skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How Foursquare Accurately Predicted That Chipotle's Sales Would Plummet
I did after your comment lead me to it! There's more than one thing that's funny about it. Is it the word 'cybercode'? The man 'near' it, whatever that means? Or the nonsensical photo? Great stuff. They should have left out the caption for their own good.
dupe, please check before submitting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11582441
Mental Health Counselors in Tennessee Can Now Legally Refuse LGBT Patients
I read your comment half-way, then upvoted it. I mentally prepared a response with further arguments against the size of the chilling effect. Then I read the rest of your reply and saw all the keywords. "Oh no", I thought, "I showed my engagement with this post by upvoting it!"

Needless to say, I don't feel like arguing against the chilling effect anymore.
Did you read the paper? They did not even track the ISIS pages. They had a small group of pages which they tracked and a control group (see the appendix)

They did not compare it to the news cycle, or consider that people are reading different pages about the same subject (AQ in Iraq for example being superseded by ISIS).

Sorry if I sound harsh but this study was terribly executed.

Doing it properly would require a lot more resources than Wikipedia daily page view dumps. I think the NY Times would be well placed to do a study on this using Wikipedia page views, their page views and their mentions of topics overtime.
> On the other hand we have a chance to save the tens of billions of people who will live and die in the 21st century and experience genocide, starvation, disease, child abuse, imprisonment, other violence, etc. We're already doing it -- it's achievable. It can't wait for a Mars colony!

i don't follow. why do you think those horrible things wouldn't happen on an extraterrestrial colony?
What makes you think that the 'billionaires, wall street bankers and venture capitalists' don't want broad prosperity?

The data on billionaires appears to be fairly mixed (50-50): http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/jun/23/...
If I was the 3rd party and was being paid $1m a pop to use the exploit, why would they want to give the details to Apple to get it patched and lose their pay-day?
> helping family & friends keep track of how the patient is doing - what helps, and what makes their condition worse.

This relates to one of my motivations for this idea: there is only so much family and friends can do and when they are tasked (if at the request of the patient) with this sort of tracking it can put strains on relationships. Sometimes the friend or loved one asked to watch out for this things is not the right person to hear it from when the data matters.

I feel it would empower patients to have their own access to this information than it being held by a friend or family member---other users contributing to the patients data is a good idea I think.

EDIT: (below)

>If your app was combined with my "scrap & rebuild" of the System, it'd probably be quite useful.

What I am proposing is a way for patients to better understand data about themselves, which would be important in any mental health system.

There are many mental health success stories today; I'm not proposing a replacement but a way of improving an existing system. I think it is important to better understand these success so they can be duplicated (and failures in the evaluation-loop learned from).
Every now and then one sees something on HN that makes you think "why didn't I think of that?" This is one of those ideas executed very well. My prediction is this guy makes millions and is eventually bought by Microsoft for a ridiculous sum of money.

I think he'd be a shoe-in for YC, but I also think that'd be a waste now - with a product like this he can easily show it off to investors and raise money, if needed, or just bootstrap off his own revenue. $120K for 7% is not a good deal with a polished product like this - I think it would be easy to beat.
I do not understand why its not possible for those same engineers/workers making planes to became teachers/proffesors ?

It seems such a terrible mis-allocations of resources since those same brilliant people could help the next generation learn and progress.

Or the simpler explanation is that Americans do not value public higher education as much as they value their global hegemonic position.
That, or it creates a nervous impetus in the authorities to pass those laws before more sophisticated encryption and adoption move faster than they can respond to it.
now they are static sites built with grunt. Before they were dynamic so the documentation and tests could be joined and runned dynamically. Now I just do that before push, which had me change the organization of few things. I converted them and I'm now hosting them in Github Pages for that same reason. I learned a lot about grunt, phantomjs and SSL with cloudflare on the process though, so I'm happy with the result.
An Attempt at Understanding the Canadian Income Tax System
3 Make-Up Products Every Woman Must Have in Her Bag – The Emporialist
This was my first major project using D3 so there was a bit of a learning curve to get it to do what I wanted, but I was happy with the results in the end. I relyied heavily on D3Kit to allow the charts to be responsive, and Google Docs/Tabletop to manage the data.

While a lot of the charts appear simple, there was a lot of work done long before I could even get to the point of making a plot by combining all the different tax rates. It turned out to be a much larger project than I expected.
Exactly. If fear of handful of terrorists have made our communities this corrupt then sadly looks like the terrorists have won in shaking the very foundation of western societies. This decay is slow but more like cancer it gives slow death to a civilization.
I guess it's yet another optimised LZ variant, and it's no surprise that LZ-based/inspired algorithms are fast, because their main loop is very simple and does not involve the intense bit manipulation of Huffman/Arithmetic algorithms. That's how very carefully optimised LZ can end up being faster than memcpy() in some cases:

http://www.oldskool.org/pc/lz4_8088
It's really not an either/or situation. Hiring could improve obviously but the current process of generic white board problems is effective if imperfect.

It's just really hard to decipher one's ability when everyone puts technical experience on their resume because they took an online class or read a book on some thing once.
> We're talking about one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations...

Somehow I keep hearing this when Japan is mentioned, and I have to wonder where this conception comes from. According to Wikipedia, the Kofun Period, the "earliest era of recorded history in Japan," starts around AD 250.

For comparison, Ramses II ruled 1279-1213 BC. Alexander the Great 336-323 BC, China's first emperor 220-210 BC.
Having worked with some such folks in a quant-focused field, I can say that their performance was no better than average and in some cases worse. After a few hires like this, my boss actually pulled me aside and asked me to take over one of the main hiring projects because he and a few other managers were unhappy with the way the emphasis on this type of paper credential had failed to produce good enough analysts, and they wanted a process more focused on probing someone's experience and ingenuity. I didn't enjoy it at the time, but that 9-month project focused on that team's hiring needs (which took me away from some of my technical projects for more time than I liked) ended up teaching me a ton about what candidates in general look like (at least for that type of firm).

But I grant this is reasoning just from the anecdata that I have. I can believe that winners perhaps represent a higher degree of skill, but then we're talking about an extremely small number of people.

Generally you're facing a tradeoff where you have to choose between a sort of rustic self-reliance skill set versus a bookworm skill set. People from either group can learn the other over time, but you can't predict how well by testing them solely on trivia that constitutes their current main group. My preference is to hire for self-reliance and learn bookworm stuff later. I used to believe the opposite (e.g. hire someone good at math because they can always learn to be an effective programmer later) but my job experience made me believe the opposite (e.g. actually it's pretty easy to teach people stochastic processes, machine learning, or cryptography, but it's incredibly hard to teach people how to be good at creative software design).
I wonder how much email this person is receiving from the mailto at the end
Not really. This relates to commerce, not photo sharing, blogs/articles, videos, link sharing, etc. So if you want to think of it as a browser for businesses and sellers, that would be more accurate.
>price your corporate license at $200-$600 per person per year. I have never been in a situation where there was even a need to discuss the cost of a tool at those price points

Come work for government, then despair.
> I can't help but think this mentality is what lead to the recent left-pad debacle

It borders on category error to compare homebrewing argument parsing with an overreliance on microframeworks extending all the way down to leftpad. Argument parsing is almost always supported directly by the language implementers in a standard library. And even if it wasn't, it's such a critical task with huge overhead for handling corner cases, cross-platform details, etc., that the value of a central implementation is obvious. A left pad operation ought to be part of the standard language (which is actually what the leftpad debacle was about, Javascript's incredible failures as a language), but it's too trivial to compare it to something like argument parsing.

> The pseudo-code of BFS is all of 20 lines, ...

If it's only 20 lines, that's great because it means it was easy for the other 500 library writers to write it, write tests, and observe and fix issues over time. So, whew, that's 20 lines I totally shouldn't waste my time on, plus unit tests and routine maintenance I don't have to commit to.

And also, given the wide acknowledgement that a good programmer should be writing at most a few hundred lines of code per day (otherwise it's probably mostly junk), 20 lines of code is not trivial.

Probably most programmers write a whole lot more than that per day (especially if counting copy/pasted code), but this is in part a sign of a bad programmer, or perhaps more so a sign of the anti-quality constraints placed on them by most employers.
Someone should email the bosses the agile manifesto.
> How do you know they were dead weight?

I've never seen any large company which didn't have at least some employees whose value was less than their salary. Frequently, such employees can even confer negative value.

Moreover, even if you don't have any deadweight, you do have an ordering of employees. Your top employees are the ones most able to find a job elsewhere and hence very unlikely to accept a pay cut.

> Hell, for that matter, why do you assume that you wouldn't have been among those deemed "dead weight" and laid off?

I don't. Even if I were supposedly in the "dead weight" I would rather be laid off, get severance, and find a new job which would pay me the salary I had negotiated previously. A pay cut is changing the terms on which I agreed to work and would frequently push the job below my BATNA.
Except that it's all rolled into one bill. Which they haven't read (they don't actually read any of the bills).

If they spend more than about ten minutes on the whole exercise I'd be shocked.
How do we reconcile sentiments like "never trust the client" alongside this community's hope for decentralization, á la "The Internet Has Been Stolen From You. Take it Back Nonviolently"?
I hope you're right. We'll see.
Great work on PostGraphQL.

Easy to setup, and well documented.

I'm going to start doing some load testing, I'll let you know what I find.
>>W-2s are usually sent in the mail currently, which have all the stuff you would want to keep private. I have never heard anyone complain that W-2s in the mail are dangerous.

That's because opening someone else's mail is a federal felony. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1708
the $6 trillion figure comes from Elon Musk during a recent interview.
But for society, and the economy as a whole, these problems are "dead-weight loss" [0]. No productive output is created by jumping through the necessary hoops to comply with every increasing complexity.

And there are opportunity costs to spending time and money on tax / regulatory compliance vs. the actual business.

If your above statement was true, then wouldn't it be more true the more complexity we added to the system?

Maybe instead of working till the middle of April [1] to pay the government our tax bill, we could be working half the year.. or longer? Surely all of that complexity would create even more openings for businesses wanting to solve the complexity problem...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss

[1] http://taxfoundation.org/article/tax-freedom-day-2015-april-...
Given the relative difficulty that privacy bills face in Congress, one wonders what kind of vested interests are at play here. Skeletons in the closet?
Driving while using a mobile and drunk driving are qualitatively different for at least one important reason...
If I'm talking or texting while I'm driving, I can stop if traffic patterns become sketchy. I can't suddenly stop being drunk.

Clear and dry with light traffic is very different than snow in a construction zone. Phone use is something I can stop doing. The same can't be said for being drunk.
Yep.

Same applies to rogue traders. They usually start faking profits after a run of success ends and they need to keep up the appearances.

Nobody (that I heard of) just started rogue trading from zero.
Fluidics
You don't ignore section headings when reading laws. Besides that, nothing in that section discusses granting authority to collect "covered communication." The section is discussing the retention policies of communications collected by some authorized manner.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11563378 (481 points, 2 days ago, 167 comments)
Regulatory Capture and Public Choice Theory should be taught in high school. It's counterintuitive on the surface, but makes a lot of sense when you see it in action. Regulations are incredibly hard to remove and very rarely are removed; on any level, state, local or federal. It's much easier to write new regulations and starve your competition.
Per the SDKs ...

If you've a Swagger/OpenAPI spec, you can use Swagger Codegen (https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-codegen), a free and open-source project, to generate API clients (SDKs) in C#, Ruby, PHP, Java, ObjC, etc.

Here is an example: https://github.com/wing328/petstore-php

You can also use Swagger Codegen to generate server stub in SpringMVC, PHP Slim and more.

Disclosure: I'm a top contributor to Swagger Codegen.

(To convert RAML, API blueprint, WSDL, etc to Swagger/OpenAPI spec 2.0, please try https://github.com/lucybot/api-spec-converter - an open-source converter written in NodeJS)
> I stand by my statements. The community, or even a handful of researchers haven't come up with a competent path to AGI. That's indisputable.

The keyword there is competent. You're making a subjective evaluation. Given your CV you must surely be aware that Goertzel has a 1,000 page book (two volumes, actually) laying out in great detail his roadmap to human-level intelligence. The leaders of other major projects in this space have their own ideas which they talk freely about at the AGI conferences, and are written down to varying degrees.
Oddly enough, I've been less worried about that sort of thing since the Snowden revelations for reasons I can't adequately explain. I _think_ that I subconsciously assumed 'suspicious' searches would be flagged and lead to tracking, but post-Snowden just assume it'll be tracked regardless so don't bother self-filtering (I'd love to know if the hours I spent researching anthrax and dispersal methods [saw it on TV, was curious if it was plausible, and fell down that rabbit-hole for a couple of days] a few months ago caused a blip on security services RADAR).

That said, it is a terrible state of affairs, and I do completely understand the impulse to self-censor to avoid future issues. Likewise, I don't see a near-to-mid term solution - mass surveillance appears fairly entrenched, is not a single country issue (which would at least make it somewhat avoidable), and very few people even near positions of power seem to be addressing it adequately (or even see it as a problem).
You know what happened "shortly before" Snowden's leaks, two terrorists killed 3 people and injured hundreds others in a terrorist attack in Boston. Is that a good time to establish a baseline for number of page views?

I'm not saying there isn't a chilling effect, just that I am highly skeptical of this measurement of it. Wikipedia pages on these subjects are practically news articles. They are going to be pretty highly linked with whatever is going on in the world at the time. Considering that, I would fully expect terrorism searches to be high after a recent terrorist attack and to drop as terms like "Al Queda" become less newsworthy on a global scale.
You may find this link helpful for both the why and how: http://adriansampson.net/blog/llvm.html

( HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9998140 )
I've noticed that too with some friends. Tesla has been a really popular short position for traders over the past year and (you guessed it) they're all taking a bath right now. It'd be interesting to see what role WSJ coverage has in that.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding things - is this a particular algorithm (that I could look up in a textbook for example?)
I hope Stripe borrows this idea, I think it's a great win-win for all parties.
I pay for iCloud, never paid for Dropbox.
Reinvest any profit you make into weening yourself off the 3rd party tech. Starting with the most mission-critical tech...
if you like react, then, imo, you should stick with react.

What i find best about vue is that lack of boilerplate and jsx.
Vue's scoped css + css preprocessor+ auto-prefix combo is a huge step toward modular css. I am certain that other libraries and framework will copy it soon enough.
Ask somebody to implement Dijkstra's algorithm and they might not remember specifically which algorithm that was. Questions shouldn't say "BFS" or "Dijkstra" in them -- if you're going to ask whiteboard questions, the way to do it is to pose a problem where that's a solution. Ask an actual shortest path problem or a weighted shortest path problem, or an "any path in non-infinite time" problem, or what-have-you.

BFS and Dijkstra's aren't really the sort of thing you implement from memory, you figure it out fresh each time, unconsciously plagiarizing from your past experiences.
damn good!!!
I can't promise anything but let's chat over email. It would be nice to simply bounce ideas off each other. :)
I'm just curious because I find it hard to believe that avionics in combat aircraft are or were so unreliable that they would have to be restarted every few hours. That would not work for e.g. bombers on long missions, fighters on CAP, etc. I can just imagine a pilot thinking, "Okay, we're about to cross the FLOT and I've got 20 minutes until the next avionics reboot. I'd better go ahead and reboot it now before we run into trouble..."
But don't many thousands of lines of code for personal and professional projects written over many years count for anything?
Ah ok. More backends.
If he himself doesn't believe his company is going to last a generation, then the quickest way to cash out (for himself, his family, and the causes he believes in) without raising alarms is to claim it's for his non-profit, right?
Re: What do you think about automatic generation of client-code in various languages?

Swagger-Codegen (https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-codegen) is a pretty mature, free and open-source project for generating API clients (e.g. ObjC, Java, C#, Ruby, Python, etc) and server stubs (e.g. PHP Slim, Java Spring, etc). Please give it a try and let us know your feedback by opening a ticket via https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-codegen/issues

Disclosure: I'm a top contributor to the project.
A game can include a payment system, or processing of personally identifiable information. Security is important.
I know this is simple, but when you need to publish multiple versions of an API on a db, I don't see this as useful. It will only get in the way down the road of defining a strong API.

What you end up with in something like this is the data model is the API. Why not just expose SQL directly at that point? (Rhetorical question)
> They did not compare it to the news cycle

Such as the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Or the rise of ISIL and Boko Haram in early 2013.

I still think the study was well executed, but the instant effect seems to disappear when you remove the 6-7 months before mid june 2013.

The long-term effect they claim to observe is more shaky. (I think one can find "statistically significant" groupings of say, Harry Potter articles, that show a similar peak and decline around the Snowden revelations.)

Can we find more flaws in this paper?
> And just yesterday my Linux did what I've never seen an OS do before - it losts it UI clock display. The solution was simple and typical for Linux - it involved killing a random process.

What desktop environment was that? There are many different ones available for Linux systems, and they don't all behave that way. e.g. I've never had that kind of problem with KDE3/TDE or KDE4.
Ant Walking Simulation
Ask HN: Canadian visa woes. Should I try Australia?
I came to Canada a few months back, looking for a Front-End / Full-Stack Developer position. After months of search, I finally found a startup who was ready to sponsor me. After making me fly from Toronto to Vancouver, telling me they would like to "go ahead", and wasting 45 days of my time ("We're talking to the lawyers") they stopped answering my emails. I'm in a fix now. My visa here expires soon, and I don't think I can find a company here to sponsor me.

I am 23-year old, self-taught, with 4-years of experience and have an impressive portfolio. Most of my work has been around JavaScript - Angular, React, and Node. On the back-end, Laravel on PHP. I have been working on my own projects for the past few years, and make enough money to sustain. I am looking to work with an exciting startup, and settle down somewhere.

These are my options now:

1. Go to Sydney, Australia, and look for work sponsorship there

2. Get a 1-year diploma in Canada. It gives me a 1-year work visa. Then, find someone to sponsor me in those 2 years

I looked at UK, but getting a visa without a college degree seems quite hard. Also, I'd have to wait for 5+ years to get residency.

I don't qualify for Working Holiday Visa.

Any advice? Is getting sponsorship with an Australian company any easier than Canada?
I sort of agree. If we imagined a world thousands of times more wealthy than the present one, I think you'd probably see a Martian colony kick off more or less "just because it's there."

But absent any return on investment, the available resources today are orders of magnitude too small to make a go of it.

In any foreseeable world, any kind of substantial off-Earth human presence (more than say 200 people) is going to require a substantial practical value to justify it. Pure science or "just because it's there" or fulfilling the childhood sci-fi dreams of various people are not going to cut it. Which bums me out too! I have childhood sci-fi dreams.

If there's a path to large-scale (or even medium-scale) human presence off Earth, it's something like solar power generation or asteroid mining.