skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everyone puts a spin on things but your twisting the facts around just as badly. For example you claimed they "saved $19 mil" when in reality, the switch had the "potential to save" based on estimated increases in water cost over the next 8 years. Also that's not what the vote was for. Basically everything you said has some truth to it with details changed/omitted to make the governor look better/dems look worse.
> I'd be surprised if he isn't able to land internships with any of the big tech companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.) with this piece as part of a larger portfolio.

Sure, but perhaps I'd be more surprised if that internship had to do with UX/interaction design. Maybe marketing, or webdesign.

If I were to make a drawing of a house, even a detailed rendering, and made a website about why I would like such a house, why it would be a nice house, that wouldn't make me an architect.

Your point about the larger portfolio is an important one. Where is it? At 21 he must have been studying this field for 2 maybe 3 years?

The site does look very neat and well-polished. That is impressive, no matter what. Clear indicator of talent. Whether that talent is UX design (people keep talking about "design" in this thread, as if it's some general thing), he does not demonstrate: no tests, no design documents, no research. Except he does claim to have focused on research, yet no word about what this research entails, the process, how it went, what he found out.

So I'm going to say, he's got great talent, for marketing shiny things to the general public. And if you think about it, it makes a lot more sense that someone great at marketing reaches the top of HN, than someone great at UX design? ;-)
Discussed here a few days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10956658
Totally agree, I used to work with a HP running Ubuntu 14.04 but the UI just sucks and most of those tiny functionalities that are available on the Mac just makes you not think of getting another laptop. I don't think I can ever use another machine that is not a Mac. I just recently found out that you could create a digital signature on the mac, also imagine the ease of taking a screen snapshot. With windows you would have installed two shitty software's to do that.
>But if they even approximately cancel, I don't see what problem that is supposed to create.

If they cancel, there's no problem. If mine is significantly greater than yours, then production goes down, and BI becomes unsustainable.

>The only way to know is to do it and find out. And if the worst case scenario is that companies have to pay some employees more to convince them to do unfun work, is that really the end of days?

If it leads to less production, and then shrinks the economy, then everyone will be worse off.
Good idea!

Just a fun weekend project <3
It would be interesting to run this survey with more ethnic groups to compare the data.

It might also be good to break more of the survey questions into east, south, and southeast Asian. I'm sure many people have a different set of biases in relation to South Asians especially, whereas a high number of people in the U.S. don't know enough to even differentiate East Asians and Southeast Asians - so their prejudices about both groups would be more similar.

I thought the use of "subethnicity" was odd - typically people use the word "ethnicity" at that level.
Si.gnatu.re – HTML email signature generator
This is a quite beautiful post about engineering in general, actually. You try to solve a practical problem as best as you can, and you get sort of an unintended-beneficial-consequences effect and end up creating principles that have a more universally-applicable nature.

I personally hope Elixir helps thrust Erlang into ever more success. (But not so much success that it becomes a victim of it...)
Zygomys – Embedded Scripting Language for Go
The lead leaching is primarily from household pipes.

The awful color of the Flint water that gets shown is from iron that has leached out of the mains.

The reason switching back to Detroit water doesn't solve anything is because the chemical scale that normally keeps much plumbing material from leaching into the water was disrupted by the improperly treated river water (they could have adjusted the PH during treatment) and has not yet reformed. The Detroit water supply is not itself full of lead or whatever.
Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science
From the very end of the "article"

>or essentially 95% of the population to be vaccinated to get herd immunity. This has profound policy implications. To be provocative: If you, as a health official, know that this number is unatainable (e.g., because too many people decide not to vaccinate their kids for some reason) -- should you recommend stopping the program to mandate vaccinatons on everyone else?

(spelling errors in article)

To say the least this a provocative statement. Even without achieving "herd immunity" many lives will be saved. That should make decisions about vaccinations more obvious.
>Instead of doing the actual work they would rather first implement their own sort function.

Strawman much. On the otherhand I regularly come across people who call library functions without understanding their runtime consequences, well those are the good ones, the bad ones 'get shit done" by calling sort just to find the maximum. Yeah they do get exactly that done, that is, shit.
> there is no logical way to qualify that criteria into a rule that can be unequivocally applied

Software patent: A patent that can be infringed using only computer software and a prior art computer.

That clearly, unequivocally does not apply to patents on drugs or the like.
I was in Scranton Pennsylvania in 1999 and was horrified at the water there, the water was yellowish orange.

My guess is many former industrial regions in the US will have heavily contaminated water.
Probably not? Definitely not. At damn near a quarter mil for speakers you're way beyond the what the human ear can detect on the curve of diminishing returns.

We agree though about speakers and the quick win they represent. They're like your car's tires, the primary interface between you and the medium, and an upgrade is the lowest hanging fruit.
How do you expect less people to hold down "traditional jobs", yet expect traditional measures of production and output to not decrease?

Redefining work doesn't answer any of the questions. Calling art work doesn't affect production, unless art suddenly becomes edible.

"I don't think production and output would go down and I most certainly don't think it would lead to societal collapse, or I wouldn't be arguing for it. Obviously."

You could say that about any position anyone takes. Nobody's accusing Bi advocates of trying to cause societal collapse. They say that BI might, in spite of the advocates best intentions, lead to problems. Your good intentions don't cause good outcomes, so just saying "I don't want society to collapse" is not a useful argument.
Or that they're just used to their IDE doing all of it for them.
It is disappointing to see this kind of mentality in science, which is built on a foundation of the primacy and public availability of measurement.

To see an oncologist from Harvard / Dana Farber get something so wrong is really sad.

Self interest is an incredibly strong and insidious influence on our opinions, and I suspect it comes into play when senior academics stake out positions like this. Would they have agreed 20 years earlier in their careers? I doubt it.
The only way I see out of it is open sourcing the entire humanity. The way I see humanity: Good community (99% of the world). Evil community (1% of the world).

Scenario - open sourcing government for everyone: If we say the power of good community is "50" and the power of bad community is "5" then open sourcing the gov will have effect something like this: (power of good community increases exponentially) ^ 2 = 2500 (power of bad community increases exponentially) ^ 2 = 25

I mean the power of bad community also increased because they too have access to the source, but they are now in a greater overall disadvantage.

That is my rough impression.
> but I have found that nothing is as important as tests when refactoring

You don't need those with static types. You only need to write tests for your actual code, not things that the compiler can check for you.

Manually writing code to check things the computer can test for you is a waste of developers time.
The BGPlay visualization on that page appears to be open sourced: https://github.com/MaxCam/BGPlay
You missed "automated" in "automated refactorings". This is what I'm talking about.

Without types, IDE's can't perform automated refactorings: you need to supervise them and make sure the IDE didn't break code.

This can't happen with static types.
Visualizing Animal movements: “small brains en masse” (Dennis Hlynsky) [video]
We'll see. According to Wikipedia, the Soyuz spacecraft used by Russians so far lost no crew since 1971.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_manned_space_mi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_manned_space_m...
I want to increase the number of webtorrent magnet links!
There is a big problem with the term MVP. It does not work uniformly in all markets, especially in mature markets when you are trying to substitute either your own product or competing with a very mature product of your competitor.
Identifying Utility Functions Using Random Forests
Mommy, Why Is There a Server in the House?
It really helps when renaming methods for example. I am not sure how much it helps with extract method.
"And switching back to Detroit water doesn't solve the lead problem in the mains, although it may be less acute."

It does solve it. The Detroit water has lower chloride levels than the Flint River sourced water, so the lead in the service lines and solder won't leach above acceptable limits. There's lead in old mains and service lines everywhere in the country, particularly in lines put in place before the mid 20th century. And the cost to remove them in places like Flint is high because the frost line is so deep.
Dot Dot Dot HTML5 Game
Is anyone else saddened that it takes a personal mortgage by a passionate professor and his team to figure this out? And that even after they proved it, a GoFundMe campaign is the only way to recoup the funds?

With the agencies involved dragging their feet, was there no other way to get someone else involved? Is there a whistleblower fund like the SEC has: https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower that gives them a portion of the impact they had (10-30% for amounts over $1 MM in the SEC's case)?
I felt that that was a perfectly fair statement on Thomas's part. It's fine if people are willing to risk their lives for a cause, but they shouldn't be misled into outright sacrificing their lives because someone irresponsibly marketed a tool as being suitable for a particular purpose.

I'm also not sure where you get the impression that Cyph is currently at an "alpha" stage, but I'm going to have to disagree with you there too. Do you have more specific feedback, and/or did you run into a bug while using it?
This is crazy! I had the same thought in mind about Zagreb after coming back from London and having fun at Google Campus. We need something like this!
Was thinking maybe it could be funded by making it an EU project and/or getting the new government on board to provide a city space (there is a bunch of old abandoned factories, for example the one on the Branimir street), but that takes a lot of bureaucracy and time.
How One Intelligent Machine Learned to Recognize Human Emotions
They claim the professor and his students did 6000 hrs of work testing samples (that's an especially round number), which they valued at an average of $27.74/hr even though everyone was a volunteer and no one was asking to be paid. This is how they came up with an estimate of a labor value of $166,487 for this voluntary work for which no students who did the work were paid or asked to be paid.

It is extremely misleading and deceptive here to say that the professor spent $147,000 because he did not spend $147,000 at all. He spent 11200+3180+50 = $14,430 and he received 32843+200+500+200 = $33,743 in grants and fees he charged for speaking, for a surplus of $19,313.

Furthermore, the money being raised is going into an account supervised by the lead. It is not being used to pay the people who did the work for their time. This is especially outrageous that he is collecting money for their volunteer work and keeping it for his own use.
Come on dude you created an entire account just for that stupid joke
Things every React.js beginner should know
My contribution to anecdata is this:

Parents bought me a 180W fluorescent (therefore 10800 to 18000 Lumens according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficacy#Examples_2 ) anti-SAD lamp.

Stupidly, I used it as an evening lamp instead of anti-SAD. I had serious troubles getting to sleep for an entire year. Typically took 1-3 hours. Blamed coffee, stress, etc. Got blackout curtains, earplugs, cooled room temp, reduced coffee, etc. When I made the connection b/t falling asleep and the anti-SAD lamp, I stopped using it altogether and almost instantly started falling asleep rapidly.

So I conclude my 10k-18k lumen lamp stimulated my awake cycle by about 1-3 hours. My suggestion therefore is: use the lamp at either end of the day in winter: just before sunrise and just after sunset. And certainly to shut it off 3 hours before bedtime. In practice this is tricky because the "unwanted dark hours" are 4:30pm to 7:30pm which is: at work, my commute home and first hour at home. So I need three lights, including one in the car?!
I slightly disagree. About half of the creative people with math knack can't code.

When I was in high school, the advanced math class had ~two types of people. People good at arithmetics and functions and people good at geometry and functions. People who we're good at arithmetics but weren't good at functions dropped out quickly.

Go to engineering school and you will find software people who thing about graphics as an afterthought. They remember numbers and words easily, enjoy squashing bugs. And they are good with function like ideas, that turn into programs. Like search engines, text editors, finding primes and brute forcing passwords. (I don't know really as I don't belong to their tribe.)

Then there are construction and mechanical engineering students. They won't code voluntarily, because they are crap at it. "What the fuck did I name that thing? How many steps should this while loop do?" Just doesn't compute. Yet these people can manage pretty massive concept design and 3D models and whatnot. CAD work is fun to them, unlike most CS majors. I'm one of that group. While I can do small programs in Python, I don't enjoy what I'm capable of doing. Learning more seems futile, as I will never be actually good at it.

This divide into two groups shows in later life too. Just check the prices of decent CAD tools, and compare them to decent IDEs. For some reason people who are able to enjoy both CAD and coding are incredibly rare. And that makes them very valuable.

If you could make graphic, grown up and powerful language, that would tap pretty huge resource of brain power. Currently it might happen as some sort of hydraulic simulation tool or autolisp plug to Autocad.
Exposing more skin in winter at high latitudes isn't easy nor safe!
Remember they switched to flint river to save a "whopping" $1 Million per year.

They are probably costing $1 Million per week now in bottled water.

Imagine what the special needs kids caused by this will cost taxpayers for the next several decades.

Even without the lead leeching issues, everyone knows the Flint river was an industrial dumping ground for decades and was very toxic - no amount of filtering would have made it safe for constant consumption.
Dolphinizr – a dolphin translator
Why do you think that " If there was a study every once in a while that said X study about climate change was wrong, and we didn't consider Y factor, but climate change still seems to be headed in a dangerous direction" leads to "I think people might be more willing to accept the thesis." instead of "look the scientists can't agree on this stuff, how are we supposed to believe them at all."

(see also the "no warming since 1998" nonsense)
A Logical Calculus Immanent in Nervous Activity [pdf]
Typing makes it easier to write a "find all references" function. Types distinguish whether a call to foo.bar() is calling the same bar as baz.bar(), which makes it easier to rename Foo's bar wherever it is used, but leave Baz's bar alone.
Superdry clothes have a reasonable price/quality ratio. I'd rate the clothes higher quality than any other Jack&Jones/Tom Tailor/H&M etc brands I own though.
Slick: Functional Relational Mapping for Mere Mortals Part 1
Cost is irrelevant honestly, it's just an entirely different market. Just like hyper cars. Are the Zondas, Ageras, and Venenos worth $2+ million. Of course they aren't. You're paying for the prestige and image. Price is just what someone is willing to pay for.
Same here, Ubuntu + built in Intel display.
Show HN: Documenting react components using runtime type introspection
The car factories in the area already knew the water was bad and could no longer use it for production lines because it was damaging paint.

It took this level of scientific study to confront the state government "deniers" that there was anything wrong, people had been showing them for months.
Of course, this has nothing to do with OO, and everything with C++.

"I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind" -- Alan Kay
I've often heard fans of AI[1] claim that a benefit of machine-based evaluations is the removal of human bias. The machine applies the rules consistently, while humans allow race, sex, religion, politics, eye-color[2], etc to bias their decisions, often without knowing the bias even exists.

This sounds great at first, but it's really just moving the problem around. Instead of many individuals making their own biased decisions, we get a uniform application of the biases of whoever designed the AI. They still may not realize how their biases influence the design process, so it's easy to think that the AI is somehow "neutral".

This is particularly bad because it removes locality from the decision process. While the fallible humans sometime inject their own racism/sexism/etc, the freedom to make those mistakes also gave them the power to fix problems that were never included in the "official policy".

Decision by remote algorithm is really just another type of central planning, and I expect it to have the same inability to respond to local conditions that cause a lot of the problems in the traditional communist states.

[1] usually combined with a new type of data collection (surveillance-as-a-business-model)

[2] biases that are often taught socially: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/class-divided/
SV is pretty much in a rain shadow from SC mountains, so what happens there has little bearing on whether or not it's wet as a whole in CA. If you look at SF, then total precip is north of 100% of normal, and holy bejesus it's been raining in the SC mountains for example.
Doesn't look too bad in 2014... http://www.amwater.com/ccr/scranton.pdf
California GeoPortal
I just read a bunch (more) about audio design, which I find very interesting. As a software engineer who is getting an electronics lab together, after a 40 year hiatus, things like this are worthwhile.

Definitely beats another hiring thread on HN :-)
Related [to Istanbul's cats] article: http://www.legalnomads.com/2012/03/istanbul-cats.html
So, it's crap that he's done something that made him feel better. Yea.

It's not science. And yes, he very well might feel better just be because he did something he believes in. But I don't see why that warrants a response like yours.
This looks very nice.

Something I've wanted in a postgres query plan visualizer is a "timeline" view of the various nodes. Seeing as for each node we get a "start time" and "duration" it seems like it should be possible to draw something a little like a flame graph to see at what points the nodes are doing their work.
The $165,000 they estimated for labor was in addition to the other costs. They aren't trying to recoup that.

The $166,487 is actual costs incurred, not the volunteers estimated labor
>"[It's a] trivial cost compared to the damage we prevented," Edwards said in an email to ATTN:. "Best investment we could have made into society."

In the world we live in, people only invest in themselves and society may or may not benefit as a consequence. This type of selflessness is rare and unsustainable.
In double-blind tests, one deliberately changes only one variable and compares/observes two groups where individual do not know whether they take a new drug or a placebo. If the drug has a positive effect, the double-blind test is an accepted method of proof, but unfortunately this limits our options severely. If cancer can be cured by changing _two_ variables, we will never find a cure. NEVER! Remember that we already do research for 50+ years and have spent trillions, so I tend to think that Einstein was right: it is insane to repeat the same experiments and to expect a different outcome.

Let's jump to Alzheimer, a feared disease with also a lot of research and not so good drugs. Dr Bredesen has made a protocol with 35 variables to cure Alzheimer. And in his first test, he reversed Alzheimer in 9 out of 10 patients. The scientific purists say that there is no double-blind study, so no proof. I am convinced that Dr Bredesen in on the right path, not only because of the results but also because of his reasoning. The treatment has no drug, but a health optimization in all possible ways. And then the body heals itself in 4 months. Please do not comment with "that cannot be true" unless you proof that it cannot be true (I do not belief that you can provide proof).

So the state of current research methods is weak. Medical research only focuses on one variable, one drug, that will cure a disease. The results of this way of doing medical research are VERY disappointing. Trillions are spent and no drugs that cure cancer, AIDS or Alzheimer have been found. Dr Bredesen has chosen a different path and I support him.
The type system only goes so far. If your refactored code calls functions that take several different parameters of the same type, you can make mistakes that the compiler won't catch.
> (1) The NSA is there to protect us, in theory.

Do people actually believe this?
I completely agree. I just think that Apple does too, but just isn't moving as fast as we want them to.
Get the Strategy Right and the Execution Is Easy
Ask HN: Where do you get your startup tshirts printed?
Any recommendations for reasonably priced and high quality prints?
If basis of your claims is same article that has been posted here. it says here:

> $180,917 in expenses for sampling, water tests, laboratory supplies, and more.

This is the out of pocket expense they are talking about. It doesn't even involve the hours spent. So unless you can disapprove that sampling costs for water tests didn't cost $166,487 - we have little reason to trust your claim.

Regardless, lets say even if that $166,487 indeed includes their hourly rates for which no one was asked to be paid, their claim is justified. Heck no one asked them to do this in first place.

There is time and place to be cynical but I don't think this is the one. I personally can't applaud them enough for work them have done.
Headline: "Professor Marc Edwards Spent $147,000..."
fine print: "...a net deficit of $147,174, which Edwards covered with his own discretionary research and personal funds..."

So...how much research money was within his discretionary budget? It's a bit of a stretch to call that "his own funds".
Dots – modular dotfiles manager