skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Different companies are great at different things. Obviously generalizing a bit here, but...just to give an example...

...Apple makes really great hardware and good software, but would you expect them to make the best social site in the world? Maybe, if they really put their minds to it they could, but it's just not part of who they are. For instance, they have one of the world's biggest captive audiences in their suite of music software, but can't add basic 1.0 features and interactions to their repetitive attempts to make a music social network inside of iTunes. It's not even funny anymore, just really sad.

...Google is very smart at algorithms and dealing with massive scale, but would you similarly expect a bunch of smart nerds to build the best possible platform for sharing or rating stuff with your friends? What limited social success they've had with YouTube they've had to just buy, and even this they almost screwed up with their ridiculous abortion of a Google Plus integration.

It's not that these companies don't have talented people inside who are capable, just there's probably a lot of corporate momentum and interference from managers on top who dictate that things need to be done a certain way.
I live in Mountain View and follow some of the city council discussions here. While the city council approved high density housing, many residents are doing their best to stifle any development up there.

This city's home owners, especially the older ones, are very active politically and also very anti-development. There's this attitude, which I consider to be very selfish, that "I bought into Mountain View for how it currently looks, and I don't want it to change", all the while, these same residents bemoan the high prices of housing and everyone except techies being priced out.

As of today, we're probably going to see a decade of environmental review challenges before a single unit gets built, since this is the most effective way to block development with red tape in California.
That grinds my gears as well. In some cases they show two progress bars, one for the current activity and another for the overall process; which I find acceptable.
Why I Did Not Go to Jail (2014)
The way I see p-values is a mathematical way to share how certain you are that something is in the realm of reality (not truth). It is not a formal conclusion of the results, and is nothing more than a "spoiler" indicating what you might also conclude.
So instead nations still foot the bill for research. The draconian US patent system proportedly produces more drug R&D than elsewhere, but where are those patents applicable?

The US, and anyone agreeing to honor its patents.

Everyone else gets free drug R&D without anything close to international discourse on funding drug research, because its privatized and thus in the scope of trade law.

Even better, the drug patent system means novel treatments are being developed for life threatening conditions that the suffers are disproportionately unlikely to be able to afford ("The Sick", as a demographic, are much poorer than average for obvious reasons). So not only are you subsidizing global drug research, you are doing it on the backs of the poor.
You can either have more dramatic results with more stringent p-value OR have less variance, aka more sampling.
Rabbit hole sidechannel debate: This is also true in the world of "Drones" and the FAA. Rulemaking committee actually references 1961 interpretation of "see and avoid" while making suggestions for drones.

Are ya kidding me??!!
As I have mentioned before my wife works in the games industry (producer not programmer) and her opinion is that the games industry treats programmers like shit. Maybe a true mad genius programmer isn't treated so badly but the 99% are seen as code monkeys that can be fired without a moments notice. It is a pretty horrible environment from the sounds of it.
Boy howdy, being down voted into oblivion for a pretty un-nuanced comment on my part. Oops.

More nuance:
I have a MBA, which taught me bookkeeping (cash vs. accrual, double-entry, basic financial statements - the CRUD of accounting) and lots of strategic financing.

Have bootstrapped/VC-financed a couple of firms - having an understanding of double-entry bookkeeping, and how to construct financial statements is/was not particularly helpful. None of those businesses went away because I did - or didn't - perform basic bookkeeping, or could/couldn't read a income statement.

At a very small scale (which is what this article is talking about) almost anyone can read a income statement and balance sheet without a strong bookkeeping fundamentals background. Yes, you can't construct said docs, but you really shouldn't anyway (that's what the bookkeepers ought to do).

Strategic finance, however, is much much more valuable, which this series doesn't really get into.

I'd argue that outsourcing basic bookkeeping then hiring a fractional CFO to help you with strategic financing is far better use of your time than spending 5, 10, or 40 hours internalizing that a new vendor invoice in accounts payable is a credit to a liability account.
I think you are the majority, your opinion on this anyway. Too many people are afraid to say this publicly.

I personally do care about the small authors, and for that I will disable my ad blocker if I come across a small site with ads but I also won't go out of my way to do so.

I come from "web 1.0" or really "beta web" pre 1995 & BBS days so the web we live on right now is / was our nightmare back then.
> RIT's college of imaging science

Just a minor point, the coffee printer is from the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences[0], not the Center for Imaging Science[0]. CIAS does have some applied programs, though it has a fair number of pure-art programs. CIS is more R&D focused.

[0] https://cias.rit.edu/

[1] http://cis.rit.edu/
> Does anyone have any idea why this is? What prevents new signals from being backwards compatible with the old system?

Presumably you can't use anything currently manufactured.

So, you'd have to commission a unique, backward compatible design. And test it. And qualify it.

And no company is going to do that without you basically paying them the same up-front amount as if you just contracted to replace all the signals.
A simple way to create Google marketing URLs
This reminds me a lot of semantic-ui[1] and the react-specific wrapper, react-semantify[2]. Semantic-UI is entirely CSS Class-based, and has lots of similar components. You can definitely use it without the react wrapper, though the wrapper makes it "feel" a bit more react-like. Some of the interactive functionality is based upon jquery, which is decidedly un-react, but while using it in my most recent project, the jquery bits haven't gotten in my way very much.

I'd love to see react-semantify expanded to replace the jquery-specific bits more thoroughly beyond simply replacing the initialization methods, but haven't had enough time to work on those changes myself.

- I've nothing to do with these projects except that I've used them recently and enjoyed them for the most part.

1: http://semantic-ui.com/
2: https://github.com/jessy1092/react-semantify
Python Patterns (2013)
> It's a pretty sweet design

Yeah, it is, but it wouldn't interact well with Rust's safety guarantees :)

(You're analysing this feature in a vacuum, but that's not how language design is done.)

> Easy to read code with standard control constructs.

I think this is in the eye of the beholder, `try!` or `?` or `catch` are (would be -- for the latter two) easy to read for Rust folks. It's just different. do-notation in Haskell is similarly "standard" for functional types, but it's totally alien to C++ folks. The main reason folks find try/catch/throw easier to understand is because they're used to it. Once I learned how enums worked in Rust, `Result` was a very straightforward and simple thing. I actually personally find `try!` easier to read, since I know exactly where a return can happen, unlike C++ where the control flow is totally obscured.

This leads to the rug getting pulled out from underneath you, which can be bad for safety. In fact, Rust's `recover()` needs to be careful about types allowed to cross a recover boundary so that it can be 100% memory safe.

So the code might be easy to read, but not easy to reason about.

> No dispatching on error types, therefore less temptation to use errors for control flow.

I don't get what you mean here. Rust doesn't dispatch on error types, though it does dispatch on Result (which may contain an error). I don't see what's wrong with this. This lets you program in a functional way (and like I mentioned, you don't have to), which isn't a bad thing.

Errors _are_ a control flow thing, you can't escape that. C++ handles the control flow around errors with try, throw, and catch, Rust does it with Result and its methods (and the try macro).

> especially if you need to catch errors from code you don't control.

`recover()` exists. Use it sparingly; it's basically only for cases when you want to catch panics in code you don't control (even then, try other solutions), or stop panics from crossing FFI boundaries.

Panics are supposed to be for irrecoverable or impossible things, where "irrecoverable" is usually a statement that only makes sense in an application, not a library. So this problem in theory shouldn't come up (I haven't seen it happen much in practice).

I think the problem of forgetting to catch an exception from code you don't control because you don't know it's there is a much more pressing problem than having stray panics (since panics are relatively rare).

> No distinction between code that can cause errors and code that cannot, thus higher-order functions become easier to write.

Result<T,E> is also a type. Treat it as any other return type in a higher order function and it works. In `Fn(...) -> T`, `T` can be a Result type, no problem.

> Rust can't even claim to be transparently callable from languages that don't support exceptions, because panics exist

and so does `recover()`.

> No performance overhead in the common case.

IIRC it doesn't turn out to be much, but ICBW. I think someone looked into this.
It also seems possible that getting rich slowly may make you happier than getting rich quickly. There is a lot of evidence that suggests that happiness around money is very relative to your expectations (which are constantly adjusting). So if you get rich slowly you will get to enjoy long periods of relative increases before your expectations adjust to your reality. Unless you are under some kind of financial stress (where jumping as quickly as possibly over that boundary is fairly important) I would expect this to produce more happiness than a quick jump to financial freedom would.
I'd imagine there are people who consider the article relevant based on its author.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Leventhal_%28programmer%2...
This paradox is a great example of why I'm uncomfortable with the idea of coming up with a p-value when you're comparing a sample mean to a point value in the first place.

If your null hypothesis amounts to little more than a scalar value that exists in a vacuum, you haven't really got a null hypothesis. If your null hypothesis is that your results will match what was seen in some other data set collected by some other person who may or may not have been using the same protocol as you, your null hypothesis describes a parallel universe and there's no way to draw an apples-to-apples comparison to it and your alternative hypothesis, which concerns data that did not come from that parallel universe.

So I guess my answer to all questions would be, "Mu."
BMW's Vision Next 100 Concept Will Learn to Drive Just Like You
The Atlantic did a great longform piece last year all about NYC's (also past-useful-life) signaling infrastructure by asking a simple question: why is it so hard to build a train arrival countdown clock?

They go into a lot of detail on how the past-useful-live infrastructure works, modern replacement technologies, and even a race between infrastructure-giant Siemans and a bunch of hackers kludging together a countdown clock:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-do...

A more interesting read than this blog post.

----------

On a different note, these "they don't make these anymore" problems make me wonder if maybe we should be pushing government to look for open-source hardware for these types of infrastructure work.

When you have equipment lifetimes of (officially) 35 years (realistically up to 100 years), can you really rely on the same Sieman's division to still be in business supporting it? In this Boston story, I wonder how much of their repair workshop is reverse-engineering some hardware whos blueprints long ago decayed in some rusting factory.

Given the right open-source hardware, could you make "they don't make these anymore" obsolete because the technology has become accessible enough that you could build it yourself? (And in the process employing "New Economy" type high-tech jobs). More importantly, should a public entity push for making it's infrastructure publicly accessible? (Pragmatically, could you find someone to build it under those terms?)
Pocket Sized Virtual Reality Device
If this is true, that is awful. That means nations are lining drug companies coffers for profit rather than just doing the research themselves and selling the fruits of research at the cost of manufacturing rather than arbitrarily insane prices due to state guaranteed monopolies.
You got my point completely. The 5 people that down-voted my comment apparently didn't.

Apparently this is a very sensitive subject here.
live in MA and take the T (what we call the subway/bus service here). Public transit is a major problem in this city and surrounding areas. It what make this city OK and expensive vs being great and affordable.

While the transit system here needs upgrading badly, this piece is very political. The quoting of Charles Chieppo is a give away.

"For many systems, Chieppo said, the focus is on improving stations or opening new ones rather than fixing the core infrastructure." The T is working on the first expansion of the subway rail system since the 1980s. Its going into the neighboring city of Somerville and "surprise" its over budget. They might kill the expansion with the focus on "fixing the existing" as kind of justification, instead of doing both at once? They're also reducing late night service for the extra couple hours they tacked on to friday and saturday, while proposing a fair hike. Things cost money, but people don't like to pay more to get less.

(I'm actually usually on one of the MASCO "private" buses that supplement the T for its failure to provide adequate routing to the Longwood Medical area.)
What's the situation on btrfs? It was supposed to make ZFS not that big deal anymore on Linux.
ZFS on Linux. No, thank you. I'll continue to use ZFS natively under FreeBSD, which is arguably a far better OS for what ZFS users would be wanting anyway. Been using *BSD since the late 90s. Never a real issue short of HW failure. I cannot say the same for the painful times I was forced to use Linux.

ZFS is indeed a lifesaver, but we in the BSD camps have know this for many moons.
GitHub Contributor Stats – Chrome Extension
I went from a PhD to a Product role. Here's how they compare
Totally correct. However, it may fly just fine with Ubuntu's "just install a damn Linux and get the app online" crowd. Ubuntu makes Linux easy to install and maintain, and that could be enough for some users. They only need one or two giant apps to grow here in order for it to be called a success.
Because the old signals systems are analog or electromechanical, all modern signals systems are computerized. You'd essentially have to build something custom from scratch to do so, which would be way more expensive than simply replacing everything. Since both options sound unappetizing, they end up doing patch repairs like this to keep the system going, but that can only last so long before it just breaks down.
> Alice should sample the population at random, take the height measurements, calculate the average, plot the distribution, calculate the variance

A student-t test is basically a lossy encoding of that information you describe (the sample mean, the variance, and the sample size).

> If the distribution is not sufficiently smooth then continue to take measurements until it's smooth, or unchanging.

From a frequentist standpoint, this would be considered sloppy and bad methodology. You don't keep sampling until you get the results you want (or until the null hypothesis is invalidated).

That said, as I mention in a comment above, the fact that you can keep sampling until the null hypothesis is invalidated (and that it is mathematically always guaranteed to happen eventually) is a big problem with the concept of hypothesis testing in the first place.
This is extremely important and I'm not surprised the media is either ignorant, doesn't understand, or 'stretches the truth' to adhere to their worldview. Statistical significance has NOTHING to do with magnitude of difference!
Thanks! This is one of the best explanations of the problem with using p-values.

Furthermore, I can recall many times when my stats professors would make it very clear what the "right" answer was, despite it being counter-intuitive but without explaining
Once again, Computerworld hyping the h1b/foreign worker threat, just as they and Wired have done since the 90s.

I was once replaced by cheaper software developers in Asia. It was painful but it happens. But I have a hard time sympathizing for workers in the tech industry. It's one one of precious few equalizers in our society. Just as in 1998 (and maybe before), you can work your way up the chain without a college education--if you have the determination and curiosity.

I guess like their typical Windows-praising and Mac-bashing pieces, it's a reliable formula for Computerworld's reader base. But protectionist policies aren't productive. Emphasizing the need to adapt and add value are a better message.
> "3. Scientific conclusions and business or policy decisions should not be based only on whether a p-value passes a specific threshold.

There is no lower threshold at which the data becomes non-predictive?
The Copywriting Hierarchy of Needs with Will Hoekenga
Can I have big news on ZFS (or BTRFS) for Windows now? I've heard how awesome this filesystem is, but I still can't use it.
In Theory: why bother with theoretical physics?
You are the worst.
R Tutorials, Hypothesis Testing in R, #glfintech
AFAIK they are saying that because it is a DKMS module and Linux is not a derivative work, they are not restricted from using it by the license. By Canonical's interpretation, it would only become an issue if they were to build the support directly into the kernel natively rather than using a standalone zfs.ko file.

Keep in mind IANAL and this is just my limited understanding of the issue.
Yep. It's all fun and games until the lawsuits start :-).

I don't understand people like this. If they were advocating using pirate copies of Microsoft Windows or other proprietary software, would they be saying "ignore Microsoft legal department and focus on how cool it is that I get a free copy of Windows ?

Stupid, stupid, stupid.
does it add "social sharing by viral magnets" or something like that?
"As with anything, evaluate the technology, evaluate the risks, and move on."

I've been selling to enterprise customers for a little while now. All technology has risk, new technology and the status quo alike. Companies weigh those risks against the expected benefits. Some folks will obviously avoid the brouhaha completely; it makes sense. Others will decide that the benefits outweigh the risk; there's nothing less comprehensible about that decision.
Fair enough, thanks for taking the time to answer
The other two replies are incorrect (I have up until this year run our business as an S-Corp).

With an S-Corp, you pay your owners a reasonable salary. $50-70k is reasonable for our field according to our CPA. Any profits or losses from the business pass through to your personal income tax via a Schedule K1. The profits are taxed like normal income, they are not taxed as capital gains.

The tax savings come from the fact that the distributions you draw from the profits of the company are not subject to FICA (medicare, social security). This saves you upwards of 13%.

If you draw more than your profits for the year (say you run an accrual method of accounting, not cash, so you recognize revenue after services have been fully rendered, rather than when the cash comes in and you can have a large bank balance but no profit for that year), the excess is essentially double taxed with capital gains. A painful mistake, so track your AAA appropriately :)
Its actually worse, in that replacing 1% of switches means the switch repair shop and field techs now have to learn 100% more and stock 100% varieties of spare parts etc. Eventually a breakeven point is found where the reduction in labor on the old switches exceeds the cost of being dual capable.

Its possible to imagine numbers where the cost of being dual capable is so high, the cheapest solution is some kind of forklift upgrade of the whole system. Which is kinda what they're doing.

A good hardware analogy is you have a company thats a windoze PC shop. Maybe even all the hardware comes from the same Dell contract, same OS image on every box, its pretty cheap. Surely OSX would improve any end user experience, but imagine the cost of instantly doubling the helpdesk workload to now handle two kinds of hardware and two OS images and two licensing agreements and generally two of everything.

Or a good software analogy is given a somewhat reliable mysql cluster, dropping postgresql on it and trying to use both at the same time is likely to result in some heartache.
>The city approved a new planning document for its North Bayshore district that envisions the creation of up to 10,250 units of high-density housing. Mountain View only has about 32,000 households total, so that would be a substantial 32 percent increase.

It's a little disappointing when the only solution to housing prices is to cram thousands of new dwellings together in a pile. My experience has been that quality of life suffers in such "developments" but maybe it will surprise us all to the contrary.
Am I really reading this correctly, that the plan seems to be "ignore the possible license incompatibility and hope Oracle doesn't sue?"

Because of all ways to fill in the "Hope _____ doesn't sue" plan, "Oracle" must be in the top 5 worst companies to fill in the blank with in the tech industry.
My favorite quote from the piece: "And it is the height of delusion to think that Oracle would grow ears to hear, a heart to care, and a brain to decide." And this is coming from a former Oracle employee.
Rebellious Magic Methods and Extending Python Syntax
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That's the problem with hiring any professional, you've got to do the homework yourself to (1) be able to communicate effectively with the professional and (2) make sure the advice you're getting makes sense.

This is true for all professions, doctor, lawyers, accountants, etc.
It is good they are going to support the building of more housing. However the requirement to sell twenty percent at below market value is simply going to pass that cost on to everyone else who cannot qualify for the lower priced housing. As in, everyone else pays more. It might be better to work otherwise as those moving into the new housing would surely be vacating other housing. Yes there will be people totally new to the area moving into the new housing but the majority should be local movers.

Before some throw out the idea that its needed to have the developers sell below market it will push some out of the market as well as the cost of the market value homes have to increase to pay for the subsidized homes. In other words, politicians do this to gain votes all the while hoping those who are adversely affected are not annoyed enough to vote against them