skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the problem: http://i.imgur.com/KW0d1qh.jpg

That's a google image search for "pacific garbage patch", and about half of the results are pure fiction. Photos of heavily polluted inhabited areas that are not actually part of the pacific gyre. Many articles reproduce these pictures from other sources and just assume they are photos of the garbage patch (a typical "citogenesis" problem: https://xkcd.com/978/).

This is very important because it bears directly on the credibility of scientists and of environmental activists. Once you lose credibility you rarely get it back. Many, many people (even some scientists, sadly) believe that action is more important than truth. That "doing the right thing" is paramount, even if you have to twist the facts a teensy bit to make them more palatable to the masses. But the masses are fickle, and they pick up on these things readily, with the result being a loss of credibility.

It's very difficult to always avoid the temptation of the easy, quick short-term gain, but the importance of maintaining scientific discipline should always override that impulse.
If you like WordPress as a writing and management tool, it's worth noting that there are several static site generators for WordPress.[1][2]

[1] http://en.staticpress.net/, https://github.com/megumiteam/staticpress
[2] https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/
I've used Hired.com, and couldn't recommend them more. It was a great experience.
Trouble in the house of rothenberg
Genuinely surprised at the usual "muah muah, can't swat them away" chatter.

Having basically the equivalent of an agent in your corner would be a very valuable service, but crucially this agent would need to have an impeccable reputation, hence any of the usual recruiters only "doing secretarial work" wouldn't work. They would need to be genuinely well connected professionals.

I can see an ongoing relationship with salary increase negotiation support, a bi-yearly in person strategy session ("It might be time to move on") as well as genuinely going to bat for you in terms of your contract ("hey, let'a push for a 7 year exercise window instead of 90 days")

Anyways. I don't know if such a service, but it seems like it should exist.
Illegal immigrants do not have to go through the bureaucratic immigration system, spend 1000s of dollars to fly in-out for visa stamping, live in uncertainty of becoming an illegal or be banned to enter the US, illegals can also work multiple jobs in any state, take time off/not pay minimum visa wage or taxes to maintain visa, etc.

Of course they have to live in fear of deportation and have broken families(many legals have this fear too).
If you look at the H-1B wages for people employed at AmaGoogFaceSoft, you will notice that this is indeed true - for pretty much any position, the H-1B immigrant makes a premium compared to the median wage for similar position across all employers at that location.

As the prestige of the employer in the market drops, the employee's wages also drops - this happens for both citizens and immigrants alike, but the drop for immigrants maybe be larger.

My point is that these large tech firms hire H-1Bs out of necessity, and not to keep wages down. The less prestigious firms do hire H-1Bs to keep wages down.
But we also have to bring into question Christians that claim they are Christian but do not act like they are. Those people may claim to be religious, but they are clearly not. Does having no belief in your religion but still participating in some things mean you aren't religious at all?
Really, most of this is about definition vs. Practice.

Agnostics can be considered atheists in practice but their definitions differ a bit.
Tiny apartments for homeless hit snags over labor, land
First world problem.

Palo Alto's University Avenue has enough good restaurants. Some are not obvious. Gyros Gyros has excellent fish platters and kabobs. There are several decent Chinese restaurants. Paris Baguette is OK.

It's interesting that Palantir is leasing all the available office space. That's unusual, but not unheard of. In the early days of Autodesk, they at one point had leased most of the office space in Sausalito. The city council was unhappy about this, so Autodesk moved to San Raphael where they could lease large office buildings.

I noticed yet another rug store opening on University Avenue recently. Someone must need an investor visa. The guy who owns most of the rug stores used to lease the upstairs to startups in exchange for equity. Now he's a venture capitalist.
>Good. What about states that backup these groups? This is basically a high-school where every girl calls the other "slut" for doing exactly what she herself does. If any other state does it, it's terrorism. But if I overthrow regimes, invade sovereign countries with bogus reasons, financing and training militias overseas, etc. it's freedom and democracy.
With which mental mechanism someone could truly think they are righteous doing that, but others are not? One cannot have the luxury of sloppiness here: if you are okay with your Government doing that all over the world, just for the sake of being rational, you have to accept the possibility of retaliation. It doesn't mean you like it. It just means that you understand what's at stake and don't act surprised not knowing why someone is attacking you.

this was the point i was trying to get to, but pulled myself into some other argument and forgot it. It took many years of reading to see through all the propaganda noise in news to finally get to this conclusion. Me and dad occasionally discuss politics. He doesn't follow international politics much and he still likes obama.
>I suppose it’s possible to change the sound of an entire piece of music just by changing the key signature, but does anyone actually do that?

>How would that work for music that also uses notes outside the scale? These seem more like questions of composition, which I definitely don’t know anything about.

From wikipedia:

Although transpositions are usually written out, musicians are occasionally asked to transpose music "at sight", that is, to read the music in one key while playing in another. Musicians who play transposing instruments sometimes have to do this (for example when encountering an unusual transposition, such as clarinet in C), as well as singers' accompanists, since singers sometimes request a different key than the one printed in the music to better fit their vocal range (although many, but not all, songs are printed in editions for high, medium, and low voice).

There are three basic techniques for teaching sight transposition: interval, clef, and numbers ...

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposition_(music)#Sight_tr...
Sounds like vim!
‘Amazon’s lead is over,’ Oracle’s Larry Ellison declares at OpenWorld
It's a distributed computation that has been mostly precomputed, ie: brain connectivity. And a very popular theory of the brain says it does calculate second-order (precision/entropy) statistics about what it models.
Quantum isn't particularly random in the information theoretic sense of the word "random". There's a pretty healthy set of rules already:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_information

The reason it's bad, using a Dennet frame of mind, is that it's a sort of left-handed "skyhook" - throwing "quantum" in the resolve the longstanding divide between Mechanists and those who believe in a Prime Mover or deity. It's an Ex Deux Machina of sorts.

I can sympathize with Penrose; his entire career was about measuring the information transforms of things like black holes, so why not apply the same basic recipe to consciousness? It's still an interesting idea, but it's not, SFAIK, testable.
Life is very silly when you're the kind of person who tends to read HN. For others, in this age and throughout history, life is not so silly, but quite serious and scary. Through common cultural themes like shared religions, communities can band together and survive. If I stop practicing my Judaism tomorrow, there will still be those who want to kill me for being a Jew - my life will not get more "silly" by losing my religion.
A bit passive aggressive don't you think?

There are plenty of reputable email clients that add extra styling to make email look better that are not necessarily spam.
> I heard a rough rule of thumb to stay away from abstracting anything until you see it repeated identically at least three times, not two. It's just a rough rule of thumb to try and make sure you're not prematurely abstracting something and building the wrong thing, but anecdotally it's been useful for me.

I've not heard that before, but I like it. I have always advocated for waiting until there's at least two instances, with a similar reasoning: don't abstract until there's a 100% proven need to do so.

> It's very easy to abstract out two things that look identical in their earliest implementation, but are actually different in intent and function--then when you get a new feature request on one of them they become obviously wildly different

On top of waiting for the proven need, I think the other big thing you should strongly consider when building an abstraction is the future of that code.

If you need to make a change (regardless of what that change is), are you fairly certain every instance of it going to change in the same way? If the answer is not an immediate and resounding 'yes', then you should really stop and consider if your abstraction is actually a helpful step towards DRY, or merely clever "architectural astronautism" that is only going to be a pain to maintain later.
It's called "data-oriented design". Look into the gaming industry, where there's a lot of anti-OOP sentiment. They're primarily coming at it from the standpoint of optimizing memory access for cache lines, but there are side benefits that come from it around reducing memory allocation and usage, and avoiding the cost of abstractions that come with hidden inefficiencies.
I'm surprised they haven't been hit with a class action lawsuit for the iTunes UX yet, since it seems designed to needlessly fill up space on your computer / phone in order to get you to upgrade to larger models.

E.g. with the podcasts sync feature, you can only decide how many episodes you want stored for every podcast at a global level, not per podcast. So e.g. you can either store the most recent ten episodes of each podcast, or every episode of each podcast. So even though for most podcasts ten is probably enough, you end up needing to store every episode of every podcast on your phone even if there is only one podcast where you want every episode.

Similarly, once you purchase an app the only option is to download all the new updates, even if you don't use the app anymore. There is no option to archive the app, so it's either let iTunes keep installing the updates each week or else delete it the app you paid for from your computer. Again, this just needlessly churns through backup disks so that Apple can sell people more external hard drives.

These are just a couple examples, but it seems like pretty much every features of iTunes is designed to force you to buy more stuff from Apple that you don't actually need.
It would be more possible to take leftist arguments about the benefits of immigration in good faith if they weren't simultaneously crowing about how ongoing immigration will shift US politics permanently to the left.

Frankly I don't care if immigration is Good For The Economy. It amounts to intentional population replacement, explicitly aimed at permantly changing the makeup, politics, culture, etc of the country. My children will suffer as a result.
I've been wondering lately if it stems from the purchasing experience. I'm looking at getting a new PC lately and there are just so many options from supplier to hardware details. How many cores do I want? Which processor architecture? What nanometer size? How much RAM? How big a hard disk? What graphics card (a dozen questions on it's own)?

Even if you restrict yourself to one supplier, they have dozens of variants and arcane naming schemes that makes working out what's current something that takes hours of research. Compare this to apple which only has a couple of SKU's at a time in each category and it makes purchasing a lot simpler.

My thinking is that apple == easy is something that just sticks in your mind from the outset.
TLDR: a person who knows nothing about music or music theory gripes about music and music theory. Admittedly knows nothing, right off the bat and several times throughout the text. How can you declare something to be "terrible", "the worst notation for anything ever", and so forth if you admittedly know nothing of the subject? I know nothing about databases, would reading the Wikipedia page on NoSQL entitle me to declare it "absolute garbage"? o.O
Pentium Jokes (Circa ~1995)
> Even if it was $4.99 or $6.99, I would definitely think about it.

Seems like you forgot to include the part that didn't support your complaint.
I'm more interested in how many of them allow anonymous uploads.

Allowing anonymous connections isn't very different from all the HTTP servers available with directory listings ("Index Of", etc).
"Not only does CoinOut make it easier to pay but also provides you with a little more data on how to manage your money." (shows nice picture of a list of transactions)

Wonderful. Now all my cash transactions can be tracked too! And tied to my real identity. I wonder what they're going to do with all this yummy data...

No thanks, I'd rather just keep those pennies in my pocket and spend them when I can, which was never much of a problem to begin with. (Or use my credit card and get a cash rebate.)
I would love something like that. Any pointer?
This is a cogent way to frame the acronym.

There are times when repeating yourself is just accidental. I might have the same middle name as a coworker. Do we actually "share" that middle name? That depends on who's asking, or what system you're trying to build. But probably not.
>why we use such an archaic notation system.

The answer is, because it works, and nobody has managed to propose a better one.
Fair enough, although that does imply that a higher price would be less likely to result in a purchase
The tensorflow team is working on a go wrapper as well:

https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/10#issuecomm...
Quit to Win
In its defense, it has Washington in its name. I.e. what's "in the box" is what the label says.
I first started programming with Game Maker 5.3, at 12. Took me 3 years to move on with Python. Learnt a lot from it (kinda funny seeing YYG blogging http://www.yoyogames.com/blog/126 back then about us kids learning how things tick)

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Rusky also hails from GM roots

http://enigma-dev.org is a FOSS alternative to GM
'Mr. Robot' Star Rami Malek Wins Best Lead Actor in a Drama Series at Emmys
It's already here.

Just look @ Snapchat HQ. There are homeless people sleeping literally right outside the main entrance. The epitome of high-tech, low life.
DataCamp: Learn R, Python and Data Science Online
The 4-6 weeks is a 2 week delivery window! (No tracking numbers then, either.)
Software as Right-Wing Extremism
>But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line-maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible-it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important-if you want to operate on your default-setting-then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.

See, the problem with going through the day this way is that it's difficult to express to anyone else, and then it doesn't really give you extra options for how to act. It's very rare that you are the one who can commit the small act of bureaucratic kindness, or that the awful woman in front of you can actually benefit from anything you might say or do.

Which is unfortunate, but on the other hand, I'm fairly sure that most people I meet would simply feel oppressed from constant exposure to the Force That Lit The Stars, like a room that's got too humid.
I was going to use it but stuck with Jekyll for now, but they have a FAQ page for that [0].

There were also a few mentions of Phenomic on Gatsby's discussion from a while back [1]. Search for it on that thread.

[0]: https://phenomic.io/docs/faq/gatsby/

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12128989
>> Better example would be a post about how to write rigorous math proofs and then not giving a rigorous proof as an example.

Oh, you mean like some of Dijkstra's numbered papers?
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...

I think "examples might help" is valid feedback, but the author has sort of provided a reason why examples aren't included: in small projects the abstractions are usually worth it, was my read. So while the author could talk about examples, he probably couldn't include then in a piece of this size.

"Can we ban" is what has rubbed me wrong way. Who is "we". How are "we" "banning"? Does this just mean you don't agree with this post being highly upvoted? Or that you want to circumvent the opinions of those who upvoted with a "ban"?

It is interesting also to think about the irony of an argument that one should work in terms of concrete examples of the subject matter, in objection to a piece that argues one should not always abstract things.
Lyft Co-Founder on the Third Transportation Revolution
Sure it is.

"But in recent years, many police agencies across the Bay Area have seen a decrease in applicants. Some say the area's high cost of living is partly to blame as job seekers move to other parts of the state to start their careers."

They only commute if the cost of doing so is worth it. When they can find reasonable jobs that provide the life they want elsewhere, they stop :)

The expensive area police hiring has dropped dramatically (SF, etc) when the less expensive areas have seen increases in ability to recruit (San Mateo, etc).

It's only when the less expensive areas don't need police that you see increases in hiring elsewhere.
Even then, they are still having more and more trouble hiring over time.
Not that much to be honest, there are some quirks and such as variable scopings (g:, s:, l: a:) and other things, but other than that it's pretty familiar.

A few great resources I found after having googled a ton around was [0] and [1]. If you are very familiar with vim (I'm not really a power user tbh), then all the commands you use with : are supported in vim script. Meaning opening a split in your script is, well, just split.

[0] http://ricostacruz.com/cheatsheets/vimscript.html

[1] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-vim-script-1/
Completely agreed. Ultimately its about readability, and replacing code with meaningful names is always a boon for readability. I don't understand people who have an aversion to adding more abstraction--every time you can replace any section of code (even one liners usually have multiple parts to them) with a meaningful name is an increase in readability as your code-specification moves closer to the language-specification of the project.

Of course there are bad abstractions. A simple test is anything that doesn't immediately refine your code into something more closely resembling the language-spec. The goal should be code with just the right amount of abstractions such that they map to this language-spec with the least amount of friction possible.
I don't have the citation handy, but there's been more consensus on Question #2 since 2009. Even assuming there wasn't, 87% agreement is pretty good evidence in favor of the idea.
> for the concept of religion to remain a useful cross-cultural category it must be shorn of its Abrahamic assumptions and understood to refer to a range of concepts and traditions that not only cluster around supernatural beliefs, but also practices, like rituals and festivals.

I've been finding it interesting to look even at the Abrahamic traditions - what parts of the ritual / lifestyle / faith are valuable, even if you assume the supernatural claims are bogus?

On this topic I've been enjoying the work of Peter Rollins [1]. One of the points he makes is that often we desire certainty in our beliefs, and feel safe with certainty. And it's interesting to watch someone swing from being certain of the existence of a god, to being certain of the non-existence. What they believe has changed ("A god does exist" / "A god does not exist") but how they believe it is much the same ("I'm sure of this because of _____").

I guess that's the difference between being an (a)theist and an agnostic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rollins
The Zen of Processor Design
Would you hide a Jew from the nazis?
This statement caught my attention in the article:

> It is optimized for speed (Hugo sites can be built in milliseconds)

Is that true, or does it just happen to be fast? It seems to me that the performance of a static site generation is irrelevant, and thus time spent on this is really wasted effort.

I don't care if it takes several minutes to build.. it'll happen on the CI server in the background, and so long as the actual deployment is atomic, it makes no difference.

A site that has time-sensitive content or update requirements of more than hundreds of times per day seems to be a poor candidate for use with a static site generator.