skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not an architectural expert, not even an interested amateur really. But it strikes me that there's some tension between the beauty of the exterior and the usability of the interior.

Take giant glass boxes, I know some people think they are wonderful, I think they are quite ugly. But an office where one entire wall is a window and light can flood in is a much more pleasant working environment than an office in a beautiful neo-gothic masterpiece with tiny windows.
Maybe this is a typo, but the way you wrote it, you lost $30.
Uccello and the Problem of Space
The main problem with McMansions is that they waste a lot of space and energy.

The purely aesthetic perspective should embarass contemporary architects by its shallowness.
I think a counter-example of that type of architectural criticism is the work of Christopher Alexander; he's extremely opinionated about what he likes and doesn't like, but in "A Pattern Language", he lays out a bunch of design principles and explains what problem they solve and why he thinks they're the optimal solution to that particular problem.

Any other architect can come along and say "I don't think that's a real problem" or "I think I have a better solution to that problem". There's no appeal to authority (e.g. "this is how architectural tradition says you're supposed to design things, and anything that breaks these rules is wrong"). Everyone is encouraged to work things out on their own from first principles and see if they come to the same conclusion. I think this is especially important in Architecture, where anything beyond basic utilitarian functionality is very tied to psychology and is therefore in a realm of conjecture where very little is definitively provable and yet many people seem to react very similarly to certain design elements.

In "A Timeless Way of Building", Alexander talks about cultivating the mental discipline of separating what you think ought to be a good design from analyzing your actual emotional response to that design. Learning to pay attention to the latter instead of the former can often lead in unexpected directions and result in better design.
https://xkcd.com/359/
The NASA definition the original one, I would think. How are people using "systems engineering" as a term elsewhere, that is incongruent with the NASA definition?

I mean, a "system" at the scale of a NASA project comprises operationalized learning across both machines and people (and supplier-contracts, and legal corporate entities.) With tolerances and maintenance plans and backups for the people-parts as well as the machine-parts of the system.

I don't know if I would describe the design of such a system as "management"; it's more akin to the sort of incentive-system creation that tax regulators or MMO game designers go through, but with a lot more rigor and data.
Seem neither Von Neumann nor Morgenstern were impressed by Nash's use of Kakutani fixed-points to come up with equilibrium solutions, they see it as impractical and difficult to apply, which it is because it assumes common knowledge of the each player's expected utility. Since then Nash's theory has been shown to be not very robust with uncertainty. Von Neumann was only interested in practical applications of math and had no patience for axiomatic formalist mathematics like that of Nash or Arrow-Debreu after being influenced by Godel's impossibility theorem (Before that point, Von Neumann tried to axiomize set theory and quantum mechanics).

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-triumph-and-f...
Baltimore is paying kids to code
I too wish he'd written about more than the façade, but this piece is only the first in a series. He goes on to talk about garages and columns, so perhaps he'll get to interiors.
You are right that morality can't be a science. However, the article is actually about the psychological study of moral behavior, which is certainly science. One reason this is important is there are many important disagreements about the psychology that such a science can help resolve.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: "Ask every developer I've worked with at every job I've had in the industry questions related to these topics on the spot and 95% will fail."
Most modern production quality software systems there days are implementing fibonacci algorithms as part of their core business rules, controlled via a red/black tree. Usually it's held together by a fizzbuzz architecture so as a minimum you should be able to whiteboard fizzbuzz. You should understand all these things well, and really if you are doing modern software development these things hould be day to day tasks anyway so they should be top of mind.
The most valuable thing about peer-reviewed journals isn't that a handful of chumps proof-read the articles before publication but that the journals are widely circulated and read by the appropriate set of scientists and technicians. One of two things will happen after publication.

The paper will have no impact, no one will base any further work on it, no one will cite it, and it will vanish like a fart in the wind. In this case, the author gets minimal prestige, and can claim a publication in a maybe-prestigious journal with an embarrassingly small number of follow-up citations. No fame, money, or power for the author, and no impact (negative or positive, if the paper was right or wrong) on the world.

Or the paper can spark a lot of ideas in the people who read it. They'll try to build on it, or they'll try to use a technique from it in another application. When this happens, if the paper was solid, then the original author gets citations, speaking engagements, money and power. If the paper was less than solid, and the people trying to build on it keep having trouble, that is when the original author's house of cards comes crashing down.

You don't need to directly replicate an experiment when you can build on it. If your experiments building on the original experiment make sense and give consistent results, you've just validated the original research in another way. If your experiments don't, and after weeks and months of wasting time checking your own work and making sure you're not doing wrong, you slowly reach the conclusion that the original research was bogus, then you begin to get angry. Then you begin to tear into the original author and his research, publicly denounce him for wasting your and everyone else's time. Then science self-corrects.

So science is generally OK -- either bogus research that gets published has no impact (no different that a lot of good research :-P ), or it proves false when other people try to build on it.

Who gets into trouble, is science journalists and laypeople who read newly published articles and assume they are gospel.
http://jokund.com
Let you create and update your blog from a simple email! Ccing people to your email will subscribe them to your blog and they'll receive the full posts in their inbox. Handles attached photos really well. Pretty correctly coded, nodejs back-end. Ho yeah we loved working on this, but we don't have the time to maintain it anymore...
He can stop whining... I admire Cook and love and use Apple products, but he should try running a small business and experience real loneliness. As he points out Apple has the bank account to hire virtually anyone, the very best people to help its businesses and fix business mistakes. Small business leaders don't and fight most of the same battles, alone, getting pounded into dust by unforgiving regulatory, liability, tax and competitive forces. My sympathy for Cook is further attenuated by the billions in cash Apple is sitting on at home and abroad that in my opinion should instead be put to work in the US economy. Google too.
The Billion-Dollar Jackpot: Engineered to Drain Your Wallet
I've used this library before. It is really good. The biggest difference that I can point out is that you can use shaders with SDL-gpu. Also - it plays nicely with the standard SDL2 lib.
I really like the idea put forward here:

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/music-in-human-evolution/

And the research into the evolution of shoulders doesn't really contradict this.
> your brain can quickly decide if a question is answerable by one of a few powerful general purpose "machines" (e.g., continuity arguments, the correspondences between geometric and algebraic objects, linear algebra, ways to reduce the infinite to the finite through various forms of compactness)

To me these tricks all feel like the same trick. "Can I find a program* that gives a finite representation of a generator or a transformation, from something I know, to my problem."

* Not as in php but as in lambda calculus.
Glass walls are rarely that enjoyable, even on the inside. You need to set the glass back from direct sun to get indirect light or you end up with a solar oven, and a huge amount of air conditioning to deal with it.

They do photograph well and win you architectural awards, however.
In Texas, a man who didn’t kill anybody is about to be executed for murder
Bad modernist architecture often places style over substance. Such houses subordinate the livability and logic of interior spaces to the needs of the exterior's aesthetic. So you end up with a "cool looking" house on the outside, whose living spaces are poorly laid out, disjointed, inharmoniously transitioned, or simply make odd choices out of necessity.
It's kind of annoying but cute to see some popular "thinkers" and writers -- fancy-smarty-pants _neuroscientists_

You done Dunning-Krugered yourself, kid.
Would have been better to have some sort of basic template here... URL / short description / traffic / revenue.
Bullet point #6 is worth emphasizing.

>biggest misconception that non-mathematicians have about how mathematicians work is that there is some mysterious mental faculty

Popular perception would have you believe that advanced math is like weight lifting, where you need the brain muscle to process it. This weight is measured in IQ, and above a certain measure you are a genius. Einstein is the champion, and so if "you're no Einstein" then you have a perfect excuse to be ignorant and incapable of any advanced topics in math.

Of course, the reality as it should be perceived is that any advanced scientific topic is more like a journey, and that it never truly gets more difficult. It just becomes more specific and hence technical. We just go deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of our choosing. Unfortunately, with this view, there are no excuses in being bad at anything. It's more dedication and obsession.

And Einstein himself has rejected any notion of genius being quoted often as saying, "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."

Except, didn't work, because the former group has written the quote off the words of a genius.
Where to Hold React Component Data: state, store, static, and this
An interview shouldn't be purely theoretical, but I disagree that there's no place for this stuff.

As an incredibly simple example that comes up all the time, if you get back a collection of items from an API do you store them in a hash keyed by id or in a list? If you can't reason about how e.g. lists are ordered but a hash has O(1) access, and use that to decide which is better in a particular case, you won't be a very strong front-end dev.

Not to mention if you need to dig into performance issues, e.g. dropping frames in animations or something.

I've also seen a lot of frontend bugs related to not thinking about/dealing with asynchronicity well. That's not a data structure problem per se, but you need a working knowledge of some basic CS concepts like threads, concurrency patterns, queues, etc.

I think the key in interviews is that this stuff shouldn't be evaluated like a school exam, where you need immediate recall of all the terms without stumbling. It's all about being able to work towards the right answer and it's fine if that involves a bit of asking or googling to double-check your ideas.
I think I got this idea from the documentary based on that book, but something that's stuck with me is the idea that if you can ruin the visual design of a building by attaching a shed (or doing something else that throws off its symmetry), then the design was bad to begin with; it was designed as an art piece and not as a usable building.
It's worth posting the response that Yodlee made[0], but essentially it says that Yodlee does give information to a few companies that use it for analytics purposes, in a form that's "de-identified" and scrubbed of PII. The response goes to lengths to say that the information has been scrubbed of any PII and in every point made in the bullet list, it talks about that specific point. While I don't doubt this, I do doubt that it's not impossible to de-anonymize the data, which is the more important part; it doesn't matter if a company hasn't done it or there is no proof that a company doesn't do it, it matters if it's possible because Yodlee could be breached and that information could then be used in ways that companies that are legally bound to agreements not to do it can't/don't. Just because the "good guys" don't do something doesn't mean it's not possible and that it'll never happen.

On a side note, it feels like the response wasn't proof read very well because there are quite a few glaring typos and issues. Someone at the company couldn't have given it a better review before posting, or reviewed it as they were adding the addendum?

0: https://www.yodlee.com/yodlee-responds/
> why someone shouldn't stick a gun in your face and take anything they want?

If they're the government, they call that taxation.
> Charter schools can dismiss students without due process, can kick out or deny students with low grades

Those are good things. These kids almost always have serious impulse control problems, and it's better for both those kids and for everyone else to have education tailored to those kids' needs. Teachers should be teachers--they shouldn't have to do double-duty as behavioral therapists.

> and are usually not obligated to provide special education services.

That's just false. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act's (IDEA) requirement to provide education appropriate to individuals with disabilities applies to charter schools: https://www2.ed.gov/offices/OCR/archives/charterqa/chardisab....

> corporate-run

Those aren't dirty words. Do you want your school run like an Apple Store, or like a DMV location?
This has more to do with thermoregulation than with the mechanical aspect of keeping your balance (which was the point I was answering to).
Somewhat different socioeconomic strata maybe [?], but would be worthwhile comparing to Barratt-style stamped-out suburban estate houses in the uk. UK doesn't have the spare land that the US has, so generally can't do McMansion-style construction (the stuff that looks similar is normally on estates populated by footballers et al - eg Gosforth Park near Newcastle, there's a similar estate near every major city, but the eye-bleeding prices suggest better quality builds, if a similarly awful visual side to the architecture)
The next really big thing will be consumer robotics, powered by advances in AI. It's still a ways off. Self-driving cars may be the first big application area. After that we'll see home robots to do cleaning, cooking, and maintenance.

Contrary to popular opinion, IoT is a dead end. The future isn't a million devices scattered around your home, but one capable robot that can be your servant and do everything for you.
You're talking about the kind of sciences with applied-science subfields, where experiments form a natural hierarchy with new knowledge necessarily building upon old.

Fields like psychology, on the other hand, need replications—"assuming another result as axiomatic in your own experiment" just doesn't come up much.
The overarching theme of American architecture gone wrong is the lack of supporting real community. It used to be that supporting commerce did that as well, but the car changed this.
might want to fix the typo in the title
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
Shoot me an email.. It's in my profile.
Evolving Twitter: A message from our CEO
But we could fairly easily measure it; we just don't find it worth the trouble.

Also, as to the ties, that's almost purely a political choice made by the sporting body. In rowing, for example, the winner in the Olympic final was decided by looking at the finish photo (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/13/theres-only-one-g...), with both rowers getting the same time in hundreds of a second.

I doubt they can align six boats to that precision at the start, even with equipment for holding the bows of the boats at the starting line.
I agree that the TV-above-the-fireplace thing is insane for exactly the reasons you mentioned, but I fear that the real problem there is that too many homeowners haven't really thought it through and want to do exactly that. :( I can almost guarantee that there will be angry replies in this thread from people who have done this and will defend it to the death in large part because they committed to it years ago and don't want to believe that they made a terrible mistake, especially now that they're used to it.

As someone who thinks about this stuff way too much, TVs above fireplaces are up there with leaving high frame rate supersampling (i.e., the "soap opera effect") turned on, and people who leave horizontal stretching enabled because that distortion is somehow less visually disturbing to them than pillarboxing when viewing SD content on an HD display. Needless to say, I'm really fun at parties. :)
Pretty much the great data viz graphs produced by D3.js are built on SVG - https://d3js.org/
"Data Smart" by Foreman

"Intro to Statistical Learning" by James, Witten, Hastie, Tibshirani

"Elements of Statistical Learning" by Hastie, Tibshirani

The first emphasizes the application of basic concepts to the practice of data science, mostly using english and excel. The second is more mathematical yet quite applied, again focusing on DS tasks, but using R. The third is more mathematical yet, yet very much in the same model as the second. The second and third are free ebooks.
This sort of thing was popular in the 2000s but thankfully I haven't noticed any new builds like this for a while
I agree with you that violence should be a last resort. But we live in a society where it isn't; for example, lethal force is used to prevent sales of cigarettes in quantities the government doesn't approve. If I attempt to build a tall building in SF against the will of the NIMBYs, potentially lethal force will eventually be used against me if I don't stop doing it. As you yourself note, all laws are enforced by someone willing to pick up a gun.

So I suppose that since all regulations are enforced with potentially lethal force, all regulatory apparatus should be provided by forced labor?

A draft isn’t an anti-democratic hack anymore than preventing a company from dumping toxic waste in a river is anti-democratic.

Of course it is. The demos wants a war staffed by volunteers. You want to remove that option from the set of choices available to them so that their only choices are either options unacceptable to them or the choice you want them to make. At least in terms of whether people have free choice, it's no different than "give me your wallet or I'll take your head".

Note that I'm not strongly opposed to this; I'm not a proponent of democracy at all. I'm only pointing out that neither are you. The 3 wolves would - given the choice - vote to eat those non-voting brown sheep across the world without forcing their baby wolflings to be put at risk. Democracy is allowing those 3 wolves and a sheep to vote on dinner.

Awhile back I saw an article about a private psyops contractor targeting american journalists who were critical of it,...

"Psyops" is a fancy word for using speech to influence the actions of others. There are a wide variety of actors who engage in it. I happen to know that a variety of educational institutions do; I know this because my ex-girlfriend sold them (along with various state-level democratic parties, interestingly) software to do exactly that.

This is of course ignoring the psyops operations that teachers themselves directly run. If this is our worry, we are already there and the military/mercenaries probably do far less of it than, e.g, our educational or journalistic institutions.

Again, let me emphasize that I'm not disagreeing with your goals. I'm very strongly opposed to using force. I'm also opposed to unchecked democracy that often results in voters harming non-voters (whether it be wars against foreigners, SF nimbys fighting against domestic immigration, or Shiv Sena trying to prevent Biharis from driving autos). I'm just disagreeing with the internals of your argument; it is blatantly anti-democratic (which I support!) and it also implies more than you want it to (meaning it's probably too broad).
> But, see, charter schools aren't about improvement. They are about blaming people without actually having to commit more money to solve the actual problem.

The U.S. spends far more money on education per capita than any other OECD country besides Switzerland. D.C. spends twice as much compared to Fairfax County next door. We don't need more money, we need reform.
> Yet, for some reason, they spend their time playing Jazz derivatives and covers or as studio musicians.

Because that's the kind of music they like to play and know best. If they went to music school, jazz and classical are the dominant music styles that are taught. Also, you can make a pretty good living as a studio musician. It's much less risky than trying to sell your own albums as a solo artist.

> Interestingly, they're all playing Jazz - which to me is so puzzling. It's akin to being a master visual artist and being absorbed in re-creating Pollack or Rothko or Kadinsky.

No, it's like a painter creating their own works with Pollack, Rothko, and Kadinsky as key influences.

You think they should do the musical equivalent of a master painter taking a job at an graphic design firm? Plenty of them do, actually, you got to pay the bills somehow. That's what being a studio musician is.

> Jazz had a moment, and it was a beautiful moment. It can be admired and relished as such, and the music can help transport one to that moment in time. But, does Jazz even make any sense in the modern world?

As the article mentions, Jazz is changing with the times, as it always has. The music that Coltrane and Miles played in the '50s and '60s was quite different from what the New Orleans bands of the early 20th century were playing. It's funny you should mention Miles because he lived and played through several eras of jazz (and was the pioneer of several of them). He also expressed an ambivalence towards his earlier work.

> " "So What" or Kind of Blue, they were done in that era, the right hour, the right day, and it happened. It's over [...] What I used to play with Bill Evans, all those different modes, and substitute chords, we had the energy then and we liked it. But I have no feel for it anymore, it's more like warmed-over turkey."

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million. So instead of trying to explain it more, here's a jazz track released last year. Tell me if it sounds boring or old-fashioned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv3SzjFIa-s

> But, if I went to a music venue today, and the band was playing Jazz, I'd be bored out of my mind.

If I went to a music venue today and they were playing hip hop I would be similarly bored. Turns out different people have different tastes.

As for why you'd go and listen to someone cover a song from Kind of Blue: jazz is mainly improvisational. That means even if they play "So What", it won't be note-for-note the same as the version on that historic record. Hearing the ideas that the musicians create in the moment by listening and responding to their bandmates is the reason I love jazz.
He doesn't sound like he's whining, just describing.
When service members die by suicide, their deaths look like civilian suicides