skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I fins the fits really strange, especially for men. Everything there is a tall fit. And the quality is rubbish, I had 2 of the zippers on my winter coat to break after a couple months use. I expected more for a decently priced coat.
From the jargon file [1]

[1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html#id3141241
2016: The year of Web Streams
Don’t Replace CoffeeScript with ES6 Transpilers (2015)
Couldn't they have coordinated with this the lunch of the new X-Files? Fox marketing sucks!
What? That's the least critical hedging comment they could have possibly made. "some say it's dumb" is their extreme negative? Really?
One in five American adults is an Amazon Prime member
Humans do indeed love a narrative...start telling a story, particularly one with an unusual character(s) in an interesting situation, then stop telling it and see what happens...you'll be prompted: "Go on, what happened next?"....at our core I think we're very hungry for knowledge, and eventually the closure provided when a story comes to a satisfactory ending...

For the majority of our time on the planet the oral tradition was all that was available to us...

I think the simpler the elements of a story are--e.g., good vs evil, good eventually wins, etc., (easily remember-able) the greater the odds are that it will be passed down through generations, or the ages, with changes and embellishments...
Nine executives have left GitHub in recent months (email req'd)
Perhaps a lot of your story books were imported from south of the border, or published by subsidiaries of US companies.
Stop making this about ego. The person was helping developers secure their apps and you're trying to make this about who is wrong. Making sure someone feels bad in the open source community won't make anything better.
My friend's Romanian and his parents iron EVERYTHING. Including socks and underwear.
it boggles my mind that Uber doesn't need to follow the same rules as taxi's
Reports of strange new energies & crafts also made science seem magical and helped fire the imagination of the next generation of scientists and engineers for the ongoing cold war. The UFO phenomenon was handy on a few fronts.
Parts of that is right, but I think you mis-state a lot of the ratings stuff.

The fundamental idea behind the ratings is (simplifying a lot) that you could take a lot of crap mortgages and then slice them into tranches, assigning losses to the lowest tranches first, and to the highest tranches last. So if you have 1000 mortgages, and you slice it into 10 tranches of 100 each, and 250 mortgages go bad, then the lowest two tranches lose 100%, the next tranche loses 50%, and the top 7 tranches lose 0%. What the ratings agencies were doing by assigning AAA grades to the top tranches was estimating the likelihood that EVERYTHING would go bad was very low.

And what I think a lot of people miss about the financial crisis is that this was not wrong. Not only was it correct in principle, but actual losses on AAA rated securities was extremely low because even among subprime a lot kept on being serviced. So the ratings agencies said "hell, we could have a massive crisis and these top tranches will still mostly pay out", and then we did have a massive crisis, and those top tranches still mostly paid out.

There were a lot of issues and problems and corners cut and bad paperwork and robosigning and a hundred and one other scandals, some quite significant. However when you say:

> They had assumed that "AAA" would remain relatively safe.

It's worth remembering that this assumption was shown to be correct! From the financial crisis inquiry report:

"Overall, for 2005 to 2007 vintage tranches of mortgage-backed securities originally rated triple-A, despite the mass downgrades, only [...] 4% of subprime securities had [...] losses imminent or had already been suffered by the end of 2009."

On the other hand, something like 95% of lower rated tranches ended up suffering losses. The tranches were a mechanism for concentrating credit risk in the lower tranches; the problem isn't that it didn't work, but that 1) it worked really well and 2) everyone was badly underestimating the total about of credit risk in the system. AAA was mostly fine; everything short of AAA was absolute toast.

(Also, I think you're missing how huge the decline in home prices was, both as cause and vector of the crisis. A vast amount of paper wealth nominally owned by the middle class vanished in a puff of smoke; most of the crisis was the result of that. But the impacts of an asset price bubble should properly be attributed to its inflation, not it's popping.)
What a sad day, he was truly one of the great minds of the twentieth century. Inspiration to generations.

P.S. Web of Stories has an extensive, autobiography style interview with Marvin Minsky [1].

[1] http://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/1
RIP. I will always hold him as an inspiration.

Of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neats_vs._scruffies

I find it interesting because Minsky did a lot of the foundational work in Neural Network research yet he philosophically identified as the opposite on the Neat/Scruffy spectrum of most NN researchers today. Much like Bayes, I think there is some immense wisdom from his research that will not even be acknowledged as wisdom for decades.
Throwing up walls isn't going to protect people from the US. It's a facile and ultimately unproductive response that plays to fear. The answer is to make US workers competitive in a global marketplace. And it absolutely is possible to compete on things other than price.

And while his numbers are invented, the concept is spot on: producing some things is expensive in the US, perhaps too much so to be competitive.
Danny Hillis: "The first time I met Marvin Minsky: I walked into his office, I was
very intimidated. He was sitting there, he was throwing wadded up
pieces of paper at a wastebasket across the room, and doing a terrible
job of it. He's missing it, they're all falling short. So I watch
this for a while. Then he looked up at me and said 'ah! I forgot! It's one half em
gee squared!'"

- From his talk On Game Software Development, in 2001 I think (from Technetcast.com)
I mean ideally you should 1) strip tags 2) encode 3) use X-XSS headers 4) use CSP headers. That way if any one of these fails, the others will catch it.

That said, there still shouldn't be security holes in the framework.
Admin, can we get a black bar for this? Marvin Minsky is widely referred to as the "Founding Father of AI."
The 'value' can be as simple as a payout. If I could go back, I'd love to invest in Snapchat. I don't think Snapchat will ever have a strong revenue stream but that doesn't matter to me - what matters to me is the buyout.

Hell, I invest in options often. There's no real value to me... only a potential investment payout.

I think it's the same with most investors of technology.
I read a history of Area 51 that had several interesting stories in a similar vein. The book struck me as down-to-earth and well researched.
http://www.amazon.com/Area-51-Uncensored-Americas-Military/d...
Interesting fact: Minsky is an Alcor member[1], so he's probably being cryopreserved right now. Though if he died from a cerebral hemorrhage, I'm not sure how well they'll be able to preserve his brain.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcor_Life_Extension_Foundatio...
I feel like you're side stepping the point of his argument. Maybe I'm misreading you both. It read (to me at least) more of a "why isn't hn this hard on other automation stories" and less of an indictment of the (fashionable) distaste for HFT.
Crom – A package manager without the package registry
H-1B Worker Takes Suit Against CGA Law to High Court
Full AI: When Machine Matches Human’s Ability to Think
I believe so many companies don't hire people for culture fit but then hire an h1b worker. If they had to pay market rate or better like you say it would be great for those of us who can't seem to make it past the interviews even when qualified.
Anybody who hasn't, do read to see how much they were ready to do. Abductions or just "anal probes" are nothing compared to their actions. Note the use of different drugs and the brain washing experiments after which some innocent people never recovered.

E.g.

"In Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up several brothels in San Francisco, California to obtain a selection of men who would be too embarrassed to talk about the events." (...) "In other experiments where people were given LSD without their knowledge, they were interrogated under bright lights with doctors in the background taking notes. The subjects were told that their "trips" would be extended indefinitely if they refused to reveal their secrets."
So why are you even arguing about H1B's? That's a drop in the bucket compared to people on family visas.

I'm pretty much ok with anyone who accepts the rules and laws even if they don't think like me. I'd like them to integrate to some extent prior to gaining citizenship, but that's different than a work visa.
Has it won? Where can I go and write `react-stack create my-new-project` and get a guaranteed working integration of the various elements that make up the stack, including a working server environment, pre-installed and configured database, and all of the other inbetweens that come with Meteor (such as DDP, livequery, Tracker, Blaze, ReactiveVar, etc)?

The "React" stack has certainly been an up and coming potential competitor for Meteor, but until Facebook or someone else actually shows signs of preparing the kind of integrated development experience that Meteor ships with out of the box, I don't think it's really similar. So that's what they're doing: tying together the best of the Javascript ecosystem, which happens to currently include a couple of projects by Facebook, into one cohesive whole that "just works".
More like a machine, not a robot. One of the traditionally viewed differences between industrial machine automation and robot automation is that robots are relatively general and can be repurposed.

Think of wiring vs software.

I would think a real robot solving a cube would perhaps at least have to pick it up and put it back down after solving.
<Academia, publicly funded research labs, non-profits... are already cap-exempt.>

And there are other skills-specific visa categories. For example, a professional hockey player on a North American roster from wherever is never denied a visa because of any other visa quota (H-1 variants, L variants, etc.)
Yeah I do this with my raspberry pi, edit with vim, for web applications the pi is plenty fast. I use the asus flip got it on sale for less than $200.
Oh, I remember reading something about this in the book "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base"
Everyone's different, but as a black person, it doesn't offend me at all.
I used to work with a couple of people that helped with that movie. I think it came out between the first two movies when the whole Matrix thing was huge :)

kaos.gen.nz was the personal domain of one of the guys I worked with. He's the "Juggling Goth" at 4:30 and did some other stuff.
github catered to some of the big open-source names early.

Of course, now that they've "won". They're basically letting the open-source stuff rot. See the recent complaint by quite a few projects about github and lack of support.

This is the problem with anointing a "winner".

Now we'll have to wait for github's replacement just like we had to wait for SourceForge's replacement.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B011HVUEME/ is the latest version I think, but I have the same version linked in your shop.
Crazy Ukrainians Travelling Thailand – GoPro Hero 4 Black
Well, I think the expectations for Apple stuff tends to be different, just because of their identity and their core customers. To draw an analogy, if you drive an Alfa Romeo, your expectations for reliability are a lot different compared to a Toyota Corolla. You certainly wouldn't be happy if your Alfa breaks down... but you wouldn't be shocked either.

Likewise, your expectations for long term support on Apple stuff is probably going to be different than Microsoft and Google stuff. I don't think Apple customers are happy with the behavior your describing, they're just way more willing to tolerate it because it's not unexpected.

The thing is, I don't think Google could get away with doing the same things. I think Apple's strategy works for Apple, but I don't think it generalizes.
The value comes from the people buying the company then.

Maybe snapchat is going to be a crucial marketing channel for them, which makes it worth it to purchase them. They transfer some of this value, to the original investors of the company who got it off the ground.

There is value, or perceived value at some point in the chain.
PlayStation 4 1TB Console – Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 Limited Edition
By industry! I assume that means we've gotten to the bottom of this http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023043198045763896...
Plenty of skilled immigrants have skills that unemployed locals do not have. Even the 'cut rate labor' people love to hate.
Mercurial has some warts of it own. Common case of working on something, then wanting to update the repository in the midst of it to get something from a co-worker isn't handled exactly stellar.

So you can shelve. When you have enabled the extension.

If I'm not mistaken, even CVS handled this better.
Planes also broadcast air temperature, wind speed and direction along with the usual altitude, speed and position. A lot of planes are flying overhead so I thought it might be neat to combine that data, as usual a quick search turned up some researchers in NL who already thought of that a few years ago. [1]

There's a lot of data around us, and lots cool projects to collect and analyze it as well.

[1] http://bibliotheek.knmi.nl/knmipubTR/TR336.pdf
I'm pretty frustrated with Australia's Apple pricing - I wanted to upgrade my macbook air (~$1050 AUD when I purchased), only to be disappointed in the new $1500 AUD pricetag. Used to be the best ultrabook for it's price on the Aus market IMO.
They're easier to activate because they're self-energizing (I'm sure Wikipedia has a handy diagram that explains). But drums don't stop as well (not an issue when you're on crappy bias-ply tires), and they tend to fade under repeated braking. They also loss stopping power in the rain more than discs do. Not as important, but I've found disc brakes to be easier to modulate as well.

There's no power assist on most motorcycle brakes. I've owned motorcycles with drum brakes. OMG, I'll take the disc brakes any day, power assist or no.
The CIA twitter feed [1] is pretty cool. This isn't them just taking advantage of X-files, their social media was already pretty good.

[1] https://twitter.com/CIA
The thing about alternative modes of user interaction, which seems to be most of what we’re really talking about here, is that we didn’t get to where we are today by accident.

As long as humans have eyes and trichromatic vision similar to what we have today, a 2D RGB display is going to be a useful medium for presenting information for us.

As long as humans have ears, audible presentation and vocal interaction are going to be of limited usefulness because they are so disruptive for everyone else.

As long as humans have small, light fingers with fine motor control, devices like keyboards and mice and joysticks and trackballs and touchpads and touchscreens are going to be useful for controlling a system.

As long as humans have big, heavy arms with imprecise muscle movement, 3D spacial interactions with sweeping, dramatic arm movements will belong in the movies, where the hero can find the bad guy in a few seconds instead of three days of tedious searching.

No doubt presentation and interaction methods will continue to evolve, but fundamentally we humans will probably still have the same senses and motor skills in ten or twenty years that we have today, so radical change seems unlikely in the near future. It’s also hard to believe that either natural language processing or data mining and predictive systems will advance so much in the next few years that they will supplant other means of interacting with technology rather than supplementing them, so again it’s hard to see established tools like keyboards and screens going away any time soon.
New app needs beta testers! You can make $$ from it (access code: welcome1)
It does seem like "Zero GUI" would have better conveyed the key idea.
Why does everyone always assume the government would hide aliens from the public?
Like carrots.

The British promulgated the belief that carrots improve eyesight to explain the effective of their aircraft spotters, instead of radar.
I think one of the biggest reasons for why it still makes sense to have a monolithic framework is server-aware React components.

Most SPAs and React applications re-use tons of stuff like login pages, news feeds, etc. Most of the time, we can re-use some of the frontend UI stuff but end up having to hook it up with our backend manually. But, if we used Meteor, the components can interact with the server side. This allows us to do stuff like use "<Login />" and just have a login page that works, in terms of both frontend and backend.

The point is that Meteor's goal should be to allow people to build abstractions and re-useable that can step over the client-server barrier. That's pretty much only possible when you make assumptions about server and client, i.e. a monolithic framework.
I love UFOs because UFOs tell us a lot about how we deal with non-reproducible observations. Walk outside and see a green, glowing light that hovers then disappears? You can walk outside again for the rest of your life and never see it again. Does that mean you didn't see anything? Of course not.

This really messes with people's heads. The rationalists will say that since we can't independently observe it, it might as well not exist. Folks who have a deep mythology as part of their worldview will simply incorporate their observation into their mythology.

Even cooler is the fact that something is obviously going on that we can't categorize or figure out. (See thunderstorm sprites and jets as a recent example). Is it one phenomenon? Highly unlikely. But beats me how many different and really cool things there are out there to discover. I'm sure some of these may take hundreds of years to nail down, if ever.

And then the government gets involved and -- get this -- starts deliberately fucking with people about it. Hey, that wasn't a new stealth bomber, that was probably aliens. While it may have confused the Soviets, it was also a deliberate attempt to mislead the voters. I'm not a constitutional expert but seems to me the one thing that ought to carry the severest penalty is government officials in a democracy deliberately trying to mislead the public about critical issues.

And then we have them pawning their B.S. off on mentally ill people. Nice. Very classy.

UFOs tell us a lot more about ourselves than they do anything from another planet. Unfortunately, much of what they tell us is rather unpleasant.
CRDT Notes
Best Pregnancy Time Lapse
Note that you've made the leap from "may be" to "must be".

There are numerous highly persistent behaviors, including play, entertainment, sleep, drugs consumption, recreational physical activity in excess of all training response stimulus requirements, etc., which nonetheless continue.

While I'm not certain that all are beneficial, and I have a difficult time myself accepting certain of these, I suspect they play a useful and possibly even vital psychological role for those undertaking them.

Even explaining these as coping mechanisms for underlying pathologies isn't particularly satisfying.
No argument there...just wanted to point out that the author of the submitted article didn't make such a claim, as that would cast some doubt about the assertions of the reporting.
I concur. As someone who is here in US on this visa (fortunately, my workplace presence resembles your seattle experience), I can totally understand what you are pointing out.

Something that'll genuinely solve all the problems (qualified americans losing jobs, outsourcing companies abusing loopholes, salaries racing to the bottom), would be to have a concept of temporary green card.

Instead of a 3 year H1b, have a 3 year green card (lets call this the Super H1b). Once an immigrant is here in the US on a Super H1b visa, he/she will be free to take up any employment if need be, even with multiple employers.

This will ensure that an employer sponsoring the Super H1b visa will be paying at or above market rate salary, because the employer truly needs this employee.

Are there chances of this visa being abused? sure. But its way low, much more beneficial (to americans, to the immigrant and also to the genuine Super H1b sponsors).

@ergothus : Do you think having such a visa would have helped (considering your experiences in Virginia and Seattle?)
Same coziness goes on with EASA certifying Airbus aircraft. And then EASA gives Boeing a harder time with this understanding. This is why countries/regions have their own aviation regulators that perform their own independent evaluations of new aircraft headed for their country. FAA certification is good within the US only. It took us six years to get EASA cert after FAA; it took our euro competitor the same time for the opposite.
> My poor kids are using their iPads in school

I know this is not what you meant but I find this sentence hilarious. Poor kids indeed, having to endure using an iPad at school, nevermind that for most of us school consisted of just pen, paper, books and not much else :)
I know the person who made this and will probably see him at Chattacon this weekend. He told me how he did it but I forget now. I'll try to remember to ask him. I think he used something like VLC to split the movie into frames, then used another package to generate the ASCII art.
Kickbacks certainly are illegal (and it should remain that way).

But, just because it is illegal, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
I don't even understand their logic. Why not simply ask the government to ban or restrict the use of old cars without those safety features, after a short transition period? That would boost sales by forcing motorists to upgrade. Emission regulations in Europe work that way and they are a boon for the auto industry.
Here’s what Twitter chief Jack Dorsey said about ‘fired’ execs
The key word being (civil) lawsuit. Neither state nor Federal governments pursued any criminal or civil action on their own.
Another eye-opening video is this one of an old-ish Volvo estate vs a new Renault Modus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBDyeWofcLY
I recently had a solo art show consisting entirely of ASCII Art works based on Taylor Swift, and it was quite successful. Probably 300 people came and I'm a veritable nobody.

A bunch of young Swift fans came with their parents and it was a good introduction for some kids as to what you can do with programming

Some images: https://www.facebook.com/dmitricherniak/media_set?set=a.5502...

A video rendering I made:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hyfGkkFoOw
I feel like you're overly being dramatic about "ditching all services". Do you literally only listen to music through soundcloud? If that is indeed the case, you're missing out on a lot of great music. Also as a listener of both Soundcloud and Spotify, I think Spotify's discovery has improved immensely to the point where it's much better than the filter bubble of a feed you create on soundcloud
> the statement that lots of wealth can only come from not creating real value seems absurd to me.

I don't think that's what he said. He said that inequality increases when wealth is created for the company's owners/investors while NOT creating value (or even reducing value) for everyone else (customers, the public, employees).

There are lots of examples of huge wealth being created at the expense of others without also creating value - for example: bad mortgages being bundled, obfuscated, and upsold. Tim actually proposes that bad startups are somewhat analogous to these sorts of financial instruments - i.e. there's a sucker at the end holding the bag.