skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The billion-dollar CRISPR patent battle: A case of big money shaping science
Agreed about Bitbucket. I've used it for a long time and haven't found it to be substantively different from GitHub in either functionality or reliability. The major downside, as I see it, is that it's just not as popular.
emphasis on next week? What about the week after? Next month?
Face paint
I feel you've done little but directly translate the LIGO experiment into Flatlandian physics. That doesn't answer the question.

Use a sheet of paper as your Flatland. Draw two points, measure the distance. Crinkle up the paper. There's still the same 'distance' of paper between the two points. Should the points be able to travel, they have to traverse the same number of paper molecules whether the paper is crinkled or not. No one living in this Flatland can measure the crinkles in this space because they live inside this space. They would need to step outside their own space with some ability to measure variations in a third dimension.

If the physics of a universe necessitates movement from one point to the next (let's suppose these points are Planck length apart, call them 'Planck-points'), if particles must be translated from Planck-point to Planck-point and can't skip anything in between, how are we to ever measure that Planck length expanded or contracted? Surely if it "takes longer" to traverse an expanded Planck length, then it hasn't expanded, but there now exists more space - more Planck-points.

If gravity wells stretch and contract _matter_ (rather than space), then this fits my mental model. If they actually stretch _space_, within which matter exist and along which matter traverses, I struggle to see how we could ever detect space deformations without stepping outside our own space.
I was interested in your comparison in #1, wrt "HN community overreacted".

I've been searching through old HN stories about Eich, but can't seem to find any where the comments generally supported firing him due to supporting Prop 8 (banning gay marriage).

Is there a particular thread you had in mind? Or are you stating the overreaction was being angry that he might have been fired over that support?
I understood that, what I'm trying to state with my rhetorical question was that all his statement served to say was "Germany created the Nazis, you should feel guilt for that". And even if you think that people deserve some sort of retribution or culpability for the supposed actions of the ancestors (which I personally don't), Germany paid for it already considering the post war fallout and the Russian occupation of Eastern Germany.
Well, sure, and if it succeeds, some people will claim the success was in spite of the policies. Ideologues gotta ideologue, and all that. But that doesn't mean we can't learn something useful - since those 'wrecker'-style arguments give off the political equivalent of code smell.
Not sure if you'd consider StatusPage.io as a "clear leader". They claim to have around 2000 customers ( http://blog.statuspage.io/introducing-private-status-pages ) which I consider a small number of a potential target group. From some other posts, their revenue is around $3M/annually.

So if this is a $5M potential market, probably there is a clear winner. If this is a $100M potential market, things are just starting.
The Whig History of Science: An Exchange
You are ignoring the financial difficulties presented to the students with worthless degrees and outstanding loans.

You are also ignoring the comically large environmental pollution that isn't airborne. Superfund sites, things like Love Canal, are all the fault of these companies.
I think we can both acknowledge race, which often goes hand-in-hand with different cultures, and treat people as individual human beings. You can make all sorts of statistical inferences based on race, but they're not really useful when you're dealing with individual people. There's so much individual variation, that a judgment based on race is silly.

Let's treat people as individuals, not as faceless members of some caste.
Why? Let me apply the principle you claim to be the case in a different, ahistorical way:

"'We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about denigrating and enslaving blacks, and NOT MENTION IT.' We live in a world where this is not remotely possible. Suggesting it is the worst sort of idealism." --some Southern slave owner, 1859

The same could be applied to historical anti-semitic movements, anti-suffrage groups--anti-anything groups, really.

It can be boiled down to: "We need to start learning how to simply NOT THINK about treating other people badly because of their appearance or where they are from, and NOT MENTION IT," and people like you saying, "That's impossible. We will always be just as hateful and prejudiced as the worst of us are now. You shouldn't even suggest that it's possible to make any progress in human society."

It boggles my mind that you could even think this way. But, then, people thinking and acting in unreasonable ways is the root of these problems.
Ya, but we don't even know if the racial disparity and gender disparity are affected by the same factors. I'm not arguing they don't exist I'm arguing for comprehensive evaluation instead of assumptions based on incomplete information. We can do better than a survey.
Dashcam video shows Montana police shooting man as he steered car away
Sort of like how the 'slight benefit' of allowing the most capable blacks to go work in predominantly white companies had disastrous effects on blacks?

Also, I'm not arguing that H-1B should be restricted to only the most capable members of a nation's society. I am super into allowing the least capable members of India to work in the US - for instance programmers who would only command $20K per year in the US job market because they are not very capable.
Algol 68 allows spaces in identifiers. That means one has to use one of the "stropping" techniques to distinguish keywords from identifiers--case stropping (IF p THEN foo ELSE bar FI), quote stropping a la the old IBM Algol F Algol 60 compiler ('if' p 'then' foo 'else' bar 'fi'), and at least one other I don't remember offhand.
Jeff Moser on Licklider:

http://www.moserware.com/2008/05/who-is-this-licklider-guy.h...
That's exactly my point in wondering about the ratio of students to established company professionals.

For every company I've ever worked at, the "community" or "network effect" of a source control vendor is meaningless. Because the repos are all private. Sure, the company might have SOME open source stuff mirrored on GitHub for publicity purposes. But the real bread-and-butter daily WORK that pays the bills takes place in private repos. In most cases, private repos that are hosted on-prem rather than in the cloud.

Sure, GitHub and its "network effect" matters for open source projects, and for resume-fodder side projects we tinker with as individuals. But all of that is free anyway. What about the scenarios where you'd have to pay GitHub a lot of money? How many vocal people on HN are actually IN that scenario?
Socially it has in certain places.

Don't assume the battle is won because you've captured a couple of cities and papers. The fact remains that the majority, at least in America, seem to be somewhat socially conservative.

EDIT: It'd be nice if we were more liberal. The biggest obstacle to that is the haughtiness and premature victory behavior that is endemic to the progressives right now.

Houston lost an important proposition for equality recently because all the progressives assumed the battle was won...and then they lost when the biblethumpers got their congregations to the polls.
Plasma physicist discusses the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator
Think what would really count as a "visual turing test" is if the computer-generated images were really "generated" by a computer, not rendered from a photo. Still, it's an interesting exercise in how much the rendering can make the photo feel "opinionated"—as if you can sense the painter behind it; that's the criteria I used for choosing, but I got a 7/10.
"Technical director Danilo Campos" was part of a major shitshow a year and a half ago on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8389163). He called HN a cesspit and then tried to work up a Twitter mob against someone who made the mistake of challenging his points.

If a vindictive, narrow-minded individual like that is a technical director and a member of Github's social-impact team, no wonder people are leaving in droves.
So try it out and put Watson in both modes. Ask him some questions, and do a voting poll to see what the sample size likes about both of them. It might be a good way to see how far Watson can be pushed.
What success really looks like in open source
What is safe for the motorist is generally unsafe for bicycles and pedestrians. Like well-marked wide lanes where you can mindlessly zoom forward with no disruptions. That's the traffic engineer's definition of "road safety". And that does indeed apply nicely to highways which are roads that only motorists are admitted to.

Yet in a city such a "zoom lane" is the direct opposite of what you want. You want trees around, people walking and crossing, bicycles eating up part of the lane, cars parked and cars passing way too close, sudden surprises, and very active, observant, and careful drivers.
"In the view of many, equality isn't enough, because the "un-oppressed" are fundamentally privileged."

Then that's not equality - equality is, or should be enough, because if the issue of diversity and equality is 'minimizing / eliminating privilege' then by definition, equality is that privilege is the same for all (or zero).

For many though, this becomes a good cover for 'preferential treatment above and beyond equality, in the name of 'compensation'.'
How do you figure that Twitter is a Wikipedia? It is very far from being a vetted, verified source of information. People say whatever they want on there.

A non-linear timeline makes sense to me, as long as the linear one is also left as an option.
I've always used sk=lf to get chronological Facebook. I wonder what the difference is, if any because I'm trying h_chr and it seems to be the same order.

My issue with it has been even though it's chronological, it doesn't actually show you all the posts from all your friends. It still does it's own crappy algorithmic filter(I think it's based on interaction) and I miss stuff from people I want to hear from all the time. I only have about 60 friends and no one is relatively chatty so there's no reason why I should miss anything.
Much faster to type (and hence, much more likely to ever be typed).
Those magic words used to work.. the standard response I get now is "Sir we are not allowed to do that".
This is correct. Sometimes the VPN connection will be bad, and I just change which host I connect to, the traffic is routed a different way and then it works fine.
I misunderstood the situation – Google search would have matched the description, of course.
From my view, race seems arbitrary. You could also split people into blue-eyed and brown-eyed or something. It still doesn't say anything about that person. Its just that many normal persons act like its a huge difference.
Checkout GiveWell (http://www.givewell.org/).
They are ex-hedge-fund guys who wanted to apply quantitative methods to this very question.

Also, from a personal standpoint, I try to give in accordance with Peter Singer's recommendations that you should help the worst off first (So things like Malaria Nets and de-worming). It's easier to be sure you're making things better if the money goes to treating a life-threatening disease that can be prevented for a few dollars a head.
But do you agree that the goal should be, more or less, to create a world where ethnicity, sex, and other body attributes matter as little as, say, eye color does today?

If so, what is the plan to achieve that goal? Don't we achieve it by actually acting that way as much as possible? That's what makes sense to me.

Suppose we, in the name of equality or diversity or fairness, actually elevate the importance of bodily attributes like ethnicity and sex, deliberately considering them during hiring, and build that practice into our culture. Having practiced doing it wrong for however many years, will we someday decide it isn't needed anymore and get rid of it?
> Skills and experiences should be the only way to choose who you hire, not race or gender.

Exactly. The issue should not be how many percent are what "race", but if companies are dumb enough to leave good programmers, managers etc waiting tables, manning the help desk etc because they doesn't fit our stereotypes.

Or: If if companies does spectacularly bad hires because of political correctness.
I happen to be one myself and I think your argument is a poor one.
Christ, the wonderful platform for learning, sharing, and doing that is GitHub is potentially under threat and the majority of discussion here is consumed with questions and accusations of racism?!

Of course white privilege exists. Next.

Onto real shit like how do we not lose yet another bastion of web awesomeness.
And "/" and ":" and all manner of others. It's a Lisp thing, where the syntax of S-expressions removes any ambiguity.
> Your definition of "currency" is too narrow, though. It includes much more than monetary certificates for bank deposits. See the history of local currencies, Silvio Gesell's Freiwirtschaft, etc.

A local currency is no different in practice than a national currency. Its use is just restricted to a particular area and thus its value is tied to a different basket of goods and backed by a different issuing authority. But all of the derivative instruments would scale up and down across both categories of currency - local bonds vs national bonds, local bank deposits vs national bank deposits, local equities vs national equities.

> Even within a free banking system, there would be inherent limitations in that banks would have to adjust their reserves so as to make full use of their lending capacity and profit on interest, because of the clearinghouse mechanism acting as a reflux. You're aware of the free banking theories of Selgin, White and Dowd, I presume.

This addresses the possible amount of risk in the system by using clearing house latency to set a cap on fractional reserve banking and ensuring that banks are marking their positions to market and not lending out too much without enough assets to back their loans. (Note that it does not eliminate risk in the system, but that banks would have to agree with one another on the latency or "reflux" as you call it that would keep the system somewhat safe from bank runs and the proliferation of unsecured loans.)

It does not address the issue of the redistribution of wealth and the creation of social safety nets that would be minimized under a free banking system as they are inefficient in a pure profit sense.

> Once you extend "currency" to being much more than bank money, though, I think your concerns become severely diminished.

I use "currency" as Hayek does: a generally accepted media of exchange. This definition is already sufficiently broad, as it captures all money created by all central banks, as well as most forms of marketable equity and debt, which are simply first order derivatives of the money created by a central bank. I'm not sure what "bank money" refers to but I assume this definition covers that asset class as well. So it is almost impossible to broaden the definition I am working with, and it does not diminish the validity of my argument or concerns at all.
I don't think we're moving left. According to the latest Gallup poll, veering right seems more like it.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/188969/red-states-outnumber-blue-...
The youtube poster's video collection is full of similar material. https://www.youtube.com/user/yoshikiohshima/videos
5/10 – I'm not human?
I mean, if the Presidency was a dictatorship, then maybe. Otherwise Watson still has to go through Congress.
I didn't get the joke. I headed over to wikipedia to confirm that Knuth was not dead.
You can already buy your way into the US with an HB-5.
The same goes for caucasian. It's a remarkably broad category that includes a lot of different nationalities and ethnicities.
I replied a similar thread sometime ago with a short-story, if the OP is interested here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10540657
'RuneScape' Can't Escape 2007
Assume malice? How do you mean?
Another interesting look at the subject is the movie THE SOCIAL NETWORK, which is rather explicit about the topic. The film starts with Zuckerberg being called an asshole and ends with the line "You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying so hard to be."

Pretty much the entire film is about how asshole-ism works in our social networks.
Haha, I never thought of it like that before.

That probably holds true for any one written in C. Maybe even some others that use server-side view generation.
>sk=h_chr forces the Newsfeed to display in chronological order

I use this bookmark too, but no, it doesn't. Posts are still "bumped" with comments and things are filtered. Can't stand it...
> Either you believe it is okay to discriminate against someone on the basis of their skin color or you don't.

In most anti-discrimination policy discussions, the question being asked is not what colour ones skin is. It is whether the person belongs to an identifiable group that has suffered systemic prejudice.

The ordinary intention of anti-discrimination is to rectify past and prevent future wrongs, and in particular to break cycles of stereotype, poverty, and crime.

Colour of skin is incidental to the formula, being an identifiable group. The primary consideration for preferential bias is belonging to a group that has suffered prejudice.

One could as readily substitute for skin colour those discriminations founded upon language, hair colour, sexual orientation, height, and body shape, among many others. The factor itself is not an entitlement to preference; it is the history of prejudice and prospect of systemic improvement that determines suitability for discrimination.

The argument that white people are being discriminated against based on a formula that rectifies past wrongs and undoes future ones belies a misunderstanding of the purpose, benefit, and impact. One may only come to this conclusion by discounting those past and future wrongs that have been committed and will continue to be committed by a system with inherent biases.
> Meritocracy

Meritocracy is a lie. Look how broken interview processes are - definitely not meritocratic. Meritocracy is a rationalisation for "I hire people I like so long as they don't say anything idiotic during the interview". You'd get better results from having some kind of bar that candidates have to meet and then just selecting one at random and giving that person the job.
So I shouldn't celebrate the interesting and cool things about other peoples' cultures (and my own)? That's sad.
Not talking or thinking about race, or any other marginalization category, does absolutely nothing to help.

"Privilege is invisible to those who have it". I humbly suggest you watch this TED presentation, https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_kimmel_why_gender_equality...

Granted it's primarily about gender equality, but it does an excellent job also addressing race, ethnicity, etc.
Any person can buy bitcoin. You don't need an "account". It's not harder than setting up a proxy. Ransomware authors apparently have a pretty good set of tutorials.
Getting to be a bit of a tangent, but living in Houston, I think that one was partly progressives being somewhat unprepared for how the campaign turned out. Progressives were ready for a gay-rights fight, and confident they could win it (probably rightly so). But they weren't ready for a trans-rights fight, in part because very little of the educational groundwork for that one has been laid (not that many people have a real idea what trans rights are, and haven't gotten used to how to think about them). Since LGBT nondiscrimination in general was included in the bill, conservatives decided to (probably wisely) ignore the gay-rights part entirely, and make it a single-issue campaign focused around the slogan "no men in women's bathrooms". (The ordinance didn't actually say anything about bathrooms, but they argued it was a slippery slope.)

What also didn't help is that this vote was attached to an off-year municipal election, in which the median voter age was 70.
Case-sensitivity makes sense because it enforces uniformity of code. Case insensitivity only matters when you want to write identifiers differently at different locations. The only place where I see this could be useful is when you use a library that uses a different convention.

The IMO better way to solve this is to set a convention for your programming language and enforce it with the compiler (at least with warnings).
I haven't bookmarked those threads but I'm certain I saw a lot of comments here saying things along the lines of "the right to free speak only protects you against the government", strongly implying that what happened to him was fair game because it wasn't the government who staged it.
Record Number of U.S. Citizens, Green-Card Holders Cut Ties with U.S. In 2015
In the sense of support for gay marriage and trying to fix problems with inequality, it's moving left. But in terms of censorship and moral guardian attitudes, I'd say America is clearly going right. A lot of the thoughts about freedom of speech and 'offending' people are basically the views of the old school religious right, except with identity politics replacing the Bible or other religious aspect.

On another note, it's interesting how at the same time, a lot of Europe seems to be getting more right wing politically. Okay, not in the sense of certain social attitudes (support for equality hasn't changed), but definitely in the sense of euroscepticism, thoughts on immigration, etc.
> They ignore all legislation. They are pretty much a bank for free.

They're more regulated than all but a handful of international banks, and it's not at all free.

PayPal is a licensed money transmitter in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. Most of those states have bond requirements for MTAs, typically six figure deposits. They're subject to 52 different regulatory agencies in the US, in addition to Regulation E consumer protections and the USA Patriot Act federally. Their US<->international transfers are overseen by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control like any bank. They're not an ordinary bank in the US only because many years ago a judge ruled that they don't qualify to be one by the nature of their business; they tried unsuccessfully to be licensed as one in order to get FDIC insurance on deposits.

They are a licensed bank in all of the EU, with a bank charter in Luxembourg, regulated by the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier. In Australia, they're licensed by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission as a financial product and by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority as a purchased payment facility provider, which is a type of authorized depository institution (i.e. bank). In most of southeast Asia, they operate under their subsidiary PayPal Pte. Ltd. which is a licensed stored value facility regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. They operate in 203 markets in total, most of which have separate financial regulations and regulatory bodies PayPal has to comply with.

https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/licenses