skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Colorado Springs resident here. I think the article provided a pretty fair assessment of things, considering it addressed how [previous Mayor] Bach identified bad deals such as the Memorial Hospital deal and the power plant scrubber. This town's leadership in general has been dysfunctional for a long time; Bach wasn't the cure-all that many had hoped he would be.

Couple of additional thoughts:

Regarding the (new) Mayor's success in getting $250M for roads: what isn't mentioned is that the roads in this town are abysmal. When I lived in Northern Virginia many moons ago, I joked that I could always tell when I drove into DC by the effect on my car's handling. Having just come back from a vacation to that area, I can affirm that Colorado Springs has surpassed DC in this respect.

The neglect of the roads was another petulant move by the City towards voters, just like the streetlights.

Secondly, despite so often being painted as an arch-conservative western extension to the bible belt, Colorado Springs is a pretty tolerant, open-minded city. I'd suggest checking out the /r/ColoradoSprings section on Reddit, especially where people ask about how LGBT-friendly, etc the place is, and read the answers from some of the other locals. It isn't the town out of "Footloose".
Facebook begins global rollout of “Find Wi-Fi” feature for its mobile apps
Interesting, thanks, but still more questions than answers and a somewhat condescending or at the opposite (as some other HN readers noted previously) somewhat "high school" trying to put together something that the teacher would approve, "Here we establish ..." ?.
THAT's the history they chose? 8 points in the history of programming, and one of them is Minecraft? Wow. It looks like they wanted to focus on the accomplishments of women, and as a father of a girl I admire that, but come on. A picture of Ada and a mention of Babbage but nothing about the foundations of logic? The creator of C++ but not the creators of C, Fortran, Lisp, or even BASIC? OOP but not functioanl. Nothing about punch cards or assembly. No Unix, no databases, no mainframes, no mobile, no cloud. Disappointing article.
This is very nicely framed, thank you. At the risk of going slightly off track, do you think this argument about active involvement also fits (physical and not electronic)books?
Can they launch a program to critique thermodynamics, gravity, planetary motion, and evolution too?
It does if you use gcc though - both variants of the code in question here compiles to the same assembly (at least with gcc 7.1 on x86-84)
Being able to unit test every single part of our stack through composition of pure functions makes for a nicely decoupled architecture.

We have a strictly defined state object that is used throughout our entire application. Because we made a contract with redux, every transaction is readable and transparent.

Writing tests for our UI layer has never been easier with React. While we do have local state inside some react components, when we use redux to pass state to our react components, they become extremely easy to test, because they turn into pure functions.

When using something like jQuery, you wouldn't just look at each frame of your state to determine how the UI would look, you would also have to look at the transitional states between A and B. Transitional states are much more difficult to understand because of the contextual implications.

Our UI layer is completely separate from our business logic and we get it automatically. Without any code modification we were able to target our large application into a CLI app just by adding a new UI layer.
Science does not. The institution of public policy based on the results of that science might.
Yes, several CAs have indicated that they are at the least watching the ACME development, and it was intended from the outset that ACME would have other users beyond Let's Encrypt.

Also keep in mind that if you're a big customer the big CAs already had products where things are streamlined for you, so the annoying experience you get as a small operator is not necessarily happening at scale for a large corporation like, say, Disney.
Okay, but apart from emergencies, why would anyone go to a hospital whose goal is profit when all the best research hospitals are non-profit?
I used matplotlib for a very long time. Now, I suggest using bokeh

http://bokeh.pydata.org/

I am finding the API a lot cleaner than Matplotlib, and it is very nice to have the ability to do integrated interactive plots in Jupyter.
There are APIs for both Amazon and Google's voice assistant services. Not surprisingly Siri doesn't expose a public one, I've no idea about Cortana. I've messed around a little with them on the Raspberry Pi.

This idea, while simple in principle, might be kinda annoying in practice. You're still left with similar issues - how do you decide which talking cylinder service answered the question best? Do you play all of the answers? For me I'm fairly sure listening to all of them in a row would frustrate me even further - just waiting for Alexa to finish telling me the news headlines is sometimes kinda annoying, especially when that information in visual form can be grokked almost instantly. Many of these devices, especially the Google one, are getting better at context based followup questions - managing who to send your follow up question to could be kinda crappy as well. I suppose you could do one device that could ask each service individually ("Alexa...", "Ok Google..."), but in my experience as soon as I get one bad answer, I inevitably just use google.com to find what I need rather than risk wasting my time on another failed conversation.

The main part that I've found hard to do in home rolled voice assistants is microphone arrays. Almost all these devices use pretty sophisticated microphone technologies for things like noise cancelling, subject isolation etc, which so far has been non-trivial to do to a similar standard in homemade versions of them. It also certainly used to be the case that creating your own "hotword" system to call the Alexa API was technically against the ToS (it allowed you to use a button press to call Alexa instead), as naturally Amazon would rather you buy a real Echo. No idea if this is still the case, and at any rate Amazon can't really enforce this either, but worth mentioning.
When I've benchmarked regexes before (Ruby ISTR) there have been situations where the regex engine optimised the code to be comparable to string functions, I can't remember the details though. Just for fun I benchmarked =~ /\Asomething/ and start_with?("something"), a situation that seems could be optimisable by the regex engine, but the string function is still faster (Ruby 2.3.1):

start_with: 5703143.1 i/s
regex: 2821224.4 i/s - 2.02x slower

That aside:

> There's no reason to contort your code around something that should automatically happen.

Absolutely, but it's a question of style at that point. "Contorting your code" suggests using a less desirable style/syntax for some gain, and I'd agree would be premature optimisation. If you're just making a choice between two styles that you consider to be pretty much equal then it's just pragmatic.

edit: Forgot to add, yes, I agree that this should happen automatically in the compiler :)
The README is a lot more matter-of-fact if that's your taste: https://github.com/jdeal/qim. I tried to have a bit more fun with the blog post and avoid simply rewriting the docs.
Unless you he scrutiny is biased and meant to discredit the science that is. Republicans lie about scientific consensus on climate change all the time. Do you think, it by some miracle this review is not biased, that they will suddenly accept those findings?

Vested interests have vested interests. Reviews of publications doesn't change that.
Well, if you have a corporate American Express card, you can pay $75/yr and you accumulate all the points on your corporate card for yourself.
Who invited him to your university, and how did they know of him?

There's no contest that his blog was an instrument in his popularity; I am questioning that it was the main one.
What does it mean to take GDP into account?
I expect there are a lot of questions that lend themselves to concise answers. BUT if sensible informally phrased questions don't get answered properly a decent percentage of the time, we learn not to bother.

I agree that voice interfaces aren't good for a lot of things. How do I cook XYZ? probably isn't suited. But overall performance just isn't that great.
He did say they "don't do a ton," so they are definitely doing some, maybe that's where?

That said, I do appreciate the sentiment here. This is a different context entirely, but in my ecomm past a/b testing was often employed by those seeking the politically safest growth path. I considered it proactive CYA where Product Managers would prefer premature optimization over having an opinion on what's best for the user.

I witnessed what I considered an unhealthy amount of a/b testing resources spent on micro adjustments eg moving a buy button a few pixels or changing the color slightly. There was very little calculated risk taking, which can be enabled with A/B testing employed differently. There's absolutely a place for those kinds of optimizations but I think they come much later in product maturity than when many organizations actually begin using them.

Then there's an entire other discussion about understanding the math behind building a relevant test and interpreting the results.
Facebook is rolling out its “Find Wi-Fi” feature worldwide
"Coming soon" button does nothing..
consensus as in general agreement, as in a majority. Pointing out that some minority group exists is hardly a refutation. Would you not say there is a consensus the Earth is round?
I would imagine that at some point, maybe in 100 years, mining may not reward you more than the cost of electricity to mine. Miners won't bother continue--how will bitcoins continue to be hashed? thanks apeace!
Per capita you are the highest, and historically as well. That's slowly changing and may not be true in the future as other nations industrialize, but you can't escape the facts.

Edit: downvotes, but no comments? Nice. Care to point out why I'm wrong?
(though I know we're in "proving a negative" territory" here)

If it's codified in law, it shouldn't be hard to find. I've looked, I can't find it. Hell, I can't even find the origins of where such a falsehood originated. So, to put it as non-snarkily as I can, I've put more time into the question than those that hold the statement as truth; my obligation is fulfilled.

EDIT: and to be clear, because someone always thinks themselves clever by bringing it up, this does not preclude shareholders from kicking the board's collective asses to the street. But that is a long way from "legal obligation".
These digital assistants are just begging for an app store. Search is just the first app, jokes and weather are other useful apps. These could easily follow a similar product life cycle pattern as smartphones.
> To the average person, myself included, the arguments made by both "sides" (ACC exists, ACC does not exist) are equally convincing. That is, both seem logical and well-argued at the superficial level we can understand without training.

Understanding climate change requires high degrees of expertise, the collection of large amounts of data, the use of large mathematical models, and the cooperation of a large number of scientists. A large number of scientists work very hard to track the state of climate change, and their assessment is that "climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities" [0].

> If ACC doesn't exist, the academic lobby will fight for their prestige ang grants)

Please see the list of scientific bodies and their statements on climate change [1]. The idea that a large majority of all scientists with knowledge pertaining to climate science in the world would be corrupted, falsify results, and make false statements over many years to fund further studies seems exceedingly unlikely.

> And so I ask: Who should be trusted, why, and how, given the limited number of hours in the day available to people who aren't directly involved in climatology as their day job?

You should trust what 97% (or more) of all climate scientists agree upon. Arguing that a group of experts of a domain should be trusted is not logically fallacious.

[0] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048...

[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
An attempt to study broadband investment in a net neutrality world
You've hit on a very big part of listening to music that appears largely lost today. Composers would know that they had a captive audience for so long a time and would be able to create large narratives in their music that just can't be pulled off today.

I have a hard time imagining just sitting down to listen to music. Not listen to music and converse or eat. Not listen to music and browse the web. Just listening to music sounds like a hard task.

However when I am at a live concert it is very easy to completely focus on the music even over a couple of hours. I can see the instruments and my other senses are involved in the experience.
Yeah, the mishmash of convenience functions and pch were pretty much exactly what I was thinking about. Also, I will vehemently agree that base R graphics are still far less magical than matplotlib. So, I guess I meant "like matplotlib, but to a far less extreme degree" :-)
No, I know.

It's a placeholder for "Getting started", which I'll activate once I open to signups.
Layout is the next frontier of web app performance
Vinyl records are a great market segmentation these days. Very few collectors are struggling to get by.
Who owns and builds airports? Private airlines run flights out of these.

Who owns and builds roads and gas stations? Private bus companies, taxis, rideshares, chauffeurs, and shipping companies run on these.

Who owns ports? Private cruise lines, ferries, and shipping companies run ships out of these.

Who owns freight rail and associated stations? Private freight and logistics companies move products over these.

Elsewhere in this thread are comments about Tokyo's private subway companies (three of them).
I don't see how that matters - if you trained your whole life for one branch of science (or one career), you're a lot more likely to stay where you are rather than spend years starting from zero to move where you think more money might be.

That's a risk many are not willing to take.
Leaving aside any quick benefits in code size or run time, named return values might make code more readable.

Fortran functions have always (since Fortran II anyway) used named result values; so did Pascal. Since you can now pick the name of the result value variable in Fortran, I find it a useful convention to just always put RESULT(RESULT) on my functions.
You're comparing many unscientific or poorly structured psychology studies to rigorously recorded and analyzed climate data?

You might as well give up now if your entire view of reality has been up-ended as you claim...
Web Development in 2017
Yeah, the article wasn't great. I think few supporters of named returns would even agree with that article.

Like all language features, you're always going to get some individuals who will misuse them. The author there I definitely think is misusing named returns for something that really needs to be optimised in the compiler instead.
Hong Kong is not fighting to get put back under British rule.

They are fighting for self determination and to be rolled by themselves, instead of outside undemocratic dictators.
The talking points have moved from "it's not happening" to "it's not our fault" in the last decade or so. The response would just be "the science isn't settled on whether humans caused that" and stuff like "plants need CO2, so maybe it's good!"
Have you tried moviepy? It works by converting matplotlib figures into numpy arrays (you can even pre-build a list of arrays and then just iterate over the list).

http://zulko.github.io/blog/2014/11/29/data-animations-with-...
I take this same "both sides" approach to gravitation in particular. Gravity is subtle and easy to misinterpret but to the average person, myself included, the arguments made by both "sides" are equally convincing.
When I watched the movie I was actually annoyed at that part because they show the code front and center but it clearly doesn't do what the plot was saying it did.. Turns out they were clear like that so viewers would be able to copy the sorce code program and run it to find the easter egg :)
Tesla's Focus Means Victory versus Complacent Mainstream in Electric Cars
huh. is it not playing for you in the embed?
Presumptuous, huh? There is no absolute proof of anything, but the Swedish axe image is substantial proof to me.

I suppose that when the designer comes forward and explains the way the image was chosen, there will be people who argue the designer is lying, or misremembering, or trying to hide the fact that their drawing was interpreted the wrong way.

This way UFOs, 9-11 Truthers, and homeopathy lies.
Of course it's a process. Please excuse me for using your post as a spring board, but:

When you try to impose rules upon children that don't make any sense for them in the situation they're in, and that they may simply be mentally incapable of following at that point in their life (cf. the primal urges), it is not going to work just like that.

Children need to make up their own mind, and given the limited experience they're coming from, for many years that mind will of course look a little different from what a grown-up opinion would be.

That doesn't mean the grown-up opinion is necessarily right, by the way. It has not seen the world from the perspective of the child. The grown-up mind may very well reach another conclusion if it had seen that world.
Presumably the people who voted for Britain's ruling government at the time.
The philosopher Karl Popper explained in 1934 that scientific theories need to be falsifiable in order to be considered scientific.

I would say that AGW theory has not yet met that standard.
> I'd love to live in a world where women were just equally represented at these things as a matter of course

serious question: why? what would make it better?

to be clear: i am not opposed (in any way) to equal representation. i do prefer (real, meaningful) equal opportunity, rather that homogeneity.
An interesting question, for sure! As someone who doesn't read a lot of fiction or lengthy non-fiction works, I'm definitely not an authority. That said, my gut tells me that the effect can't possibly be as strong--we don't tend to, "read in the background" the way we consume music. A certain active involvement is required to do more than move our eyes across the pages randomly.
Agreed. I actually considered pointing out that in my original comment.

As an American with a fascination in documentaries I have heard the term a lot but most consider it to be very specific to military submarines operated by Germany in the first and second world wars only. I suppose the term Unterseeboot still sees usage outside of the States these days.
Sounds like a nice gravy train for the company.
Comparing ICANN to FIFA is exactly how I have described them in the past. Having been to ICANN conferences, I can confidently say they answer to no-one at this point and it shows.
> If it is done by experts in good faith this will probably be a good thing to strengthen the signal/noise ratio in climate science.

“Aye, and”—to quote Scotty—“if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon.”

It's not like Pruitt and his boss haven't already staked out a definitive position on climate science, or like Pruitt would structure (or his boss would tolerate him structuring) this in any way not assured to support that position.
> Unless you he scrutiny is biased and meant to discredit the science that is.

The entire point of scrutiny is to discredit and of course it's going to be biased. That's the point. If the science is solid, it'll withstand the scrutiny. And if it's not, it won't.

Any kind of scrutiny or inquiry should be encouraged, regardless of where it comes from.
I love this discussion. And will add, the each play is unique. That's the thing I like about vinyl, it's a moment one time you're there and it'll never happen exactly the same way again.
Some bands I like sell posters, but I've only seen them at concerts. I can't find any examples on their websites.
In defense of the article, I can see how anyone writing a lot of Go would start to get a bit desperate for shortcuts. It's a language that's relentlessly hard on prolific writers, putting their needs second in favor of minimizing the context required for any code.

So I could see how things like having a alternative-providing validator chain take 5% fewer characters would feel intoxicating after using code generation to stamp out four variants of a competent data structure for some primitive types.
Why should one trust majority, and not minority, if "minority" people are also qualified and respected (Spencer, Curry)? There were episodes in the history of science, when the majority turned out to be wrong.

Here's one example:

https://www.insidescience.org/news/scientific-consensus-almo...
Don't rip with iTunes?
That would possibly have been the case in 1965, but party membership is at historically low levels and in multiple states independents outnumber either single party.

Unfortunately, 50-65% of people who are eligible to vote actually do so. Often, they do end up voting along party lines, but that's not because of party loyalty so much as a lack of knowledge regarding the candidates. If you give people the opportunity to learn about these things and impress upon them the importance of doing so, they will be more likely to vote rationally.
Infographic: 14 Defunct Car Brands, and How They Failed
The situation is that facts about the Subject recorded in a certificate must be Validated.

For the Domain Name Validation (which is the main thing web browsers and several other kinds of software care about) this is done by one of the 10 Blessed Methods. ACME automates three of those ten methods. Some others can't be automated (e.g. get a bona fide lawyer to sign a physical paper document saying they've checked you really own the DNS name)

EV requires also validating the Subject entity's name and place of business. This cannot be entirely automated today. But some CA issuers specialising in EV get very close, like an hour turnaround in most cases for businesses in places where they operate.

The intent in ACME is that semi-automated processes would be handled to one side of ACME, you'd do them offline, and you'd gain "authz" which are how ACME tracks validation, for the things which had been validated offline.

Also, it's not necessary to re-validate everything for every new issuance. Suppose you prove you're really EXA Metal Pole Location Executives, business #123123123 of Some City, Texas. A CA would be entitled to rely on having validated that for some time, I think it's currently up to three years. In that time you could issue and re-issue hundreds, even thousands of certificates with no extra fuss.
Real science should even welcome biased, hostile scrutiny. Actually, that's the best kind of scrutiny.

Read Blaise Pascal's work where he demonstrated how to create a vacuum experimentally. At the time, everyone thought that was impossible. Pascal calmly addresses tons of detractors (many of whom had real skin in the game). If climatologists can't do that, then their work SHOULD be questioned.
Might be interesting to test with Wolfram Alpha as well. It looks like some of the questions wouldn't fit the WA API, but I'm curious how it would score.
If Buddhist Monks Trained AI
It's interesting that they employ a dozen flight searchers who manually look all day. Are there any flight prices APIs that can be scraped, looking for significant outliers?
Google’s new experiment, Triangle, block individual apps from using mobile data
It's not the pilot, but it's definitely in the first few episodes.