skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You think people aren't already flocking to countries with cheap programmers?
Building Market-Networks to Reshape the Legal Profession
And don't forget that Prescott Bush was at the center of that plot.
Can they go smaller?
The spaceship rises: A first look at Apple's new campus
I need something between twitter and medium. Short, but not that short, with connections to people who might be interested (ie, not the people on Medium).
This came up in discussion about the Challenger explosion. Basically: the O-ring problem is obvious now, but how were they to know at the time that this one problem was the one they had to address, among the thousands of other issues they were dealing with?

But if you go back and look at it, that was a loud problem with people saying "astronauts are going to die if you don't fix this," and there wasn't anything else of similar urgency.

Hindsight bias is definitely common. "They should have known!" But so is a sort of anti-hindsight bias. "They never could have known!"
here is a very theoretical account by Luca Trevisan of Stanford

http://theory.stanford.edu/~trevisan/books/crypto.pdf
> when in fact there were many people beforehand pointing out exactly what was likely to go wrong.

There's a strong survivors bias here. You can usually always find some people pointing out that something might happen. That doesn't really tell you anything about the validity of their arguments.
Bitcoin, Scaling and Choices
after watching "The Big Short", and understanding that a CDO is essentially a risk bundle, this made things way more terrifying to me.
​Ray Tomlinson, father of e-mail, dead at 74
Scalable vendor security reviews
Apple has shut down the first fully-functional OS X ransomware
We're stuck with massively large nuclear plants in part because the only way of making a new plant cost effective given the regulatory regime is to make them big.
I believe that some evidence has become public. I recall reading about this, and it was based on more than "We know that they must do it". I'll see if I can find some examples. But it won't be today.
I've used a similar, albeit more opinionated library for boilerplate UI stuff (modals, dropdowns, etc.) and the issue I have with it is styling. It works fine for the well-defined use cases but when you need to style something not part of the proptypes or as a child/parent of the given prop, the treatment becomes worse than the cure. You have to resort to rooting around the DOM with dev tools, determining the proper divs (which are usually horribly long and messy), make the style, and hope the library isn't overwriting it at runtime.
5% (1 in 20) is a pretty weak threshold to pass. Let's go 5 sigma (p < 3e-7) for discoveries and reserve 0.05 < p < 3e-7 for stuff we should take closer looks at.
Wow! The museum sells the printed statue of Nefertiti (a replica) for 9.000,00 Euros! What a bargain for something stolen from Egypt.
Perhaps? I'm looking for systems that attempt to address such perceived advantages.

Perhaps this example is clearer: A system where user reputation tapers off over time. This would impact the early adopter advantage. This would probably be a bad idea for many online communities but perhaps not all.

In general I'm interested in any system that has a different model then the traditional vanilla up button / like accumulative system.
It's scary how true this is. And then there are small bugs that come up when you do a series of steps in a certain order which no user will possibly do that are required to be given high priority for fixing.

As for relevancy, I think I'm going to just point people to this article every time one of those issues is raised.
All too true regarding the legal industry. It's broken.
If by social psychology you mean "the way people think and behave socially", i agree. If you mean "the results and theories of the discipline called 'social psychology'", i disagree. It must be the case that each of us has some understanding of our social behavior and the behavior of others. Otherwise we would never form social structures.

i don't know if i've ever gained real insight into human behavior from reading the results of a contrived experiment.
I would argue that .NET did allow for developers to be very productive at shipping the worst UI code I have ever seen. Productivity != shipping horrible code faster than ever. In my opinion.
Ruins of a Soviet Telecom Facility
I don't know for certain, but this is basically very low voltage shock therapy, and we know that has effects on the brain, and is efficacious in treating depression.
If you don't know the basics, how to do you know when your accountant or bookkeeper is making a mistake, or giving you bad advice? How to do you know if they are optimizing their advice to make their jobs easier, not yours?

I stared an LLC last year. It it took two months to find an anchor client, and they started paying net 60 (so no income for four months). Compared to the year previous, my income effectively dropped 25%. The accountant figured estimated payments that would require me to pay every penny I made during the first half of the year. That would mean 6 months without income. He was simply taking last year's tax obligation dividing it by the number of quarters left, not the actual tax obligation.
Did I mention he talked me into an LLC because the administration was simpler? He forgot to mention how much more in taxes I would be paying compared to an S Corp.

I'm now reading every tax book I can get my hands on, and am reading accounting textbooks. No one will watch out for your money like you should.
> Management will always talk about having a healthy work-life balance but the implication is there that you could be doing more, fixing more bugs, taking on more work.
> [...] feeling like your effort is constantly being judged means you end up doing it again and again.

This resonates with me! I have experienced this kind of management schizophrenia many times, telling you that you have flexible working hours, that you can manage your time yourself, that you should take your time, do things right... And then, on the other side, appears the pressure to deliver, the "questions" that suggest you might need to "hurry" a bit more, to deliver more stuff, to cut some corners if necessary...
Here's the scary part to me:

> "For a second paper published last year, Carter and McCullough completed a second meta-analysis that included different studies, including 48 experiments that had never been published. Again, they found “very little evidence” of a real effect."

> "“All of a sudden it felt like everything was crumbling,” says Carter, now 31 years old and not yet in a tenure-track position. “I basically lost my compass. Normally I could say, all right there have been 100 published studies on this, so I can feel good about it, I can feel confident. And then that just went away.”"

So you have at least 100 bullshit studies on a really popular and often citied experiment. If bullshit can hide in plain sight like this, imagine what is lurking out of sight?
Tech Workers Should Unionize
I always change my mind and partial fear of others judging me or me evolving way beyond my previous viewpoint.
And an RPi (at least the first revision) USB isn't near fast enough for a Kinect. Other SBCs could work though, like a Beagle* or the guts of a SheevaPlug.
I think the optimal quantity of caffeine varies from person to person and would be affected by individual tolerance and biochemistry.

I've seen research suggesting the use of repeated low dosages (20-200mg per hour) throughout the morning and early afternoon for optimal performance. However, many of these studies have very small sample sizes and should be read cautiously.

I feel best with no caffeine at all.
Ha! Now you want to close all the museums of the world? Louvre, Vatican, British Museum all of them is filled of stolen pieces. What kind of subversive are you?
What's New in jQuery 3
17 reasons why not to use Slack (written by Basecamp/37signals)
The funny/ironic thing is that ffmpeg (they HATE when people spell it FFmpeg -- FFmpeg is to ffmpeg as Frisco is to San Francisco) is very likely infringing on MPEG LA's patents. They have a glob of evasive rhetoric tiptoeing around that issue ("we are not lawyers," etc.) in their FAQ while not failing to expose their hypocrisy.

https://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html
Helping the global poor is a great soundbite, but there are plenty of ways to do the same thing without harming the vast majority of Americans.

Of note the rich got a free ride while breaking the US middle class. That's actually bad for long term economic growth. It also entrenched and entrenched authoritarian governments around the world ex: China.
I agree as well!

Here is what probability theory teaches us. The proper role of data is to adjust our prior beliefs about probabilities to posterior beliefs through Bayes' theorem. The challenge is how to best communicate this result to people who may have had a wide range of prior beliefs.

p-values capture a degree of surprise in the result. Naively, a surprising result should catch our attention and cause us to rethink things. This is not a valid statistical procedure, but it IS how we naively think. And the substitution of a complex question for a simpler one is exactly how our brains are set up to handle complex questions about our environment. (I'm currently working through Thinking Fast and Slow which has a lot to say about this.)

Simple Bayesian approaches take the opposite approach. You generally start with some relatively naive prior, and then treat the posterior as being the conclusion. Which is not very realistic if the real prior was something quite different.

Both approaches have a fundamental mistake. The mistake is that we are taking a data set and asking what it TELLS us about the world. When in probability theory the real role of data is how to UPDATE our views about the world.

This is why I have come to believe that for simple A/B testing, thinking about p-values is a mistake. The only three pieces of information that you need is how much data you are willing to collect, how much you have collected, and how big the performance difference is. Stop either when you have hit the maximum amount of data you're willing to throw at the test, or when the difference exceeds the square root of that maximum amount. This is about as good as any simple rule can do.

If you try to be clever with p-values you will generally wind up putting yourself at saving yourself some effort in return for a small risk per test of making very bad mistakes. Accepting small risk per test over many tests for a long time puts you at high odds of eventually making a catastrophic mistake. This is a very bad tradeoff.

I've personally seen a bad A/B test with a low p-value rolled out that produced a 15% loss in business for a company whose revenues were in the tens of millions annually. It. Was. Not. Pretty. (The problem was eventually found and fixed..a year later and after considerable turnover among the executive team.)
http://www.livinganthropologically.com/anthropology/guns-ger...
ROI (lack of) or the losing end of opportunity cost (there is something better I could be doing).
Many years ago I worked for a stint at ebay and I was definitely considered a pariah for not flaring out my desk with juvenile toys. I did that in Grade 9 with my locker
Why should I, as a man, applaud sentiments such as "If there are no men, nobody can get harassed by men"? Replace the word men with any other group and tell me if you think that sounds acceptable. The Geek Feminism list of incidents[0] she links to is a joke, which is very much representative of the movement in its current form. Some examples of the horrors women go through in the tech industry:

-Lena Söderberg's photograph is first used in image processing experiments.
-CeBIT booth babes (Technology industry)
-Julian Assange arrest (for Sexual assault)
-libuv gendered pronouns patch dispute
-Sqoot posts a blog article that includes a photo of a topless woman

[0] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents
How could anyone ever think that a war could be a mechanism for making money? No doubt many have, but it's nearly prima facie false.

It's possible for certain kinds of wars of conquest to leave improved trade networks in their wake - the Mongol Conquest worked this way - but the currency of violence is blood, not treasure. History is full of examples of ruinous wars. It has very few that worked out ... financially even for the victors.
Joe Gibbons on His Drawings from Rikers Island
I'd say it's about the highest form of violation. if someone says your copylefted code now belongs to them, and you don't sue them for relief, it becomes their property under law, and you lose your claim to copyleft in the first place.
And LACK of the right 15 minute meeting wastes months of development time as we build the wrong thing and then throw it out.

The trick is knowing which piece of communication is the one that will actually matter. I have no idea how to solve this one.
p-value analysis has its big caveats like multiple comparisons, but Bayesian has its own, such as it's extremely hard to calculate priors. Both are challenging to use in difficult analysis and both can be abused.
I hadn't considered adjusting percentages, but I had considered allowing people to complain about and/or exclude websites from payment (veto, in your term).

Otherwise my inclination is to stick to a formula, because you have to balance the interests of users and providers for a network effect to form.
I'm thinking those little candy dots that peel off.
Asian Bipolar Parents
Raymond Tomlinson, Who Put the @ Sign in Email, Is Dead at 74
I can't even remember at this point how long ago I deleted my linkedin profile; it was never anything more than a spam factory in my experience. What surprises me is not that they're still terrible, but that they are still - somehow, years later, despite seemingly everyone in the industry knowing they are a complete waste of time - not yet out of business.
You can write bad code in any language. .NET was more productive for good code too.
Abbott Labs' IT Layoffs 'harsh and Insensitive’ 10 Signs Layoffs Are Coming
Man, I remember when jQuery 1.0 was released. I didn't immediately switch, but I thought it was nice to have another library option. (I had previously hand-written basically 100% of my JS, including the DOM and AJAX stuff. I eventually caught on...)
That does seem quite plausible, more plausible than a hack/leak of the museum's data itself IMO.
> That they have this code...

They don't have any bypass code. They have detailed plans for the autodestruct mechanism. That's it. They are probably the entity on the planet with the best understanding of the autodestruct system, but the autodestruct system does not have an "off" switch.

To reverse the analogy: The safe designer's bypass "code" is analogous to a back door already built into iOS that opens when presented with some information held in secret by Apple. (Think CALEA wiretapping infrastructure built into US-destined telecom infrastructure equipment.)

Because Apple has to write a special version of iOS to fulfil FedGov's request, we can reasonably assume that there is no pre-built back door in iOS that sits around, awaiting the secret information.
ELI5 what is/was the super cookie ? What is/was the purpose, and how does/did it work ?
This item is from the cultural heritage of Egypt. It belongs to the country. German has stolen it.
More like the $300M blunder. Eliminating all hurdles to completing a payment should be a no brainier. Ask to create an account after a purchase not before.
Ride a Terrifying Glass “Skyslide” Down the Side of an L.A. Skyscraper
Trepanning for the 21st century!
How to debug Docker containers when logs don't give you enough information
$1.3m? They won't even notice.
This is a cheeky comment from Don Knuth.
Everyone Uses P-Values, but No One Knows What They Are
T-Mobile got called out pretty hard when it was discovered they were downscaling videos [0] under the guise of their "Binge On" program. But hidden tracking cookies are far more disturbing that (noticeably) downscaled images/videos. Ultimately, the people are the consumers of images/videos. Who knows who the consumers of that tracking data might be... Obviously advertisers, but who else? The NSA?

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles...
I'd say it has had a profound effect. The thought that you can wear down someone's willpower by making them make too many decisions is pretty scary if your job is to make decisions. One work-around that, for example, the POTUS has espoused is wearing the same clothes every day. (One less decision to make.)

See: http://www.fastcompany.com/3026265/work-smart/always-wear-th...
> I probably wouldn't connect with them on Facebook since to me it still feels a bit too "personal".

This is an interesting angle. There was a time when Facebook was only friends and family. My impression is that (for better or worse) this is changing rapidly. I wonder if Facebook will try to get into one of the fields mentioned in the four points in rdli's comment.
If you read / believe in Teal, profit making isn't the sole function of Teal organizations.
Random labyrinth maker with visual exploring using Pygame
Using HTTPS properly
Maybe my definitions are off, but clicking or not clicking based on the arrangement of letters in a word seems like an cognitive task, not one of willpower; it seems pretty easy to do without much stress. So this new result seems like a very oblique attack, not a strike at the foundations of ego depletion theory.
Is the p-value really not the probability of your results being due to chance? Is that not a perfectly valid definition of it?

I suppose 'chance' is a little hand-wavy, but isn't a p-value just the probability of your data given that your hypothesis is false? Isn't that literally and precisely the probability that they occurred by chance?
I don't blog. I'm afraid people will make fun of what I write if I do.

I have a similar feeling on HackerNews, that people will jump on me. It's also why I don't use Twitter.
jQuery doesn't automatically attach the ETag, but the browser does.
And I'd argue the opposite, based on desire paths.

People will bend the Web to suit their goals. You as a web dev with a need for ads revenue focus on that. Me as a web user with a need for information and pathological hatred of anything distracting, focus on my needs. Users with visual and motor disabilities (I support a community of same) are quite actively thwarted by many revenue-positive factors.

My fix for a bunch of Web gunk is to have a default set of client-side CSS that kills, well, a bunch of crap. Flyovers, modals, interstitials, fixed header/footer elements, and a slew of other stuff. Ello's front-end guy pretty understandably said it voided my warranty for the World Wide Web. And he's not wrong.

But man does it make things suck ever so much less.

Which gets to the point: much of the stylesheet is glob-match patterns on descriptors that are frequently annoying as fuck-all. Which was why I'd showed it to him. That sheet, or others like it, are going to be in the client world, and soon, and if you're putting flyover and modal keywords in your selectors, they're going to get blocked.

Yes, it's an iterative arms race. Your turn.

(And: ultimately the solution is to fix the revenue/compensation model for published works. Online and elsewhere. That'll take a while, but it'll also fix very nearly everything wrong with the present iteration of the Web.)
Deploying a Private PaaS: The Good, the Meh, and the Aw Crap
Eligible Receiver: NSA’s successful 1997 hack of the U.S. military
The Only Cost in Computers Is Time
Starting with a single department as a test case, and then moving out from there probably would have been a way to meet foolish and brave inbetween.
> They gave me a degree in political science, but I felt that political science was an oxymoron and it left me with no respect for the field.

For what it's worth, Andrew Gelman (quoted in the article) is one of the most pre-eminent Bayesian statisticians alive, and is a professor in both the department of Statistics and Political Science!

"Political Science" need not be an oxymoron, even if a lot of self-professed political scientists use rather unscientific methods.
Pebble bed reactors and Thorium reactors are two types that are just now being taken seriously, and largely because of work outside of the US. E.g. China's HTR-10 and coming HTR-PM [1] is based on decades old designs that were originally largely shelved because their advantages were not advantages then (the waste from traditional reactors was a plus when you want to produce lots of nuclear weapons, so why design reactors that produce different waste?). HTR-PM modules are designed to be "mass produced" once the first reactor is operational.

This [2] article covers both China's pebble bed and Thorium ambitions, as well as an evolutionary design based on a Westinghouse design that they are hoping to export.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-10

[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-02-21/china-wants-...
Finally, some good news about the Silicon Valley housing crisis
Excellent comment. Keying on this:

>For a business with resources, capital allocation is perhaps the most important concern and accounting is the toolset you work with

Warren Buffett, arguably the most successful capitalist ever, says when it really comes down to it, a CEO's job is essentially one thing: Capital ( or "resource") allocation.
It's about finding the right balance. If members of society weren't accountable at all to the rest of society, we would have absolute anarchy. If we had perfect compliance, we would have a totalitarian state. Schneier makes this point very well in his book - it's good that society can force cooperation most of the time, but it's also good that it's not able to force cooperation from everyone, all the time.

Reputation is a powerful (and rather dangerous) tool and software-assisted reputation calculation is something that's going to exist and can't be un-invented. Therefore, I think it would be best if that tool were accessible to all sides of society so it isn't exclusively applied by the powerful against the weak. I don't mean to imply that any use of reputation systems by the powerful is bad and any use by the less-powerful is inherently good, I just think that abuse is less likely if those wielding the tool are fully aware that the same tool can and will be used against them if they get enough people mad.
Experience helps. But there is no magic answer that fixes the problem.
It doesn't. Power matters.

Just as Lenin, et al had to maintain a repressive aristocracy during the "transition period" in the journey to the dictatorship of the proletariat, there's always an incentive to keep the transition period a little longer.
Can you say a bit more? I'd like something short and simpler.
>We should have good 3D scans of every museum item of note by now and available for free for the public. How can we sell this concept to the boards, trustees, curators, and bureaucrats who control these items?

Because one of the greatest source of funds to museums and libraries are their licensing of images and objects in their possession.
> 5% (1 in 20) is a pretty weak threshold to pass. Let's go 5 sigma (p < 3e-7) for discoveries and reserve 0.05 < p < 3e-7 for stuff we should take closer looks at.

This would still end up leading to misuse of P-values. Let's say you're doing a genome-wide association study on several hundred thousand SNPs. The traditional threshold is 5e-8 (0.05 / 1,000,000 effective tests). So using 3e-7 for the threshold for "discovery", you'd count many things as discovery that shouldn't be so.

On the other hand, let's say you do a study with 20 people with cancer. You give 10 of them a drug, the other 10 a placebo. All 10 with the drug survive; all 10 with the placebo die. Your P value is 0.0002. This doesn't count as discovery, but clinically I know what my judgment is going to be.

This is all to say that the misuse of P-values does not just come from the threshold.