skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That the income distribution is shrinking in the middle distribution of the population of the U.S. is a critical data trend with a number of unpleasant implications.

From an ideological perspective, it damages the traditional worship of hard work and the idealization of middle class life. Idealistic visions (as reflected from the movies, the shows, the social policy of the era around the middle of the 20th century pretty much up until the end of it) showed the suburban life, the housewife, the house, the two car garage. It's easy to be politically complacent, knowing you're in the country that's number one, when those things are what you can realistically strive for. Laissez-faire capitalism was always sold as being more fair than the evil 'socialist' Europe - and worse - that was further east. Because even when you were low, you could feel comfortable about bettering your lot ("my grandfather came here with nothing..."). Now the stats are pointing away from that reality.

Economically it's pretty iffy, given that 80+% of the American GDP is the services sector, which has a large component of dependency on spending power. Retail alone is what, 5-6% of GDP, and then you have entertainment, real estate, and much else that depends on money being spent by people not on the very top.

Real estate's an interesting one. Another piece of the Dream that made us the greatest country, as we were told. That's another trend that the current generation faces that was not faced in the 1950's: the ratio of median income to median housing costs.

A lot of us here are in IT (or Law or other professions that I have noticed), and in many ways we're very lucky, even if we did work hard to get to where we are, since we're further up the curve and don't face the same exposure. In the U.S. health care costs and educational costs have also gone up well above the income increases, adding further to the discontentment.

Meanwhile, the political world has gone mad. We're now back to identity politics, with demagogues on both sides of the spectrum. Any explanation about the economic underlying conditions? Nope, instead we talk about immigrants, or X racial privilege, or gender/racial identity in the boardrooms, or X foreign power.

New thread suggestion: "Ask HN: Which remote island can I escape to and live comfortably and cheaply?"
Many sites have a simple requirement of "allow user to upload a jpeg, resize it to create user profile pic for the user". No need to support anything but the most common formats for this, but you need security and you need speed of resizing.
>https://www.particle.io/button 20 $

Since this was mentioned elsewhere in the thread, this is actually $49. With a little work, the $19 Photon could certainly do the same.
I'm actually building a note-taking webapp based around Markdown! I was wondering what features you found lacking or wish you had with your setup? (and if you'd like to try it out feel free to dm me)
it's obvious that computer scientists have COMPLETELY dropped the ball by not figuring out a way for anyone to write "it", "that", "which" and so on and have the IDE and language disambiguate it into what you were JUST talking about. This is stuff that my great-grandparents should have been suggesting some time after Ada Lovelace wrote about the analytical engine in 1842 or 1843. Not something I should be writing about in 2016. Yeah, okay, before always-on Internet it might make sense to have a small, unambiguous, self-contained grammar. The same is not true in 2016.

Here's how you calculate the absolute value of an integer:
-> "if it's non-negative, return it; if it's negative return its opposite".

Here's how you calculate the absolute value of an integer if you're using any programming language written in 60 years:
-> "if (argument <= 0) return argument; else return argument * -1." (or some variation)

There is literally no way to refer to "it" instead of "argument" except by changing "argument" to read "a" (or "i" or "x" or "$_" or...)

My point is that it's literally impossible to write "if (it > =0) return it; else return (it * -1)" if you've just mentioned "it" and you are there to check and correct the IDE if it's wrong. (Oh, wait, I should write "to correct the IDE if the IDE is wrong.")

I bet 90% of human languages have a way to refer to something you've JUST mentioned without repeating a word for it. (Words like it, that, etc.) I bet 0% of computer languages let you write "it" for the last thing you just referred to, even if there is literally 1 choice in the whole function, as in my absolute value example.

Ridiculous!
You aren't giving false positives any credit. False positives can be DEVASTATING. If a test has 50, 75, 90% false positive rates, as many do - you are causing much panic for nothing.

If tests were 100% reliable and a simple pinprick.. absolutely, everyone should take one when they wake up and drink their morning coffee. But with the accuracy of tests today? Not so sure.

basically take any 100% healthy person. Run 500 tests on them. They will have 5-6 major problems via a false positive result. Run more detailed invasive tests on those. Maybe you rule them out, maybe you get another false positive. You could end up going through Chemo or some other "cure" for a disease you never had, and the "cure" could end up giving you real cancer.
That's a pretty vague definition.

Houses, cars and even food expenditures can easily vary by a factor of 3-4 even within a relatively small area based on individual preferences and habits.

What is an "ample" house?

Define your terms.
What do you consider cheap? I can get a basic metabolic panel of 26 tests (lipids, glucose, CBC, electrolytes, organ functions) for around $50 as an individual. This includes drawing the blood, shipping and third part profit margins. Imagine the actual costs which are probably around $15 or so. I'm guessing a lot of these basic tests have been automated so they can be done cheaply. So I don't think costs are the main issue with the current technology. There are tests which are much more expensive but those may have manual labor involved and I don't think Theranos can make them any more cost effective.
BBC Radio 4's "In Our Time" has a great discussion about this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b077j4yv
As I understand it, there is no shortage of divers. There is a shortage of divers with the specialized knowledge and abilities he possesses.

It's more dangerous than sitting at a desk, but realistically it's not as dangerous as it sounds.
I always see comments like this, that states some data about unions and decreasing wages and rights, etc.

While I agree, I almost never see anyone going one step further and saying what can be done about it. "Call your representatives!" says many, but this is a mainly passive action that depends too much on faith in the incorruptibility of our representatives. We can continue to do this, but we need a more powerful and active direction.

With the tech bubble collapsing and people losing their jobs (especially with what's currently happening in Silicon Valley), I think maybe it is time for a dedicated union for both engineers (us) and other employees. That is, some kind of active effort designed to spearhead these principles. How can this happen? HN readers are smart; we can organize ourselves, can't we?
small by india standards?
10X faster than Storm. How? What are the tradeoffs?
How the ICIJ Unraveled the Panama Papers Data
One of my biggest digs with typical mathematical/scientific notation is that reading equations where there are a number of things that are variables and other things that are constants with all one letter isn't great. I WISH we had used SPEED_OF_LIGHT in math class.
They arw pulling a MakerBot.
What kind of other alternatives would you suggest for command-line image editing ? I tend to use it mostly for conversion, resizing and mosaic… and if there is something widespread, easy to use and faster/more flexible, I'm game. But the command-line part of the requirement is an absolute necessity :)
There are a lot of formats, some of them are better exercised than others. It's not as complete as imagemagick, but we're getting one or two formats per release lately.
"Every quarter, hedge funds and institutional investors managing more than $100 million are required by law to reveal their US long positions to the SEC. These 13f filings include only long US stock positions, ADRs, equity options and notes."

http://www.octafinance.com/13f-filings/#ixzz48YTGbIeH
As a barese, I cannot let it go: here in Bari there is a total separation between pizza and focaccia. I know in other parts of Italy the difference is smoothered, but

A pizza is only made in pizzeria, is baked directly into the wood stove, over the marble

A focaccia is only made in panificio, is baked into a baking tray

Btw a focaccia barese is a total specific thing (always with oil, olive, and tomato pieces) it was a shock to know this thing does not exist outiside my city
I agree with your comment. Beyond the false premise, I think that this fivethirtyeight piece is extremely dangerous because it seems to prefer shocking headlines over actually depth. i.e. "We Don’t Need More Blood Tests" and the infographic "How accurate tests can be mostly wrong."
Maybe, maybe not. For example the treatments for prostate cancer can be worse than not treating early state elevated PSAs.

Being told you have AIDs, then 24h later being told "just kidding false positive"... do you think that has no consequences on your life?
I know this is limited to bankruptcy practice now. But I'd love to see this evolve, and maybe even two AI lawyers fighting in court, or a Judge Judy trained AI Judge.

But humor aside, getting to the next level of an AI lawyer would mean it would need to understand more than case law, taking into consideration facts of the case and evidence. It'd be great to have and apply for underrepresented defendants who can't afford to hire an attorney (and basically everyone on death row). Almost all defendants in capital cases cannot afford their own attorneys.
How does the performance compare to the traditional stream processors?
If you don't have the ability to near-instantaneously "spike" your production to meet demand, then you have an opportunity for arbitrage. At least a time-based one.

Additionally, if you do have over-abundant capacity to pre-manufacture well above that required "spike", then you need to a) use logistics to get it there and b) foresight of knowing where you need to get it to, and how much of it.

Otherwise, you'd have to have the ability to produce any arbitrary amount of it at the desired location when the need requires. By it, I generally mean all products.
That's quite a blast from the past! I was totally into Digital Blasphemy wallpapers back in 90's, didn't know there are still new ones being created.
Popular torrent client turns users into Litecoin miners
Tesla moving away from SDK App mirroring from iPhones to center consoles instead
Yeah, the problem with outlawing "retval" in particular is that there's no good variable name in this situation:

int sum(Collection<Integer> c)
{
int retval = 0;
for(int i = 0; i < c.size(); i++){
retval += c.get(i);
}
return retval;
}

What the hell should I call retval? If I call it sum, that's redundant with the method name. Also, while it might work in Java, it would be more dangerous in a language like Ruby where the equivalent code:

def sum(c)
sum = 0
c.each do |e| retval += e end
sum
end

would, due to lexical scoping, make it impossible to call the method recursively.
it's always funny to me when people talk about the Norman Conquest with respect to Romance Languages... the Normans were Vikings, Germanic. In terms of Romantic influences, it is the Normans who were conquested by Latinate language :)
Best I ever did was $2/word from ESPN the Magazine.
Thank you - missed that. The $125,000 line still doesn't make sense though, even in flyover country (where I live). That's barely enough to buy a 2nd/3rd tier home in a strong school district where I live. Would think that easy access to good schools and good housing are table-stakes for being "upper class".
Ok, we changed the URL to that from http://www.smh.com.au/technology/innovation/professor-reveal....
I dont agree, its backed by everyone that participates. This is just FUD that is propagated by those with vested interests for preserving the status quo.

A currency policy that is constantly being manipulated and a money supply that is constantly tinkered with(quantitative easing?) is unlikely to keep the trust of many when there are alternatives.
One of the cofounders here. We're in C++ - no 15-20% cost on JVM. Plus we've made a lot of optimizations on our communication and networking including libevent.
If you need that much information about a variable, I would expect, in general, that the context it lives in is doing waaaay too much and should be broken up.
> Sad to say, there are many areas of the country where living on $125,000 still definitely sucks.

Only by truly decadent standards could an income of $125,000 be said to "definitely suck". $125k is 2.4x median income and puts you in the 97th percentile of all American workers.
But why would greed lead to this? Why make this change at all?
I wish everyone would date documents.
Why Chatbots will transform the world faster than Apps ever could
Something tells me law firms are probably not going to pass along the cost savings of this automation to their clients...
This is verry funny!! http://nodejsreactions.tumblr.com
You've missed the other side of the equation, which is: what if there is no cure for the 27% with the supposed condition? What help has been provided then?

What if there are some recommended follow-up treatments, but they are all expensive and risky, with the possibility of terrible complications?

This is how over-diagnosis actually leads to worse outcomes on a population scale. Medicine is often viewed as this big near-perfect algorithm where information is always enabling. In fact, too much information can be counterproductive for a patient and doctor.
Software engineering Code of Ethics [pdf]
So... is that system not working?
> Is that a problem in practice in Python?

> I prefer being able to tell if something is a collection, and which core type of collection, at a glance (barring refs).

Not really a problem, but if you're writing more than a one-off script, such as a module you plan on sharing, it may be common that you get a mixture of concrete types coming in depending on the app and platform. I think in practice, it's actually beneficial to assume you do not know the core type of collection (if your operations will work with many/all of them).

For example, a range object or generator in Python 3, but a list in Python 2. And then someone else comes along and uses your modules with sets.

So with "fruits" (or something like "fruit_iter" for anyone who disagrees with plural naming), you know that you can safely iterate through it. But you may not be able to do random access, or reassignment of elements. There might be times when this matters, in which case you'd want to enforce a specific type.

The only thing I do not like about this is that in Python strings are also iterables. So the difference between passing "Apple" and ["apple"] can be quite large, and yet your program will iterate through "a", "p", "p", "l", "e" with no complaints. The worst experience I've had with this was working with a web API that would return either an array of strings, or only a string if there was one result (not a 1-element array), or a dictionary of objects if there were many results. 99% percent of the time it returned the array of string, and since strings and dictionaries are iterable, it took me a while to notice the bug.

I ought to learn Perl, because that's pretty cool. You're right that that example is terrible to read, haha, but I'm sure there are scenarios where it's helpful.
CryptoBin – The Ultimate Secure Pastebin
i think it's pretty typical for people to appraise their own relative income level lower than it actually is.
Please don't post snarky 'yet another' dismissals in response to new work. We're trying for more thoughtful discourse than that here. It's fine, of course, to ask what's new or how something differs from another instance in its class.

Also, please don't use all caps for emphasis. That's in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Philly cops used surveillance van marked 'Google Maps'
Certainly an impressive result, and may have some practical application for easing the burden of repeatedly answering the same question asked in different ways. I'm not sure I would call this passing the Turing test though. The picture at the top of the original article[1] is very informative. The bot does a passable job of answering the initial question, but it seems like a canned response and when the student asks for a more in-depth explanation, a different human TA had to step in and take over. Then a couple other students in the same thread actually post that they have suspicions whether or not "Jill" is a real person.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/05/1... (Credit to exodust for posting it in a different comment)
I found the following graph from the same pew research pretty interesting.

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2016/05/ST_2016.05.12_m...

Essentially, the middle class shrank from 55% of the population in 2000 to 51% of the population in 2014.

However, the upper class absorbed 3% (3/4th) of the shrinking middle class growing from 17% to 20% of the population, while the lower class absorbed only 1% (1/4th) of the shrinking middle class.

Having said that, you will not hear that 3/4th of the middle have disappeared and become upper class, you will only hear 4% of middle class has disappeared subtly implying everyone has become lower class.
Ask HN: Will e-ink laptops be a thing soon, or ever?
I'm a writer by night and a programmer by day. I have to stare at bright LCD all day for work because I don't have a choice right now, but when I'm writing, an e-Ink display would be more than enough, and much, much easier on my eyes.

My dream would be something with a Mac keyboard, a 13-inch e-ink display like a kindle, a simple word processor (rich text only, no need for MS word or anything fancy), days of battery power, light weight, and a simple means of transferring snippets of text and document files from my main machine or phone to the tablet. I would probably do research on a "real" computer then copy and paste snippets to the word processor machine as needed.

Internet connectivity for basic email and file transfer would be nice, but I can save the facebooking and the gaming for my main computer.

Anyone else thinks this is a good idea?
Interesting, my probably incorrect assumptions are that the semantic web was largely 2000s era hype that didn't really take off. What are Vivs, Google and Apples semantic web offerings? I guess you are referring to the knowledge graph API from Google? Also what's an ipfs?
Gr8 point. Also, cost of living is not adjusted for in federal taxes especially if one falls into the standard deduction. Living in the bay area as a renter on 125K, you probably end of paying about 20K in Federal taxes and 30K in rent.
What other reason could there be?

There is one, big, obvious government-shaped reason.
> The manager will be able to walk around a virtual office as they like (perhaps in 'mute' mode where you don't see or hear them!)

Nothing like working in a panopticon [1]!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
How Apple’s $1B investment in Didi fits into its vision
>If a test has 50, 75, 90% false positive rates, as many do

What tests are you referring to? I can't find a reference but I highly doubt the FDA would approve of many tests with that high of false-positive rates.
I had no problem with it, gpg --edit-key + keytocard worked flawlessly.
The podcast: https://serialpodcast.org/season-two/artwork
I find it very hard to believe that was a a base salary. (Of course, I could be wrong.)

Of course it's possible to make a lot more than that! Just not as a salary. It would be interesting to know the details of their package. Also, how come you happened to know?
dsa

pppppp
Mapbox Streets redesign
How does the NN encode the fact that when you eat "with" a fork, the word "with" isn't the same sort of "with" as eating something "with" anchovies.

By looking at the noun in the NP embedded in the PP rather than the preposition. Whether this actually happens depends on various factors:

- In some dependency annotation schemes it's actually the head of the NP that attaches to the head with the prepositional phrase relation. Though this is uncommon, since typically the preposition is the direct dependent of the head.

- In some transition systems, attachment of a dependent is done when all its dependents are attached. So, at the moment the preposition is attached to a head, you already know what the preposition governs.

- In some transition systems, previously-made attachments can be changed (e.g. when you encounter a noun in a PP which suggests a different attachment).

- You might already look ahead in the buffer, either by having a small number of buffer positions as the input of the NN or by forming a representation of the current buffer using an RNN.

tl;dr NN can definitely learn such things, but you may have to help a bit by picking the right transition system or classifier inputs.
Here's some benchmark:

Word count of 1.13B messages
- Storm: ~16K QPS/node, 100ms per event (P999)
- Spark Streaming: 100K QPS/node, 1s batch window
- Concord: 500K QPS/node, 10ms per event (P999)

Server log processing (29G server log, ~260M msgs)
7 different computations including deduplication, counting, pattern matching, windowing...
4 nodes, 8 vCPU, 32GB RAM each
Concord: 1M – 1.8M QPS / cluster
Spark Streaming: 72K – 2M QPS / cluster

Concord generally performed in the consistent range of 1-1.8M QPS for whereas Spark's throughput varied differently based on window sliding / amount of internal shared state.
> Most names should be Teutonic, following the spirit of languages like Norwegian, rather than the elliptical vagueness of Romance languages like English. Norwegian has more words like tannlege (literally "tooth doctor") and sykehus (literally "sick house"), and fewer words like dentist and hospital (which don't break down into other English words, and are thus confusing unless you already know their meaning).

Not only is this vaguely racist; it's also wrong, which is worse.

- English is, in fact, a Germanic language.

- Using more specific words (and English has lots of words) is the opposite of vagueness. A "sick house" could be a house that contains sick people, a house that is sick itself (rotten beams?), a noble family ("house") whose fortunes have turned, etc. A "hospital" is, unambiguously, a facility where the sick are given professional care. Of course, in a different timeline "sickhouse" could have been the word for "hospital", but then it would have been a word of its own, taking up the same amount of space in your mental dictionary as "hospital" does.

- Romance languages are, arguably, less vague even in their grammar. You know that thing where you just jam two words together and call it a day? You see very little of that in Romance languages. Instead, you put a preposition in there, which forces you to be more specific about the exact way in which the two things are related.

- Of course, a "Teutonic" fan would then say that this is a problem with Romance language, and the ability to jam words together is what makes a language truly rich. (Because it's easier to form new words? In which case, see item 2.) And sure, it's ok to have preferences. But if you're going to be a Grammar Nazi, or a literal Nazi, you better have a clue what you're talking about.