skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish I had more than one upvote, mostly for your first point. It feels like news outlets choose "urgency" over importance (even if that urgency is mostly trumped up by news organizations). But while climate change is obviously a huge issue, if you live in an area with higher gun deaths then firearm legislation is a big deal to you. If your news outlet isn't reporting information about that, then people will lose trust in a group that they feel is refusing to report on that topic (see the current US Presidential race).
I think Thomas actually addresses your second point head-on, by 1) only picking people/organizations that have been checked more than 15 fact checks, then 2) comparing how each party was ranked - showing that they aren't really picking one party or group over the other. It seems like they mostly pick topics or people/organizations that are highly-rated in the news (which goes back to your first point, but that seems a turtle too far, maybe). :)
"I’ve had much luck in my life: being born into a middle-class family and having any natural ability nurtured by my parents and then by the education system"

This might be lucky on the part of the individual, but parents that sacrifice their own time, money, and life for their child's future definitely isn't luck. It's a choice. If more people saw it this way, we might have parents that actually cared about their child's education and less people in abject poverty.

..and 'nurtured by the education system' is kind of a joke in the US. The K-12 education system is terrible for everyone.

"Yet there is a dearth of thinking about how we can make these jobs more fulfilling, better paid and more respected"

The problem is that low-skilled jobs will always be low-paid in a capitalist system because pretty much anyone can do them. The only way to counter this is to artificially limit the amount of people that can actually do the job by limiting the supply or create some sort of union to force higher wages. Both bad ideas for the long-term.

"and to increase the relationship between effort and success."

Effort has never equaled success. You might put all the effort in the world into something and it you will still fail. You can always learn from your failures. I failed job interviews, businesses, and many other things before I succeeded. We should be stressing to our youth that you aren't entitled to success. You need to earn it.

"it is not uncommon to find graduates working in a bar on a zero hours contract"

What was their major? STEM majors have little problems finding work. Liberal arts? many can't find a job. We should be encouraging students to pick a major that at least has chance of being able to get a job that pays well enough to pay off their debt. Otherwise, it's just a gamble. They might as well start their own business and skip college altogether.

We should be talking about the trades. I know people that are carpenters and electricians and they can't get enough young people even interested enough to apply for the job.

Mostly because they don't want to start out from the bottom and work their way up. Many feel like they should be making $100K right away.
Series of anonymous (anonymity can be achieved with various means, some more legal than others) shell companies used to launder money aren't exactly unheard of.

There's very little courts can do, besides issuing countless of subpoenas and search warrants, which has been the standard way of handling criminal investigations for decades now.

Here's a telephony related example: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/magazine/the-serial-swatte... ctrl+f subpoenas
How to HACK COC?
first you most root your phone then donlowd freedom app and go to COC page then go to buy gems part and choose one of them and have a lot FUN!
Japanese engineers have built a super-efficient floating solar plant
Energy spending as percent of personal consumption hits all time low
Good to know the FISA court is watching out for us. </sarcasm>
This looks really great and I love the direction. Hopefully they're working on making it more consumer-friendly. ;)

Questions:

1. They say that "While most solutions (Dropbox, GlusterFS, OwnCloud etc.) store your files unprotected in the cloud or on a specific server, we took a diametrically opposed direction by relying heavily on encryption. Whenever a file is stored in Infinit, it is cut into chunks, every chunk is encrypted with a unique key (AES-256) and stored, providing both encryption at rest and in transit."

Isn't that actually a lot like Dropbox? (https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/27)

2. How stable is FUSE for OS X? Last time I used it (couple of years) was for SSHFS and it was unstable and crashed the machine every now and then.
This blogpost reminded me of how drastically things are going to change, and likely for the better. Less vehicles sitting around doing nothing, less vehicles needed at all, replaced by shared vehicles. Should be a big improvement for both the economy and the environment.
> All you are changing is which people get the tickets.

I don't think this is true. Without scalpers, a sold-out concert ends up with basically every seat filled. Since services like StubHub have gotten big, it is now more common for there to be many empty seats because those were snatched up by scalpers and never got bought.

The scalpers are often acting rationally here by holding out for high prices until the end instead of dumping their tickets because they make more overall that way even if some inventory goes unsold.
Is the constraint still energy storage?
Emacs gets a bad rap as a "kitchen sink" program, but it isn't really, any more than something like the Bourne shell or Python. The majority of Emacs' built-ins are things like an elisp interpreter, some text processing stuff, and system libraries. Conversely, most of the really interesting things you can do with Emacs, like web browsing (eww), git repo management (magit), terminal emulation (ansi-term), etc. are really just programs written in elisp. Some of them also happen to be distributed with Emacs.
Ff
gg
Frayokit News: MISS BUMBUM BRAZIL STORMS LONDON CITY WITH HER SEXY BOOTY
> Neither is static typing. It's a layer of protection, much like tests.

Not true. The curry-howard correspondence shows the relationship between typed programs and proofs. I recommend you watch a Phillip Wadler talk about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeRVdYN6fE8

Note: This doesn't mean that type systems can prove _all assertions_ about a program, but type systems do indeed work as provers.

> I don't think that's necessarily true. You still need to write tests with or without static typing. Those tests you need to write anyway will catch type errors in a dynamically typed language that a statically typed language picked up at compile time..

This isn't necessarily true unless you test for all inputs (which tends to be infeasible in most cases). A type system can reject inputs by virtue of their lack of conformance to a type, which eliminates the need to test them.

> The question is whether you need to write more tests and whether the greater number of tests offsets the greater amount of code you need to write to statically type your code.

I don't have any evidence to support this (if someone does or has proof to the contrary, I'd love to see it referenced here), but I believe there is almost no overhead imposed by a static type system with type inference.

> Ditto for types.

I acknowledged this above, you just removed that part from the quote. In practice I've never had a bug with the type system (that I'm aware of), while I've seen hundreds of bugs from incorrect test assertions.
Slightly tangential, but, could someone share their experience using Go specifically for building websites?

How does Go (including Go frameworks specifically geared towards web development) compare in terms of performance, ease of development with RoR, Laravel?

Is building websites using Go a good use case or is Go better suited for building high performance microservices?
What Happens to Lazy Programmers?
The information regarding the unladen state of the nachos can be compressed into fewer bits by just saying "chips".
I think the big difference they're implying (though I haven't been able to actually /verify/ the implication yet) is that Dropbox holds the keys to decrypt that content. Infinit doesn't.
Is there any research into how well this works in Autistic people, especially aspergers? Maybe the problem is the lack of ability to smell emotion and people missing this feedback are unable to learn how to spot emotions through other means.
> door/window sensors you can remotely monitor (a lot cheaper than a subscription to ADT or whatever)

ADT's value is that they continuously monitor the system status, contact you when it changes, and dispatch the police for true alarms. Unmonitored alarms have been a thing for decades.

> Of course you will because there's maybe one other thermostat at the home store that isn't garbage?

What is your definition of "garbage"? I have had no issues buying thermostats, either before or since the Nest.

> And they still cost about as much.

Huh? The Nest is $250. I never have, and probably never will, pay more than $100 for a thermostat, and usually pay less than $50.
TTIP Documents Revealed
Yes, definitely. If you had an engine with 3000s Isp, which according to Wikipedia wouldn't be unreasonable for an ion thruster, then your mass fraction would be about exp(-2/30) ~ 0.94. So you'd only need 6% of your payload for fuel in that case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse#Examples
I see, that wasn't clear to me, thank you!
I think your second sentence was sarcastic, but in case others also miss it: the OP's article specifically plots one party vs the other.
Doulci 2016 Can Bypass iOS 9.3 iCloud Activation Lock
> Arbitragers win the first auction and resell the ad, finding exchanges where it’s more valuable and pocketing the difference

I don't understand how this is possible. The original advertiser has to trust that the first exchange is reporting accurate demographic info. How does the exchange know the demographic info is accurate if anyone can buy the ads and sell them on another exchange?
All phenomena are emergent.
A couple points:

1. It's unlikely that the price is set at $X, and there are precisely enough tickets to satisfy everyone who wants one at $X, but no more. Either the tickets won't sell out at $X, or there will be those who can't get tickets at $X.

2. If the original sellers knew how much demand there was, either they'd set the price to be as close to the balance point as possible, or not. If they did, then there should be no opportunity for scalpers unless the price is very unsticky upwards; but if there are a lot of people willing to pay well above the original price, then it's again unlikely that demand is equal to supply.

3. If the original sellers didn't try to set the market value, then there would have been a shortage anyway. Again, the fact that scalpers can extract a large amount from each resold ticket means there's enough demand at high prices, and therefore likely to be too much demand at low prices.
How many people/companies did it take to build GPUs? A lot of people, to be sure, but as a fraction of all software engineers, that number is incredibly tiny.

The vast majority of software engineers---even if we filter to just the set who have actually used GPUs for a project---only know the high-level APIs (OpenGL for graphics, CuDNN for AI, etc.). Fewer engineers are familiar with the more general-purpose APIs (CUDA, OpenCL, etc.), and even fewer still know any of what goes on underneath those layers.

Bottom line: it takes a relatively small community of people to build tools for everyone else to use. People will need to know how to use the highest level of APIs, but most need not understand what goes on underneath that.
Could anyone help me understand why is it 9 times more expensive to design a chip at 7nm than 28nm?

I would have naively thought chip design is fairly automated, but a 9x increase makes is sound like every gate and path is delicately hand-stitched like a Persian rug.
I don't think it's that easy. Humans only have a limited ability to handle variation. Treating everyone as a special case (as you do for people you actually know) breaks down as you scale up.

When administering computers we talk about treating them as "cattle, not pets" to increase our ability to manage large systems. Using the same metaphor with people would be offensive but the policy-making impulse is similar.

To some extent it even arises for valuing fairness. We make rules to try to treat people consistently and fairly, forgetting that people are a mess of special cases.

Small companies value consistency too (using the same tools and procedures) but it's just easier and less likely to backfire with fewer people.
Browsing on Twitter feels like browsing on the "new" section of YC. Lots of unfiltered stuff. It would be great to select only for non-cheap (articles containing more than 300 words) content that exactly falls on my interests (at least use a naive bayes classifier or something to cut out the cat posts from the serious posts).
Go is pretty good for anything backend related.
lowRISC [0] is designing a RISC-V chip and intending to finish tape out this year.

[0] http://www.lowrisc.org/
> right, because the FIS judges who say no get fired. this is survivor bias in action.

Any indication that judges have ever been "fired" from the FISA Court?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
Why Are Your Gut Microbes Different from Mine?
I can only believe you're making a rhetorical point, but even in the abstract, threatening mass murder is beyond the pale here. Please respect the site rules and the community and don't post like this here.
I don't think this undermines my point about value of tickets. If the total spent on some group of tickets goes up, then the buyers valued those tickets more than otherwise; it's thus better for them to have those tickets than the previous group.
"Clever" or "overly specialized", depending on your viewpoint.
"Beliefs and stories passed on by thousands of individuals are important factors, maybe even the main ones, in determining big shifts in the economy."

We've known this all the way back to Keynes. That's why he wanted the government to step in and pick up the slack created by individual consumers creating a self fulfilling prophecy of cutting back their own spending by 10% in preparation for a possible bad economy. Not only would the government spending help offset reduced consumer spending but the knowledge, within the broad population, that the government would do this would reduce fear of a recession and thus reduce the recession inducing behavior.
Yep. I thought the example Thomas brought up about the New Year's Eve sexual assault incident was a great example of exactly this.
Radiohead.com goes blank
To be fair, I don't think 538 ever presented themselves as being anything but a bunch of data nerds.
I think everyone wonders about Twitter's head count. But, you know, nuclear reactors at 1,500 ft are child's play compared to 140 character messages.

Kidding aside, it'd be interesting to get Twitter's ops team headcount for comparison.
> though I haven't been able to actually /verify/ the implication yet

Honest question: how would you verify such a thing? Even if you audit the code, once they open-source it, how do you know that what you see is the same as what they run on their end? (Or do you mean 'verify' just in the informal sense of having them state that that is what they mean, rather than in some more formal trust-free sense?)
I sometimes fear that I am too lazy to make it long term as a programmer but it is hard to pin down what is a virtue and what is a vice.
I am a bit cautious about that. While the researcher do insane amounts of high quality and ill compensated work, clean energy and battery storage feel as predictable as "our incredible journey" or "cured cancer/obesity in mice/petri dish" posts.

1st - we have "Researches made a break trough"
2nd - the new technology is below current / at par
3rd - more works needs to be done to get to acceptable parameter and market
4th - years have passed - there is no hint of commercialization

Meanwhile exiting tech has gotten couple of incremental improvements and economy of scale and makes the inroads of newcomers next to impossible.

If the next decade is going to be insane it will be on the shoulders of existing tech. The nature of the beast.
From the article: "The microbiome field is negotiating the same cycle of hype, backlash, and introspection [other preliminary medical findings have experienced]. Thousands of studies have linked the microbiome to almost every condition you can imagine, but many of these correlations are likely to be illusory. 'A lot of people have been annoyed by the hype surrounding our area, and I think they were probably right,' says Raes. 'It’s time that, from within the field, we look critically at what we’re doing ourselves. We tried to do that with our paper. Yes, we’ve had the hype. Now, it’s time for the consolidation.'"

Here on Hacker News, I have seen repeated articles become greeted by comments that assume we already know all about how to regulate what microbes are in our guts and how that influences health. In fact, we have no idea about such things and don't have nearly enough data yet to make any definite statements about how gut microbes really to human health, or even if they influence human health at all for most people.
As with most deep learning papers, though, the results aren't independently reproducible. The dataset is private, the source is closed, and it hasn't been turned into a product. The magic inking button is still a ways off yet.
Anybody who's heard of lots of programming languages has heard of Java. I've heard of lots of committees, but not this one.
You mean NP-complete, right?
"Nonetheless", ftfy. Sorry for nitpicking.
What I Learned from a Year of Teaching Computer Science
Great point about addressing readership and gaining trust.

Also, I should add I really liked Thomas's article. It doesn't address some of the points I mentioned, but it's clearly a thoughtful article that backs up its investigation with evidence.

And I am too hard on Vox and 538. I have every reason to believe they're trying to get it right - while balancing the needs of their business - and I'm glad they have entered the media landscape. I hope more players that approach journalism from different investigative and analytical angles will follow. Both orgs could improve, and anyway defaulting to mastheads to assess quality is only a heuristic.
Agreed, but I will say it's been a boon to my iOS development.
This is sort of a sad story.

On one hand, I have nothing against Matt Edman at all. He's just a programmer (like many of us), working for a business to make some money. There's nothing at all wrong with that.

If Matt didn't work for the government helping break Tor hidden services, someone else surely would -- so it's a moot point to call him out for acting against pro-privacy ideals.

On the other hand: it's a bit sad that we (the professionals who make up the tech community at large) can't all stand together and help push security, privacy, and anonymity forward by our actions.

I think that the real lesson to be learned here is that more of us need to get involved with contributing to and donating to projects like Tor. By making these pieces of software stronger, we can hopefully one day prevent the ability for anyone to compromise client security. I think that's the long term ideal thing to do.
Front End to Back End: Everything Is on Scala Using Play, Scala.js and ScalaCSS
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2694
The Collin class is based on a scaled up version of the the Swedish Västergötland-class, which has a complement of 18 officers and 6 conscript. I could imagine the Collin class to need more personnel if it sails longer, but I don't know if 60 is excessive or not.
Berlin Is Banning Most Vacation Apartment Rentals
I worked with both Go and Elixir but found Elixir and Phoenix better than Go for building backends for web services. I was more productive and all the awesomeness of Erlang VM made me choose Elixir. I would say give Elixir a try.
This is really cool and it's pure js (no plugins)!

This song is nice: http://tinyrave.com/tracks/27-more-midi-dk-country
I guess I'm trying to nail down the point that whatever constitutes the basic "threshold" for voting is also a political argument that would face almost (if not the same) issues within an preparatory system than without. In fact, at least in the U.S. where I am, one of the purposes of primary schooling is to do just that, i.e., provide basic knowledge of what is involved in required a U.S. Civics course.

So, where does that line get drawn? Who decides, and how? The current regime? The line seems to have always been in motion. I don't think there's an institutional answer to it.
Is there a chance of there being better / more automated tools?
Oh, I don't think it's easy. Indeed, I wonder if it's possible.

In which case, I'd like to see what happened if we favored humanity over scale.
Has a quantum computer been built that can solve a problem faster or cheaper than conventional hardware? Afaict no. From an outsiders pov quantum computing seems to be advancing, but until the science and engineering can overcome the challenges and build something that can do something useful, then it seems too early to study it (outside of curiosity, the theory is kind of interesting).
I believe you are correct as well and they mention Moore's Law being broken in the article[1]. Silicon at least is pretty much done for. And if their cost estimate of over a quarter billion to do an SOC in 10/7nm is accurate you won't see very many interesting "side" projects on that node, those will all live on 28nm at $30M/project.

But the more interesting effect for me has been that Moore's law has slowed down but the exponential growth it had given computers allowed them to speed past even our more amazing ideas. We haven't reached Jim Gray's "smoking hairy golfballs"[2] yet but we also don't upgrade our machines nearly as often. When I bought a new laptop, I bought it for its stylus experience, before that I bought a new lap top for its retina display, and two years before that was the last laptop I had purchased because the one before it wasn't powerful enough to do the stuff I needed to do (most e-cad, m-cad, and code development)

So how does the world change? Some software places might consider writing software that doesn't change for change sake. Every year my m-cad vendor wants me to upgrade to the latest version and every year its the same story, tweak here, bug fix there but no new features. Support for new things the OS has imposed sure, but not real features.

This has been great for Linux folks, where the same computer has been fine for 5 - 6 years now. They can look forward to actually seeing a computer fail due to old age rather than forced obsolescence. It will be harder to maintain a distro that runs on a decade's worth of hardware changes. And that latter is the killer.

So computers aren't changing but as I mentioned before the I/O around them is, better screens, better peripherals, different ways to do storage. Since that is the only way to force upgrades these days, I expect to see a lot more of that.

[1] From the article -- “Because Moore’s Law has broken down and you no longer get gains in all areas at the same time by going to the next node, each foundry customer will have a different strategy, depending on which parameter is most important,” according to a source at one large customer, who asked not to be named.

[2] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gray/papers/Su...
It's using a trained torch model, available as a separate down download. That's a large blob of code and data, around 670MB.
Maybe the feeling that you are revolutionizing an industry -- which gives you contempt for those who came before you?