skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 2. The smart thing financially would have been to let the community die but, he didn't and paid the price

So, I'm a skosh biased, as the person currently running MetaFilter, with a moderation staff that's managed to grow back to close to the pre-crisis status quo, but I don't think that's really the best take on it.

With the benefit of hindsight, mostly what should have happened differently and for the better was to take the downslide more seriously more quickly in terms of changing our spending and saving and model for what the next year or three years looked like, and to have gotten the community involved in that discussion sooner. We'd likely be in more or less the same place we are today, which is smaller but pretty steady and the community doing well, but with fewer lurches and less pain and fumbling along the way.

I appreciate Matt's public frankness in this piece about some of the winging-it nature of the site's business history and the missteps along the way, because I know he's always tended to want to be more private or cautious about that sort of thing. And I think the nature of MetaFilter as a tiny business and a relatively close-knit community informs some of that dynamic; it's hard enough for a business to break bad news to customers, but to folks who are genuinely members of a community there's a whole other emotional commitment involved.
Need to ship in a hurry? App will link you with travellers for faster deliveries
My understanding is that most medical equipment is now designed to be incompatible for accidental hook-ups to the wrong thing. If the epi and IV aren't incompatible, there's somebody already working on making things that way..
>> "no one has time to learn everything" - especially at the beginning of their career.

I wish I had this book at the beginning of my career. http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-Pr.... Makes you design the hardware, then the software for that hardware.

Should not take more than 8 - 12 weeks with school work/day job.
Swift/T: Dataflow Composition of Tcl Scripts for Petascale Computing (2015) [pdf]
Until they build one, it's only potentially cheaper.
List of recessions in the US [1]. Tell me when they were longer and more frequent - before or after central banking.

The Great Moderation [2], a period of such low economic volatility that even economists find it amazing. Did this happen before or after the gold standard was removed?

IGM poll of around 100 of the top economists in the US the following [3] "If the US replaced its discretionary monetary policy regime with a gold standard, defining a "dollar" as a specific number of ounces of gold, the price-stability and employment outcomes would be better for the average American."

Every single one either disagreed or strongly disagreed. 100%. Not a single dissenter.

Want to really see what a gold standard would have done over the past few decades? Here [4] is gold prices for the past 100 years.

The price was 220 in 1970, 2000 in 1980, 369 in 2000, 1600 in 2010, and now has dropped to 1200, with a lot of intermediate fluctuations. It's all over the map. These fluctuations are far larger than any business cycle or inflation over the same time period.

If gold were the standard (i.e., the fixed value), then, since the dollar has fairly small fluctuations and more important quite stable predictability, this graph is what living costs would have done as the rest of value fluctuated this wildly.

Simply put, gold is vastly more volatile than almost any economy, and certainly more volatile than the US economy. The gold standard is terrible.

Finally, here [5] is a paper that follows the gold standard across 24 countries around the Great Depression, and pretty conclusive shows a strong divergence in economic health (employment, wages, growth) between those countries on the gold standard and those off it. Such effects, seen at the time, pretty much killed the gold standard as the deflationary effects became clear.

Now, present your fluctuation metric before and after a gold standard and demonstrate your claimed increase. It simply is wrong. These multiple methods conclusively show it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation

[3] http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-re...

[4] http://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-y...

[5] http://www.nber.org/chapters/c11482.pdf
[Also MS employee that works on the docs.microsoft.com team]

No, we will not break links. We are doing graceful redirects from MSDN/TechNet to the new site.
DuckDuckGo made so much money last year, it's giving away $225,000
>panic attacks

I created a throwaway account for this, but:

I developed panic attacks after spending a few years living with somebody who had severe depression peppered with episodes of psychosis (my wife). I didn't know the things that would send them into a psychotic episode[1], and the stress of it eventually caused me to be diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.

This person is now on the proper medications, and no longer has psychotic episodes, but my panic attacks remain.

It isn't a stretch to think that constant harassment by the FBI could cause something similar. It's pretty well established that this is what killed Aaron Swartz.

[1] An interesting observation I've made regarding this: part of my life involves a job that deals with people who are having a psychologically challenging reaction to psychedelic drugs. The people having the worst acid trips are identical to the types of psychosis that my wife used to have. Like there is something that they really need to tell me, but can't get me to understand. My inability to understand what they need to tell me causes a tremendous amount of anguish.
I also find this usage to probably be viewable as abuse, but clearly GitHub has chosen to continue allowing it, even as it has caused them issues like this. I think for them, it has provided some interesting insights about their infrastructure and areas they can optimize (not necessarily because they are lacking). Besides the work they put into this, I can think of at least one other noticeable change they made, which was how the repo pages displayed huge file lists (CocoaPods used to have a massive list of files at the root).

So yes, it's probably not great, but it has given GitHub some fun inf. challenges to build to. If it was something they felt like they couldn't handle, I'm sure they'd politely ask them to hop off their platform ;)
Let's say you're worried that a scientist might misrepresent their work. So you force them to communicate through a PR staff person. Now you have 2 people who might misrepresent the work.
The police cannot legally "stop" you absent cause to detain you.
As others pointed out, you can find information about the new Bing Image API here: https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/bing-imag.... I cannot provide an official deprecation date yet, but here's a rough timeline: we will first announce the pricing plan for the new APIs in early-to-mid summer. We will then provide a notice to existing users of the old APIs to switch to the newer version within 6-12 months - note again that the dates are not final.
This is a good point. I've been dealing almost exclusively with highly dynamic UIs, and that's almost certainly skewed my perception of IB's usefulness.
When people want to learn how to create something, usually it starts off as imitation.

"I want to make a video game just like Mario!"

"I'd love to learn how to make a social network just like Twitter!"

"I'd like to learn how to make a desktop app just like iTunes!"

"I want to know how to make a programming language just like Lua!"

But the majority of software people use these days is web-based, even the desktop versions, from Facebook to Spotify to Twitter to Snapchat or whatever that's called. (I'm dating myself aren't I?)

So it makes sense that people getting into programming want to learn how to make web stuff first. But as they get deeper into learning how to make some website, they'll necessarily need to learn how to make the stuff that goes with it, like a backend server that uses a database, or a companion iOS app, or whatever.
What factors contribute to the performance disparity, and where could efficiencies be found?
AmigaOS 4: “Enhancer Software” updates system files and tools
Not at all. docs.microsoft.com is the documentation portal and has nothing to do with the online Office Word service.
How to Interface with Big (Engineering) Companies?
In brief: How do you get started interfacing with huge (engineering) companies?

The long story:

I've long been interested in marine logistics and shipping, I've built boats and
even developed a small-scale autonomous boat (read: RC sailboat) and with rising
incidence of crewmember ransom, increased trade volume and changes in the
quality and availability of autonomous system algorithms -- I think it's time to
retrofit an existing vessels with an autonomous stern system, with backup human-based satellite navigation from land.

I reached out to MARINTEK and Marorka, asking for some relevant contacts within
their respective organizations, and it may not surprise you that the response I
got back was somewhere between puzzled and threatening.

I don't think it would be feasible to mount an operation to build boats from
scratch, but if I could convince one of these organizations to help identify
legal barriers to unmanned vessels and license some autonomous shipping technology I build,
it could have a shot.

Do I just keep bothering them until they crack or is there a defined procedure
for reaching out like this? Is hearing something like this simply too insane for big corporate entities?
User Datagram Protocol? What gives you that impression? In any case, we run several versions of the interview, to allow people to reapply
[Disclosure: working on the team that built docs.microsoft.com]

We are fixing that. Thank you for the feedback!
Robot stitches tissue by itself, a step to more automated OR
Formally, I think this to be a good list of fudamentals: programing paradigms, algorithms, data structures, compilers, operating systems, networking, math for CS.

What else would you recommend adding to the fundamentals list?
Well sure there systems requiring any particular resource level. Long before the requirement is 2 GB ram, one might wish to get that on a server if for no other reason than to minimize installation hassles. Clearly, preferences vary.

Do you develop on any particular project 325 days a year? That's hardcore.
I think that's why the focus is on deep learning and self improvement for AIs.

We may not be able to create an AI that's as intelligent as us, but we can create a rudimentary AI that can then make itself smarter as time goes by (and since it can be practically immortal it would have a lot of time to learn) and which can be easily duplicated later.

Downside is we probably won't know what it's actually thinking and what it will do...
It works out of the box in Firefox 48.0a2.

Navigate to about:debugging, and load the manifest.json as a Temporary Add-on.

It will stay installed until you close the browser. I don't think permanently loading extensions this way will work in the normal Extensions pane until Firefox 48 is in release.

See the "Chrome compatibility" section: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/29/webextensions-in-...
https://github.com/pyGrowler/Growler
"A micro web-framework using asyncio coroutines and chained middleware."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11631292
how does the pool get funded? You can have some really perverse incentives depending on how its funded...
And in the same vein, "who on earth is going to buy a tablet"? The iPad is going to be a dud. Nobody needs or wants tablets.

People don't know what they want, so we'll make them want it.
I don't think they've been keeping on their staff all these years out of charity, or that the repeated failure of vending machine based stores - including experiments by major fast food chains - to survive in the US market is an indication that this will be a good survival strategy.
Is this Bitcoin time stamping thing the only alternative, or are there other ways to securely time stamp a document?
IBM raises its blockchain game with secure cloud services and Docker integration
As a web developer wanting to dive into cryptography, where should I start? A goal of mine is to to contribute to an open source project in the next 6 months.
While I agree that this seems like "scientist has pet theory, does study to prove it", I don't think the bias/irrationality claims disprove much.

The way to reconcile those claims is to say that many of our statistical/estimation patterns are very bad. Mostly, they were good once, but are completely unequipped to deal with the modern world. I know "we're optimized for the savannah" is a laugh-line at this point, but it doesn't seem absurd to claim that we're using statistical techniques that are easy but inflexible. Flawless Bayesian updating is basically unachievable, and a lot of our biases seem like once-useful heuristics that screw us a lot in the modern world.

Tetlock's Superforcasting seems like a good reference here: it's a study of people who are uncommonly good at estimating future probabilities. These are people who estimate near-future events to better than half a percent (as in, rounding from .1% to .5% reliably lowers their accuracy). Most of them claim to use a lot of numerical probability estimates, which suggests that they might be employing an existing system consciously to get the bugs out.

None of this means I buy the study, but I'm not willing to reject the hypothesis, either. Given that we're running on neural nets, I wouldn't be surprised if we deal in actually probabilities and are just exceedingly bad at it.
I really don't think people will be the irrational holdouts they claim to be. People say a lot of silly things they don't actually mean. While many of us enjoy the feeling behind the wheel now and then, it's actually a nuisance for most people most of the time.

One thing I'd love to see is a safe racing mode where the computer allows people to drive like maniacs, but intervenes before the situation actually becomes dangerous. I suspect at some point automatic drivers will become so precise they will truly be able to scare the shit out of passengers safely.
[PM on the docs.microsoft.com team]

Yes, we are planning to address content structure to make sure that all important reference and conceptual information is well-organized and accessible. If you have any particular concerns regarding this, feel free to shoot me an email: dendeli [at] microsoft
That's not quite true. When catching a ball we constantly adjust as we go so we're not perfectly calculating where it will land. We can train humans to roughly approximate where a ball will land, that's about it.
Amusing typesetting error:

> We also discussed powers of ten, so that he knew that
> 102 was 100, 103 is 1000, and 10100 is a 1 followed by a
> hundred noughts.
OK, then who gets to receive less value for their efforts so that others can receive more? That's what it boils down to.

Goods and services are finite, and at the level of a society/world/country are being consumed at the level they are produced (notice we don't have warehouses continually filling decade after decade of anything). UBI means everyone would be able consume more than they are now -- it doesn't matter what they consume, but it would be more. And it might allow some that are producing to produce less (work less). That imbalance can't exist for very long at all until prices rise to get back to equilibrium. There's no way around it.
If we could make a machine better than us in every way, why couldn't that machine make us better in every way?
It's not that much of a stretch to imagine that the reason the FBI are threatening to abduct her off the street and deny her the right to legal counsel is somehow related to her being a major Tor contributor.
The first link is about installing panels in regions of moderate insolation like Germany. Areas with more sun make more sense.
It's not a lie though, the distinction is subtle but important.

Something like asking you what the closing stock price for GOOG was yesterday. If you said "I think it was 500" but say it was 505, boom insta-crime.

There's been quite a few examples of the FBI then using the threat of prosecuting the above "crime" in order to get leverage so people will comply with things they may not have usually done.
Typically background check interviews are contracted out now. The FBI should be out of the picture.

https://www.opm.gov/investigations/background-investigations...
[PM on the docs.microsoft.com team]

Not at all. We do graceful 301 redirects, so for all content from MSDN/TechNet that gets moved, none of the references will break.
yeah, i hit that wall, then came into the comments..... on the plus side i just saved hella time by not reading the article, so i guess im the winner either way.
Superfluous adjectives
All mobile graphics should be in vector form. There's no excuse for raster except photos. And if we are talking about vectors, it's easy to use them and everything's pixel-perfect.
One could assume that they are either simply lazy or incapable of designing such a system on their own. By taking a look at their "index" which consists of one giant directory in a single GitHub Repo, one could indeed argue that it's a mixture of both.

There are so many (big) companies out there using cocoapads for their app development, getting a few to sponsor the hosting bills should be more than doable. A lack of funding is really no excuse.
Being an employee at a startup does mean you took a risk, but nothing in comparison to the founders who built it.

Most employees don't understand that a lot of things change along with way when building a company. Most product companies start with dreams of IPO or getting sold to a large company at a massive valuation. This seldom happens for the vast majority of startups - who either go bust, sell to slightly larger players or becoming SMBs for life.

The owners of a company will make money in most of the above cases - employees won't, and rightfully so.
> Finding someone to ask them a question is not harassment.

Refusing to talk to a person's lawyer, then saying "we will be attempting to talk to this person without a lawyer present", is absolutely harassment.
Yes, I'm sure it was exactly that. My point is that it's a failure, because it's an insult to the test-taker's intelligence. "Here's a trivial problem to solve, now I want to see you solve it in the most inefficient manner possible."
> We have no evidence that Ford ever said those words.

https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast
Another side effect of Medicare and Medicaid overfunding. According to AARP, people are getting way too much medical care - to many surgical diagnostics and procedures putting people at increased risks.
Well, Europe is choke-full with concentration camps for immigrants to be detained and then approved or deported -- while few would call its leaders Nazis

It's one thing to have such things forced upon you by circumstance. It's quite another thing to actively create the circumstance, especially when the majority of people who would wind up in them are basically ordinary people trying to get by.

And Roosevelt and Truman had Japanese Americans thrown in concentration camps and nobody called them a "Nazi"

Comparisons have been made, and I think those are useful exercises of awareness.

The fact that there's this knee-jerk reaction that effectively short circuits rational analysis of historical fact is detrimental to learning from history. Nazis, "The Greatest Generation," rank and file Japanese soldiery -- all of the above are human beings placed in particular situations. We need to learn from history to prevent such circumstances from happening again, and be able to think clearly about the same social, economic, and psychological mechanisms at play in today's world.

There are no demons in history. There are only human beings and natural circumstances. The only demons in history are those we imagine, as our minds still inhabit a "demon filled world." This is part of what we refer to as "waking up from history."
Ouch. If ever there was a good reason to change your name...
OneVest Co-Founder Criticizes Title III Equity Crowdfunding in Open Letter
Wow.

I took 6.001 as an undergrad at MIT. It changed my view of software forever.

Years later, I now spend most of my time training programmers at hi-tech companies in Python. The ideas that I got from 6.001 are pervasive in my training, and are fundamental (I think) for programmers to understand if they want to do their jobs well.

Given that I teach tons of Python, you might think that I'm happy that they switched to Python as the language of instruction. That's not the case; I think that Lisp offers more options for thinking about programming in different ways.

One of the great things about 6.001 was that it didn't try to teach you how to program for a job. It taught you how to think like a programmer, so that you could easily learn any language or technology they threw at you.

Oh, well.
Well, each of those things created new unforeseen problems, such as cyber-crime (and, I believe, a decline of quality in journalism). On the other hand, none of them actually presented the possibility of direct physical harm, which might occur with failure in autonomous vehicles. And which is something people are wary about.

In my own opinion, being a passenger in a self-driving vehicle wouldn't be riskier than being a passenger in a normal vehicle. On the contrary, I think it's safer. But there's the issue of how human drivers might behave or be forced to behave once self-driving cars become widespread.

What if human drivers' become more trusting of other cars' behavior and start paying less attention? Human drivers might become involved in worse crashes between themselves.

What if there's an adverse selection effect? If the public is convinced that self-driving cars are safer for individual passengers, then the most risk-averse drivers might be more likely to join in, leaving less risk-averse (and prone to accident) drivers on the road.

How would human drivers interact with platoons? What if a human driver is stuck in a suddenly decelerating platoon? Would he panic and swerve? Would he crash?

My point is that there might be all kinds of unforeseen consequences. Maybe good, maybe bad. That's reason why I'm not particularly enthusiastic about self-driving cars (or anything else for that matter): we'll only know whether it's good or bad in hindsight.
Thanks, but I was hoping for the long version :)
How are rel=noreferrer and rel=noopener equivalent in Firefox?
"Never touch a running system."

Complexity kills!
Did you finish cryptopals?

cryptopals.com
In both those cases, there should be no problem with letting the person's attorney know what this is about. If it's a clearance investigation, it's a no brainer. The government has no problem leaving voice mail in Peter's mailbox saying "we're trying to reach Paul because Bob's applied for a security clearance." So this kind of secretiveness is unnecessary.

If it's an ongoing investigation, having the lawyer there is a GOOD THING, because it becomes the lawyer's job to keep his client aware of the repercussions of doing anything to sabotage the investigation.
Ok, it's not a long shot any more, Trump's the winner now that Kasich has dropped out.

This is going to be an interesting election. I predict half the Democrat voters are going to vote for Trump, and half the Republican voters are going to vote for Hillary.

It'd be really interesting if Bernie changed his mind and decided to run as an independent. With so many people hating both Trump and Hillary, Bernie could actually win that one, maybe.
It's not hard for the language, but we don't have the proper framework yet. Because such a framework is quite a task.