skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Which is the justification for disallowing overly offensive clothing and behaviour.

Now you might say that displaying a grammar error isn't anywhere near as offensive as nudity, not even if the grammar error is displayed in the most prominent fashion available to the shop, and for years on end. But I don't think that's a given. It is at least discussable.
From the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> In Submissions

> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

The original title has more information: "Dopamine neuronal loss contributes to memory and reward dysfunction in a model of Alzheimer’s disease"

The problem with the submitted title: "Ask HN: Is this a breaktrough in Alzheimer research and cause?"(nature.com)
is that all discovers are presented by the researchers/press release/etc. as a breakthrough. There are plenty of news about increasing the battery life by 73%, the solar cell efficiency by 42% or curing cancer. After a while, the dust settle and sometimes the result is interesting and is an improvement.

In this case, it's published in "Nature Communications", not in the main "Nature" journal. I don't know the difference in quality between them, but I suppose that if this were a groundbreaking breakthrough article the authors would try to publish it in the main "Nature" journal.

The research was in a mouse model, not human patients, so perhaps it's a good hint to guide a future treatment in humans, but it's not clear.

Also, they didn't found a "cure" for the mouse model. IIUC they only found what is the part of the brain affected by the first symptoms. But they have to cut the mouse to see it, it's not an non invasive detection technique.

Perhaps this is a good starting point for a future better understanding of the illness and a treatment, or perhaps no.
Saying that something is "magical" is often merely short-hand for "this behavior would take too much time or effort to figure out right now, let's not get lost in the weeds and just continue along with our objectives."

Admittedly, some technical folks are apt to take words literally and don't response well to the usage of the word "magic/magical" even when its meant in a figurative sense.
That's what it is for me. I spent five and a half years slowly doing a masters in mathematics in my own time, evenings and weekends, for the pure thrill of it.

Now I'm learning Japanese just for the sake of being able to read, write and speak Japanese. Wnet all the way to Tokyo in December for five mornings' worth of Japanese lessons (and some tourism stuff around it); just for the pleasure of learning something of interest.

As you say, a fancy way to waste time. I understand some people do other things to the same ends; movies, television, music, socialising, drugs and alcohol, dancing, art, reading, writing, building things, making things, running, climbing, swimming, on and on and on. Oh, the range of things we humans do as fancy wastes of time.
In a university setting, it seems to me that teaching in combination with support from endowment (not research grants) can be one of the scenario for this ... key is still to have fundamentally good people with passion and joy for the endeavor ..
Interesting data structures: the BK-tree
> Suppose Facebook embraces the fact that editorial power is political power

If they have editorial power then it's time to do away with the Digital Safe Harbors and time to consider antitrust.
> UBI reduces the incentive to work, and risks stranding millions of people in a subsistence living trap, able to just about get by, but cut off from the opportunity for upward mobility, as this essay details well.

The claim is prima facie false, so I looked at the source provided ("this essay" is [1]) and it doesn't support that claim AT ALL.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601499/basic-income-a-sel...
Santa Claus.
"Before we hire you, we first need you to outwit this burmese python..."
>"One other point, these cloud companies like Amazon and Google do a great deal of self congratulations for some pretty embarrassing architectures. Necessitating million server datacenters is as WTF to me as being proud of millions of lines of code when someone else is doing it with magnitudes less"

Can you explain what these "embarrassing architectures"?

Also two of the largest tech companies on the planet using millions of servers is a "WTF" to you? Care to explain? Also I don't think either Amazon or Google has ever released actual numbers for server counts. Please provide a citation for this.

>"as being proud of millions of lines of code when someone else is doing it with magnitudes less"

This is also a pretty vague statement. Lines of code for what? And who is doing that same "what" with less code?

>"They are basically asleep at the wheel because their architectures are predicated on poor assumptions, shirking understanding of computer architecture for 10s of thousands of SREs and "full stack developers".

Do you really believe that Google and Amazon don't understand computer architecture?

Please provide citations for how you arrived at the at the number of SREs and "Full Stack Developers" at Google and Amazon. I don't think Google/Amazon even have "Full Stack Developer" as a job title.

>"I led the creation of an OS team, to look from first principles, where we were spending CPU/bus/IO bandwidth, and focusing on north-south delivery instead of horizontal scale"

You did this at Limelight Networks then I presume according to the link you provided? You realize that a CDN is predominantly North-South traffic right? CDNs are a very different business than being general purpose cloud providers which in addition to north-south traffic have substantial east-west traffic.

You fault Google and Amazon for "congratulating" themselves yet the link you provide presumably to substantiate your own grand achievements is fluffy press release. A press release with zero detail around the claims being made and no link to a white paper or any technical specifics are given.

Limelight is not exactly what I would call a market leader or a name associated with being a great technical innovator. Limelight lost 73 million dollars last years and has a 270 million market cap. They were also sued by CDN provider Akami and agreed to pay Akami licensing fees as part of the settlement for that infringement.[1]

>"A team of 5, we are able to deliver significant shareholder value"

Your company's stock trades at $2.56 a share while Amazon and Alphabets trade at well over $800 a share. I will gladly take the share holder value that Google's and Amazon's "10s of thousands of SREs and "full stack developers" provide over your team of 5.

[1] http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/news/2017/02/08/limelight...
Why not produce useful software needed by wider society as part of the course? Whether it's open source which will give them the github credentials or something like CodeForAmerica that fixes needed public works.

The problem is the dog eat dog narrow mindedness of seeing everything as a competition and not learning anything about collaboration and serving others. Something a lot of CS grads would benefit massively from, I know I would have.
Again, I get where you are coming from, but then there is this:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-hU7LNS3S3F0/UgQM8LZeTuI/A...

It shows Shanghai in 1987 vs 2013

From a humanist angle, those buildings are outrageous monstrosities and monuments to human egos. However, they were built from wealth generation that probably gave farmers in paddy fields the opportunity to be elevated out of relative poverty to positions where they could gain an education and likely some are now right here with us on HN.

Likely it was all paid for by your average WalMart / Apple / Amazon shopper.

A deeper question is if we feel this is money well spent, and skyscrapers as legacies certainly didn't start in China and are quite prevalent in the West as well.

Taxing the hell out of frivolous luxury goods might be a jolly good start but dunno if that's going to fly anytime soon because even that is a subjective call at best.

Boo, tricky stuff :/
If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability.

Absolutely, could not agree more. This is the only way to beat gamification of metrics in my opinion.

There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. I fundamentally believe that no amount of rules or metrics can turn a bad academic into a good one, an unsafe doctor into a safe one or a crooked politician into an honest public servant. We have to calm down with the metrics, accreditations and regulations, and accept that some people are better than others at certain things, hire the right people and trust them to do a good job.
I guess that's a sign of a really unhealthy community if they have no process of getting hackers into their system so that they can get productive within 15 weeks.

I really don't buy the "too much bureaucracy" argument. Google is really transparent in terms of GSoC and I would say they're really well managed. I read that as a sign of OpenBSD's weakness, not Google's.
Almost certainly not.

Apple just announced to the whole world that they are no longer interested in Imagnation Technologies' IP.

Announcing to the world that they were interested in Imagination Technologies after all (by acquiring them) would not only have made the prior announcement deceptive, but also (almost certainly) be considered market manipulation, given that the announcement caused a 60% drop in the stock's price.
Investigating is essentially a space particular term for critical thinking. Bugs are depicted as word problems.Since mental models are approximations, they are in some cases inaccurate, prompting unusual conduct in programming when it is created on top of flawed suspicions.
Not really. If anything it just makes coding challenges useless for distinguishing between people who can think, and people who can regurgitate.

It's one thing to "know" how to balance a binary tree because you've read up on and practiced the most common challenges - it's something else entirely to actually think through and understand a problem, then come up with a solution.

I'd much rather have someone who can describe the edge cases and the complexity of a problem but get the final solution slightly wrong (but hey, the know the edge cases so can write tests for it, right?), than someone who can regurgitate code they've written before without really understanding it.
This works because both sides have a well-understood model of what 'performing' looks like. And if you don't, you'll be shown the door very quickly.
It shouldn't be a surprise given the fact that physics was revolutionized by a patent clerk.

Additionally, having a relaxing job with lots of free time doesn't just free you to explore hard problems, it also promotes creativity. This is because stress is the ultimate creativity killer. Thus these sorts of jobs are really a recipe for deep thinking.
I was brought up not to believe in Santa (and apparently got into trouble at school for upsetting other children by telling them he didn't exist) and find it amazing that other parents are happy to lie to their children like this - setting a precedent that adults are not to be trusted, thus undermining lots of potentially valuable true advice. On the other hand, my family also took me to church every week, so there's that...
You see, it's quite hard to show to a person on the outside the absence of real political contention between the "official opposition" here and Putin's regime. It's the thing about showing an absence: I would need to provide you with a ton of context for you to appreciate the glaring complacency of the "official opposition".

Here are some examples, though:

- we had presidential elections in 2012. Per Russian law, there are only two entities who can sue for electoral fraud: a candidate whose score was harmed and a state prosecutor. The fraud was widespread during that voting, with dozens of filmed cases (see [1], [2], etc. One of fraud cases I witnessed myself). Guess which candidate stood for themselves in court? Not a single one.

- can you please name a single "opposition party" which participated in the recent (26th of March) protest?

- can you please name a single "opposition leader" (including 2012 candidates) who debated against Putin or demanded debates? In fact, can you please provide an example of any sort of pointed critique of Putin (like the curious source of wealth of his friends) from any candidate in the 2012 election campaign?

I should also note that you are very dismissive of my "opinion", and yet I'm definitely more knowledgeable of the intricacies of the political process here. I don't think that sounds like a desire for "facts"; on the contrary, you are trying to dismiss counterarguments to your (wrong) accusation.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEf9YSxobTE

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwwlBzmM8qs
Invitation to the Game
I'm a C+/B- developer. I've been doing this stuff for touching two decades, and these questions gave me a prickly sweat down my back. There is a part of me that feels very lucky to have plopped onto the Earth right when I did, before there was an organized process to weed me out. I'm entrenched enough that interviews are generally just culture fit interviews. I think I'd need ulcer medicine to get a job with no reputation.
Honestly, I think you'd learn more about a potential hire that way than by presenting them with these sort of challenges.
yeah, white men.

you're all idiots.
Render markdown in your terminal
> Of course, preventing public school teachers from unionizing will simply allow the government to exploit them.

What are the examples in modern liberal democracies where governments exploited non-unionized workers?

The arguments for unions assume an adversarial relationship between employer and employees. But they don't go through for governments.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/02/bu...
Well, the way they spoke out about their lack of participation kinda hurts the perception of GSoC, thus I'd say it's a good moment to talk about it.

Also, is there a list of software development taboos we shouldn't discuss here or it's just my impression that it's a bit too easy to get you angry by a simple comment?
On the other hand, i was discussing a gsoc project on Debian since last year (was very excited about it), and guess what, Debian was not accepted as a gsoc organization for this year, nice...

edit-> i'm a student and gsoc's stipend would help me a lot.
> Because e.g. the user asked the question on Facebook Messenger. And you don't want to send them to your website when you can reply instantly, right there.

You're defending the use of a bot for a scenario that only occurs because the bot exists.
If I understand UK visa rules correctly, getting a work permit as someone who designs or develops tech for robots is as easy as getting a job offer from a company that wants you to design or develop tech for robots for them.
50 grand challenges for the 21st century
I'd rather take my chances with a snake than trying to solve "Add two integers without using + or -".
Welp, rather have trolls "winning the internet" whatever that means, than have mainstream journalism "win the internet". All this autistic screeching from journalists, these days, because they are loosing their foothold, lying didn't help win the election and it won't "win the internet" either.
Fun fact: that's the original definition of the term Realpolitik, as coined by Ludwig von Rochau, a German writer and politician in the 19th century.

He said that the great achievement of the Enlightenment had been to show that might is not necessarily right. The mistake liberals made was to assume that the law of the strong had suddenly evaporated simply because it had been shown to be unjust. Rochau wrote that "to bring down the walls of Jericho, the Realpolitiker knows the simple pickaxe is more useful than the mightiest trumpet."

I've been reading "Realpolitik: A History" and I think there are some useful lessons for today.
Based on the assumption that he wasn't actually where he was supposed to be. I've had several cancellations from drivers, when being worse for wear, for not being where I'm supposed to be even when I've not moved and seen the car drive past without a phonecall. Probably don't want the hassle of a half-cut passenger, but it's a nuisance from their end. Do they get a cut of the charge?
I don't understand code challenges. Can you even program without Google and Stack Overflow anymore? And god-forbid being experienced in a dozen frameworks and libraries if it's not the exact combination the company uses.
Become a better developer with an efficient technical watch
> Quantum uncertainty is a fundamental consequence of the underlying physics, it has nothing to do with influence from the measurement process.

If you can prove that, your Nobel prize awaits. :)

The truth is that nobody knows why there is quantum uncertainty. The common belief is that the uncertainty is "real", but non-local hidden variable theories have not been proven to be impossible.

(In a recent survey of physicists, 47% favoured explicitly real uncertainty - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.00676.pdf)
Most Developers Don't Know Security
This is very interesting. I have no doubts that not having to deal with fault tolerance at the application level compensates for the efforts to put in place this architecture. And yes, in my opinion, "application-level consensus" is the perfect term to designate this architecture.
Please remember that the laws are only modeled on the EU directives, one have to expect a substantial compatibility, but the specific terms may change on a country basis.

One of the aims of the GDPR has been to standardize the protection, zeroing the differences.

http://194.242.234.211/documents/10160/2012405/Personal+Data...

Specifically ask the removal of any information that may lead to any form of authentication (prior or post any processing, the deanonymisation trick is not allowed).

You just need to prove they have obtained your data in violation of anyone of the provisions.

In my case "they incorporated a company, embedding the data in the datastore in such a way that they violated the term of service of the previous company, their own tos (I never subscribed to their website yet they insistently phoned and texted me) and the actual privacy law, adding to this the delete form was unmaintained and didn't work, which is another violation".

Edit: sorry for the multiple updates, I am typing from my iPhone.
I installed some obscure instant messenger app to try the latest and greatest Microsoft chatbot a couple weeks ago.

Walked away very disappointed. The chatbot would give incoherent unfitting answers every three sentences or so. It was also unable to keep in mind what had already been written.
Thanks, sounds nice.

Does this also work with the SaaS version of WP or do I have to host my own WP instance to get this going?

And does it support role based access? I will probably have 2 kinds of front-end users. Free users and subscription users.
Spot on. Just spot on. I do share this thought
Alcamy: An open self-learning platform
Minor stuff like spending 3 weeks "unemployed" and without a salary because her boss couldn't be arsed/was too busy to sort out the paperwork, grant money almost getting lost in the shuffle, stuff like that.

And even if you perceive a personnel issue as genuinely minor and you genuinely do consider it a waste of time, telling someone that problems they perceive as genuine are so insignificant to you that you don't even want to consider them, despite that being part of your job, is a great way to build resentment and destroy teams. A good manager should be able to quickly and efficiently handle minor issues without making people feel ignored and insignificant.
Sure I agree as well. That there are so many resources and tools available to answer these coding challenges that if for whatever reason such a challenge was presented the minimum is to be able to answer thr challenge. Going beyond would be to know when to use such a data structure or its inherent strengths and weaknesses etc.
I'd say I am very happy for every project they accepted. It's obvious they have limits on how many and how different organizations they can accept and it's not fun job to tell those who got declined that they should try next year.
Current research indicates that the best way to promote performance is not to encourage someone's current performance, but instead encourage their development of skill mastery.

In the short term, rewards (like money) produce the best results of all, but they also seem to impair learning.
$25k is really not middle class, especially in cities with higher COL.
"We see you're familiar with compression but how about pandas?"
If you're a private enterprise, anything you do can be reasonably related to money (revenue, profit, long term forecast etc.), and we have ample tools to measure performance, align incentives and evaluate risk over the money-abstraction. This works because money flows through the whole process and partakes in every transaction.

Academic pursuits are, monetarily speaking, money sinks. They might be worthwhile investments, but only so far as they deliver patents or attract grants. Academic professionals want to advance the state of the art, and only small parts of that work is applicable to the money-abstraction.

In order to prevent Science(TM) from grinding to a halt, we replace Money with some other measurable so we can apply our existing tools and make risk-assessment before granting money to academics who will (most certainly) spend every last cent of it to indulge their pursuits. We chose measurables in a trade-off between academic freedom + infinite spending and academic constraints + finite spending, because the supply of Science(TM) is practically unbounded.

I'm stating the obvious here in order to ask the question: What is the gosh-darned alternative?