skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry if this isn't a very good explanation. You've hit upon a key aspect of evolution, and I think you're right that there isn't a good, popular layperson's explanation of the mechanism that actually tackles the statistical aspect instead of glossing over it.

I want to reply in a very strongly worded way to this point.

There is a huge disconnect between the assertions made by proponents (like Dawkins) of evolutionary explanations, that "evolution has been proven LIKE GRAVITY at this point" and the lack of widely accessible explanation of how the most obvious statistical questions are settled in favor of the theory actually working. I don't even mean comfortably working, like "it should have taken 3 trillion years but we got lucky". I mean like, how does a binary decision select for things that are not even correlated to survival or reproduction but merely comfort? And even more astonishingly, how is it able to take such long (1000s of generations) speculative paths, without any apparent benefit until the basic version of the thing is fully formed? Combine that with the contradictory empirical evidence of punctuated equilibria broken by genetic explosions and I'm not so sure the theory is correct. Mutation and natural selection seem insufficient to explain the features we see.

But the disconnect between the dearth of actual answers (as available to someone with a mathematics background like me) with the insistence that evolution "is as sure as gravity" makes me skeptical. I find the situation very close to bullshit that is politically motivated and propagated through systematic bullying.

I should point out that this is not for religious reasons but merely because the theory seems like one of those early simple theories (like the humors or luminiferous ether) that always felt off and were too simple.

PS: just to be clear, I am not challenging the theory of common descent, but rather the proposed explanation for evolution as being completely a product of random mutation and natural selection -- evolution is a vague term which adds to the equivocation problem and is further evidence that there is strong political pressure in the scientific establishment to prop up the theory.
Best way to filter your todos
Because most people who will be working in the cooperative are sane and will bail out if things get tough. You need a crazy founder to take enormous risks.

Just look around you, most of the tech titans are founders who took risk, can you give examples of tech cooperatives which are equally famous?
Well I fail to see HOW Microsoft makes money on browser history?

I do find it VERY interesting that the first time we get to see the "New Microsoft" profits that the profits were down BUT higher for "cloud."

> Under his leadership, Microsoft has been shifting its business towards cloud services, such as Microsoft Azure, Dynamics CRM and Office 365. http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500272095/Microsoft-shar...
Sadly all the links to copies of it are dead.
Econometrics is pretty valuable for any of the data-mining operations. Most econ majors I know are really good with stats and enjoy digging into datasets almost obsessively. I'd certainly hire them. Good economists also have a well structured way of reasoning through problems.

As the article says, Varian, author one of the more mathy econ intro text (imo haven't sampled all) has been at Google for quite some time now.
So yeah...why not?
I like programming but I'm tired of the hours, of being salaried, and of employers that could lay their filthy hands on everything I make outside of work. I hate "unlimited vacation" but it's nearly impossible to avoid. I like how my small company job is much more intellectually stimulating than my old big company one, but the work never ends and I should be making a lot more in this city.
Speaking as one using Windows Server 2008 R2 terminals all day, I would assert that plenty of people use that graphical interface today.
Nobody has total control over their supply chain. Substitution of counterfeit parts can happen at many points in the supply chain. Until resilient die-level traceability is universal, the best you can hope for is to minimise the risk.

FTDI do not provide any useful traceability systems. Rather than providing their customers with a reliable means to identify genuine parts, they have hugely increased the risk posed to their customers by counterfeit parts.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2011/11/07/7323/counterfeit-c...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/counterfeit-chip...
> intern dev Alice codes the in private mode

yes, blame the intern...

let's blame all the telemetry snooping in Windows 10 on a bunch of interns too ? it's like Microsoft can't hire professionals to develop its two main products . There is no benefit of the doubt, they know what they are doing.
A suggestion for Twitter: stop looking for new users
those diagonal sections that run somewhat parallel to the river are past tracks of the river as it slivered its way through the landscape over time.
Is 5G even an accepted standard yet?
Don't be misled thinking the brain "is a computer". It's not general-purpose, it's non-purpose. People often picture it as if evolution picked a "computation" or "intelligence" quality off the Platonic shelf and implanted it onto the brain.

An alternative way to view the brain is as a complex switchboard. Instead of doing stuff itself, signals just flow through it and reshape the vessel, like rivers shape the landscape. Of course this is also an incomplete view, but demonstrates at least one alternative metaphor.

Metaphors matter, they are central to how we conduct research.

Also, most of what the brain does isn't creativity, insight, curiosity and all these glorious things, but rather breathing regulation, hormone regulation, control of digestion, muscles, a lot of "body stuff" instead of "abstract, ideal, body-independent stuff". I'd actually argue that everything we think about (even things like morality) have a rooting in our bodily, real existence and nothing is purely abstract.
Some drawing app with HTML5 Canvas API https://github.com/nkudo/canvas-project Really enjoyed every single minute I spent coding this app, pure bliss.
hm, could you link please? I can't seem to find it.
Or login to Gmail. Open another tab to read Hacker news, not logging in. Close your incognito Gmail tab. Read HN. Forget that you ever were in Gmail. Then leave HN and go to some other, completely different website that allows Google login. You'll get in there without another Google login; the incognito session remembers you.
"Markets always assume the correct rate, because if not there is something that can be profited from."

There is always something that can be profited from. Therefore markets never assume the correct rates.
Oh that's interesting! I don't find the special effects in those movies laughable at all. In Dr. Strangelove they play only a minor role in the film, while I think in 2001 he cleverly worked around the technical limitations, and used a set and model design that still largely looks (60s style) futuristic, rather than dated.

Compare it with contemporary or slightly newer movies like Planet of the Apes, Barbarella, Logan's run. It's not a standard space opera with space battles, faster than light travel, alien empires and magic space gravity. Sure, the men in ape suits look a little naff, but then I don't see how else he could have done it. Claymation would have been worse, herding actual gorillas not an option.
You make a model, then you make predictions. If they fail, your model was wrong. You can do that in evolution theory, even though you are mostly looking at history. Maybe you predict that all birds should have tails at least 30'' long, then you look around and see that they don't. You can also look at the way genes spread - I suppose you can compare the observed spread of a gene to the spread that would be expected if it were random.

Nevertheless, once you see something unexplained (like zebra stripe), I suppose you start with creating theories, then you try to verify them. Isn't the article here doing exactly that?
Pick a niche (with good characteristics) and make sure to be good at things in that niche. From there on, the client or employer will obviously pay you in the way that you want (freelance or employee). The work will also be maximally interesting. I personally get a fantastic rate doing pretty much what I like from my home office.
I've been lucky enough to have handled one of these books in the rare books room at the Natural History Museum in London, and have also been involved in developing reproductions for The British Library.

The really surprising thing about the books housed in public collections is that each of the pages is unceremoniously stamped with the mark of their owner, much as I would expect they would mark a more easily replaceable text book.
I wonder if they give a technical interview.
It's really interesting that 45 vertical ft of silt can pile up on top of something in 150 years.
Can a children's toy stop drunken Uber passengers from attacking their drivers?
China calls lending platform Ezubo a $7.6B Ponzi scheme
Great article.

I know that the topic here is C, but I think it's interesting to point out that Delphi (Object Pascal) has always produced executables that work like this (since 1996). With one of our database server products written using Delphi, executables are about 3MB in size and have zero external dependencies. You can literally copy the executable on to any Windows machine, run it (or install it as a service to be run), and it will work.

It's kind of a whole different mindset compared to other approaches that involve many more non-OS runtime dependencies. It certainly makes installation/configuration support a non-issue.
Interesting approach, but I also wonder about damage to the birds. I'm guessing they are using eagles due to the size, but I would have thought falcons would be easier to train.

Best comment I've seen is "I hope they leave my Amazon orders alone."
Sure, if you are willing to throw your money away because some driver thinks you have a "fake chip" so be it.

Oh and it's not reliable because you might get one that's accepted by the current driver but gets bricked in the future
Oh boy. The filter bubble is real! (That’s not meant to be disparaging. We are all in our own isolated bubbles, clueless about a great many things and the details of how people behave.)

People often don’t use separate OS accounts (it’s often just not necessary) and even if they do they will often still share the PC from time to time (even if just for a brief moment) or just show something off for some other people.

During all those occasions the browser history could be visible, even if people aren’t really prying (autocomplete, frequently visited websites, …).
How would you implement it? Make each new tab a separate profile that we destruct on close?
Marc Andreessen and Silver Lake may buy Twitter
It sure saves on cooling, but watching someone trying to replace a failed drive will prove entertaining.
Which city? and why you don't like unlimited vacation? I personaly don't like it because it's a bit hypocritical.
British researchers get green light to genetically modify human embryos
When I first started out as a self-thought programer and worked for the first company where I really enjoyed my work, the second was horrible, third was cool at first until it began to suck. I am now usually assigned tasks like changing the margin of buttons and other annoying stuff, I don't feel my skills are improving and am not gaining any knowledge. Really horrible
The Chinese government is not a great adversary to have, though.
Analyse memory leaks in tomcat using eclipse and jvisiualvm
That it has been looked at at /any level/ (e.g. this plugin) is great, and it does so without waiting for a decade of W3C and browser standards back-and-forth.
Specifying and Verifying Systems in TLA+ [pdf]
Microsoft research project puts cloud in ocean for the first time
Or you might be using the presentism fallacy.

After all, we keep reinventing LISP and it is from the 1950s.

"Put it in the browser" is a strange thing to do. A browser isn't really a VM for running applications; it's a document renderer. Coupling a browser with an operating system is also a strange thing to do. Yet these all occupied people's minds for a long time.

Roughly only 40% of my computer use is on the Web at all. And much of that in on fora that could use a transport other than HTTP.

Applications are not really documents.
Airlines Are Racing to Add Ultra Long Haul Flights
Flow, a static type checker, designed to find type errors in JavaScript programs
It's likely the areas of focus that this list is taken from - there is a lot of AI/Software engineering/Complexity theory, but relatively little e.g. programming languages theory, or compiler optimisation
> Why do we say homosexuality is primarily genetic if evolution is true?

In my opinion it must be to help the fitness of the community they live in. The communities with low likelihood to spawn a gay person are (were?) much more likely to go extinct. It can also be a basic property (side effect?) of the sexual appeal arms race.

There is also the case of suicides, when they happen to young people that hasn't reproduced yet. It can also be argued its for the benefit of the community.

So the thesis is that the primary force in evolution is not individual's fitness but it is the community's fitness.
Why New York Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation Is Embracing Blockchain
3 Week Diet
Unfortunately that's a major deal breaker for using this for any professional project. Making things accessible isn't really that hard, and it makes the lives of people who need it much easier. It's a shame it's not more common place.
That's the wrong question to ask.

Instead, 'How do I know that the devices I bought up to 3 years ago don't have a "detected counterfeit" chip and get nuked by a future FTDI driver update?'

Or, 'How do I keep from getting malware and other bad actor software in via Windows Updates?'
> but 99.9% of developers will never make half of what a specialized MD or successful lawyer or someone in finance might make.

It is exactly the other way around. Mark Zuckerberg is a PHP programmer, not an MD or a lawyer. Same for Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and another host of lesser known billionaires and millionaires. In other words, an MD or a lawyer could impossible make what a successful programmer might make.
Ask HN: Recommended VPN Service Providers
I'm working from more public places recently and would like to add a VPN to my toolkit to help protect my privacy and reduce my risk of exposure to possibly unsafe networks.

Ideally, I'd like a service provider rather than self-hosted solution at the moment. Which ones do you guys have experience with and would recommend?
whats interesting is that a natural "herbal" (fungal) substance with the advertised properties does exist and has been used for the purpose.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprine
Twitter Shares Jump on Possible Deal with Marc Andreessen and Silver Lake
In the age of multi-megabyte webpages [1], 1.5KB is definitely small.

[1] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Yes and if the a particular theory of evolution were only 5 years old that would be fine. But several classical formulations like the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_evolutionary_synthesi... have been around for decades and various proponents around the world yell that they are "as proven as gravity". A strange position to take when there was little falsification. Your examples above serve to illustrate the point - they are just illustrations of how falsification might look like if it were done. If the prediction and falsification framework was robust by now, you wouldn't have to come up with made-up examples, there would have been tons of them like there are for other, widely tested theories, even in biology
Hackers Allegedly Hijack Drone After Massive Breach at NASA
EDIT: "bricked" is wrong, they completely deleted the machine. Had to correct this ;)
Freestyle typing todo app with statistics and encouragement
Yup. Use of the title attribute would be better, but I don't think there's a way to turn off the default behaviour, unfortunately.
> What Elsevier does should be illegal.

So you lobby for an abolishment of the copyright laws - interesting idea...

Indeed: It is quite impossible to claim that "what Elsevier does should be illegal" and not standing up for an abolishment of the existing copyright laws.

On the other hand: The copyleft free software licenses currently only work because of the copyright laws. Keep that in mind...

As you can see, your simple statement has deep consequences. I personally rather think, what many academics do, should be illegal. Here the consequences are far less radical...
Things you may want to know about Let's Encrypt
Man uses microchip implanted in hand to pass through airport security
OP here (and member of the Project Natick team) - the site has been updated with our video, and there's now a blog post with some more information: http://news.microsoft.com/features/microsoft-research-projec...
Git is insecure by default
Any reason, you, who lives in US and making a living off American companies, would want an unlikely catastrophic event to destroy US, and hoping authoritarian billionnaire dictators in China and Russia to gain even more military power on the world?
Show HN: ReportNest – Employee engagement software for productive teams
OneGo is bringing a Netflix-style approach to air travel
I was a "pest control technician" (exterminator) before I started programming professionally, so I know how you feel. My life now is a cakewalk by comparison.
Not necessarily. Hypothetical of two alternatives:

1. Do a small renovation to a bridge and it will stay usable for five more years, or

2. Do something more comprehensive (teardown + rebuild), after which you don't have to do anything for 20 years

If there's a temporary high in building costs, it makes sense to do 1. If there's a temporary low, it makes sense to do 2.
Betfair Historical Exchange Data requires you to have "100 Betfair points" which you acquire by gambling on their site. It's hardly an open dataset.
I'm betting this isn't a bug but isn't malicious either. Possible scenario:

Product: So Sue, how's the restore-session-after-crash feature going?

Dev: Great, just about done.

Product: So it's working for all sessions now? Fantastic!

Dev: Yep! Well, all sessions except private ones of course.

Product: ... so you haven't finished private sessions yet?

Dev: No, it's just that we don't store anything on disk for them, so there's nothing to restore.

Product: ...

Dev: ...

Product: Users don't know what "stored on disk" even means. They're going to be very upset if we lose their work after a crash, just because the session happened to be private. Maybe even more so.

Dev: But with nothing on disk, that would be impossible.

Product: You devs have such a fixed mindset. If I had a penny for every time I'd heard one tell me something was "impossible." So store what you need on disk, and ...

Dev: But history ...

Product ... and flag it so it doesn't show up in history or as a visited link. Wouldn't that work?

Dev: Well, kind of, but ...

Product: Great! So we have a solution. How long to get that coded up?

[Later] Product: "Impossible" laugh Hah!
What this means is git doesn't make sure that blobs match shas on fetch. Malicious control of source or network can insert nasty things and git won't notice. Solution is setting transfer.fsckobjects = true.
Isn't there a tag for links similar to the description tag for images? If so, you could just enter the tooltip there as well.
Not surprising, if they even managed to run fake banks(0)..

0. http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-30932424
That may be true at present, but higher frequency systems do ideally allow for higher data rates.

EDIT: No, I'm wrong.
I'd say the problem is pushing updates to a life critical system without testing it on a pre-production system that will behave the exact same way.
The Curious Case of Minimum Viable Product
"you are not allowed to update drivers unless you have validated them."

And when QA validates them on a set of systems that happen to be legit and ships it to systems that happen to have counterfeits?

You seem to be arguing in this thread with a false dilemma between EITHER we must accept counterfeiting OR we must brick the chips, but there are in between measures that are way safer.

Prior art: Several versions of Windows have been able to detect if they were "genuine". Non-genuine windows did not brick their machine, or destroy themselves. Quick googling suggests it blocks you from getting updates, and pops up with links to a page on Microsoft where you could properly license it with some discount. That exact solution may not apply here, but there are options other than destroying hardware that is carrying your name.

(I mean, this isn't even good for FTDI... how many customers will never find out about this and simply learn that "FTDI chips spontaneously die a lot"? Not the brand experience I'm looking for!)
I agree with others that performance on programming puzzles is not representative of your skill as a developer. However, I'd also like to add that knowing how to analyze worst case runtime or space with Big O notation is very useful and can make a huge impact on the performance of your application.

While reviewing programming puzzles may not be a great use of your time, I would suggest refreshing your knowledge on the Big O complexity of common data structures and algorithms.
https://imgflip.com/i/yedoi ;0)>
i enjoy programming. but with projects that come and all the politics take the fun away & also make the product nonsense till heads are counted.
In Silicon Valley, Pitching Parental Leave to the Converted
It's not really a bug. Just that the rectangle border overlays the triangle.
We're in-between Buffalo and Niagara Falls, so I have a little context here. If you haven't seen the Niagara River, it is one really fast-moving, rather large, river, so it's quite an engineering feat (at least to a layperson like myself) to dam even a portion of it.
Three or four times in the past week, there's been front-page stories on HN that have reminded me of this.

Rob Newman [0] (UK activist / comedian) has recently been considering evolution[1], particularly in response to the Selfish Gene approach to evolutionary biology. He's not a fan.

Over the past couple of months his new radio show - the Entirely Accurate Encyclopaedia of Evolution[2] - has been broadcast in the UK on the BBC - a delightful combination of droll + biology/science in jokes + enlightenment.

Mentioned partly because it deals with these kinds of claims in the abstract.

Primarily because it deals with these kinds of claims specifically. In one episode he speaks about Cyclosa tremula [3] spider, who builds spider replicas from her prey - they are grey, while she is striped black & white (we finally return to the zebra analogy). When birds come to prey upon her, she bounces up and down quickly, turning herself grey - to match these replicas. He makes mention of a throw-away phrase from another paper on the subject, suggesting that Cylocsa tremula builds these facsimiles out of loneliness.

The point being that we can never really know what mechanisms other organisms are using to evolve.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Newman_(comedian)
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/comedy/10322813/Robert-Newman-The-universe-Richard-Dawkins-imagines-couldnt-exist-for-five-seconds.html
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06jm72p
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclosa
8 Reasons to Incorporate Your New Company Early
No, on a Core-2 :)
One of the coolest parts is how Roswell with scripts: you can run a local file, or in a custom directory just for scripts, and even better: you can install scripts from libraries.

This way, if a library needs to expose some functionality to the terminal, just add a Roswell script =]