons?

- I should have learned this already, but I'm still amazed every time I read an old text describing exactly the same problems we have in the contemporary world. Here's me thinking they are unique to our age, but apparently King Solomon is right, and there truly is nothing new under the Sun, at least in human relations - we keep repeating the same patterns, generation after generation.

- I guess I'm starting to appreciate the stated reasons for classic education.

Thank you for linking to the text.
Machine learning does not generalize statistics; mathematics does.
first commit was Date: Fri May 9 11:18:08 2014 -0600, this is very fast to 2.0
True. It's pretty exciting tech, although apparently it's not very comfortable or easy to work into clothing and gear. It seems pretty promising for very extreme conditions though, like climbing Everest.
You impelled me to go look up groupthink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

It looks like the main idea behind the groupthink term is that it results in "an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome" due to desire for conformity. I'd recommend that you read some of pg's essays, because I don't think the term "groupthink" applies here. I can't identify any irrational or dysfunctional decision-making behind the community's love of these good pieces of writing. I'd also guess that most HNers like pg's writing because it's good, not because they're trying to conform.
Why does it make sense to have this particular syntactic redundancy and not one of the many others that has been proposed? You could make a similar argument that Algol-style 'if' / 'fi' pairs help eliminate brace errors where you accidentally close the wrong construct, but clearly they have not been popular in recent years.
The insanity and hypocracy in the American immigration system is infurating and will lead to fewer immigrants in the future. With the way the H1B system works it is extremely impractical to hire foreign workers who may be more qualified than domestic ones. Hardly any of the visas are dual intent. I know a Canadian who has been here for like 20 years and still doesnt have a green card. Most other countries give you permanent residency after you stay for a certain number of years. There is no startup visa. Want to come work at a company in the USA? There are a few (if bad) options. Want to start a company in the USA and employ Americans? Be prepared to bend the truth and risk getting deported.

The United States has enjoyed its position of supremecy after Europe imploded from two world wars, and it is being taken for granted now.
Yes, datagnan will work on one of these as it's implemented completely in C/C++, and the longterm vision is indeed to build smart modular storage drives on top of such embedded platforms.
Both can be true..
I know most of the people involved in this and it's just a shit sandwich. Randi wanted a person crucified, that's not how companies and foundations function, and thankfully so. I hope she finds success in new endeavors and am sad she had to leave under gross circumstance.
WhatsApp experiencing outage
bubblesort?
Verification. If you compare traditional data analysis in Excel and such, it is much easier to verify what is going on in a notebook than it is in multitudes of Excel sheets. Easy calculation views, graphs, tables, etc.
Great list, but I think the Shelling Point one (35) is blurring it with Shelling Fences. The former is (correctly) described as the point that people converge do in the absence of communication; the latter is the need to "hold the line" against proverbial camels that want to keep going further into our tent.
What to do with the resulting electric energy?

(1) Smelt iron or aluminum?

(2) Split H2O into O2 and H2 and
use the H2 for fuel.

(3) Convert water and coal
to gasoline.

(4) Desalinate and/or purify water and use
the water for humans food and drink, bathing,
washing, swimming, lawns, greenhouse agriculture,
or just to make the desert bloom?

(5) Heat salt to store the energy, and
then run water through tubes in the
hot salt to generate high pressure
steam to drive steam turbines
and, then, electric generators
and, then, transmit the power
across the Mediterranean to Europe
and sell it?

Uses (1)-(4) have the advantages
that get just to use the power
while the sun is shining and
don't have to store the power
for nighttime use or
transmit the electric power long
distances. Would have
to transmit the hydrogen or
gasoline for those options.

In the words of the skeptical
mayor's wife in the movie
The Music Man, "I'm reticent.
Yes, I'm reticent."

Why? The idea is not nearly new.
So,
I do have to suspect that a good
engineering-economic analysis
would show that we would need
progress in:

(1) Keeping desert sand off the
solar panels.

(2) In case want to use the
electric energy to make
hydrocarbons, a good
source of coal
near the desert.

(3) Energy storage.

(4) Superconductivity for the
transmission lines across the
Mediterranean.

Might be able to pay for it if
the world can agree on some
huge carbon taxes.

Nukes might be be cheaper.

Might keep in mind that the spot,
wholesale cost of electric
power in the US has been
under $0.01 per KWH and the
full cost, say, ballpark $0.06.
So, the cost to a consumer of
10, 12, 22 or so cents per KWH
is mostly for distribution,
not generation. But
the panels in the desert
handle only the
generation part,
do nothing for the
short distance distribution
costs where the consumers
are and make the long distance
distribution, e.g., across the
Mediterranean, more expensive.

Also on the money side, might
want to keep in mind that
the major oil sources in the
Mideast pump oil for
less than $1 per barrel.
That price is tough to
compete with.

Right, might be shipping the
power to France which is
doing quite well with nukes.

Then once carbon taxes
start to take hold,
people might watch

'The Great Global Warming Swindle'

at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg

and discover the evidence that
CO2, methane, etc. from human
activities has nothing at all
to do with the climate or
temperature of earth
and, instead, changes in those
two are driven by
changes in the activity
level of the sun,
the sun spots,
the solar wind,
the blocking of
cosmic rays hitting
the atmosphere,
the rate of formation
of water droplets,
the rate of H2O cloud
formation, and, thus,
the cooling effect of
clouds.

Then people will object
to carbon taxes.

Net, it appears that
while the Watts of
solar energy per
1000 square miles of
desert are astoundingly high,
for
what people in the population centers want
in electric power,
motor fuel, clean water,
etc., that desert solar
power is just not very valuable.
Extensive previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10815995
If Randi Harper the serial harasser and professional cry bully is getting a platform on hacker news than this place has finally kicked the bucket.
Great, have they solved the problem with their workers crying at their desks yet?
"As for illegal immigrants, any business that employs them should be fined the value of the wages they saved..."

If the worst consequence they could suffer is break-even, you continue the financial incentive of breaking the law.
Additionally, what's wrong with FreeBSD? I'd like to hear their take on this.

Because while I'm generally highly sceptic of this "everyone needs a CoC now!", the alleged reaction by Core goes much much further and is simply astonishing.

Maybe someone needs to explain to them that freedom of association includes freedom not to associate. "His harassment was outside our mailing list" is not a good reason to decline any action.
Here is the underlying study: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi....

The actual conclusion of the study is rather different than the headline. To understand why you really need to break down the methodology and conclusions.

First, the surveys of "public preference" are based not on voters, but general surveys. The authors studied:

> 1,779 instances between 1981 and 2002 in which
a national survey of the general public asked a favor/
oppose question about a proposed policy change.

Because voters are wealthier, older, and more conservative than non-voters, public opinion is not the same thing as voter opinion.

Second, they defined "economic elite" as people at the 90th percentile:

> We believe that the preferences of “affluent” Americans
at the ninetieth income percentile can usefully be taken as
proxies for the opinions of wealthy or very-high-income
Americans, and can be used to test the central predictions
of Economic-Elite theories

So the "economic elite" here are people with household incomes above $150,000. If you account for the fact that the median voter is about 45, that's a top 15% income or so.

Third, there is a high correlation between the preferences of the public and those of the economic elite:

> It turns out, in fact, that the preferences of average
citizens are positively and fairly highly correlated, across
issues, with the preferences of economic elites (refer to
table 2).

Fourth, interest groups also have significant independent power:

> By contrast, economic elites are estimated to have
a quite substantial, highly significant, independent
impact on policy. This does not mean that theories of
Economic-Elite Domination are wholly upheld, since our
results indicate that individual elites must share their
policy influence with organized interest groups.

Thus, the real takeaway is something like: adopted policies generally reflect public opinion, except policies that have low support among the top ~15% of voters and/or interest groups are unlikely to get adopted:

> When both interest groups and affluent Americans
oppose a policy it has an even lower likelihood of being
adopted (these proposed policies consist primarily of tax
increases).

That is a predictable outcome of representative democracy and does not imply that the U.S. is an oligarchy, or at least not the way one traditionally thinks of the term. When you define "economic elite" as the top 15%, you're roping in a big chunk of small business owners, professionals, property owners, etc. These are the people who employ other people, pay property taxes, serve on the PTA, and vote, especially in local elections. So 55% of the public may support say a hike on business taxes in a city, but if representatives worry that such an increase will make the city uncompetitive for jobs vis-a-vis other cities, the policy may not pass.
Some open source projects prefer to avoid discouraging prospective contributors, even if they know that the task the contributor is currently working on has no chance of acceptance. The hope is usually that avoiding discouragement will build a larger community, and that contributors will eventually realize the futility of their efforts or otherwise organically move towards making productive contributions to the project.
I watched it on TV, late at night, as a kid. I remember barely being able to fall asleep out of fear, and I think it took a week for the effects of this movie to wear off. I'm older now and I've seen enough sad, scary and disrupting movies that it doesn't affect me anymore, but I'm pretty sure that if I tried to show it to my SO, I'd have my own Event Horizon right there in the apartment.

EDIT: I also had the "next time I'm picking the movie" moment after I took my then-girlfriend to see Prometheus. The TED2023 trailer looked so cool and I didn't realize it's a prequel to Alien...
Hilariously, SpaceX lists prices for their launches on their website.. For a 4.85MT payload to geotransfer orbit, they charge $61.2M.

http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities
Don't do this. It's implying that people should just "not be hurt by it and move on." ... That the problem is with the people reacting. Surely, I agree that giving attention to stuff often fuels the flames, but the answer isn't to place the burden on the victims. The answer is to actually DEAL with the issue and have shit HAPPEN to make people (women, trans, queer, minorities) safer!
There are benefits to both.

You can't use a distributed system for, say, Aluminum smelting, which requires tons of electric power.

If the idea suggested in the article is implemented, the Sahara could be turned into a "powerhouse" and an invaluable economic resource to the rest of the world. Integration of this system into the global economy would entail tremendous changes to both the world's interest and understanding of Northern Africa.
:(...

As someone who didn't really follow the whole controversy the past years, this was an eye-opener for me. Did it really get that bad?

Stop tolerating the intolerant! Also, I don't understand the point of GamerGate. As an outsider, all I see is two groups making themselves look really bad and everyone else loosing. You don't convince others by threatening and harassing them, something the extremes at both sides seem to do. Why?

By the way, note how she did not mention the harasser's username in her post.
Meta: avoiding pointless drama on HN is probably easiest if you avoid posting articles from/about people with long Encyclopedia Dramatica articles.
I'm studying logic, myself. I'm about halfway through Sweet Reason, by Henle & Tomoczyko. Anyone who wants to study logic owes it to himself to become familiar with traditional Aristotelian logic as well as modern symbolic logic.

Henry B. Veatch is one author to look up on this (if you can find affordable used copies of his works). The principle textbook for traditional logic that's still in print is Socratic Logic by Peter Kreeft. Be aware that he is sharply critical of symbolic logic. It's good to be aware of the issues involved; in particular, the paradoxes of material implication. When symbolic logic was being developed, many of its supporters looked disparagingly on traditional logic. Few logicians take that view, anymore.

Symbolic logic won the fight, but traditional logic won the argument. By the former, I mean that symbolic logic is taught nearly to the exclusion of traditional logic. By the latter, I mean that the objections made by the old guard are seen by everyone as valid and are being addressed by the new logic. For example, in traditional logic, the conclusion follows with real necessity from the premises as an effect follows from a cause. Modern logic has revived the study of modal logic in order to deal such things as necessity and possibility.

Furthermore, while symbolic logic is superior for mathematical proofs and technical philosophy, traditional syllogistic logic is better suited for everyday life and verbal arguments; it is the Newtonian mechanics of logic.
> Precisely the same problem exists with state-level universal healthcare. Even if most people in a state want it, they can't enact it because it's too easy for people from neighboring states to free-ride on those services.

How so? If you are a resident, you get "free" care. If not, you get a bill. Is this not how Canada works WRT Americans who need to use the Canadian health system?
Notice that this blog post provides zero in the way of evidence. Before assuming everything written here is true, it would be worthwhile to fact check.