skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except in some very particular situations (maybe you're looking for investors in your coffee roastery tech startup), getting coffee is a means to an end, the "end" being the same thing as the "ask" that DelaneyM is referring to.

"Hi $name, interested in grabbing coffee?" buries the "ask" until during the coffee chat.

It can be tough to do, but I think a lot of very busy people would actually appreciate you just coming out and asking for what you want, even in the first sentence.
When I went back to a full time job after running a company for 3 years I felt like I was on vacation. I had 2 small kids and a steady job with paid time off and a 40 hour work week...pretty much feels like vacation by comparison.

Wrote up the full story (it's long) if you are interested though. http://www.brightball.com/articles/what-exactly-happened-to-...
Congratulations! Kudos on getting the website up.

I RSVP'd, but can you guess under who?
Not sure if something has changed since you left this comment, but the astrological / alchemical symbols at the top of the page are links directly to the sun and each of the planets.
Humans, we like to build fences.
Without getting too political, I'd like to point out that the purpose of the Black Lives Matters movement is to address differences between the life the average black person is afforded vs. that of a non-minority person (ie. white).

There's a strong correlation between black and being poor, and perhaps the solution is not to create a divide by race, but rather by socioeconomic status. A lot of problems we have today, faced both by black people and poor people alike, can be solved by addressing the problems in poor neighbourhoods.

Of course that is not to say all black people are poor, that would be ridiculous. But in the mind of someone who thinks in a certain way, because a person is black it means that they are in fact more likely to be from a poorer family, may have received lesser education, etc. So I think socioeconomic status is a much more fair and less divisive way grouping people.

"All lives matter" is certainly reactionary, but I think there's truth to the idea the BLM isn't the correct way to solve the problem.
It doesn't matter.

If you know the reporting rate and the unreported rate, and you know the reported recidivism rate, a naïve scaling will get you close to the "real" recidivism rate.
I specifically add things to my products that might trigger some ladies on black twitter so that it goes viral.

I thought everyone was doing this.
Stallman calls it "GNU/kWindows".
Code Like a Girl: Dinah Davis on Amplifying Women’s Voices
Good. Let's all do this, please.
Yes I have. I don't know much about it though. In my imagination I see crates of Cybersyn machines being shuttled away for good measure like the Ark of the Covenant into that warehouse. I can see them thinking, "ah, let's revisit this in, say, a century or two".

It is high time these kinds of projects were revisited, not as an attempt to provide a new economic system per se as some envisioned in the past, but to change central government.

As you probably already know many governments in the West are approaching half of the real economy. Things are starting to get weird, which is normal when the territory has evolved beyond the map. I think there shall be a phase change sooner rather than later in how government is managed. I mean a deep structural change in how administration works and not an ideological one.

The question is not so much how and why, since there are lots of productive lines of inquiry and the value proposition is endless, but what must be done to accomplish political decision making moving from a network of men to one partly/wholly composed of machines making autonomous decisions?

My guess is that governance does not require an AGI. It is already a slow moving narrow AI that lives partly in the legal realm and partly in the human realm. I suspect the technology to do this existed decades ago and the real reason the idea has not been developed is inertia. That and it's slightly scary. It is like fiddling with the boot sector! Better recreate a backup...
I'm 57 and a working developer. In school,
It was a beautiful feeling if your card deck compiled, ran, didn't run out of CPU time, and produced the correct print out, the very first time.
Wow who knew being a flying fish was such a pain.
As someone who writes fiction, I respectfully disagree. Art, music and other forms of so called entertainment often elevate the mind and spirit, help people cope with emotional issues and accomplish a great deal more than pissing the night away.

Video games and other forms of entertainment are generally going to have more value for developing people than your typical game of gambling.

It has nothing to do with me personally disliking it. It has to do with me being concerned that this solution doesn't add real value to the system to help people eat nutritious food, breathe clean air and so on.

I think entertainment has real value for the human species. But not all entertainment is equally valuable.
Sounds like you were NOT running a business, but the business you built was running you. In other words, you created a job for yourself, rather then a business.
If you're into this, you might also like:

Inviting Disaster: Lessons From the Edge of Technology:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0066620821
It might have been coerced on their great grandparents. Everyone living was born into a mostly Christian population.

They presumably would react to your assertion that they should go back to selected beliefs of their ancestors much the same way that you would react if someone demanded that you do the same.
Since when is 10 point text "small"? I wonder what device you are viewing it on and what its scale system is.

This might explain why I've occasionally started to see articles formatted with body text that is ungodly huge, so I have to zoom out to get enough text on the page to read comfortably. I don't know who thinks 20 point body text is a good idea, but perhaps it's because they are using a similar browser setup.
Hello World for the Next Generation
Every sentence here is inaccurate, so you might want to check your sources.

1) (It's GNOME in upper case)

2) gtk+ was not "taken over" by a bunch of GNOME developers. gtk+ always was largely shouldered by the GNOME project. Those that show up to play are at an advantage.

3) Switching to gtk+ 3.x was hard precisely due to the longevity of gtk+ 2.x. It managed to stick around for 10 years and exposed all private structures in public API. So people got used to doing bad things that following PIMPL helps avoid. So they did, making the transition harder.

4) Firefox's has very little incentive to change a working code-base. The ultimate incentive was HiDPI and Wayland support. Thing's that couldn't just be shoe-horned into gtk+ 2.x.

5) GIMP is not "still thinking about it". The sad state is that GIMP is being mostly worked on by one person (with some occasional help). It's a very large code-base which was very entrenched in gtk+ 2'isms that we moved away from (like public structure access). There is a nightly flatpak for 3.x if you'd like to test it and file bugs.
I think that it's just a catchy phrase, especially considering the source.

I can't really see Microsoft really trying to go up against Apple these days. For both of them, Google is a way bigger adversary.
OP asked for anecdotal advice anyway. Curious, what's the "conventional" advice in this situation?
That would be one of the worst reasons to get locked out of the world's most populous market...
I had also not heard of this. The English article makes it sound like it's going to take 60 years to invent a way to decommission the reactor, but the more detailed German article on the same topic says

> Erst nach einer weiteren Abklingzeit von mindestens 60 Jahren soll der AVR-Behälter schließlich von Robotern zerlegt werden und in ein Endlager überführt werden.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_(J%C3%BClich)#R.C3.BCckbau...

'not until after a further decay period of at least 60 years will the AVR vessel finally be taken apart by robots and transported to a final disposal location'

So it seems that the 60 year period isn't specifically to allow for the invention of a decommissioning technique for this site, but primarily to allow the radiation levels inside to diminish.

It still sounds like a very extreme situation.
Step one: have genes correlated with the type of success you're looking for. As far as I'm aware, you have a margin of 10-20% worth of difference you might be able to make once the kid is born.
Of course, but it's about control over your chances of winning big
My lightweight solution is to append `&& tput bel` to long-running commands, to ring the terminal bell upon completion :) Requires sound of course, but it's reasonably easy to remember and quick to type. eg. try `sleep 5 && tput bel`

I've also used a similar cheap hack to listen to web traffic... Just write a bell character to your server log when something interesting happens, then `tail -f` the log file for live data sonification!
Yes and no. You could walk around downtown out to Ela beach without too much trouble as long as you don't look well off. Once outside that area, you need a crew.

When my colleagues and I were traveling there, we would play a game: What is the worst story in the paper during your trip?

I think the winner was a riot over cabbages that resulted in multiple fatalities. Also saw stories of people robbed in the lobby of the police station.

What is crazy is that PNG was a member of RAMSI, an organization that was tasked with keeping order in the Solomon Islands.
For the non-Korean speakers, that is just the English word hangulized with Korean characters (Seu-no-oo).
Cool stuff - I like when some real engineering hits HN and it's good to see the analysis feeding upstream to help improve the garbage collector in golang -- very win-win.
> The bigger the datasets, the better results you have

Wouldn't you agree that the ability to achieve relatively good results with relatively small datasets is one of the main reasons for the current ML boom?

> it's a trivial thing for AI to absorb huge amounts of information

Of course, I agree on that. But I also note that "traditional" (non-ML) algorithms can digest big data too, so I don't see that ability as the defining characteristic of the current wave of ML-related technologies.
Kind of weirdly disingenuous that the article says "the workers" did this and "the workers" did that. What, was management completely absent for a period of months, and a bunch of yokels were just randomly flipping switches?

If "a worker" was overriding a failsafe, it's because right behind him a supervisor was telling him they had to get the plant back online, or else he'd be fired.
The person I replied to basically implied that working as an employee is falling prey to some sort of "scam". This is not a widely held view.

I understand what they are getting at, and I'm actually sympathetic to the view point. But the reality is much more nuanced.

Edit: To more explicitly answer your question, I would say that being self-employed is more difficult and demanding than working for someone else. Thus for many people it makes more sense to be an employee.
This might be useful to me.

What is the app in the foreground, in the screenshot at the bottom? Looks like a multi-tabbed text editor?
Do you actually believe that as a non-founding employee you'll be able to make the difference between the company delivering "a life changing amount of money" to employees instead of the far more common outcome?

I guess the same type of mind that believes meritocracy really exists could believe such a thing...
Step two: create experiences that allow people to become successful.
There is still a chain for history, or used to be thirty years ago, including a foreign language, philosophy, economics, literature, political science, and usually visual arts. That undergraduate history is more accessible than, say, quantum computing, or that professors might let you into a graduate level history class with no prior courses, does not (or at least should not) mean that you are gaining everything that can be had from such a course compared to someone with the full background.
There is an active home brew computer / cpu scene that demonstrates how to accomplish this cheaply. No need to spend anywhere near what this megaprocessor costs
This reminds me of the cleaning person who cleaned up a modern art piece that was all about the stains: http://m.dw.com/en/cleaning-lady-destroys-contemporary-sculp...
> I'm less interested in the question of "can computers be conscious?", and more interested in "what is consciousness". I believe taking the direction of the first question leads to a dead end, because even /if/ you build a consciousness computer, you still wouldn't have a way to prove it.

I agree with you, but I don't think the first question is a dead end... suppose you devise and install a computer chip that can replace a tiny portion of your brain by interfacing with neurons around it, and over time it learns to perform the same function as the piece of brain tissue it replaced. If you think this is physically possible (even if not feasible with current technology), then by extension, over a long enough period of time you could replace every bit of biological nervous tissue with synthetic components. Assuming the synthetic components were able to wholly serve the same functions as the biological ones that they replaced, you would have a computer which was conscious, and you would have an inside perspective on it. :)

On the other hand, in theory it might be possible to do that complete nervous system replacement without actually understanding what consciousness is. So I agree that "what is consciousness?" is still a more interesting question. I found The Ego Tunnel[0] to be a good jumping off point for defining consciousness.

At this point I think the problem of consciousness is one of scope: any description of consciousness that fits into the the mental capacity allocated to our intuition will lack explanations for aspects of our conscious experience that we can easily identify with a few moments of introspection, and any more comprehensive description of consciousness will exceed our ability to intuitively grasp as a whole. I don't think this is a fundamental limitation; I think it's just a reflection of how much base knowledge is necessary to build up adequate intuitions because of the complexity of the system.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0097DHVGW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
Very anecdotally, this was something that I noticed not just in SF, but also LA. The marked difference for me as a Londoner between the huge homelessness problem we have in London and what I saw in SF/LA was the levels of mental illness coupled with dehumanising levels of despair that I saw in the homeless populations of SF/LA.

Does anyone have a good idea of why SF/LA (the US in general?) exhibited this characteristic of homelessness more markedly than in London (where I almost never see the sort of extremely obvious health issues that I saw in SF/LA every time I've been there)? Is it because of the US healthcare system, perhaps?

Incidentally, there is a good episode of the BBC's "The Inquiry" which asks about one route of dealing with this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03rh5my
Where are you finding you're rewriting the most code? Is it around the interface or data structures at use inside the code? Or something else entirely?

I find getting the data and data structures correct leads to the simplest implementation -- and chipping away at the code as you go along trying to make it simpler and faster is usually how a solution evolves.

I don't know if anyone writes the perfect implementation of anything complex the first time -- you have to work at it.
What are the most misleading alternate definitions in taught mathematics?
> They're both ideas, but we mean something very different.

are you sure about that?. words are a social convention adopted to provide a vehicle for transferring meanings from one mind to another. what are the meanings underlying the words though? why do you agree that the conventional word "idea" can be used to signify both meanings, but then claim that the meaning is somehow very different.
Diabetes sniffer dogs?
Lead UX/UI Designer for ROSS Intelligence (YC S15)
Do you have a citation?
Curious how you could solve that. I guess you would need to time stamp the coordinates. Then if you had data on how each region has moved you could calculate new coordinates over time. Sounds painful.
I did this about a year ago after being self-employed for about 6 years. One of the biggest reasons was actually the social aspects of working; I rarely worked with other people, or if I did, not for long.

There are plenty of downsides to going back to being an employee, though. I wouldn't do it if it weren't with the right people. At the time, I took a pay cut to do it, but it worked out and I'm happy with my decision, because I got what I wanted: to work with great people and build relationships with them. And the reduced stress from not having to hustle all the time has been good.

Since you're self-employed, take your time and really find an employer that suits you. You have a lot of leverage in negotiations since you know you don't _need_ any given job you interview for.

I've gone through more than one cycle before of building up a set of clients from scratch, so I know that I can always go back to freelancing if I want to. I wouldn't be too worried about getting stuck as an employee unless you let your skills stagnate.
Every Business I Have Started That Failed
My solution would be for the US to purchase Kiribati and relocate the citizens to the Texas coast.

The EEZ would then be turned into a conversation zone. The USN would use it as an MOA to keep out the tuna fleets.

Once Kiribati is under water, those EEZs would turn into international waters. It has been a few years, but IIRC there isn't much impingement of other nations' EEZs on that of Kiribati.
> Music is probably one of the places where math is used the least.

As a musician, I disagree with this rather strongly. Math underpins music in pretty much every aspect. Even a beginner musician will end up needing to know basic fractional arithmetic (since note lengths are represented as fractions or multiples of a "beat" length, and said "beat" is in turn usually notated as a fraction of a minute). So if you can read music even at a basic level, you're using math constantly, even if it's notated using dots and stems instead of (or in addition to) numbers.

This isn't even going into some more advanced topics of music theory, like the wavelength ratios between notes in a scale/chord, the difference between "just" and "tempered" tuning, how resonance works and why some notes on some instruments resonate differently than other notes on other instruments, etc.
Tangentially, but I love the aesthetics of having lot of books on shelves, but now that's clearly obsolete with digital libraries. In the future, digital e-books may be superior to traditional books in all the way it matters, even.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyshine

Apparently until that reactor no one realized the radiation can reflect off the air and reach the surroundings.
Another (lengthy!) take on the same topic by Scott Alexander: http://squid314.livejournal.com/346391.html
Their name for themselves is I-Kiribati and pronounced with the 'tee' sound.
Jesus imagine if your job was to code dog ears to photos? That would be so humiliating.

Now imagine your job was to COPY the feature from a SUCCESSFUL app? SO much worse!
How is VLC a shadow of what it used to be? I'm not trying to be argumentative, genuinely curious.
Interesting article. I don't know that I'd take too much to heart given some of the obvious caveats the author has been nice enough to make explicit, but it sounds like I'd be hard pressed to argue the suggestions contained within.

For the tl;dr crowd:

- written by a physician

- people often think that heart disease is controllable by our actions whereas they feel that cancer is not

- > people can’t change many risk factors of heart disease like age, race and family genetics

- > A more recent study published in Nature argues that there is a lot we can do. [about cancer]

- > Using sophisticated modeling techniques, the researchers argued that less than 30 percent of the lifetime risk of getting cancer was because of intrinsic risk factors, or the “bad luck.”

- > [another study] identified four domains that are often noted to be related to disease prevention: smoking, drinking, obesity and exercise

- if you limit that stuff, and not meaning 0 smoking, but "having quit within the last 5 years", no more than 1 drink a day (women) or 2 drinks a day (men), your BMI is >= 18.5 and <= 27.5 (BMI is such a shit and antiquated metric, IMO, incidentally), and perform 150mins/wk moderate intensity excercise or 75mins/wk vigorous intensity exercise, then you're in the low risk group. so the barrier to entry is not super high.

HOWever:

> No study is perfect, and this is no exception. These cohorts are overwhelmingly white and consist of health professionals, who are not necessarily like the population at large. But the checks against the national data showed that if anything, these results might be underestimating how much cancer is preventable by healthy behaviors.

[...]

Optimistic conclusion, for a skeptical cheapskate like myself,

> As we talk about cancer “moonshots” that will most likely cost billions of dollars and might not achieve results, it’s worth considering that — as in many cases — prevention is not only the cheapest course, but also the most effective.

Hard to fault this article. I'm glad you posted it, thank you.
> for many people it makes more sense to be an employee.

Not for me though. I wonder if we could make a poll among people who have tried both.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Estimates_o... There are three citations attached to the first sentence in this paragraph.

Also take a look at the caveats section there though. It's technically possible that we're doing something which we could stop doing and vastly improve IQ; however once that became standard, the inheritance correlation would be higher, not lower.

Measuring the heritability of IQ-type intelligence is inherently difficult; but outside of sociology departments, there is effective consensus that the correlation is at least half.

Also, I would conjecture that there's a publication bias in favour of finding that nurture tops nature; because it is what people want to be true. This is a special concern in publications from after rightfully-unpopular negative eugenics programmes.
Probably true; remember the controversy about the skin lightening filter? That would be a default filter in Asia where fair skin is aesthetically considered more beautiful.
This is nearly a year old. However it really is funny to consider that a country can tax such an abundant thing as the sun.
There's a huge difference between brilliance and success, however. Brilliant people often have tragic flaws, which render them ultimate failures; and make them fabulously unhappy.
> But, the only reason they can't do this is "contracts"?

You make it sound like the contracts aren't a real barrier. If they break their contracts, they could face millions, nay, billions in fines, fees, and settlements from being sued by everyone they had a contract with.

> they could today stop signing these "old media" contracts

They have. But contracts for broadcasting rights are usually 10 year deals. And up until recently (2010-ish) they were usually just automatically renewed. So you're looking at old media sticking around until 2020-ish. By then, most companies will have moved on from the old way of doing things completely.