skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just remembered one of the more accessible papers I've looked at in the past, which might be interesting even if you are not familiar with the subfield (which is a big thing with reading "random" papers, context is often required):

Wobbrock, J.O., Wilson, A.D. and Li, Y. (2007). Gestures without libraries, toolkits or training: A $1 recognizer for user interface prototypes. http://faculty.washington.edu/wobbrock/pubs/uist-07.01.pdf

They also have a great page related to that paper with actual implementations and links to works building on it: http://depts.washington.edu/madlab/proj/dollar/index.html (Otherwise it can be worthwhile to follow the citation chain on Google Scholar or other sites, at least with papers that are not cited by everybody)

Some other ideas:

There are also resources like https://blog.acolyer.org/ where papers are presented in blog-post form, reading both the paper and the reviews might help to get an eye for what you can and can not get from them.

Try to find conferences or other venues with papers from a field you know a lot about/have worked in, reading papers with understanding for the context is always easier. Many fields have "classic" papers that are often referenced and more or less required background knowledge to judge things, these are interesting to find and read as well.
Median, mean, and mode are all types of averages. But yes, I was just reading Nassim Taleb today scolding the multitude for not recognizing the difference between median and mean.
Anki[0] is an excellent, free spaced-repetition app if making paper flash cards isn't your style.

[0] http://ankisrs.net/
Steam's Top 100 best selling games of 2016 measured by gross revenue
Temporal Tessellation for Video Annotation and Summarization
The Unsolvable Math Problem
Power to be D3 deficient? [0] Do you have some inferiority complex? It's objectively better to have white skin that can tan instead of a darker one. It's always possible to cover from the sun. Only disadvantage: in sunny climates, ~4x higher risk of skin cancer, but the absolute risk is still a minuscule ~25/100k.

"It is evident that as much as 69%-82% of the South Asian populations in India had 25(OH)D levels in plasma less than the minimum acceptable levels of 20 ng/ml"

Skin colors evolved when most people were outside for the entire day. Now the opposite is true.

[0] http://www.pjms.com.pk/issues/octdec208/article/reviewarticl...
A great article addressing a difficult idea. The article slightly overgeneralizes for simplicity.

One omission is that the author doesn't mention the "data table" concept when he talks about SQL tables. Data frames in R or Python/pandas map directly onto the SQL table idea.

And thus the article explains, without stating it explicitly, why Python is such a good data analysis language. You get the LISP "everything is an object pointer" data model in the core language[1], and FORTRAN arrays (numpy) and SQL tables (pandas) are for practical purposes part of the language. (One could also argue that COBOL records are dealt with by pandas, but in practice people use both namedtuples and pandas tables for large named records, and both are not perfect for this purpose.)

Having those "Big Three" data models at your fingertips in Python gives great power, and even though python is not fast, the big three data models make Python useful for almost all forms of data analysis.

[1]. When python says "everything is an object", it really means "everything is a pointer to an object". You can tell because everything is passed by reference, not value. Even "print(genericObject)" gives you the address of the object.
How to get started with development in the cloud
Hello,

If you are interested to get started with blob storage development for azure you can check out the following blog http://blog.datainstructors.com/2017/01/building-your-first-application-using.html .
Is there a lot of Chinese speculation in the Seattle market?
Does that have a little more flexibility in it's geometry?
I learned about that documentary thanks to a previous HN thread.
I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.
The amount of sugar added to many processed foods is insane.
Show HN: awslambdaproxy an AWS Lambda powered HTTP(s) web proxy
Sure, you can file a bug with a snippet and expected assembly and make the devs do the work :P

They generally seem pretty willing if it's simple, and if it isn't then it'd probably be a pretty involved (but interesting!) side project for you anyway.
You get the lines because you're lining up all numbers divisible by 2, 3, 5 and 7. You get a very similar pattern with 210, and a sparser one with, for example, 30030.
Agreed. Unless you're doing barbell squats it's far more important in my experience to just get started.

Waiting to start until you have the perfect equipment or technique or form or strategy raises the starting friction and prevents me from doing a great many things I should be doing.
We should create flexible walls. Disrupt walls.
That is my take of hire slow as well.

Although in most cases if the second guy you talk to is perfect, you may still need to look a bit more to be sure.
> Anyone can organize at any time, and the employer is free to tell you to pound sand and hire someone else.

The reason why governments have historically enacted laws that regulate unions and their interaction with employees - and this is not the first such law by a long shot - is because, even with collective bargaining, unions are often simply not powerful enough to meaningfully negotiate, and so the power imbalance remains.
Well, I hate to belabour such a boring point, but the solo cup is the result of an invention by a single person. At least, there's only one person's name on the patent.

From the article:

"some of the most underappreciated aspects of the cup can be traced to a simple design aimed at solving a rather sticky problem."

So, a tricky problem solved by the ingenuity of an individual.
Yes, that's right. I wonder if it's a similar thing showing up in the spiral. Just a simple consequence like the one that causes the lines.
I've had the same thing happen. We had a guy write some JNI code (C shim for Java). It was woeful; didn't even check the return value of getenv().
I don't find out until this thing crashes first deployment in production.

Another example: our Java and QA guys wondered why they couldn't get Jmeter to do Kerberos authentication. I quickly Googled and found that their Jmeter used a version pf Apache's HTTP library which couldn't do Kerberos. They just needed to update.

I'm constantly asked 'quick' questions (unfortunately quick questions tend to have the longer answers).

I ask them dumb questions and ask them to ask dumb questions (why, where, what) but it's taken to be insincere. Perhaps it's just straight fatigue that I find difficult to hide.

I realise I need a new job, even if its giant drop in salary.
I always wondered why the US didn't nuke Japanese military bases instead of major cities. Would have made the same impression on the Japanese government with far fewer civilian casualties.
> I won't meta-program for tests, but I will do things like make a list of classes, or symbols or whatever, to pass to a loop. Just keep it simple.

This is a case where metaprogramming for tests came in handy.

I had a bug recently that involved someone making a change that violated an invariant property of a class. To codify this invariant, I was tempted to do what you did, to make a list of symbols to feed into my test to ensure the invariant was obeyed. However this bug was caused precisely by someone adding a new symbol, a method, that didn't obey this property. The test using this design wouldn't catch this failure. I instead opted to do some introspection (it's Python, so it was dead simple) on the class to ensure all of its methods obeyed this invariant. It took a little extra time to implement but in the end it worked.
Interesting usage of the way AWS endpoints work.

I guess a lot of websites break from this, since web servers sometimes don't like traffic coming from different sources for the same "session".
Ladar acted with integrity and self sacrifice. He's earned trust in a way that not many others have.

I am looking forward to trying darkmail, or whatever they're branding it as now.
A Sigmoid Dialogue [pdf]
Even if they aren't profitable or being sold copyright holders often try to prevent piracy anyway.
Interesting article, until you realize that the entire basis of the claim that the patent is worth billions is that the author assumed the 1-click patent "increases Amazon’s sales by 5% each year". Amazon isn't too forthcoming with their numbers, but really wanted to see more support to that claim.
If you want to learn a language, find a cheap immersion school in a country and spend 3 months there. Guatemala is great for Spanish. I hear Montreal is good for French.

Drawing... well, I'm not having much luck with that. Did 6 months of drawing 1 hour a day last year. Think I got a little better. Reddit has a couple of useful groups to follow:

https://www.reddit.com/r/learntodraw/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals/
Please don't post uncivil comments.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13297287 and marked it off-topic.
Yup, plenty of others examples. There's also more sort of "gray" examples of things like streaming sites that just "index" the streams that are on various servers and file sharing sites like openload.

It's always a matter of how much attention you grab and what people you piss off. Things can look like they are fine, legal, and alright, until they aren't. It's hard to know if a strategy works until it doesn't.

Beyond the perception issues I mentioned, all I am saying is that the legal issues tend to be somewhat volatile because what is legally or ethically correct isn't necessarily what happens in reality. Combine that with other motivators like politicians and deep pockets and it gets pretty scary.

I am glad my spouse works in what I would call a more moral side of prosecution that's hard to argue the other way. She can't and I can't say that entirely good things happen in other areas of prosecution like piracy and digital crimes. If someone wants to cause you trouble, they can often find a "way" or at the very least dig and bother enough until they invent something or shake things up to find something. The cost of a legal battle alone sometimes is its own form of extortion and can be a deterrent. Gross behavior, but it happens.
Yes, precisely
I think you're missing two things: (1) there are clients who demand administrative access, and since they pay the bills, they get it (2) maintainability. As much as I detest WordPress, and as garbage as many of the public plugins are, what would be even worse is having my team take over support for one of your sites with your custom plugins. Ramp up cost is a very real thing.
It wasn't unsolvable, there was just no proof yet ;P
For newsletter signups specifically, I have a "zero fucks given" KPI: However I configure the "Signup for our Newsletter" CTA, I make sure to watch for signups like "fuckoff@fuckyou.com" - As soon as I see one I know the CTA is annoying people and I come up with a better way.
The most insidious type of bias, and the least noticed, is researcher bias.
Use-Case Approach to Bookmarks in Your Browser
I'm the opposite of an LLVM expert, but I'm having a hard time seeing the relevance of that email. It's about how LLVM IR isn't cross platform, but inline assembly isn't either, right?
Umm, wordpress is a useful widely supported lowest common denominator
once we have artificial general intelligence, everything changes infinitely forever.

How do you think it will change everything infinitely forever? Are you confident this would be a positive change for us and all species on earth? This is where I'm a little lost about the enthusiasm for AGI but I'm curious what others think?
Dismissed Wordpress for many years, then I found WPEngine (I know, mentioned below, but I have some points to make). Edit: Not affiliated with them in any way. Just a really big fan.

My number one reason for WPEngine is their excellent support, both in terms of response times and general knowledge. They have never let me or a client down.

My time is money (or the client's money). Yes it's much more expensive than self-hosting, but my hourly rates are much more than their professional plan costs each month. One unfortunate issue and they'll spend more on paying me than they'll save on hosting elsewhere for a year. This is also how I "sell" WPEngine to new leads. It's not a hard sell.

I now have 12+ client sites there. Some several years and none have suffered a single issue of a compromised site. I've actually used WPE's (free) service to migrate compromised sites to their platform and get them cleaned as a feature to garner new clients.

The WPE interface allows me to switch between them in an instant. Add to that general performance/caching, security/firewall, automatic updates, daily snapshots and reverting to a previous version with one click, on-demand backups, the staging site functionality, free automated SSL certs, CDN (pro plans), etc etc

It has come to the point that I don't accept any projects that don't agree on hosting there.

PS Fought battles with many different CMSs --e.g. don't even get me started on Joomla or even Drupal-- and don't believe that wordpress is any more vulnerable than other CMS sites. Moreover, there are so many WordPress developers out there, that I can safely promise that me getting hit by a truck is really not a problem.

Edit 2: I limit plugins to the absolute minimum. I avoid free plugins whenever possible. Buying highly rated plugins with support from places like ThemeForest is really really useful and well worth the money.
Well, yes. Foamy keg beer of dubious provenance deserves no less than a cheap plastic cup.
This is my everyday at the moment. WordPress's biggest success, in my opinion, is that it is synonymous with "website" for many incoming clients. I get "We need a WordPress site" far more often than "We need a website", and they're almost exclusively asking for the latter once we break down the business goals. Always feels like I'm starting from an entrenched position though.
Listen to some talks by Neil Theise and Donald Hoffman. They each make a pretty good case that conscious agents like humans and ants have many quantum-like effects that are directly comparable to entanglement and observation effects. The argument is that it is conscious agents all the way down
Well yeah, but then Disney came along...
Thanks! Yeah, it definitely has potential to break some websites, although I haven't run into anything specific yet. Two scenarios where I know current code will break:

* Anything that requires a long lived HTTP connection

* If you get unlucky and you load part of a web page while proxy is moving over to a new Lambda function
Parallel Programming, Fork Join, and Reducers
But the win in that game is to save 10k per year in the US, then retire in Europe. Get full retirement in half the time.

Many do that within the US with cost of living games. Work in SF for 5 years saving 200k a year. Move to Flordia and be set living in 40k a year for life. (Or some variation thereof)
Funny coincidence that it was named "writegood" by a guy named Benjamin and "Silence Dogood" was a pen name of Benjamin Franklin.
That's much better! Something approaching 1/5 made me think of movie theater concessions.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the passive voice, but people overuse it. For example, I've edited technical documents that used the passive voice so frequently that I lost track of what was being done by the user and what was being done automatically.
Website overloaded... here's a cache.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...

"What books would be entering the public domain if we had the pre-1978 copyright laws?"

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
John Updike, Rabbit, Run
Joy Adamson, Born Free: A Lioness of Two Worlds
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty
Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval: The Age of Roosevelt
Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
Scott O’Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins
John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique

"Consider the films and television shows from 1960 that would have become available this year."

The Time Machine
Psycho
Spartacus
Exodus
The Apartment
Inherit the Wind
The Magnificent Seven
Ocean’s 11
The Alamo
The Andy Griffith Show (first episodes)
The Flintstones (first episodes)

Also listed: songs from 1960 (e.g. Elvis's "It's Now or Never"), and copyrighted scientific research from 1960 still behind paywalls (e.g. 1960 papers on the structure of hemoglobin and myoglobin).
I bought the mobile app and the license for my Mac. I don't use their cloud service and when I sync my mobile it is via the local wifi to my Mac and I don't use any cloud options like Dropbox or iCloud etc.
I don't blame you or think you are paranoid. I don't know as much as I like, but for various reasons ranging from family to work to my childhood, I've seen a fair amount of "stuff" in the world that at the very least makes me both cautious and skeptical.

The average person isn't really going to be targeted for most things though. What is scary sometimes is the recklessness that people exhibit when they do have powerful information about other people. That enables some of the bad actors, whether private citizens, criminal organizations, fraudsters, or otherwise to do bad things with the information. Gathering information is a dangerous thing even if used for noble purposes because it's very hard to guarantee it is used for that.

As far as cooperation between intelligence agencies and copyright lobby, again I can't say. My feeling and first-hand experiences have more been it's an indirect relationship at best. More that lobbies pressure people, who in turn pressure intelligence. That combined with negligence and sloppy information handling and operational security, and sometimes the wrong people are able to see information they shouldn't that was often for other purposes.

I'll never understand what makes corporations and the idea of nations make people act so irrationally and often evil. It's really not that hard in life, don't be an a-hole. If you have to ask yourself if you are doing the right thing, you probably aren't most of the time. Money has just become such a huge part of civilization that it becomes a primary motivator of behaviors for many people, and the results speak for themselves.

I could go on, but I'll leave it at money makes the world go round, and sometimes I feel we've just recreated things like serfdom, monarchy, divine right, and the whole family of awfulness like that in new forms.
>So, why so many plugins? Am I missing something?

Many people treat WordPress as a fully featured CMS/CRM that runs their entire business. They often have multiple complex custom developed plugins.
Ideological trolling isn't allowed on HN. It results in flamewars, and divisive topics are hard enough to discuss without it.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13298026 and marked it off-topic.
Well, I'm talking about the out of pocket expense when you're covered. My ER visit wasn't $50 either, technically; the ambulance bill alone was 50x the copay, in the itemized bill they mailed me. But I was personally responsible for very little of it.
Everyone keeps recommending Mindfulness in Plain English, including people I have a deep admiration from. But I went into it thinking it'd be a no-bs exploration of meditation and closed the book once the author mentioned how some meditators experienced "talking to their ancestors".

I'm sure that you can be objective and cut through that type of statement but meh, I couldn't do it. Maybe I'll try again at some point but that one really put me off.
If you're developing websites which are inoperative if the user agent does not support JavaScript, your development practices are broken.

I browse without JavaScript by default, and if a page doesn't load properly because someone decided to implement not a web page but a web page viewing client-side web application, I usually just leave. Then there are terminal browsers like lynx.

Moreover, reimplementing a web browser's navigation logic for a specific site is silly. It will in all likelihood be less reliable than a web browser's navigation logic. Moreover, it will always be slower for the initial page load than just serving a normal web page.

Yes, maybe you'll make things slightly faster for subsequent page loads. But consider that initial page loads from search engine referrals may well be the most important case, latency-wise. And if you do server-side rendering with progressive enhancement, you can have your cake and eat it if you really want to implement your own navigation logic with pushState, etc.; serve the static page and enhance it with an async script.
I don't agree with this analogy though. Who's to say if life evolved on earth all over again, we'd end up in the exact same place? Sure, some of the same adaptations would re-emerge. But some might not. And there might be extraneous mutations that had no effect on fitness at all but drastically changed the appearance of some subset of species. If we assume true randomness is involved then we assume evolution itself is going to deliver non-deterministic results, don't we?

To put it in terms of genetic algorithms, we could run through N generations M different times and get different results each time.

To me that makes it seem like saying "randomness is an important aspect of evolution" isn't so far from the mark.
I'd appreciate a more general appreciation of how little can be accurately predicted. Any time I hear sports commentators predict winners I internally shake my head. Why do so few people have the ability to admit to themselves that most things are just unpredictable?
This reminded to me (even before reading the article) of the marvellous piece of text: I, pencil, by L. E. Read: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html
Non-paywall link: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/12/27/us-path-on-legal-mar...

The usual web link didn't work for me this time.
There are many parts of what you're saying I disagree with.

Here's some work from Harvard establishing that obesity does incurr a higher healthcare cost burden (https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesi...)

I can cite similar articles for excessive smoking/drinking as well, and as anecdata the physicians in my family firsthand support the statements in the above.

You're absolutely right re: asymptotic end of life costs, and I would be in full support of a rethink to the ROI on those costs (especially if they're being footed via e.g. medicare/other tax based resources)

But if anything I think this is _more_ reason for healthy people to be angry, as I'd argue that the upper bound on marginal benefit to keep a 90 year old alive another year as opposed to proactively treating smoking/obesity is probably far lower. (just by the empiricism that even in a best case the 90 year old probably doesn't have as much time left)

At the end of the day, the amount of money that my employer reports as paying for insurance is _astounding_ and I've yet to see any data to support that it's being used effectively, especially given trends of increasing rates without commensurate gains in QOL/life expectancy (there has absolutely been gains but most of the recent cost hikes have been political and divorced from a more needs based cost growth, assessing "need" as per net long term outcomes)

As I said in another post, I've had to surmount a few stress based/sedentary based injuries, and to be bluntly selfish, I'd rather that money to buy myself more stability/a faster retirement so that I may better take care of my own body and not incur a heavy cost on others later in life. (or worse, cut years off my own)