skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really think you have it backwards on basic and speculative research to lose financing from the public. How would you propose "proving that results are beneficial to society"? And how is this different from the current funding proposal process? Committees that fund proposals certainly look at the success of prior research by the group.

I don't think anyone would disagree with you when you say "We should rather find and implement a model that leads to best research results possible." Viable alternative models are what I am looking for.
How I took control of my personal finances. A simple walkthrough for you
Happiness is that for which a trap cannot be laid...

Time is more valuable for some--book lovers, hobbyists,daydreamers, etc...
Money is more valuable for others...earning it, the implied security of holding it, etc...

It seems to me, based on experience, that the route to general happiness is to eliminate as many things as possible that past experience has led you to believe won't make you happy...

A life spent in contentment, interspersed with moments of joy (or, happiness) is likely all that humans can resonably hope for...
I've seen this idea expressed multiple times in this thread, and wonder how it is that HN users' are so out of touch with the gaming crowd.

Almost all serious PC gamers I've ever known upgrade their graphics cards every 9 - 18months. Very few serious gamers keep a gaming rig untouched for 2 years.

Also the comments about a screen or a graphics card being used for more than gaming. Again, sorry, but most hardcore gamers have a gaming rig for gaming, and will use a phone/tablet/laptop for their more casual usage. They generally dislike cluttering up their primary machine with office productivity apps, etc.

It's a false comparison. It's like someone owning a car for track racing, and saying: "yeah, the seats are expensive, but they will be useful when driving down to the shops to pick up some milk". Absurd. Sure, people might drive their road legal track car to a car show, or a garage, or a parts shop, or their friends, from time to time, but that's part of the hobby experience - not used as a justification for the parts/modification.
But a sample size of one is worthless, especially when the person running the experiment is high :)

On a more serious note, I have no idea how you'd actually test this. How would you prove or disprove that someone experimenting with hallucinogens is actually communicating with something else?

The only thing I can think of is having two people under the influence being able to communicate with each other, with absolutely no other way of doing so. Subjects A and B have never met, and don't have any way of passing messages during their experience. Subject A is told to pass some randomly generated string to subject B, either directly or via some alien intermediary. If Subject B can guess Subject A's string, then that might be evidence of something interesting and objectively external happening.
The Money-Richest Persons in the World don't have to trade nearly as much of their time to complete maintenance tasks that few people enjoy doing.
Out of curiosity, Im not user so this might be ignorant, but why can't people ignore your posts on Twitter, Facebook/Instagram. Are you just referring to notifications ?

I do get the point of the psychological barrier and the problem of broadcasting likes, retweets, comments etc. I think some people will say "what if no one responds" then why would I put this out there, and stop them from putting out something that might be interesting.
I know... it chafes me to see pre-enlightenment values amongst spaceships and space travel and sci-fi-like environments.
Delivering Safer Cars Faster with Continuous Delivery
Do you believe that technical indicators take into account factors like political and social pressures on an asset?
Reading all these comments that bash HDF5 makes me want to tell how HDF5 has really worked for my group.

Although the spec is huge, there is plenty of sample code online to get it working. You do actually have to read it though to understand slabs, hyperslabs, strides etc. Once you get though, its really versitle.

As far as speed, we used it to replace our propriatary data format. We would have to provide readers to all the scientists that use our data. It was nightmare. Some people want stuff in R, some in Python 2.7, some in Python 3.4, some in Matlab, and the list goes on. HDF5 gets rid of all this.

When in the field and the system shits the bed, its really easy to open an HDF5 file in HDFview and inspect the file contents. I dont always have matlab available when im in the field, same with python. Sometimes I just need to look at a time series and I can diagnose the problems with the system.

For me, its silly in 2016 to have any kind of proprietary binary format when something HDF5 exists.

Many of the complaints the author had makes me think he the stereotypical scientist of really smart in one area but cant program worth the beans. I dont think that HDF5's fault.
See this blog post for what I am talking about: https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/3074/use-caution-with...

If PostgreSQL had gone the same route as MS SQL I would have expected a similar set of bugs. I suspect all of this have been fixed by now, but I do not follow MS SQL.
> Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux.

Woah, really? There are plenty.

Photoshop & Lightroom debatable, but I can agree — nothing FOSS really substitutes them, unfortunately.

AutoCAD & ArchiCAD. Solidworks. Pretty much all specific 3D modelling tools like Poser (though I don't really need that last one).

Ableton, Cubase, everything from NativeInstruments, including sample libraries which sometimes are the reason why you need KONTAKT, and not some other sampler. U-he Zebra. Hundreds of various VST plugins from different developers: reverbs, phasers, limiters, etc. Often this stuff is quite trivial, but there just is some amount of domain knowledge which random opensource developer just doesn't possess. That's why free stuff available sucks or even doesn't exist.

Decent speech recognition and text to speech. Nonexistent.

OCR is quite better, but still loses to commercial alternatives like ABBYY. Understandably so.

To put it shorter: pretty much any software which isn't trivial to write or requires domain knowledge. The only decent examples of these in the FOSS world I can remember are Blender and Krita.
I decided to have a little fun with this: https://twitter.com/mattl/status/685224731667087360
Blackberry powered by Android
That is a fantastic book indeed. It's on the Combat Studies Institute reading list, and rightly so.
VR is the real thing. You still throw the football. You just get to see exactly what you did, and how it compares with the throws before and after. And you can get things like realtime audio feedback while you move to give you information about where your body is relative to where you're trying to train to. The possibilities are infinite.
For those interested in the Steven Pinker article, "Why Academics Stink at Writing", and are looking to avoid the paywall, here's the direct link to PDF from his website: http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/why_academics_sti...
Very nicely written!! :)
I do something similar, albeit a bit leakier. I have all my money coming in to one nexus account, and then I have weekly/biweekly/monthly outflows of everything (bills, stock investments, transfers to 3x different banks, mortgage). I keep that account with a bunch of buffer, but ignore all my other accounts. Each month I keep that main account 'floating' is another month where all those other accounts are growing. If I ever dip too low, I can supplement with one of my other accounts.

It's not a great solution, but it's the one that I've stuck with best.
What if they don't want to make art? Being mentally ill doesn't necessarily grant one creative insight. What if they exhibit antisocial or violent behavior?
Well one can hope that they evaluate the pictures your looking at in the photo app and use that to insure the ads shown in the start menu provide value and joy to the user.</snark>
I hate the olympics. It's a huge waste of money and resources and robs the taxpayers. Wish we could just always have it in Greece or something rather than moving it every time.
There should be a tool to which you could say: here's an idea, please rewrite it into defensive form.
Introducing the Meteor Guide
The phenomenon of the nitpicky someone-on-the-internet-is-wrong type comment is so prevalent, I thing we need an acronym like tl;dr for it.

How about "willful misinterpretation; doesn't justify response"?

Wm;djr
That's only a fair test if ETs have the means of doing so. If they're as stumped by this problem as we are, they'll shrug their tentacles and tell us they're not willing to spend 20 years building a supercomputer capable of factoring large numbers for anything less than a ton of gold-pressed latinum.
Eyeview, Leading AdTech Startup, Is Hiring Java Engineers
But is it any more coercive than putting those kids into psychiatric care and putting them on drugs that just make them not feel anything anymore?

I'm schizotypal myself and I can say those methods of coping with this have not helped me at all. By now, I understand most of my paranormal thoughts are just windows into the unconcious mind. I think that having a centuries old tradition of identifying and using these thoughts would have helped me better than talking to psychiatrists that don't have the slightest clue about what goes on in my mind.
28nm die size is previous gen mobile GPUs. But would be great to see how this performs for desktop use when they shift to smaller process nodes and scale it to match power consumption and cost with say, GTX 980
Deservingly.
Ask HN: Should I do anything when encountering a Craigslist apartment scammer?
Looking for apartments in LA. There are several postings by a guy named Dan; the places are clean and slightly cheaper than market rate. My gf and I applied for one of the places, sent in an application and got quickly approved. Red flags were obvious:

- could not come visit the place
- could not arrange a meeting as he is out of town on business
- phone number in the ad is dead
- the "landlord" email was some random name "@landlord.com"
- payment can be only sent via wire transfer direct into bank account (we asked about Paypal)
- sent another email under a fake email with a bogus application that no right-minded landlord would accept, and was accepted quickly

Here are a few listings though there are a bunch more:

http://losangeles.craigslist.org/wst/sub/5376701320.html

http://losangeles.craigslist.org/wst/sub/5376720622.html

http://losangeles.craigslist.org/wst/sub/5368761400.html

This being Craigslist, is there a point of "reporting" him? How would one even do that?
The author disingenuously wants you to believe that he's never heard of Moore's law.
iOS Pull to Refresh Broken OnEverything?
Testing out my lovely app today (SkipCast, a Podcast player) and noticed for the first time that if I activate pull to refresh on a root view controller and then change views, going back to the root view shows the activity indicator is now stuck in place.

Thinking this must be on my end, I fired up Apple Mail and went into an inbox. I activate pull to refresh and left, and sure enough when I came back the activity indicator is indeed frozen in place.

Any ideas on how to avoid this besides canceling the pull to refresh operation when we leave the view?
Thanks for the link...
Yup. 38 here, and I can barely use it. My teenage daughters do it just fine (they were the ones who talked me into signing up). Although I am very technical the UI kills me. As a teen I think there are less mental barriers, assumptions and the like who picked it up just like I picked up DOS and Windows 3.1 when I was a teenager.
How Meteorology Changed Agriculture
1) low probability

2) even lower probability if you're an opportunist as described (note that smart investors like YC actively avoid them).

3) large minimum years investment required, especially if acquired or acqui-hired, maybe 4-10 years, during which you suffer the opportunity costs I described.

4) just easier to explore and be open to the rare opportunities, while still making decent money, by doing something like consulting at low hours. From this position you can always do a startup if you see something great.
T-Mobile CEO to EFF: ‘Who the Fuck Are You?’
>Manufacturing moving out of China http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/10/11/is-the-made....

Clothing is the lowest point on the value chain. They never meant to become a clothing manufacturer perpetually, they were using it as a way to leapfrog up the value chain.

They're pretty happy to let Bangladesh take over the manufacturing of clothes while they do electronics (and ultimately aerospace and CPUs).
Palmer said that they get the controllers for next to nothing (remember the deal they made with Microsoft?). If you don't want it you can sell it and come out ahead of where you would be if they had never included it.
Self-experimentation as I suggest -- an age old tradition in the scientific sphere -- is simply meant to reorient the person towards a broader understanding of the dimensions possible within the tryptamine-consciousness experience. I would never claim that personal experience alone is enough to quantify anything beyond mere opinion; that's where a formal control-based study steps in. But what it can do is quite dramatically open the mind to possibilities that were previously thought impossible or inconceivable -- a valuable practice.
You can't "value time over money" per se. That's like saying "value dollars over pounds". There's just a (not-necessarily-linear) marginal exchange rate between the two.
We pursue unification in physics, so why not in math?

http://faculty.luther.edu/~macdonal/
http://geometry.mrao.cam.ac.uk/2015/10/geometric-algebra-201...
Classic causation <-> correlation problem.

It turns out that if you are happy, you are disproportionately likely to have time as a scarcer resource than money...
This is very common across most psychology studies from what I understand.

> In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the premier journal in social psychology – the subdiscipline of psychology that should (arguably) be the most attentive to questions about the subjects’ backgrounds – 67% of the American samples (and 80% of the samples from other countries) were composed solely of undergraduates in psychology courses (Arnett 2008). In other words, a randomly selected American undergraduate is more than 4,000 times more likely to be a research participant than is a randomly selected person from outside of the West.

Source: http://hci.ucsd.edu/102b/readings/WeirdestPeople.pdf
I agree with you that these things are interesting, and these studies will probably reveal some really interesting stuff about human consciousness, and our brain's chemical make-up. But it's a really huge leap to hope really hard that it'll also reveal the secret to contacting aliens.
I might be missing something here but isn't there a big difference between "we don't have any conclusive evidence yet" and "this is a myth and is false"?

Also, I think some of the persistence of this "myth" is that people (adults) will flat-out tell you that they may not be able to absorb certain information without seeing some visual representation of it, whereas others will tell they can understand more easily, for example, just from a verbal description.
> as guiding them down a path that has been generally beneficial for the majority, like going to school.

Possibly unpopular opinion: school is not negotiable for children and so there's no guiding. It's pure coercion.

Also, there's no popular alternative to school so that we can compare enough data and prove that school is beneficial. Unschooling exists and seems to healthier, efficient and beneficial compared to school but there's just not enough data.

School was a great alternative at a time when it was the only place to get information. This is no longer true.
This is really cool. What is the target audience? I have been thinking of making a custom in car computer and this seems better than a linux distro for that purpose.
To bring it back to the parent comment, wouldn't it make sense for such a culture to live near a black hole? All of their waste emissions would be shadowed pretty well by the accretion disk, and other species might avoid the neighborhood in general given that it's not a safe or nice place to be.
Also, I think you actually validated minimaxir's point. The app succeeded with crappy UI/UX and that sets an example to others: "hey you don't have to build good UX". It's dangerous.
And you would think "forcing", "violence" and "the threat of violence" would all be clear. Right up until some one comes along and asserts that it's impossible to force people to do things because they can always choose to die instead. Or some one defines violence as "anything done to me specifically that I don't like at the moment for rhetorical purposes"
Ginger Roll Official Mobile Game Launch Trailer
Feedback on JavaScript for Beginners?
Is there any plan to add other cryptocurrencies?
Different VR devices are different. The GearVR for example has no positional tracking, which can make people very sick. Oculus has been focused almost entirely on fixing nausea issues one by one for the last 4 years. In addition game design choices have a huge effect. Games will be rated on a scale of how nauseating they can be. The most accessible experiences will be no more nauseating than sitting at the bus stop.
Recently HN discussed Chaum's ideas [1] and DigiCash [2]. His ecash [3] system was going to be something like an anonymous Google Wallet. Bitcoin wins in being decentralized, it does not need a bank or Google to issue electronic cash and guarantee that you can eventually get real money in return. But it is not anonymous.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10850192
[2] https://cryptome.org/jya/digicrash.htm
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash
My personal anecdote from Tsukiji was one of the auctions. There were a bunch of tuna, I think some frozen some not, layed out on the ground, a guy comes up and puts a small plastic crate on the ground and stands on it and begins the auction. The thing that struck me was the rythm it was exactly the same as the auctioneers used in my home of England in cattle/sheep auctions. Even if you didn't speak the language, as soon as you heard it you knew exactly what it was.
> Coming up with counter-examples is the default response.
> Instead, I try to say a supporting example first.

I like what you did there. Not just you, it seems many of the comments are coming up with nitpicks or counterexamples. I don't know what that means, I just found it ironic.
Of course if you don't have the juice to actually fix the problem then this can backfire.

The most angry I've ever gotten is with Comcast's offshore chat/call center. The reason is because they are trained to tell you that they will solve your problem, and that afterwards that it has been solved in such an emphatic fashion that only a sociopath would dare to question. Yet they do this without any actual indication that what they are doing is having any effect at all. And the worse thing is, even when you call back they act like they are listening to what you did previously, but in fact they are just waiting to interject the script where they make you jump through the same 20 hoops over and over again. In my case it turned out to be a faulty modem, so none of what they were doing had any effect at all, but in no way did they ever let on any actual information or engage in any reasoning.

I suspect the only reason hasn't replaced that call center with a voicemail tree is presumably because they need a Turing-test capable human to get the customer to calm down long enough for them to re-read step 25 from the level 1 tech support handbook.

I apologize for hijacking your thread, but I had to get this off my chest.
Must be a Mac thing. I downloaded the .zip file and the plugins work.
I am someone who really doesn’t like vacations. I don’t like travel, I don’t like hotels, and I don’t like eating in restaurants all the time.

What I do like is living for an extended period of time in a new location where I can really get a feel for the place (months not days). I go years without a vacation then move somewhere for 6 months or longer.
>But an average employee can absolutely be an ass, as long as they don't anger the management, and it won't likely affect the bottom-line that much.

Parent was referring to being an ass in general. If you act like a dick in the workplace, it will affect your promotions, etc. People will just not think of you first when looking to shower praise.
That's why I want a Boston Dynamics Atlas as my telepresence.
You're assuming that all of the titles that will be available at launch have already been released. I think that's a bad assumption.
They are. I don't think it's in any way more arcane to install than, say, MySQL. Not to say the latter has stellar documentation, but those complaints are picky if not invalid.
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> when you ingest N,N-Dimethyltryptamine certain strange contact-like phenomena tend to occur

That's not in question.

> occur within the biological-psychological interface known as Consciousness

This sentence includes a little submarine-like assumption, namely that our brains are merely the interface to a larger paranormal consciousness, as opposed to being the hardware that actually generates "consciousness". At this point, there is no scientific reason to believe this assumption which you smuggled in there has any factual validity.

> These contact experiences were so shocking that the lead investigator, Rick Strassman, discontinued his study.

Scientific efforts don't get discontinued because they are "shocking". While an individual researcher might move on, for whatever reason, it's not correct to imply that certain outcomes are so disconcerting the scientific community would shy away from them. Otherwise, large swaths of physics and biology would have been abandoned a long time ago.

> My position is: the phenomena [...] is deeply strange, and [...] it might be time to approach the subject of consciousness from a different angle.

Yes, I think that position was understood from your first comment.
More than that, they don't relate percentages that need to be related.

For the black case, 29% weren't attacking, 15% were unarmed.
What's to say the 15% that were unarmed weren't attacking?

There's no way to draw any meaningful conclusion from this data, because it's crap data.

What would be useful? Relating scenarios where someone shouldn't have been shot, like the percentage of unarmed people that were shot and not attacking.
I think decentralized mixing is on the horizon and may become baked into bitcoin wallets down the line. I'm speculating based on the emergence of protocols like FairExchange and Xim http://forensics.umass.edu/pubs/bissias.wpes.2014.pdf
FYI, HDFView is not the only viewer in town.

its also really easy to write a viewer in python using matplotlib.
I think you meant "diminishing marginal utility". The law of diminishing marginal returns concerns employees not goods consumed.

Though not specifically relevant to your post, this "law" doesn't always hold. Some goods have a utility threshold that must be crossed before they become valuable or increase in utility (e.g., various medicines and antibiotics). Money operates similarly, i.e., its utility does not necessarily diminish, much less in monotonic fashion. Assume that if I make N dollars, I may be able to afford popcorn or I may be able to afford butter, but not both. Let's also assume that I derive little satisfaction from popcorn or butter alone. However, if I make N+1 dollars, I can afford both popcorn and butter from which I derive a great deal of satisfaction. The addition $1 has greater utility than the Nth dollar I had previously.