skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As anyone who has worked with DMT or Ayahuasca can tell you, you don't need to travel far to reach the outer limits of space or even have contact experiences

The effects of drug-induced illusions are scientifically interesting to a number of research fields, including biochemistry and neurobiology. It may also be valuable for self-discovery and personal actualization. However, if you claim to be able to discern cosmological facts from these experiences, we are now firmly in the realm of religion.

> and this is very easy to test should the completely anti-scientific legal mechanisms preventing such a study be overcome

There have been a lot of studies testing supernatural powers, with and without the influence of drugs, in the sixties and seventies. None of these have ever yielded anything. But if it's very easy to test, as you claim, then go ahead and test it. The James Randi foundation offers a sizable prize for you if you can show this works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_...
What I am concerned about is my privacy. Bitcoin is not so anonymous: whoever you pay will know your bitcoin address. And even if you create pseudonyms, money can be traced unless you use some mixes and "money laundry" services.

As for buying photographs it may be ok, but I would not pay for news articles (such as LWN, for example) with non-anonymous account.
World's Tallest Evacuation Chute Approved to 81 Meters
Would have been better had you used SVG.
Here's one: Get a high-paying software job in a high COL area, work for a decade or so while minimizing your expenses (live cheaply/with friends) and investing as much as possible in a diversified stock market portfolio.

Then when you're sick of it, move to a cheaper area, get a part-time job and sell 3-4% of your assets every year to make up for the deficit. If you're lucky, the safe withdrawal rate of 3-4% will even be enough (or close) to have the ability to quit working for a living completely. Or perhaps your part-time job can cover all your expenses and you can just keep letting your portfolio grow at the expected long-term rate of 6-7% per year.
Honestly, if the academics didnt choose their research the private industry wouldnt have to hire r and d. This sounds more of a ploy to save costs by having academics build for the industry on government money than to hire people to further a companies interests.
It would be nice to live in a society when the certainty of someone having committed a crime directly relates to the justice system's proclamation of guilt.

Instead, for most Americans, for whom a competent lawyer is outside of the range of reasonable cost, we only get public defenders. A prosecutor's career is built on the back of successful convictions, whether just or not, while a public defender's career is built on the number of cases they can speedily close. For both, the most advantageous and therefore most common resolution is a guilty plea bargain.

"N Guilty Men" philosophical debates are too far above today's justice system for serious consideration.
>I don't agree with this;

No, that was your point. You said quote "nobody else is going to come in and take those customers except Chinese companies"

>Foreign companies will continue to invest in China

Sure they will, but it will be dramatically smaller. $850 billion a year outflow makes it so

>if people became even moderately wealthy

IF. These rural farmers have to compete with cheaper workforces in southeast Asia. And english speaking knowledge workers worldwide.

>As long as the Chinese government is willing to sponsor public works projects

The government did that already since 2008. All they got were 300% gdp/debt ratio and badly constructed roads/buildings. They can't borrow anymore money to do that, not with the carry trade unwinding and default rates going up.
$15 Minimum Wage in ﻿ Emeryville
> What I really value is being able to do interesting work that I'm proud of. So I'm very motivated to make money to the extent that it provides freedom to work on interesting things.

I couldn't agree more. I'm in the same ramen profitable situation (very similar amount). I love the challenges the product throws at me. Money is indeed just a means to be able to work on those.

For those who don't agree: the average person has about 60-ish years in his/her life where he/she is able to decide what they do with their time? Why postpone doing things that interest you?
PathTracing (Though not regular Ray tracing) is actually pretty tricky to parallelize. I'd be interested in hearing what their hardware actually does? I'm guessing some hardware implementation of ray intersections with a BVH or kd-Tree?

The problem that occurs when trying to do path tracing on current hardware is that secondary (reflected) rays are incoherent so the gpu will stall one ray while waiting for another that hit something, leading to poor utilization of the gpu. It's still normally faster than on a cpu, but compared to "simpler" problems like some linear algebra (Machine Learning or similar) the perf of gpu vs cpu is low.
I think Industry Research is mostly driven by some constraints that applies to their architecture, their business use-cases and how much the company is willing to spend $$$ on research that adds value to their products or services. Academics on the other hand thinks beyond the box and researches and gives clues to upcoming industries on where the problem might be and how it could be solved, therefore eventually helping Industry grow with validation from the researches and allowing them to put them into "products" and "services".

Therefore, I don't think Academics should stop doing what they do (i.e. wander around) and have a laser focus on Industry's product-based researches.
Ask HN: Consultant with 6 months at big firm. Is it too soon to apply for startup?
I'm a new grad with a degree in finance, but I love programming and tackling challenging, weird and new problems. I'm about a half-year into working for a big consulting firm, but I can already tell that it's not going to work long-term - I don't like super-structured hours, relatively limited freedoms and a big hierarchy.

When is too early to start applying for new jobs? How do I go about interviewing if I'm not sure that the startup I'm interviewing at is right for me and I don't want to leave my current job if it's not? What's your advice?
Solvability and game design
he said 'nobody else is going to come in and take those customers except Chinese companies'
Taking Issue with Paul Graham’s Premises
> Here is a shot of them taking a selfie, to capture the best night of their lives. Selfies are relevant.

*Brilliant!
You considered a trial where you keep a low price for 3-6 months then a higher one? They see both in the beginning with no trickery. Just a clear indicator they try it cheap and keep it inexpensively.
How would you recommend shorting China? It does sound like a pretty safe bet.
CX-20 an open source alternative to DJI Phantom Drone
> ...doesn't explain the basics (how to actually install it)...

Er, http://www.postgresql.org/download/ and/or http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/installation.h... ?

> ...tends to combine information that is more for advanced users on the same page as beginners.

There's a tutorial for beginners: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/tutorial.html

Then there's reference material in the rest of the manual. The tutorial even suggests the order in which you should read the rest of the manual. :)
Ex-SpaceX engineers doing encryption for Syrian aid missions
Here's one good article I've read on achieving economic freedom: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...
I'm not claiming anything, I'm saying: its possible that there is more to consciousness than it appears and that the barriers to studying the relationships between certain tryptamine compounds and the human psyche is a worthy scientific endeavor to overcome. All I can speak to are my own personal experiences, and those who participated in Rick Strassman's DMT study between 1990 and 1995 at the University of New Mexico.

If you don't mind me asking, how is this not clear?
I have stable clients. I've only had 2 main ones over the last 3 years. I think there are maybe some misconceptions about what a consulting life must be like. I agree it does sound stressful if it were my long term goal, but it is not, it's primarily a type of life that keeps me as open as possible to finding something truly worth pursuing (IMO at least), which may or may not take the form of a startup. I have my candidates here, which change as I learn.
I don't quite understand how "valuing time over money" is meaningful. Time and money have an exchange rate. If you want more time, you can generally forego additional money to get it, and vice versa.

Perhaps it should have stated that being happier correlates with valuing an additional minute of leisure time at a higher amount of money.

And that is as much as saying that people paid more for their work are happier, which seems almost tautological.
Of course, there's tons of academic research that does all of those things. And I of course agree that too much academic software is "works on my grad students machine"--an enormous amount of my time on Racket is spent on real-world works-in-practice issues. But this doesn't seem like it's a particular issue of industry-relevant systems work, just Sturgeon's Law.

Also, failure to address the general case is not so bad--it just means that the next part of the general case has to be addressed by the next researcher.

Finally, I think the real issue is academics who have an idea, and cloak it in pseudo-relevance to industry to sell it. A program analysis framework isn't suddenly industry-relevant now that it applied to JavaScript, and we should just be ok with not chasing the latest industry fad.
Excellent piece - I think my favourite is the advice to criminals section: "Criminals, therefore, are advised to go to New Mexico (n = 99) or Oklahoma (n = 100)."
Saying you don't need a trustworthy seller is so obviously wrong... even proper, regulated, reliable and biased-towards-the-buyer companies like eBay and Amazon still publish seller ranks, ratings and reviews. Furthermore, they actively filter out the scammers. You are closing your eyes to the problems OB is creating itself.
A Night Out in the Twenties
Of course they have had failures -- but the company does not seem to be suffering from them. Why not? If (as this article suggests) broad focus means that the company will have problems, then here's a company with an absurdly broad focus but few problems: the fire phone being a perfect example that cost money, but apparently didn't distract the company in any particular way.
Because valuing time more than money is a luxury afforded primarily by people with plenty of money.
I think I've lost count at how many different things were said to be the "bitcoin kiler app"
Usually takes a chargeoff (you never pay the delinquent amount) for it to hit your credit.
Alot of Chinese nationals are staying put in silicon valley. ALOT.
There’s almost no evidence that cancer screening saves lives, say researchers
These problems can be overcome (somewhat) by using more clever path tracing such as bidirectional path tracing, and mutating "successful" paths instead of creating new ones, such as in Metropolis Light Transport.
It may not look like a sexy marketing feature. But it is the #1 reason why I don't recommend PostgreSQL.

I also don't think that query hints are a good way to do it. And I don't mind if the way to do it is somewhat cumbersome. This is very much a case where 20% of the work can give 99% of the benefit.

For example what about the following approach?

1. Add an option to EXPLAIN that will cause PostgreSQL's optimizer to spit out multiple plans it considered, with costs, and with a description of the plan that PostgreSQL can easily parse and fit to a query.

2. Add a PLAN command that can be applied to a prepared statement and will set its plan. It is an error to submit a plan that does not match the query.

And now in the rare case where I don't like a query's plan I can:

EXPLAIN PLANS=3 (query);

Pick my desired plan from the list (hopefully)

Then in my code I:

PREPARE foo AS (query);
PLAN foo (selected plan);
EXECUTE foo;

And now if I notice that a query performs worse than I think it should, I can make it do what I want it to.
In case it wasn't clear in the original comment, the big name is usually someone who was only tangentially involved in the project, if at all. Sometimes it's the head of the org the project took place in. They may have approved the budget for the project, but it's rare that the big name did any of the work.

This is like when Tim Bray mentioned that Amazon is great because he hasn't experienced the same problems that have gotten a lot of press lately. Of course he's treated well! He's Tim Bray!

Matt Welsh is exactly the kind of big name that isn't going to lose credit on something. Of course he gets credit! He's Matt Welsh!
I don't know what to say. I think OP did a good job of explaining what makes Snapchat so great, but their initial confusion and the confusion from the commenters within this thread boggles me. Recently I was in a room with a well-known VC who wouldn't believe a college student who said that they enjoy using Snapchat, as if they couldn't comprehend how anyone would like it.

Virtually all the comments are about how Snapchat confuses them and that there must be something seriously wrong with it. And yet the app is immensely popular. If you're one of those people, then Snapchat is not really made for you.

You might be able to understand why Snapchat is a beloved app by reading a report about what the millennials are up to these days but I encourage anyone dealing with this confusion to make an effort to talk to people outside of your normal social circles once in a while. This kind of empathy with others will make you much more effective when you're creating for people who are not like you.
That's how I have it setup
If the training is anything like the writing in this article, no one is doing any thinking to begin with, let alone differently. It's a lot of vacuous bullshit. Frankly, you should be training people to identify it as such.
What about the afterlife? Many believe the temporary sacrifices they make while on Earth will benefit them for eternity in the afterlife.

Whatever makes you happy. :)
That feature is included with every new account!
I wonder if the Sorted Deferred Shading algorithm from Disney's Hyperion renderer could be adapted to realtime rendering? Optimizing a renderer that does one frame every 10 minutes to produce one every 16ms is difficult, but a scaled-down version with a lot of fakery might be possible.

http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/innovations/hyperi...
PostgreSQL 9.4.4 on x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc (GCC) 4.8.2 20140120 (Red Hat 4.8.2-16), 64-bit

If it matters, it is an Amazon RDS instance.
Not only that, but saying "the top 68 percent" is flat out wrong. Even if a normal distribution is assumed, it should say "the middle 68 percent" or something to that effect.
"Perfect is the enemy of good", perfection isn't always necessary for effective communication, and the perceived intent of the writer usually matters more. If you think the writer is trying to mislead someone, or they said something that you think will lead to misunderstandings of something important, then call them out or ask for a correction. I took the post as being more about "the writer didn't cover all the edge cases" than about "the writer wrote something intentionally false/wrong/misleading".
Three things I’ve learned on my first week as a freelancer
With h5dump you can specify which datasets you want to dump. I am sure nobody is going to use awk, grep and wc to process terabytes of data. As for sanity checks, like checking that probabilities stored in a dataset sum up to 1.0 and things like that, dumping one dataset and processing it with awk should be ok.
That I recall, the RISC-V instruction set was created by looking at existing RISC instructions, industry demands, and so on. The result was a pretty good baseline that was unencumbered by patents or I.P. restrictions. From there, simulators and reference hardware emerged. Unlike many toys, the Rocket CPU was designed and prototyped with a reasonable flow on 45nm and 28nm. Many others followed through with variants for embedded and server applications with prior MIPS and SPARC work showing security mods will be next.

Them not having every industrial tool available doesn't change the fact that the research, from ISA design to tools developed, was quite practical and with high potential for adoption in industry. An industry that rejects almost everything out of academia if we're talking replacing x86 or ARM. Some support for my hypothesis comes from the fact that all kinds of academics are building on it and major industry players just committed support.

Is it ideal? No. I usually recommend Gaisler's SPARC work, Oracle/Fujitsu/IBM for high-end, Cavium's Octeons for RISC + accelerators, and some others as more ideal. Yet, it was a smart start that could easily become those and with some components made already. Also progressing faster on that than anything else.
David talks building a product in the renewable energy space
Who the F Is the EFF? John Legere Wants to Know
The Mach Loop Experience
Forgive me for jumping in with yet more unsolicited advice, but I can't help thinking that all your users should be paying at least $5 per month.

An example transition plan:

* switch new users to a free trial -> sign up to $5/month for continued access
* observe conversion rate from trial users to paying customers
* perform `conversion rate x existing active user base` calculation
* send apologetic email to existing users pointing out that free != sustainable, with offer to grandfather in free access to any who feel strongly enough to send you a personal email about it
What I hate more is the thought of having my financial data stored in some shady, cobbled together, cloud service, hosted somewhere on Amazon AWS.

I predict, that it is only a question of time until they will encounter some disastrous data leak.

Begin a YNAB user for more than a year now, I am really angry at them for this move. So I'll guess I have to move on to something else after the support for the YNAB4 apps will be shut down.
Hands-On with HTC Vive Pre Developer Kit VR Headset
PostgreSQL UPSERT Done Right
Could anyone link to the "learning styles" claim?

If it is about as coarse categories as "visual" vs "verbal", then debunking does not sound strange (but I guess mostly because not many people are very polarized wrt this axis).

But in general - well, almost each single person has her/his tastes (senses involved, brevity/verbosity, level of challenge, level of feedback, amount of social interaction, amount of noise, etc, etc). So, I would rather guess than psychological research are flawed (too few categories, misaligned categories, binning, self-reported data, etc) than anything else.

(I do have both experience with teaching and with doing research-level psychology.)
> But the sushi in the nearby restaurants was the best I've ever had before or since.

I was coming here to say just this. Best sushi I've ever had and will likely ever have. Period.
Thanks for helping prove my point and teaching me something I wish I had known earlier!
Can you elaborate on the 401k point? Do you think they're a problem because generally people cant make good investment decisions, or that there are structural problems with the vehicle itself that make it a bad choice for any worker?
TechNet not MSDN.
You're correct. There's no actual basis validating anything on the order of $1 million for the two cats. That's the flaw in why the parent's example doesn't work, it never actually meets reality in any way. Market valuations don't only exist in theory.

Market caps for eg public companies are generally given legitimacy through trading, routine liquidity, auditing of financials, and dozens of other processes and regulations that companies must conform to. You can sell your Microsoft stock for a very well known amount of dollars, under very well known terms, essentially any time you want during market hours; you can never sell those cats for $500,000.

The difference between me claiming my right shoe is worth $50 billion, and owning all of Uber's stock and having that be worth $50 billion? People with a lot of money, and a lot of reputation, deciding that Uber is worth $50 billion, after typically having put their money where their mouth is and investing. To say nothing of Uber having a real business (meaning they can raise debt, have credit ratings, sales, cash flow, operating projections, et al), having a value that the IRS or an auditing firm or investors can actually assess, and so on. One is verifiable to some large degree, the other can never be anything more than an absurdity - I can very likely sell my Uber stock for a lot of value, even if I take a big discount; I can never sell my right shoe at even a 99.99% discount to the $50 billion.
I'd really want to try, but when I need to scroll to see the end of the list of permissions it needs, I refuse to install it...
First passenger drone makes its debut at CES
> ...as there's no such thing as prophecy, or magical cures...

Isn't that quite a strong claim?
So now Stripe has that risk on their books? Don't you think they'll eventually need to do the same as Paypal did?

Maybe Stripe won't freeze your assets first, but they could notify you that they will only support a certain transaction volume unless you take a loan.
Dan from Optus Mobile Politely Schools Racists on Facebook
where are you getting 10 minutes from?

most animation or vfx rendering takes hours per frame.
> I'm not claiming anything, I'm saying: its possible that there is more to consciousness than it appears

That is not correct. In the post above you said, literally, "you don't need to travel far to reach the outer limits of space or even have contact experiences [...] Its like, Fermi's Paradox is almost completely irrelevant if you come from the position that any sufficiently advanced civilization is aware of the possible non-local properties of consciousness". That's a claim.

I think it's fair to conclude you are not assigning an extremely low probability to there being "more to consciousness than it appears".

> studying the relationships between certain tryptamine compounds and the human psyche

This is a purely biological endeavor. The reason why I responded to your earlier post, and also the reason why this even shows up in a thread about planet formation, is that you claim to be able to explore the cosmos by ingesting mind-altering substances.

> All I can speak to are my own personal experiences.

For what it's worth, nobody is disputing you had these experiences. What is in dispute is the claim that these experiences yield scientific facts by virtue of remote viewing.
People aren't going to "say that" just because you demand it. So you're saying that, yes, using a text editor to edit JPEG files is a pain, error-prone, and horribly time consuming, but privacy. Fine, just say that and quit cajoling people into falling into your argumentative traps.
This is why I don't have comments on my own blog. I love discussion and appreciate it where it belongs, like hacker news and reddit, but if I'm writing it is my own outlet and I really don't want other people to see what other people think about what I write. I prefer people come up with their own opinions. If they want to discuss, they can message me.
YNAB Classic would not be that hard to replicate as a foss project. After the recent switch I am very tempted to do this.
Talking to Jonathan Blow, creator of “Braid,” about his new game, “The Witness.”