skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The best we can hope for is to hear evidence from both sides, and come to our own conclusion.

I don't think the principle of evidence-based decision-making applies to most social situations. For one, there usually is no evidence. With the Mayer situation, while everyone might agree that the turnstiles are no longer there, we have no video footage or recorded conversations to examine. So in a real sense, narratives and hearsay are all we have. For another, we care about other people's opinions. Like with online reviews, people find value even in reviews that don't give any explanations, or for food product reviews that amount to nothing more than, "Five stars, because it tastes good."

If someone makes an accusatory statement about another person, I agree that there's definitely a burden of proof. But Core1024's comment doesn't seem to me to be accusatory or an attempt to frame Mayer as a selfish person. I think the comment reframes Mayer's actions as being motivated by efficiency as opposed to empathy, which I think is a much more neutral view.

> Can you provide an example where one perspective on a person is correct (or more correct), another perspective on that person is incorrect (or less correct), and the relative correctness is not based on objective truth or an appeal to moral authority?

Any interpretation you have of a social situation. Any opinion you have of your work environment or social circle. Your beliefs about what defines a certain culture. We understand intellectually that these are all opinions and that opinions are subjective, but there's no sense in which we would ever behave as if our beliefs are not true. Otherwise why would we believe them in the first place? I think it's disingenuous to look for objectivity in social interpretations. And anyway this isn't a criminal trial, or something like that. It's pure gossip.
Are we supposed to ignore that the media is 100% unified in stopping Trump from becoming president? I'm against Trump (who I believe to be a fascist and psychologically unstable) but I'm not going to pretend that it is honest to say that Trump literally asked Russia to hack Hillary's emails. I watched the entire press conference btw. If the election pitted Sanders against Bush the media would not hesitate to be this dishonest when attacking Sanders, it just so happens that by far the biggest outsider this year happens to be the biggest asshole too.
Harris's point is that moral accountability lies solely with the murderers, not the cartoonists. The same goes for your examples. You don't blame the person trying to vote. Yes, there are practical expectations (this is why I use a pseudonym when criticizing certain ideas), but saying, "What did you expect?" is an indictment of the group doing the harm, not the provocateur.
What does this even prove an employee is able to do? Read other people's work?

It would seem so. That, and a willingness to say and do whatever it takes to sit with the "big boys."
Right, we've hosted you for a few tech talks (I'm that Australian guy who MCs).

Email me on ... uh ... wednesday, maybe? We could get you to visit to check the buildpack work we did last week.
Well, that makes more sense. I honestly never thought about who filed, even in my parents' divorce.
Eh, I don't think so. Civil Liberties over Family Values and all that.
Interesting that this fails, since removing one element was an example they considered. Maybe they should include the length of the lists as "magic numbers" which they then use to generate functions. For example, here they might generate the functions take_the_first_2 and remove_the_last_(4-2) as candidates.
IIBM Institute of Business Management
Previous discussion of the IEEE survey: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12177761

This submission is just the first link from that article that links to the data.
Sure, but I bet your solar panels don't manufacture and maintain themselves.

To the GP's point, the total cost of ownership of a plant that makes gasoline-level fuel is going to be more about water and land than anything else.

But the efficiency of solar panels, considering their subsidies, the rare minerals used in their manufacture, their delivery and their maintenance... I'm confident it's a lot less than e.g. coal, even accounting for pollution costs, because if it really were cheaper all-around we'd be using it everywhere!
RailsConf: Skun kWorks
I imagine this would end up in a situation where most companies ask for everything, just like the privacy / permissions requests we see when installing mobile apps.

It seems like it would be a lot better than what we currently have, though. At least there would be a market for companies that aren't shitty about it.
A lot of people have been looking to attack this problem from a legal (via licensing) or economic point of view, but really, I don't see either of these being nearly as effective as a cultural approach.

There are few other industries that consider 80h+ work weeks as a badge of honour, and in ownership of our ongoing work.

Instead, we should continue to encourage:

1) Better management of work/life balance

2) Better delegation of tasks and project ownership - as a side effect, this reduces the bus factor and also likely increases the quality of a project as more ideas are mixed in

3) Make it more acceptable to simply walk away from projects. While some might see this as "selfish", if you want someone to work on it full time, you can always offer to hire them, or pick up the work yourself.
My small issue is that he attacks empirical science at its periphery (statistical muckery, mostly going on in politicized debates, pharma, etc.) rather than it's core. My experience in biology is quite similar to what he describes with people more-or-less dispassionately seeking the truth. It's a 'messier' field, so perhaps there's more room for personal pride, but I have my doubts about that. Anyone who holds hypotheses dear is a poor mathematician or biologist, just the same.

Basically, it's a basic vs. applied science critique; basic science is quite brutal, and you will be wrong very often. Usually there's little at stake regarding which conclusion you come to, so long as you're investigating something interesting. Someone trying to create effective medicine is in a very different situation.

> there’s very little fame outside of the immediate group of people you’re talking to

This is very true in most basic science fields. There are about 4 or 5 other labs in the world that are familiar with the details of my sub-field, and this is true for most of my colleagues. Mathematics is certainly not privileged in this sense.
Waffle House ordering system
> You lose some guarantees, but gain a lot, and the quality
> of a codebase will always be up to its programmers.

I started using Haskell because I thought it was cool how it could spread out work over multiple cores. I continue using it because of its guarantees, enabling me to do large refactors and be reasonably confident that the compiler has caught all errors (if I construct my types properly).

I would argue that the only true value a compiler has to offer are guarantees. A compiler that is able to do something "most of the time" isn't worth much. So, losing some guarantees may be both crucial and irrelevant, depending on which guarantees we're talking about.
This should be released, if only so that we can learn how to evade it. Perhaps it could be broken by only writing anonymously in a different language from that of your public life, for example.
A metric ton (1.1 tons) of #1 Winter Wheat ranges from $140 to $160. Israeli desal water is about $0.52 cubic meter or 260 gallons. Using the 1 ton wheat is 216,000 gallons of water, it comes to about $430 per ton using the desalinated water.

Thus, wheat imports water at $0.15 cents per cubic meter.
Yes. But on the other hand, oil is extremely convenient for storage and transporting. Perhaps we can achieve a more efficient way of converting atmospheric CO2 to oil than photosynthesis. (And while there, complex oil instead of simple sugars)
Would you mind sharing more about how this happened? Did you do the conversion or did someone else do it?
Yet you disapprove OP's statement ;)
Thanks. About the second part of my question - are you doing much the same stuff as JAGS/Stan? Like, they do a lot of work to make sure that their MCMC is validly converging to the posterior - does Bayadera make similar guarantees?

Is the speedup coming from a better implementation, or because GPUs are just way faster, or because it cuts statistical corners? If its cutting corners, are they sensible?
EU encouraged car industry to cheat, French report says
Further, the individual traffic streams in a 10 gigabit per second circuit would be encrypted at layers 4 through 7. Assuming that people are using properly implemented public /private key cryptography, of course.

Even so, the metadata of who is talking to who and traffic flow analysis is very valuable to the NSA.
Yes it would, sun rays only hit the ground once.
Noise Is a Drug and New York Is Full of Addicts
There's no reason why you can't do both: worry that another country could influence the electoral process via hacking and see the value in having this information exposed. The media and the Democrats only want people to focus on the former.
subset-sum is a computer science undergraduate homework problem -- if you have learned dynamic programming, and paid attention to the frequent reminders that software companies like to ask about dynamic programming in interviews, it is a straightforward problem to solve in 30minutes.

You may argue that undergraduate computer science is not relevant to a software engineering job, and you might be right, but it's a relatively level playing field. What would you recommend instead? Ask a candidate something more job-specific, to build something you are currently working on, that tests for familiarity with the specific domain and toolset you happen to be using?
But what about knees?
The "clubhouse" is "computer science undergraduate curriculum", which is available for free online.
So his point is that murder is bad? That seems a bit self-evident to me. Am I missing something? Why is he focussing on the cartoons?
Math PhD here. I have also had the chance to work with many bright "analytically-minded" people from other backgrounds while a management consultant.

This article is spot on, and some of the behaviors really do seem more indicative of "mathematical people" -- which I suggest really stands for "those who have done research in a 'mathematical' field." (The key being the mix of cold, hard precision in the idealized proof with the squishy, intuitive, human activity of discovering what is pretty and true -- an aspect usually lost in math education!)

Some examples I found most poignant:

- The article mentions "fluidity with definitions" and illustrates it well with the anecdote about Keith Devlin. This is a skill distinct from pure "analytical reasoning," as it requires comfort with definitions that are at once precise but also open to (frequent) change. The process of forming and changing definitions is creative and imprecise, and falls into what is sometimes called "conceptual reasoning." (A programming analog might be API design.)

- Several of the other points are tools for figuring out what is true, and for precising imprecise statements. For example the need to "teas[e] apart .. assumptions" is only natural when reading papers with Theorems that have very precise conditions .. which do not exactly hold in the case you need! In many other "analytical" contexts pre-conditions are not made as precise and arguments by analogy are considered acceptable provided the conclusion is believed. (A programming analog might be debugging when some implicit pre-conditions or invariants break.)
If that's what it takes to play with the "big boys" as you say then count me out.

I'm not interested in showing solutions for other people problems, I'm interested in finding solutions to problems I need to solve. Problems that might have never been solved before.

I want to think outside of the box and work on providing real world solutions, writing as clean code as I can, and being able to work with others through many revisions of our projects.

I don't want to work some place where I am meant to parrot back information I found from somewhere else.
Such a tool exists. I've had hlint tell me many times how to do something in a better way. At some point I had it hooked into my IDE, so it would mark improvable code in yellow.

Especially in the first year I learned a lot of new Haskell syntax and functions just from its suggestions.
The paths that are hard-coded are non-negotiably incompatible with how Cloud Foundry locks down its containers.

Other language managers don't hard-code and will allow stuff to run from a local directory.
I would add the concept that the law, unlike software, is capable of openly defying logic. Courts are permitted to dismiss case law and rule in a completely new and unforeseen direction. That's how caselaw evolves. Someone breaks the pattern and, should others agree, that new thinking is adopted as new law.

All the important case, all the ones lawyers rely upon in arguments, began with a court or judge breaking from the pattern. That's why they progress up to higher authorities. That's why they supersede previous caselaw.
> that somebody won't be able to disagree with by counter example

I really don't understand this. You give a counterexample to a theorem; you don't give one to a definition. If someone disagrees with the definition and wants to use a different one, then they are talking about a different thing (even if they want to use the same English word to refer to each of them) and their conclusions can not be compared in any meaningful way.

Imo, you can't "proceed carefully" with a definition that is open to interpretation. If you could do so safely, then you know enough about how people could interpret your definition to form a more rigorous definition.
Why almost nobody who claims to "know statistics" adds standard deviation
values to a chart with median or mean? And then "median is better to
understand the distribution!" No, it is not, it's similarly useless. Give me
the sigma.
As it says in the article:

"the artificial leaf delivers syngas, or synthesis gas, a mixture of hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide. Syngas can be burned directly, or converted into diesel or other hydrocarbon fuels."

Hydrogen and carbon dioxide are the feedstocks for the Fischer-Tropsch process, which produces conventional hydrocarbon fuel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...

In other words, H2 and CO are exactly what you want!
Do you think that the people who invented PageRank and planet scale social graphs and virtualized server hardware and advertising auctions and personalizatio models were not capable of solving computer science homework problems?
Yeah, this sentence in the middle of the article:

> The ability to turn CO2 into fuel at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline would render fossil fuels obsolete.

Doesn't actually say that this is at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline :)

Sly words.
> The satirists shows Mohammed weeping over deaths committed in his name without realizing that depicting him such is a blasphemous thing in the eyes of the very Muslims he wants to convince.

I'm sorry, but you missed the point. The surviving Charlie Hebdo staff knew that any depiction of Muhammad (even a favorable one) would provoke jihadists and Islamists. The cartoon was a message to those extremists: "We won't be cowed by your violence." If Charlie Hebdo had stopped cartooning the prophet after the attack, it would have sent a different message: Violent tactics work.

> The rich are very effective at taking the weapons aimed at them and making them ways to attack others.

I am compelled to call out this cheap rhetorical trick. The people who made these cartoons had actual weapons aimed at them. They were actually attacked, and most of them actually died.
This looks like an elaborate attempt to replicate the Königsberg bridge problem. Or at least, it should be, with its seven bridges to an island.
FWIW, my (half of) rent (split with SO) in Montreal is less than 15% of my net income. And I'm not even in software. People see the low engineer salaries around here and are generally reluctant to come, but I find the quality of life to be high and rent to be low.

Of course, there are other aspects to cost-of-living than rent, and quality of life is somewhat subjective.

EDIT: For anyone curious, here is a nifty heat map of rents in the city:

http://ici.radio-canada.ca/special/cartes/15-06_annonces-log...
Sorta like rejecting the parallel postulate?
If you look at trajectory, coal is in decline and solar panels are being installed at a great clip. The decline in coal is mostly due to natural gas, but in the US, generation from solar tripled between 2013 and 2015.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf...
In my day, we'd use moderators: put the forum/list in a mode where every new post goes through a human review first. After a while, things calm down, and you revert to the anything-goes default.

I don't know how well that would work for high-traffic forums of today, but it can scale pretty easily by employing many moderators.

http://www.netlingo.com/word/moderated-mailing-list.php
I'm guessing you haven't read the Grapes of Wrath? Any ideas why the Dust Bowl wasn't solved by market forces?

It actually was civilization ending in affected areas of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas. And the massive migration that ensued had negative impacts around the country too.
Yes, because burnable fuels are usually far more energy dense than batteries, and also as others have pointed out because this process is carbon neutral. Maybe someday we'll have significantly better batteries, but until then..
> Authors: Mohammad Asadi, Kibum Kim, Cong Liu, Aditya Venkata Addepalli, Pedram Abbasi, Poya Yasaei, Patrick Phillips, Amirhossein Behranginia, José M. Cerrato, Richard Haasch, Peter Zapol, Bijandra Kumar, Robert F. Klie, Jeremiah Abiade, Larry A. Curtiss, Amin Salehi-Khojin

I wonder how many of the scientists who made this discovery would be banned from entering the United States by Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
There's a really great Quora answer along the same lines: https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-understand-advanced...
"Nanotechnology" again. It's just surface chemistry, people. It's nice that they can do this in the lab, but as usual, the PR is excessive. "The ability to turn CO2 into fuel at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline would render fossil fuels obsolete." At least get to pilot plant stage before issuing statements like that.

Especially since UC Berkeley announced a similar breakthrough last year.[1] Wikipedia points out that artificial photosynthesis was first achieved in 1912, and some of the same claims were made back then. There are lots of artificial photosynthesis projects. One of the best was in 2011, the first "artificial leaf"[3]. It ran for 44 hours.

The usual questions apply. How efficient is this? Does the catalyst get used up, or crud up with contaminants, and if so, how fast? What limits the life of the system? What are the costs like? (Excessive catalyst cost has been a problem.)
Is this better than all the other groups doing similar work?

Artificial photosynthesis may be useful someday, but this probably isn't the big breakthrough that makes it a commercial product. That may come, though.

[1] http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/04/16/major-advance-in-artifi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_photosynthesis
[3] https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/20...
Cartage looks neat (thought Googling it took a few tries).

To me it "looks" like a buildpack, insofar as you are taking something, injecting its dependencies and producing an artifact that's ready to run by itself. If you ever whack bin/detect, bin/compile and bin/release onto it, it'll probably work well enough as a buildpack in connected environments.
If you look at the (random) chart I found here[1] some places in the US are getting 6 - 7 sun hours (hours of insolation) so 7000 / 24 = 291 watts / square meter / day. So using a figure of 100 is quite reasonable when you consider that lots of places don't get that much sun.

1. http://www.solarpanelsplus.com/industry-professionals/insola...
"UDP connections"?
UPD is connection less.
Knuth's paper gave incorrect credit to an earlier paper that did not mention the algorithm.

The tortoise and hare algorithm is so simple that it was never published as a novel result, it was never an "open question". It was just something people figured out when it came up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection#Tortoise_and_h...
>* Hard to believe this is something more than 'wannabe business PR' plus movie PR.*

By the way what is that movie's actual name? I haven't been able to find it on imdb, rotten tomatoes, etc.
Isn't what you're describing called biodiesel? Palm oil, rapeseed oil, etc.

The problem is that however much humans need electrical energy, they need food a hell of a lot more. Electrical energy has to come from the land we're not feeding ourselves from, i.e. deserts, grasslands, rooftops.
Exactly. While the parent comments correctly claim that many Middle-Eastern countries are technically capitalist, they do not provide a fair system where anyone with the capital can set up shop and start offering products/services. There is a large amount of bureaucratic red tape and often lack of property protections that scare away genuine capital.
To me, programming (on personal projects) is as fun, if not more fun, as games. I've played some great games that I was fully engrossed in, but for the most part I feel like I'd rather spend my time programming with a tangible reward (a program that does something novel) than gaming with a virtual reward (put there by the developers, they can't be entirely new things).
Sounds similar to "the theory of the leisure class".
Weekly Programming Challenge #1: Binary Search Tree
Ok, yes. Politicians live under a rock on a different planet. We all know this. :-(

It's definitely not an age thing though ... I see plenty of people in their golden years on smartphones and have quite a few facebook friends north of 80 who post frequently and clearly understand the basic tenants of the things.
The scapegoat was for collecting the sins of the group onto one thing ( animal ) and casting it out of the village. Leviticus 16:9... this is where the term comes from and way predates 1978. There is another goat which is sacrificed immediately as well.
http://biblehub.com/leviticus/16-10.htm
Prior to the use of natural gas, such a mixture was used for lighting and cooking:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gas

I guess it won't be much different than natural gas from a safety standpoint.
There are interesting paradoxes though when you mix "legalistic" and "geeky" worldviews. :P E.g. let's say somebody publishes the statement "one of the prime factors in Bill's SSN is 7"... and then someone else, independently... ;P You get the point! :)
It doesn't help that the NEDC cycle is way too generous with car makers, making people believe they can achieve a 30-50% longer range with a certain amount of petrol/diesel, when in reality they get 30% less.
Probably also worth noting that syngas is the primary input for the Haber-Bosch method used to generate the ammonia feedstock for most of our synthetic fertilizers. If you just take the CO and pump it underground then you are actually producing fertilizer for agriculture using a carbon negative process.
Building a React Native app from scratch
In the US, at least where I've lived, most consumer ISPs will hijack nxdomain to their own search engine, which allows them to display ads and sign deals with search engines and make some cash on the side.
Please replace the term "religious people" with "people of color" and understand the harm you are doing in your discourse. It is blatant prejudice.
Which, not coincidentally, is also what the companies stashing profits overseas hope to accomplish through future changes in the tax law.